Forgotten flowers, and a ladybug

As a photographer, I usually take about 20 photos of something to get one that I like. That may sound like a bad ratio of hit and miss, but I don't think anyone can simply go out and take amazing shot after amazing shot. Anyway, all that to say that my hard drive has been clogging up with photos that I don't need or want. Spring is here, time to clean up.

This week I was going through photos of flowers that I had taken at my mom's house and I found a batch of RAW images that I never edited. My new rule is to edit and delete all the photos I don't want each day that I shoot, so I don't get into another muddle as I have currently. I think when I was starting out, every shot was special to me and I didn't have the heart to slice and dice. Now I am much more ruthless.


Summer is almost here and I can't wait to take more shots of flowers when the weather finally gets warm.

Full Moon in May

Last night was an almost full moon. Something like 98.8% which is close enough for me, so I packed up and drove up to Nosehill in the NW to look East and get the moonrise.


I arrived and got set up, and positioned myself between the cars in the parking lot full of couples making out, and friends drinking. Downtown was just enjoying the last seconds of sunset, and I quickly shot a few frames in that direction. Then the moon started to climb off the horizon.

I love watching the moon on the horizon as it looks huge, but it also suffers from so much distortion due to the atmosphere, dust, pollution as to give a hazy photo. But if you don't look too close, it's a pretty photo.

Last time I shot the moon was four years ago when I was a student at SAIT. Then I used a borrowed 400mm F4 lens, with a 1.4x teleconverter on my 8MP 30D. This time I had my 300mm F2.8, with my 18MP 7D which gave me a beautiful amount of detail on the moon. The advances in sensors allowed me to get an image close to my first attempt without buying a longer lens. Can't wait to try this out with a 5D MkIII when it gets released. I hear they are thinking 30-35MP.

Ring around Calgary

I bought a Ray ring flash ($200) the other day and tried it out last night. I was told that a ring flash will give me a shadow-less image, but you do lose a stop of flash output due to the extra distance the light has to travel. It's a neat tool, and it attracts a lot of attention.

My friend Mike posed for a few photos which allowed me to gauge the ring flash. I noticed I had to push it to +2 TTL metering, and that I was in a lot closer than I thought I would have to be. When I put on the fish-eye lens with the ring flash on, you get a neat effect where the ring flash is part of the photo.

I then used the ring flash to frame the city view and dropped the flash unit down to 1/128th power as I only needed a small burst of light. After that, with night coming on, I took off the ring and set up a tripod, waiting for the office lights to come on.

Future uses for the ring flash will be at weddings for cool portraits, photo booth photos, and generally looking a little different when using a flash.

Roses

A few months ago, I saw this terrific shot of a rose. Just the rose head, each petal perfect in shape and lit with a small amount of light. Deeps shadows stretch across the flower and the curl in the rose was without flaw. Made me wonder if I could take the same shot so I started to hunt for a perfect rose. Sadly, no such thing exists, but I did have an "ok" rose to shoot, and these are the results.

I set up shop in the kitchen with black felt as a background hanging on the wall. I had to secure the rose using clamps so it would show the side that I liked, and then had the camera on tripod with a flash externally linked with a Pocket Wizard. Too much light, and the rose turned purple, too little and you couldn't see it.

I ended up shooting the whole thing at 125/sec at F9 on ISO 100 with a 1/2 power flash bouncing off the ceiling. This combination gave me the correct color without the shadows being opened up too much.

Each month I buy a photo magazine and look at the photos and always say "I could do that" but never do. It was a cheap experiment at $7 for a rose and $5 for the felt. At least I can check that one off.