Sunset Years

Here is an example of what I talked about in my previous post with exposing into the sun. If you expose for the scene your subject will be underexposed. This is what I was looking for in this photo and I did have to manipulate a bit because my camera does have pretty good dynamic range and I wanted the silhouette. I think even though I converted it to black and white it retains a warmth with the good friends in the foreground and the young couple in the light. 

 Shot with the Sony A55 and 16-80 at 60mm, 1/640th sec f8 iso 100

Let Me Introduce You To

High Dynamic Range photography. It is an interesting concept that I have toyed with a bit in the past. I recently took a 2 hour workshop with pmdphotography. We learned the basics of what to look for and some good methods of capturing images to create HDR photographs. I won't get technical but try to explain it briefly. Say you took a photo of your friend with the sun behind him/her. If the scene is exposed properly your friend will look dark. If your friend is exposed properly the scene is overly bright. By taking multiple photos you can combine them and have both appear properly exposed. In this post Grey Of Light To Colour Of Dark  I did something similar to HDR but only using 3 images and also desaturated 2 of the images. Here are 3 I did the evening of the workshop using between 6 and 9 images and a program called Photomatix. This is fun stuff. 

 This is the first one I did taken directly into the sun to really try test the ability to go from direct sun to deep shadow. It works!

 We all went and took photo's all around the area and came up with a lot of different photos. Dar was there too and I really enjoyed what she did. I noticed these chrome pipes and had an idea of what they might look like and I was right. 

While we were in the cafeteria talking about what we had done and learning about processing he mentioned you can do photo's of interiors with HDR to. So Dar and I both immediately set up our tripods and gave it a try. We both came up with very different looks using the same software. 

Hey You Graffiti My Graffiti?

Does that make sense? I am still coming to grips with painting graffiti on a wall then painting over the painting. I talked about it very briefly in a previous post . There is some beautiful work done here which inevitably gets painted over. I talked to a young guy recently about it. He is a pretty accomplished painter (I think he did this one). I asked him about how everything gets done over and no one seems to be upset about it. He said there's a sort of agreement that it's ok to paint over other peoples stuff but you should do it with something better. That doesn't always happen but usually it's at least interesting. When I saw this after talking to him it clicked with me. Really.......

 I guess you kind of have to.

Being Famous

Being a famous photographer does have it's advantages. World travel, admiration of people from all over, Meeting other famous people. In some cases fortune even. Some day, I might even be famous, who knows. In the meantime I'll sure accept the odd kiss on the cheek from a pretty young lady. 

 Oh and thanks to the other pretty young lady who took the photo!

A Good Weekend Part Two

Then we were off to Seattle. When I go to Seattle I think of Vancouver only with an American flavour. We visited the Experience Music Project while there. Well it really was the intent of this trip. In here I was allowed to bring my camera. I had a lot of fun with that. While in there I was having trouble with the wifi. I went seeking help not really expecting any. I met up with a young guy at the front counter and he stopped everything he was doing and worked it out with me till I had the wifi. It's a kind of you had to be there thing but I was quite taken with the help he gave, not something you see all that often in this day and age.
This is the guitar Jimi Hendrix used to play The Star Spangled Banner * at Woodstock in 1969
*If you aren't a fan of Hendrix you might not enjoy the video but you do get to see him play this guitar.

There are 2 floors of displays here about music and Sci Fi. They have rooms with instruments you can jam with to your hearts content. There is a Nirvana display that I didn't bother with. Dale isn't a fan either but he did go look and says it is very well done. There is a lot about music history in there. I didn't get to see everything but I did take in the display for Battlestar Galactica and Avatar. They were worth seeing I thought. The Avatar had more things to look at and seemed to offer more detail in the displays. Battlestar Galactica had 3 full size space ships and other props.

We went and wandered a bit around the Space Needle. There were huge crowds here and some music festival going on that was closed off. Dale and I were here with our family at the Seattle worlds fair. I'd say "Gosh, aside from the Space Needle it sure looks a lot different" but I was just a little kid so I wouldn't remember. I know we didn't go up to the top then because the lines were huge. They were huge this day as well so we still didn't go up. Here are a couple of photos I took. One I was using the posterization (b/w) I used on the photo of Dar a while back.




Then one normal in case you aren't into the fancy pants effects.

 Stay tuned for part three

A Good Weekend Part One

It was the labour day weekend. It wasn't a real photography outing kind of weekend although I did carry my camera around the whole time. My brother came to visit so we decided to get out and see the sights. All the best laid plans seemed to fall together quite nicely. 
On Friday Dale and I had the day to ourselves so we went into Vancouver and did a couple things we wanted to. Dale to a music store and me of course to a camera store. We then paid a visit to the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.

I saw Planetarium Crab Sculpture for the first time on a high school tour and thought how cool it would be to make some kind of walking riding machine out of it. I guess I had a little more imagination then. The sculpture is apparently the most photographed thing in Vancouver. I've taken a few over the years. I don't recall a lot about that trip except they had a real shrunken head on display. Now that was something to see for an impressionable young teen. I can recall looking up close and thinking he might have had freckles. I didn't see the head this visit. I imagine it is stored to avoid upsetting any sensitive souls. 

We saw two shows in the Planetarium Star Theatre. We could have missed the second one as although they were billed as different shows, the second one was mostly a repeat of the first one.

This is the projector they use to create the night sky. The first time I saw it rise out of the bay I imagined it to be some satellite never sent to space and adapted to use as a projector. Making up stuff up like that was so much fun. They call it Harold but they aren't sure why.  

Saturday was a very long but really great day I thought. We headed off to Seattle. On the way down we stopped at the Boeing Future of Flight Museum. The museum part can be gone through fairly quickly, the main attraction is the tour of the Everett production line. There are no cameras allowed so I didn't get any photo's inside. It is about a 90 minute tour of the  huge aircraft manufacturing plant. The buildings themselves are awesome with doors the size of football fields. There were all kinds of interesting facts about them. "At one time rain clouds actually formed in the Boeing plant before a state-of-the-art air circulation system was installed"

They build 747's, 777's, and 787 Dreamliners at this plant. The 787's parts are built elsewhere and put together here. Below is a photo with 2 of the 4 "Dreamlifters", Modified 747's to carry the fuselage sections to the plant from where they're constructed. They said the construction of previous aircraft was measured in weeks, the 787 is put together in mere days.

Another interesting little fact about the production facility is there is no central heating. They use the body heat from staff, heat from lights and tools that rises, is filtered, then pumped down into the building. I thought that was ingenious. 

I was going to try make the whole weekend one blog post but It is getting a little longer to put together than I thought so I am going to do this in three parts. I'll try be a little more diligent with the next two. 

Sitting On A Knot In The Bay

Dumb title I know but it popped into my head so I went with it. While at Steveston the other day I was noticing some knots. They looked to be an interesting subject and there were a few different ones. I never needed them much beyond tying my shoes, I am pretty good at that. Beyond my shoes I know it can be embarrassing trying to fake a knot only to have it fall apart and into the water. So I will likely stick to taking photo's of them whenever I find an interesting one. There were some just looked like jumbles but these were pretty neat.

Sony a55 with the 50mm attached shot at 1/250th sec f7.1 iso 400 Taken here  49.12332667,-123.18652000

 The Sony a100 using the venerable beercan at 210 1/800th sec f5 iso 100

I remember going out in a boat being intimidated because I thought I was going to have to learn all kinds of different knots to tie up the boat. I was taught this one below.... not even a knot really. Loop tug, loop tug.... so simple. Of course the other folk smiled a bit when I did it about 15 loops. Just making sure, you know.

 With the Sony a55 and the 50mm 1/2500 sec f7.1 iso 400 Taken here 49.12328167,-123.18591667