Water Drop – Home

09. October 2012 · Comments Off on Water Drop – Home · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

So today I was feeling all creative.  It happens every now and then so I thought I’d better jump on the moment and do something different.  So I shot the water drop below.  So how did I go about doing this, and more importantly can you do this too?  Well the answer is yes, you need a little gear, and a lot of patience.

Here’s how to get your own version.  Firstly I did the dishes, not mandatory but I needed the sink in the kitchen and the dirty dishes were in the way.  Once I had a clean sink, I placed a large cutting board over one of the sinks.  Then I sent Abi off to find some of her more colorful dresses and tops, she came down with half her wardrobe (so be specific if you have a 9 year old when you ask the same).  I picked out this cute orange, yellow and purple leotard and placed it on the board.  Next I got a small glass bowl and placed that on top of the leotard and half filled the bowl with water.  With me so far?

OK, next I got some lights.  You can’t really do this with natural light as you need to shoot at a pretty high shutter speed and small aperture.  So I grabbed a couple of speed lights and set them up on either side of the bowl.  You could do this with one speed light you just might not have it evenly lit on both sides.

Then I grabbed the macro lens and placed the camera on a tripod and turned on the faucet – and the dripping began.

Now you have to start taking pictures and trying to time it as the drop hits the water in the bowl.  The lights fire and freeze motion and hopefully you get a nice picture.

It takes time to get the focus right (you need to do this manually) and you need a pretty small aperture (I used f/16 here) so you have a big depth of field (which using a macro lens is really no more than half an inch).

Tonight I took 687 shots and ended up with 49 that I really liked and kept.  Out of the 49 this one was my favorite.  You can see the leotard in the background which is in soft focus, but you can also make out the leotard’s patten in the water drop, which I think is pretty cool.  The whole thing took around an hour and it’s actually a lot of fun – go ahead, give it a go.

The guys were playing hide and seek tonight, Master Chief had a great hiding place but they found him in the end.

 

Hoover Dam – Nevada

17. September 2012 · Comments Off on Hoover Dam – Nevada · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , ,

I looked through my picture library tonight and decided to post this image from Hoover Dam.  This is a really rare picture of the dam with nobody in shot.  Talk about having patience I waited ages for this image.

Obviously there are two sides to the dam, there’s the water side (this side) and the “dry” side.  It was ridiculously hot there and getting a good picture in direct sunlight was proving to be difficult.  But this one really came out well.  I stupidly didn’t have a wide angle lens with me so getting “everything” in to really show the dam was very difficult.  So I had to chose compositions that showed enough to make an interesting picture but still showed the majesty of the dam.

This really is an amazing piece of engineering, especially when you consider when it was built (1931-1936).  In this image I’m standing in Nevada, looking across the dam towards Arizona.  I have no idea what the purpose of the large towers are but they look really cool coming out of the aqua marine water.  When I looked at this image when I got home it’s almost like a landscape from “starwars” or something, it just strikes me as something from another planet.  For this reason I LOVED the image.

What made this fun to take was I was using a new tripod but to get the picture I wanted I needed to put the tripod onto the bridge wall.  However I needed to get the camera as low to the bridge as I could.  So I turned the legs upside down and turned the tripod over, so the camera was hanging upside down under the top of the tripod.  People were walking past me looking at me like I was nuts.  but this was the end result so well worth the stares.

This is art imitating life!  Tonight I got home with a horrible headache, I think Carter was feeling it too hence the picture.

Marina Park – Kirkland

31. August 2012 · Comments Off on Marina Park – Kirkland · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

I got home this evening and again didn’t know what to post so I had dinner and headed out with the camera.  I didn’t have any idea where I was going but the sun was going down so I followed that.  I didn’t want to head to Seattle again as it was getting late so I drove down to Kirkland.  I parked up in Marina Park and got the camera and tripod.

It was pretty warm out still and there were a load of people walking outside enjoying the evening and the sunset.  There were loads of really nice opportunities to shoot images and I got a few nice shots.  I love shooting water at night but if there are boats on the water they tend to be a little out of focus.  They are bobbing up and down on the water and at night I have to have a long exposure so there is a load of motion blur. That said, I think moonlight and street lamps on water look really nice.

The image I chose to post tonight was a shot of the water front along the small beach.  By shooting towards the large gazebo I got a lot of light on the water and the sky facing west (so you just got the end of the sunset above).  Interesting as I was shooting with long exposures the people walking past didn’t appear in any of the shots as they kept moving and didn’t stay still long enough for the camera to pick them up.  So very little work to do in Photoshop.

Master Chief saw some dog treats and asked to try one, Carter said he had to play dog first.

Small Lock – Ballard

30. August 2012 · Comments Off on Small Lock – Ballard · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , ,

The other day we visited Ballard Locks in Seattle and got some great shots of the boats moving from Lake Union through to Elliott Bay.  They have two locks in Ballard, one really really big (it’s like two football pictures) and one that’s pretty small.  The big one takes a LONG time to fill up with boats, then it takes a long time for the water to rise.  So if you go into the big lock you have better have a lot of time.

The smaller lock (in tonight’s picture) is a lot smaller.  For example here you can see it containing pretty much one big boat and a few small sail boats and it’s full.  So with this one you get in and out quicker.  I’m not sure what the rules are, if it costs more or something but most boats you see there go through the larger lock.

In the image below I’m standing on the gates that open and let the boats out so I’m literally at one end and the can see the gates at the other.

This is a cool place to take a camera, the only down side is that there are either too many people there in the way or you end up with all these fences in the way of the pictures.  They fence off every thing here.  So it’s hard to try to take pictures that focus on the subject you want.

Beside the docks they have a fish ladder where you can go and watch the salmon jump up the ladder to get up river to spawn.  I’ll go back there in a few weeks and try to get some shots of the fish as it’s quite amazing to see.

Carter decided to make some paper plane’s tonight, they didn’t fly very far though.

I90 Night Bridge – Seattle

29. August 2012 · Comments Off on I90 Night Bridge – Seattle · Categories: Image a Day · Tags: , , , ,

Wednesday’s are a bad day for me lately.  I get to work at 7:30 and stay here until gone 9 at night.  So I really don’t get much time to take a picture and post it.

So to overcome that I now get two pictures on Tuesday (clever eh?).  Then all I have to do on Wednesday is write something about the image and I’m done.

So last night I drove to Seattle and photographed the Seattle Boat Club (not to be confused with the Seattle Yacht Club that is in a totally different place).  After shooting that image I went looking for today’s picture.

I was driving sown Lake Washington Boulevard and I saw the I90 Bridge all lit up.  It was pretty dark by this time so they had these red lights along the bridge, and loads of traffic headlights and stop lights on the bridge itself.

So I found somewhere to park and took the image below.  When I took this I was a little worried it may be a little boring as the sky on the back of the camera didn’t look that great.  But when I got home I was pleased with the image.  This was I think a 10 second exposure (or something like that), so you can see the lines of lights from the cars on the bridge.

I managed to get some cloud detail in the sky so it looked ok.  Not bad for a Wednesday image.

Tonight Cater and Master Chief wanted a Caesar Salad, so we made them make it themselves!

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