2. Photography

365

A photo a day, for a year. The excitement, the drama, the successes, and the failures.
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Day 27. August 4, 2010. Self-portrait! I wanted to play with lighting, but didn't want to subject a fellow member of the house to my torture, so I just used myself. I wanted to have a noticeable light fall-off across my face that faded into darkness, so I did some test shots on a chair, and moved my light as far out as I could with my short lighting cable. Having to prefocus manually, then walk into the frame, forced me to stop down quite a bit to keep everything sharp. After a while, I was liking the setup, but the shots kept coming out looking too artificial (and my poses looked too ridiculous), so I attached an orange gel filter to warmify everything.<br /> <br /> 50mm f/1.4 lens. f/8.0. 1/100. ISO 400.<br /> 580EX II ~10ft front-left of camera at 1/16 straight-on with orange filter.
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Day 27. August 4, 2010. Self-portrait! I wanted to play with lighting, but didn't want to subject a fellow member of the house to my torture, so I just used myself. I wanted to have a noticeable light fall-off across my face that faded into darkness, so I did some test shots on a chair, and moved my light as far out as I could with my short lighting cable. Having to prefocus manually, then walk into the frame, forced me to stop down quite a bit to keep everything sharp. After a while, I was liking the setup, but the shots kept coming out looking too artificial (and my poses looked too ridiculous), so I attached an orange gel filter to warmify everything.

50mm f/1.4 lens. f/8.0. 1/100. ISO 400.
580EX II ~10ft front-left of camera at 1/16 straight-on with orange filter.

  • Day 21. July 29, 2010. Ada plotting world domination. Or perhaps just killing a bird. No one knows with Ada. This was in the evening just as the sun was setting, 54mm on a 1.6 crop body, with a weak on-camera flash to bring out some fur highlights, and light up her eyes.
  • Day 22. July 30, 2010. With the right light, even a dandelion looks amazing. I probably looked ridiculous hunting around the lawn for a dandelion with a perfect patchily lit background. Even with the tripod, I had to shoot wide open to get a fast enough shutter to stop the dandelion in the wind. This is definitely an experiment to try again on a less windy day.
  • Day 23. July 31, 2010. This was going to be a shoot of our ridiculous number of knives on our magnetic knife racks, but there was cooking going on, and the colors on the cutting boards were irresistible.
  • Day 24. August 1, 2010. Last IM soccer game of the summer. Chris and Aaron defending a player from Baby Seal Clubbers.
  • Day 25. August 2, 2010. One of the most commented-on "features" of our house is our large collection of wine corks from our insatiable appetite for wine. Here is one of many high surfaces in the kitchen that has been taken over by the corks. This is also the first picture so far in this collection that used an off-camera flash. Hooray! The kitchen light was just terrible and cast very bland shadows, so I reflected a flash at 1/8 power off of the wall to the left.<br /> <br /> 85mm f/1.8 lens. f/4.5. 1/160. ISO 100.
  • Day 26. August 3, 2010. I was feeling a little creeped out today by something that happened, so I kept looking for subjects that could convey this creepiness. I found it as I was walking back to my room and someone was in the shower, with the lights peeking out. I think I creeped out my housemates a little as I set up my tripod with the lens facing the bathroom door...<br /> <br /> 50mm f/1.4 lens. f/4.5. 20s. ISO 100.
  • Day 27. August 4, 2010. Self-portrait! I wanted to play with lighting, but didn't want to subject a fellow member of the house to my torture, so I just used myself. I wanted to have a noticeable light fall-off across my face that faded into darkness, so I did some test shots on a chair, and moved my light as far out as I could with my short lighting cable. Having to prefocus manually, then walk into the frame, forced me to stop down quite a bit to keep everything sharp. After a while, I was liking the setup, but the shots kept coming out looking too artificial (and my poses looked too ridiculous), so I attached an orange gel filter to warmify everything.<br /> <br /> 50mm f/1.4 lens. f/8.0. 1/100. ISO 400.<br /> 580EX II ~10ft front-left of camera at 1/16 straight-on with orange filter.
  • Day 28. August 5, 2010. If you know what this is just from the picture, you either know me too well, or are a master of the art of duck-egg preservation. This is the edge of a high-edged metal pan that I've been using to make salted duck eggs. The extremely saturated brine solution evaporates, and capillary action deposits salt all around the outside edges. It's fascinating.<br /> <br /> 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro lens. f/5.6. 1/200. ISO 320.
  • Day 28. August 6, 2010. On the way up to Half Moon Bay, we passed by Crystal Springs Reservoir, and the evening fog was a perfect balance between thin enough to let streaks of light through, and thick enough to make interesting patterns in the distance. Unfortunately, there wasn't a stopping are on the near side of the bridge, but we stopped on the far side and did some trespassing to get this angle. A little tricky to expose this correctly since the sky's still pretty bright low on the horizon. In post-processing, I removed the four power lines, added contrast to the sky, and brightened the foreground.<br /> <br /> (Update: Also, I just realized. This could totally be an ad for quite a few of the basic composition principles at work. Rule of Thirds, breaking the horizon, etc)<br /> <br /> (Update 2: Forgot to mention that I used a circular polarizer for this to have more control over the reflections off of the water.)<br /> <br /> 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens @ 38mm. f/8.0. 1/125. ISO 200.
  • Day 30. August 7, 2010. Molly made these amazing chocolate leaves by rubbing the leaves into the chocolate, or at least that's what I think she said. Originally, these were on aluminum foil, which made for interesting reflections, but as our house is seriously lacking in lighting right now--the workmen working on the remodeling probably severed the electrical line to all the lights in the front of the house--I used some artificial lighting which didn't do so well with super-reflective aluminum foil. Hence, the paper towel. The light was a flash bounced from the ceiling at 1/8 power.<br /> <br /> 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro. f/6.3. 1/40. ISO 200. Lighting: 580EX II on camera bounced from ceiling at 1/8 power. Increased black clipping in post-processing.
  • Day 31. August 8, 2010. Terman Fountain at Stanford behind the Terman Engineering Center. The shallowest fountain at Stanford, but also the largest, so it functions as a great reflecting pool, especially half an hour or so after when the fountains shut off at around 10PM.<br /> <br /> 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 @ 22mm. f/13. 10s. ISO 200.
  • Day 32. August 9, 2010. I often step right outside my room on a chilly night to get a breath of fresh air before going to bed. I don't know what it says about me, but I really like the way my room looks from the outside, especially with the Christmas lights plugged in. It looks so cozy, like I can just sit on the bed and read or do stuff on my laptop for hours. So this is my attempt at capturing that feeling. Manually defocused and triggered with a wireless remote. The red light in the corner was actually rather annoying. With it off, the room was missing a nice light gradient, but with it on, it was completely overpowering. Eventually, I just underexposed quite a bit, and brought up the brightness in Lightroom, and because it was underexposed, there was still room for recovery.<br /> <br /> I'm sitting at approximately that same spot right now writing this caption.<br /> <br /> 50mm f/1.4 @ f/1.6. 1/13. ISO 100.
  • Day 33. August 10, 2010. It was a late night, and I hadn't really thought at all about what today's picture was going to be, so I asked a friend who, as a joke, suggested, "sidewalk." I decided to take it seriously, and see what I do with that mundane suggestion. I tried to use my legs and the shadow to draw attention to the sidewalk and the cracks that seem to be spokes around the light source. The asphalt gap separating foreground and background is just brimming with silent action. This was also shot with b/w in mind, but the colors turned out surprisingly well, with that nice singular turquoise-blue window in the background framed by the light and the car.<br /> <br /> EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 @ 10mm f/3.5. 8.0s. ISO 200.
  • Day 34. August 12, 2010. Wait a minute, you may be thinking to yourself. Isn't Day 33 supposed to be August 11? Err...yes. Yesterday ended up overflowing, so I just did an extra-awesome shoot today, and posted two pictures.<br /> <br /> I've always wanted to try smoke photography, so I did some reading online, and went for it. It was a lot easier than I though, but it did take patience and careful attention to detail. There's a picture of my setup here <a href="http://lekan.smugmug.com/gallery/11925214_AspKu/#968172745_2urEf">http://lekan.smugmug.com/gallery/11925214_AspKu/#968172745_2urEf</a>). I used my 100mm macro, and manually focused on a match tip held in place by a mic stand with a clip head. I hung a black cloth on a chair to use as a backdrop. Lighting was from camera right for the first few, then switched to camera left. For the smoke to be in focus, I had to stop down to f/11. Smoke also moves surprisingly quickly, so balancing the shutter speed with flash recycle speed with flash power was fun to juggle. Eventually, I settled at a 1/20 shutter, and just varied the flash power, usually between 1/32 and 1/8. Near the end of the shoot, I had enough experience predicting when an interesting smoke pattern would appear that I increased power to 1/4. In total, I used about 30 matches and 420 exposures, which resulted in 17 I developed. Here are my two quick favorites.<br /> <br /> (Update: OK. I'm not sure why smugmug does a terrible job of recompressing the dark areas on its jpg's. If you're interested in an image without all the ugly artifacts everywhere, just let me know and I'll email it to you.)<br /> <br /> 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro @ f/11. 1/20s. ISO 200. 580EX II from camera left and above match tip, 1ft away, at 1/4 power.
  • Day 35. August 12, 2010. See comments for previous photo.<br /> <br /> This was almost a discard since the smoke was blurred. But after transforming to b/w, this turned out really well. There's a little excess smoke in the top-left that I was thinking about cloning away, but decided to leave this completely without processing (besides converting to b/w).<br /> <br /> 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro @ f/11. 1/20s. ISO 100. 580EX II from camera left and above match tip, 1ft away, at 1/8 power.
  • Day 36. August 13, 2010. Everyone, meet Kona, Casey's dog, who is perhaps the most chill dog I have ever met, except when he feels threatened by small dogs.<br /> <br /> EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens @ 17mm, f/2.8. 1/15, ISO 400.
  • Day 37. August 14, 2010. Two dog pictures in a row! This was an excitable little explorer who kept trying to make friends with a group of us as we were chilling in Dolores Park in San Francisco. She was especially persistent in attempting to snag a slice of the cheesecake. Even as I was taking this shot of her, she came in close to sniff and attempt to lick the lens. Thankfully, the lens hood prevented any direct tongue-glass contact.<br /> <br /> EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS @ 17mm, f/2.8. 1/160. ISO 100.
  • Day 38. August 15, 2010. Random succulents I found!<br /> <br /> EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS @ 23mm, f/2.8. 1/640. ISO 100.
  • Day 39. August 16, 2010. And, ladies and gentlemen, this is why I haven't posted a picture in an entire week. I was in Atlanta for business for much of the week, then upon returning, had a bad nosebleed directly prior to embarking on the high-altitude study. And yes, this is indeed a photograph of toilet paper. The W sure has a way of making everything look nice, doesn't it.<br /> <br /> EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS @ 55mm, f/2.8. 1/40. ISO 400.
  • Day 40. August 17, 2010. The view from my window on the 16th floor of the W in midtown Atlanta, GA. This was taken about 10 minutes after sunset, just as the blue was starting to set in. I took quite a series of these that I could theoretically make an interesting time-lapse of the sunset, Phillip Bloom-style. Maybe next time I get the free time to learn how...<br /> <br /> EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 @ 14mm, f/10. 20s. ISO 100.
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