I found a great new (to me) Tumblr blog today. It’s Time Magazine’s LightBox, where they showcase some amazing photographs from days gone by. Check it out if you’re looking for some photographic inspiration!
http://timelightbox.tumblr.com/
Tag: photography blog Time inspiration
It rained all day today, which gave me a perfect excuse to stay indoors and work on our income taxes. But by the end of the day I had a good dose of cabin fever and was ready to go outside, rain or not. By about 6:00PM the rain had stopped and a light fog had settled in for the evening. I decided it might be a good time to do a little night shooting in downtown Tupelo.
I was hoping to get some interesting photos of the lights glowing through the fog, but it wasn’t quite dense enough to provide the effect I was looking for. In addition, there was more traffic downtown than I had expected due to a theatre production by the Tupelo Community Theatre that was going on at the Lyric.
Still, I did get quite a few images that I really liked. I used the D700 and my 50mm prime lens, mounted on the tripod so I wouldn’t be at the mercy of the dim light. Andy went with me and we walked around for about an hour before the fog turned to a light sprinkle and we headed back to the car to protect the equipment.
I processed sixteen of the images when we got home, and decided to do them all in black and white–it just seemed to fit the mood. I used Paintshop Photo Pro X4 with Topaz Black & White Effects, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. Let me know what you think!
We stopped by Veterans Park in Tupelo on Sunday afternoon just about an hour before sundown. We wanted to see if there were any geese on the lake, and we were fortunate enough to get there just when (1) the light was right and (2) a family was tossing pieces of bread into the water to attract the geese, ducks and other waterfowl.
I tried to practice something that I read recently about photographing birds and other wildlife–try to focus on the eyes. It’s harder than it looks, as animals don’t exactly look into the camera and pose for you. But just thinking about that little rule made me pay more attention to what I was shooting, and I did manage to capture a few shots where the eyes look pretty darn sharp!
I used my Nikon D5000 with the 55-200mm lens for this shot, set at about 190mm. I used a fairly large aperture of F/6.3 to get a faster shutter speed and also to blur the background a little bit. I processed the raw file in Paintshop Photo Pro X4, using Topaz Adjust 5, as well as Topaz DeNoise to clean up the very slight bit of noise in the dark areas of the water.
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This past Sunday we took an afternoon drive to Tombigbee State Park, just about twenty minutes from our house, to explore the countryside and look for a few photo-ops. The trees are still bare and most of the ground cover is still brown, but it was a beautiful day with bright blue skies, and we thoroughly enjoyed our day-trip.
Tombigbee State Park is small as far as parks go, but they have a beautiful lake, some nice campsites, recreational facilities (including an excellent Frisbee golf course that winds its way through the woods), and picnicking and boating facilities. They also have a number of rustic but well-equipped cabins for rent, and we will definitely be making reservations for a stay there in the near future.
I carried both my camera bodies with me. I had the Nikon D5000 with my 55-200mm lens attached, and I also had my Nikon D700 full-frame monster with the 14-24mm wide-angle lens mounted. It was nice to be able to switch back and forth between cameras while shooting the same scene, and to be able to compare results between the equipment.
The first shot I want to share is this image taken with the D5000 and the 55-200 zoom. I wanted to capture the hanging sweet gum ball while blurring the lake in the background, and the telephoto lens with a wide aperture was perfect. I even managed to capture the wisps of spider web on the lower fork of the branch:
I’ll share more photos in the next few days. I’m still anxious for springtime to get here so things will start to green up a little. But it’s still possible to find beauty in the middle of winter time if we just take the time to look for it.
If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
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I found this really cool app for the iPhone that lets you combine multiple photos into one image. The app is called Diptic, and it’s available in the iTunes app store for only $.99.
Diptic provides and intuitive interface that allows you to select a layout from the generous selection. You can then fill each space on the layout with an image from your camera roll, or you can take a new photo. The images can be sized, moved around, and even enhanced within the app with the toolset provided.
Diptic is very simple to use. Within five minutes of downloading it to my iPhone, I had whipped out this awesome composite image of my cat, Macho, from three photos in my camera roll.
If you’re an iPhone photographer, be sure to take a look at Diptic! And no, I’m not affiliated and I don’t get paid to say this.
Since I acquired an iPhone several months ago, I’ve done a lot of experimenting with its amazing 8-megapixel camera and various photography apps that I’ve picked up.
I decided it’s time to start sharing some of these shots on my blog!
Here’s one that I took today on our front porch. It was raining outside, and I was able to capture the reflection of one of our trees in the puddle of water at my feet. The leaf that was lying near the puddle gives a sense of scale and anchors the photo in time…winter in the South.
This shot was taken using Instagram.
View on Instagram • Sent via InstagalleryLeaf on Reflection
By Suzanne Hight (@zannwalker)
Sent from my iPad
It’s been dreary, foggy, and rainy here in Tupelo, with little daylight for photography on these short winter days. So I went back to the archives, pulled out some brackets from our March 2011 trip to Jerome, and churned out a little HDR love for you guys. This was taken at the Gold King Mine ghost town, just north of downtown Jerome. It’s a photographer’s paradise, especially if you’re into HDR. Enjoy!
(HDR from five bracketed images, combined in Photomatix V4. Post-processing in Paintshop Photo Pro X4, using Topaz Adjust 5.)
If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
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Today was kind of strange. It was Christmas Eve Eve, and a Friday at that, so it was a day that I really didn’t expect to get much work done. But, adding to the weirdness of the day, my work laptop somehow acquired a virus, so it’s been out of commission since day before yesterday. I spent hours on Skype with our helpdesk yesterday trying to get my system up and running, to no avail. So today they’re shipping me a replacement laptop, which should arrive early next week.
There wasn’t much I could do today, other than check my email (using my own personal computer) and respond as necessary–and I only received two emails that required responses. By lunchtime I was ready to get out of the house and away from the computer. So even though it was a gray, overcast day, I decided to do a little shooting. I’ve been wanting to take some Zen-inspired photos to have framed for my home office, and I thought today would be the perfect time to do that.
Andy went with me on the excursion, and we drove out to Elvis Presley Lake, just north of where we live. We had not been there yet, so we weren’t sure what to expect in the way of photo ops. We found a nice lake with camping spots, picnic tables, boat ramps and fishing piers, and very nice bath and shower facilities.
I wanted to get some shots using very shallow depth of field, so I used my 50mm prime lens. We found a spot where there were some downed trees near the water’s edge, and I took a few shots before the cold wind literally drove us back to the car. Here are three that I processed this afternoon, using Paintshop Photo Pro X4 and Topaz Black & White Effects using the Sepia presets. I sized these to be 5 x 7′s, and I’m going to have them mounted in 8 x 10 or 8.5 x 11 frames to go in my office. I used similar processing on each one as I want them to be displayed as a set:
After warming up for just a minute, we walked over the hill where the wind was a little less biting, and took some shots of the boat docks and the fishing pier. There was a large sign on the pier that said “No Swimming”. Just a few yards from the entrance to the pier, I found this lying on the bed of pine needles, and couldn’t resist grabbing a quick photo to be processed in Topaz Adjust. Needless to say, this image will NOT be joining the others on my office wall, but I did find the photo to be oddly compelling:
If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
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Tonight I decided to pull out some old brackets and do some HDR processing, using the new Topaz Adjust and Topaz Black & White Effects plug-ins that I’ve recently acquired.
I found this set of brackets that I shot from the top of South Mountain Park in Phoenix, on a partly-cloudy afternoon just after a storm front had moved through. From the top of South Mountain, there was a clear view of the suburb of Ahwatukee, and the remaining clouds were still dramatic enough to really lend a sense of scale to the landscape. From the to of South Mountain, you can almost see forever!
I shot these brackets with my 14-24mm Nikkor wide-angle lens, using my Nikon D700 camera mounted on a tripod. I processed the brackets in Photomatix 4, then edited the resulting TIFF in Paintshop Photo Pro X4. First I used Topaz Adjust to correct exposure and bump up the clarity slightly. I then added a layer using Topaz Black & White Effects, using the low-key preset which I adjusted slightly to add some detail. I lowered the opacity of this layer, as I just wanted to add a little drama to the clouds, especially where the sun was filtering through.
Today, we closed on the sale of our home in Arizona, so we no longer have any real estate ties to the Phoenix area. I guess this image is a little bit of nostalgia for a place that I really did enjoy living and photographing. I’ll still be returning there several times a year for work, so hopefully this won’t be the last time I see such a magnificent landscape as this through my viewfinder.
You know how I love the Topaz suite of plug-ins. Topaz Adjust is my go-to plug-in for making my images pop, and Topaz DeNoise does an excellent job of getting rid of those ugly pixels from low-light images. Just recently I added Topaz Black & White effects to my toolbox, and I love the wide choice of presets and sliders that give the user total control of the resulting image.
So when I got the latest email from Topaz announcing a major upgrade to their Lens Effects plug-in, I jumped at it. I did not have this plug-in already, but through a special offer that’s good from now through Christmas Eve, I was able to purchase it new at the upgrade prices of $29.99.
The main reason I wanted to have this particular tool was to try my hand at the effect known as tilt/shift. I don’t have a tilt/shift lens in my gear collection, but this plug-in does a pretty decent job of mimicking the effect through some judicious blurring of parts of the image.
If you’re not familiar with tilt/shift, the effect is meant to take an image from the real world and make it look like it’s a toy or a model. Ideally, the image is shot from an overhead vantage point (visualize looking down at a model train on a table). The idea is to have some small part of the image be in sharp focus while the rest of the image is blurred, making it look like a small toy model of what it really is.
Here’s my first attempt at the tilt/shift effect, using Topaz Lens Effects. This photo was made in Jerome, Arizona, from the balcony of the Grand Hotel looking down upon the town in the early morning sunrise. This is the original unedited version:
Unedited original image - Jerome, Arizona
Now here is the edited version, using the tilt/shift preset in Topaz Lens Effects:
Edited with Tilt/Shift preset in Topaz Lens Effects
Notice how the pickup truck in the middle of the image begins to look like a toy model with the blurred foreground and background? Pretty cool, huh?
I can’t wait to try out some more images using this effect, as well as the other presets that are included with this plug-in! If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, here’s the link to the Topaz product page, and be sure to use the coupon code “simplefocus” that’s good through 12/24/2011. (And no, I’m not affiliated with Topaz and don’t get a cut!)
If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
Facebook at ZannWalker Photography
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My Official Website at http://zannwalker.com
