Category: 52things

This week was the annual Christmas musical production at the church I attend, Bethesda Bible Church in Ypsilanti, MI. I played guitar and ran loops for our band (using the church music rig I posted about in week 24), and had a great time of it. There’s always downtime for the band during rehearsal, of course, so I took advantage of this time to shoot some behind-the-scenes photos.

On Tuesday evening, I only had my Casio Exilim point-and-shoot with me. It’s a decent enough camera (and the high-speed video mode is amazing) but it’s not great in low light. I figured I would make the most of it, and set the camera to its highest ISO value and black-and-white mode to get a grainy black-and-white film look. I was really pleased with how the photos turned out!

I particularly liked how this photo of Ron, our keyboard player, turned out – the spotlight was shining right into him, providing a great rim light all around him.

For Thursday’s dress rehearsal, I brought my main camera with an assortment of lenses and shot more typical documentary-style stuff in full color and good resolution. It was a nice counterpoint to the grainy b&w of the first shoot.

This week’s project was a little light in terms of what I accomplished. As such, this writeup is very much about process, not as much about results.

This was an extremely busy week for me at work and in my personal life, so I knew I would not have any time during the week to work on this week’s project. One thing that has come into even sharper focus during this year of projects is how much I’m influenced artistically by the seasons and the weather (witness: “Raindays“, “6 strings for a winter’s day“, “autumn dsp” (from “Live at Leopold Bros“), etc. I saw the weather had forecast snow for Friday morning, however, so I had great thoughts of getting up early and getting some snow photos. It didn’t happen, so my project time got pushed to today (Sunday).

I started out this morning with shooting some photos in the early morning light with the Canon 70-300 IS lens. I wanted to shoot handheld, and the IS (Image Stabilization) lets me do that in lower light conditions better than my other lenses. I also thought shooting with a longer lens than I would typically choose would be a nice challenge. I got a few interesting detail photos, and I really like the blue-white quality of light on a snowy morning when it’s still overcast. Here are a few of those photos:

Later on in the afternoon, I took out my Yashica 55mm ML Macro lens, with thoughts of shooting some snowflake or icicle macro photos. This is a tricky lens for a couple of reasons. As with all macro setups, it benefits from having a very stable tripod since you’re dealing with such fine detail and short distances. I do not have a very stable tripod, although it works OK most of the time. Also, this lens meters about 2-3 stops overexposed when using my camera’s built-in light meter, so it’s always a guessing game, changing the aperture, using the Live View to compose and focus, and hoping for the best. I never felt like I truly got anything worth looking at, but here’s an example anyway.

As I was reviewing the images to upload and post, I found I really didn’t think any of them were particularly noteworthy, so I decided to go out and do one more session of shooting. By then, it was dark, and the temperature had dropped. I briefly considered using my off-camera flash setup, but the idea of hauling a flash, lightstand and potentially light modifiers (like an umbrella) in the cold and dark made me go simple: I put the camera on the tripod, and got ready to shoot some long exposures.

I’ve done a lot of long exposure work over the past few years, and I find it a comfort zone. It really simplifies things in many ways: I know I have to focus most of all on composition and choosing an appropriate depth of field, since the exposure time will be dictated by how much light I need to let in to make a good exposure.

Finally, I felt like I made a few worthwhile images! It took all day, and I reverted to a safe, known technique, but I’m satisfied. My favorite image of the day is the last one on the page.

This past week’s project is overdue as concerns posting about it. On December 4, 2010, I participated in the Ann Arbor area’s Help-Portrait event. It’s hard to post much about an event like this, as it’s quite personal and part of the ideals include not sharing images produced. Even posting about it has been delayed due to needing a chance to think through how to share about it.

I was part of an amazing team. Here are a couple photos of our crew:

Rod and Jill Love are a husband-wife team. Jill was the main organizer behind the event, and Rod gave a ton of help the day of the event.

Chris Clements is a super talented photographer from Ann Arbor. We shared lots of talk and enthusiasm about all areas of photography, from lighting gear and techniques to processing styles and more.

In the end, I simply ask that you check out the Help-Portrait site and consider what you could do to help someone else out, whether it’s through your art or something else.

This week’s project was pretty straightforward. I’ve been interested in trying out Adobe Lightroom 3 for a while, and this week I downloaded and installed the free 30-day trial in order to put it through its paces and try it out.

I have been using iPhoto for many, many years as my photo library software, and overall I’m quite pleased with it. However, as I continue to build up my library of photos, iPhoto becomes a less viable option. In large part, this is because all your photos have to be saved on your computer’s internal drive – there’s no way to have part of your library on your internal drive and part of it on an external hard drive. Because I use a laptop, this means I’m perpetually crunched for drive space since my photo library is at least 100GB by itself, not to mention my music and video work.

One thing that became immediately apparent upon installing Lightroom 3 is that I would have to spend some time getting used to its paradigm. The interface is somewhat familiar since I use Photoshop CS3, but there’s a lot that’s different. However, I started to dive in and figure it out.

I quickly began to enjoy the way that I was able to unearth old photos that I’d taken but never seriously considered as usable before – the cataloging features of Lightroom really shine. I’m still getting used to the editing controls, but the ability to quickly switch from Lightroom into Photoshop CS3 and have edits in Photoshop automatically show up in a new version in Lightroom is pretty great. The ability to export with a watermark automatically added is also wonderful – saves some tedious work in Photoshop.

To finish it off, here’s a new background image I made with a photo I shot last winter. The cropping, toning, and watermarking with the chromedecay logo were all done in Lightroom 3. Click below for the full size (1280 x 800) on Flickr.

For this week’s project, I wanted to pull out a creative tool I haven’t used in a few years: my Lomo Fisheye film camera. I decided to make this week’s project about the juxtaposition of shooting film and digital to capture the autumn colors and mood. My goal was to shoot all week, with both film and digital, and I think these images get across the feel of autumn in Michigan.

Using the Lomo Fisheye was interesting. I have to confess, I have a like-hate relationship with film, which is why I haven’t shot any in a few years. I like the tactile feeling of holding a print, and there’s still nothing quite like getting an envelope of prints back from the developer, but the lack of instant feedback and high cost of getting film developed keeps me from loving it.

The Lomo Fisheye is especially quirky, since it’s literally point and shoot – fixed focus, fixed shutter speed (around 1/100th second, from what I’ve read), fixed aperture. I shot everything on Kodak Portra 400, which is a good fit since a lot of the days were cloudy (the 400-speed film helps with that).

Along with the fisheye, I also shot lots of digital images, with a variety of lenses. Here are a few with the Canon 50mm f/1.8:

I also shot a few photos with the Canon 70-300 IS USM in order to zoom in tight or isolate individual leaves against the blue sky from Monday:

A lot of the photos I shot with the Lomo Fisheye were done in the car, driving from place to place.

This morning, the last day of the project, I decided to make a couple long exposures in the early morning light as my car warmed up in the dark.

It’s funny – the last few frames I made with the fisheye ended up being strong favorites, even when I felt like I was out of time and just trying to use up the last of the film in order to get it processed.

See the full set of images on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chromedecay/sets/72157625195810147/