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All posts for the month January, 2012

Macro photography, something for you?

Posted by Arno on January 30, 2012
Posted in: black and white, color, industry, macro, object, photography, Photoshop, shapes. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

Things always look different that way.
Last week I had a conversation about this with a buddy of mine. “Should I buy a macro lens?” “Is macro photography something for me?”
It depends… I think macro photography could be something for anyone. But you need to realize that EVERYthing is a potential subject. Which, by the way, counts for everything in photography.
In that sense it’s a lot like black and white photography. You need to learn how to see things in black and white. You need to be able to convert a colored scene into a black and white scene in your mind’s eye and be able to tell how it looks when you drain it from its color and add the necessary contrast (and maybe some grain).

Macro photography isn’t only about a close-up of a bug. It’s not about just the facets of a fly’s eye. Macro photography is everywhere. Every mundane subject from a distance can turn into a great abstract in macro. You just need to recognize it.
Of course this is all subjective, as is everything in photography. But the photographer is the artist. S/He’s the creative one. Everything’s worth a shot.

Question is… Color or black and white? Even in macro photography 😉

Grid

D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/4.2, Tamron 90mm macro

Grid

D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/4.2, Tamron 90mm macro

And sometimes you have to look up to get something in the eye

Posted by Arno on January 25, 2012
Posted in: color, nature, photography, seasons, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

😀

It’s been snowing here pretty much non-stop for the past week.
I got a parking ticket for parking with a permit in an area where my permit is valid, because the parking smurf was too lazy to clean the snow off my window to see the permit (or then I don’t understand what’s written on the sign, but we’ll see about that when I object to the fine).
Anyway… In all desperate frustration, you throw your arms up to the sky, look up and quietly say some really foul words and then fall silent for the beauty that meets your eye up there.
Not all beauty is on eye-height, or at your feet for that matter.

It's snowing!

D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/2.4, Nikkor 50mm

And sometimes you simply have no clue WHAT really meets the eye…

Posted by Arno on January 24, 2012
Posted in: color, industry, macro, object, photography, Photoshop, shapes. Tagged: , . Leave a Comment

I have these funky things that I run into every now and again. Comes with the job, really, I guess. I’ve had it before, and it’s happened again. The things you encounter when you’re cleaning up… IF you care to see beyond the regular, that is…
I’ll give away an A3 print of the last image to the one who can guess what this is (hint: you can’t describe it in one word 😉 ).

Abstract

D700, ISO200, 2 sec @ f/13, Tamron 90mm macro

Abstract

D700, ISO200, 1 sec @ f/13, Tamron 90mm macro

Abstract

As above, but with some Photoshopping involved.

Sometimes there’s more that meets the eye…

Posted by Arno on January 22, 2012
Posted in: black and white, color, industry, object, photography, Photoshop, seasons, shapes, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 1 comment

… or less 😉

Color or duotone?

Bike covered under the snow

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

Bike covered under the snow

D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm

Same place, more different worlds

Posted by Arno on January 19, 2012
Posted in: color, industry, lightroom, long exposure, object, photography, seasons, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

As a photographer you know that “light” is one of the most essential variables in anything you do.
Living in a country as Finland, and especially in winter, you see funky things happen with light whenever there’s snow around. It may be in the middle of the night, and pitch black, but with a nice pack of snow, it could almost be twilight, because the snow reflects every bit of light.
It’s the same with both natural light and artificial light.

Yesterday I shot a picture of the street down here in daylight, the sky so overcast that it was a perfectly white massive softbox, good for nice and neutral colors.

This morning I set up the camera again, but earlier. It was still (or again) overcast, but there was the shade of this 15 minutes of civil twilight, where everything turns blue for a short while. It was just before 9am when I took the first shots, with the street lights still burning. It’s funny how the street lights seem to absorb all natural light and throw off this funky orange hue.
Below first the colors as the camera recorded it (slightly accentuated from the RAW file) and on second what I turned it into (because I like it better when it looks a bit warmer 😉 ).

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 5 images combined in Photoshop

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 5 images combined in Photoshop

But then, I actually didn’t know this was going to happen beforehand, the street lights switched off. It was in the  middle of one of the 30 second exposures when that happened, so in that particular image (not posted here) you can actually see the after-glow of the street lights. That image ended up somewhat underexposed (salvageable, but not really interesting), but the following exposures gave a nice example of how big an influence the light, its color and the color of the environment influences the image you take.

Below again first the image with the colors as the camera recorded it, and the next one adjusted to how we “know” a snowy scene is supposed to look.

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 4 images combined in Photoshop

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND, 4 images combined in Photoshop

Same place, different world

Posted by Arno on January 18, 2012
Posted in: color, lightroom, long exposure, object, photography, Photoshop, seasons, weather. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a Comment

A few months ago I posted a picture taken from the window of my new apartment. It’s really an excellent place to overview what’s going on “in the world below”.
Now that winter’s finally set in, and we’ve got some snow on the ground, it changes everything. The place is the same, but it looks like it’s a completely different world.

I’ll let the picture speak for itself (starting to think there may be an interesting series in this…):

Traffic

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm, Singh-Ray VariND filter, three exposures combined in Photoshop