October 1, 2009 - Well planned snapshots

1/40

f5.0

ISO 800

29mm

RAW

A little more simple of a shot today. I got this while my kids were browsing around for a book to buy at their school's book fair. But even with something that looks like a snapshot still has some thought and planning behind it.

Take this shot, for instance. I cheated a little by putting the camera in 'P' mode. This mode lets the camera make all the decisions but lets me influence them. In this instance my influences were setting the camera to ISO 800 and using the fluorescent white balance. The film speed gave it enough light to properly expose the shots without using a flash, while the white balance matched the lights in the library.

Now all I had to do was follow my kids around as they looked at books. But even there I used a specific technique. In this shot, I crouched down so the camera was on the same level as my kids. This simple change in angle of view really changes the whole feel of the photo because it is as if we are seeing the world from their perspective. It's subtle, but can have a powerful effect.

As to what I would change, I wish I had a little more shutter speed. The camera was fooled a little and overexposed the shot, but I was able to dial it back down using Adobe Camera Raw adn Photoshop Elements. If the camera hadn't been fooled, however, the shutter speed would have been a little faster and maybe I wouldn't have gotten the slight motion blur in Morgan's hands.

Oh, and one more thing — why in the world are they holding the book upside down?

September 30, 2009 - Peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies

1/13

f5.6

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

Welcome to one of my all-time favorite cookies. These peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies are so easy to make but so hard to stop eating, especially when you have a cold glass of milk with them!

I took this photo as the cookies were cooling. We had just pulled them out of the oven and placed the chocolate kisses on each one. The heat from the cookies was melting the kisses in place. That's why there is a sheen on the kisses — they're liquifying.

I shot this in RAW and without a flash, using the light from the stovetop. I used my image-stabilized 18-55mm lens, which allowed me to take the handheld shot at an incredibly slow 1/13 of a second (it probably helped that I braced my elbows on the countertop as I held the camera).

The reason why the shutter speed is so slow is because I was pushing the aperture to as small as possible to get a deeper depth of field. When focusing this close to your subject (the cookies were only about 12 inches away), your depth of field is really shallow and you need a smaller aperture to get more in focus. In particular, I wanted this shot to have a whole cookie in focus, and f5.6 allowed me to do this.

Thanks to the RAW format, I had good control of converting the color to true white using Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera Raw (it comes bundled with PSE). I have tried setting my camera's white balance to incandescent so it will match the light bulb under the stove's hood. But for some reason this light gets all wacky anyway, so I have to correct it using PSE.

Even though I shot this in landscape format, I liked the resulting crop better as a vertical. I think it brings more attention to the in-focus cookies in the lower third of the shot (rule of thirds!). I also add more feeling of depth to the shot by having one row out of focus in front and three rows behind.

I really like this shot a lot. If I had to nitpick anything, there would only be a couple. First, I think the kiss in the very front has an odd, slightly distracting shape. And second, I wish the two kisses in focus had more of a reflective shine like the ones in the back.

I am not sure why, but I really like taking food shots. I often find myself studying the food shots in elaborate restaurant menus, trying to figure out what makes each photo so nice, so effective. Then I try to keep those things I notice in mind for the next time I shoot.

I think I am getting better. What do you think?

September 29, 2009 - Deliciously disgusting cake

1/80

f5.6

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

I'll admit up front, this isn't going to be easy to explain. That thing on the table is a cake. It is also supposed to be meatloaf. But in actuality, it's really supposed to be a monster's foot. Make sense?

Don't worry, it didn't make sense at first to me either.

Here's the explanation. I work as a programmer at HowStuffWorks.com, and we just launched the TLC Cooking portion of our website (which you can find at recipes.howstuffworks.com). Being in a celebratory mood, the folks at TLC headquarters wanted to send us us a large cake for everyone to eat. But they didn't want to send just a plain cake — oh no, that just wouldn't be fun enough. They wanted to send a special cake that would look like one of the dishes from the recipes on the new site. But what recipe did they pick? One from the Halloween section called Feet of Meat!

So in honor of our accomplishment, we got to eat cake that was meant to look like a cooked foot of some Halloween monster. How appetizing.

In today's shot, our editor in chief, Conal Byrne, had just cut off the first piece of cake (for those wondering, it was the big toe), revealing to everyone that the cake was red velvet, creating a great illusion of raw meat inside. Everyone either laughed, gasped, or gagged. But what would you expect? Even those on the other side of the cake (who couldn't see the red inside) still saw the blood red cake stuck to the knife as he pulled it out of the cake. Yum, nothing like simulated red meat!

I took this photo just at the height of everyone's reaction. I like the candid emotions and reactions caught on their faces. It was a prime moment, and it can be hard to catch these kind of reactions. If I wasn't ready with the camera when the moment happened, I would have never caught it. Of course, it helped that I knew the cake was red velvet and I was expecting a good reaction. A little planning and anticipation can go a long way in getting great photos.

I used my dedicated flash and bounced it off of the ceiling to get a nice even amount of lighting in the whole room. This technique also eliminates the vast majority of shadows in the room, which helps add to the overall effect of the photo.

I purposely cropped it very wide to eliminate all of the dead space in the upper and lower portion of the photo. This helped draw attention to the most important parts of the photo, the cake and everyone's reaction to it. I just wish it wasn't so dark in the back corner. Maybe I should have had my flash pointing a little more forward instead of just straight up.

September 28, 2009 - Caught red-handed (again!)

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

I've been caught red-handed again. Twice in the same week I have missed a day, and I don't have anything to post for today.

(Ugh. I feel so ashamed . . . .)

So, in honor of how I feel, today I have posted a photo taken by my daughter, Leigh Ann, when she caught me red-handed as I was licking the chocolate chip pumpkin muffin dough off of the spatula we used back on September 20th.

She saw me taking photos that night, and after I had put the camera down she asked if she could get some photos herself. I said yes (of course) and away she went snapping photos. Little did I know she would get such a good one!

September 27, 2009 - Homemade spaghetti and meatballs

1/30

f2.8

ISO 400

50mm

RAW

Just a quick one tonight. We had spaghetti and meatballs today and I just couldn't resist another food shot. This was taken while the meatballs were simmering in our cast iron skillet with the spaghetti sauce.

I did quite a bit of contrast control in Photoshop Elements to get the photo to have enough snap to it. I am sure glad I shot it as RAW so I could have more control over how the final picture came out.

I like the way it turned out, especially with the bubbles that show it was simmering. What do you think?

September 26, 2009 - Beautiful day in Buckhead

1/1000

f7.1

ISO 200

30mm

RAW

Well, I have finally done it. I missed a day. I was going to try to sneak this past you, but then thought surely someone would catch that the metadata for the image clearly showed it was taken on Sept. 25th and not the 26th and I would have a huge Internet scandal on my hands that make my life a living nightmare.

But then I thought, why not admit it? I'm not perfect, just like David Letterman isn't perfect, and if he can admit his shortcomings on national TV then I can surely admit mine to the world.

Whew. That feels so much better.

On to the picture. The cloud cover was just gorgeous today (oops, I mean yesterday), so I got a good shot of the office building and condominium you can see from the 15th floor deck at my office. And because my floor is roughly halfway up the height of these two buildings, I don't get any perspective distortion.

Based on the image data, it looks like I had the camera in 'P' mode, which means the camera made most of the decisions for me (which is generally fine for a photo like this). My only post-production thought was if I should take out the tower crane or not that is protruding on the right side of the image. Since I am so far behind in making my daily posts, I decided not to.

What do you think, should I have?

September 25, 2009 - Tannah and Spot

1/400

f2.5

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Tannah had the privilege of bringing home the class pet for the weekend. She had so much fun with Spot today that I just had to get a photo of the two of them together.

Just like many of my other black and white photos, I had her sit down by the large living room window and used the natural ambient lighting to illuminate her. I used the higher ISO setting to create some graininess in the photo, and the wide f2.5 aperture to blur out the background.

I don't have any regrets with this photo. I had taken about a dozen different ones with her and Spot, and this was the best. I think it does a great job of capturing her happiness and contentment. What do you guys think?

September 24, 2009 - Cleaning up from the flood

1/50

f4

ISO 400

27mm

RAW

I went to watch Emma at tennis practice today and heard some commotion in the woods behind the tennis courts. I found a county crew trying to clean out this massive drainage pipe, which had become clogged sometime during (or maybe even before) the flooding we had.

The pipe is what a small creek flows through as it goes under one of the roads in our neighborhood. Normally, the creek doesn't have much more than a trickle flowing through it, but was fairly raging during the flood because at least 20 yards empty into it just from our neighborhood alone.

Because of the clog, the creek backed up until it flowed over through one of the houses and over the street. Then it joined up with a larger creek and flooded out the tennis court and swimming pool area. The county crew was trying to clear out the clog so they could send an engineer into the pipe to inspect it for washout damage under the roadway.

This photo was kind of challenging because of the lighting. We were in the thick trees, but there were several open spots that was letting in quite a bit of light. This light was confusing the camera and making it underexpose the majority of the photo. I put the camera into 'P' mode (which on my Canon is one spot away from the fully automatic green mode). This allowed the camera to make all of the adjustments it thought it needed but also gave me the chance to override it.

Since the camera was underexposing the photo pretty severely, I used the exposure compensation setting to overexpose the shot by nearly one full stop. This canceled out the camera's confusion and gave me the exposure I wanted.

I wish I could have used the camera's flash, but that would have drawn a lot of attention to me and I wasn't sure I wanted it. I was worried a little that they might complain if it became obvious I was photographing their work. But if I could have used a flash it would have helped light up the shadows of the photo, especially in the pipe.

September 23, 2009 - Church volleyball

1/500

f2.0

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Getting a photo today was a challenge. I was busy all day, and then had a church youth group meeting after dinner. But when I showed up they were getting ready to play volleyball, so I pulled out my camera.

I quickly figured out, however, that the lighting in our church's simple gymnasium was pretty bad. I had to use my 50mm f1.8 lens, open all the way to f2, in order to get enough light (at ISO 1600) for stop action photos.

To make matters worse, this lens doesn't have a quick autofocus, so many of my photos were out of focus.

Here is one of the few acceptable ones I feel I got. It was taken during the serve and I cropped in on it to focus on the concentration on his face and the blur of the ball as it was hit. This blur really helps add a feeling of action to the shot.

Because of the light colored room divider behind him, the camera was fooled and it underexposed the photo a little. That is why it is so grainy. When shooting at high ISO's, it is vitally important to properly expose the photo during the shot. This will help reduce the graininess of the photo. The more you have to fix the exposure after the shot with your photo editing software, the worse the grain will be.

The lighting was also casting a horrible color that was really hard to nail down in post-processing. Due to being so behind in my posts, I didn't spend much time on it.