September 22, 2009 - Damage from the lightning?

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My neighbor, whose lightning strike I told you about in yesterday's post, had a bunch of electronics blow out in his house. How? The water pipe from the city supply ran through the roots of the tree. The lightning's charge traveled down the pipe and into their house.

Thankfully, we were more lucky. We didn't get any lightning strikes. But for some reason the DVD player was dead when we tried to use it today. Today's photo is of Joshua trying to get Tannah's favorite movie out of the player.

I used my dedicated flash pointed up into the ceiling, as I described in the third paragraph of Sunday's post about making some muffins. I composed the photo with Joshua off to one side and the player at the bottom to kind of frame the image a little.

I just wish I had left the armoire door so you could see the TV inside. That would really help set the photo properly. I also wish I had put a little white card behind the head of the flash so it would have bounced a little light into Joshua's face.

September 21, 2009 - Lightning strike too close to home

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Today's photo is more of a fun snapshot. Last night we got a ton of rain — officially seven inches. And the worst of it came down during a horrible lightning storm.

Near the end of the storm (around 5 a.m.) I heard a loud SNAP, followed immediately by a massive thunderclap. It clearly came from somewhere in front of the house. I thought for sure one of our trees had been struck.

In the morning we found out it was the massive poplar tree across the street in our neighbor's yard. In the photo you can see the strike went clear down to the ground, shattering off bark and wood as it went. Tannah is holding one of the pieces (which we had found in our yard) that had splintered off from the strike.

This is a straight-forward shot. I used my wide-angle lens to get as much of the 80-foot tree as I could, but I didn't want to step much further back so you could still make out the streak down the tree. I included Tannah to help give some relevance to how big the tree really is.

In hindsight, I should have shot it at ISO 800 or open up the aperture to f4. This would have increased the shutter speed to 1/60. I could have also had Tannah hold the piece of wood more to the side so you could make it out clearly. The way she is holding it in the photo makes it hard to visually separate it from her torso.

PS — this rain was the start of the great Atlanta flood of 2009. Luckily, we didn't get much more during the day. But some parts of the Atlanta area got two to three more inches as the day went on. I don't have any photos of actual flooding, but I will have some more rain- and storm-related photos coming up.

September 20, 2009 - Making pumpkin muffins

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f5.6

ISO 400

20mm

RAW

Tonight we made a treat — chocolate chip pumpkin muffins!

I used my dedicated flash to light up the kitchen. I pointed it straight up so it would bounce off the ceiling and create a brighter, broader light. It did a good job.

I set the camera on manual, with the shutter at 1/60, aperture at f5.6, and ISO at 400. For indoor shots with a flash, these are my favorite settings. The camera does a great job of figuring out how much flash to use, and my Sigma EF500 Super flash has plenty of power.

The 1/60 shutter speed does a good job of stopping action, while the f5.6 aperture usually creates a good depth of field for indoors. With the film speed set at ISO 400, it's fast enough to light up most of the room and have a slight (yet pleasant) light falloff towards the back.

I composed this shot specifically. I got in close to Tannah and down on her level so you could easily see her. I arranged the simple ingredients so you could see what they were. Because I focused in close, the depth of field in this shot was fairly shallow which helped put the messy counter behind her out of focus (which helps reduce its distraction yet convey enough to easily convey that this is a kitchen).

I like this photo. It really captures the idea well of making something with my kids. Leigh Ann was helping a little, too. And when she wasn't helping, she took my camera and took some photos of Tannah and I working side by side.

By the way, the recipe is really simple. One box of spice cake mix, one bag of mini chocolate chips, and one regular-sized can of pumpkin. Mix it all up (no water needed) with a teaspoon of nutmeg and put it in muffin tins. Cook them at 325° for 10 minutes (for miniature muffins, longer for regular ones) and enjoy!

September 19, 2009 - Flower on a rainy day

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f8

ISO 800

49mm

RAW

I am sure you have all heard about Atlanta's great flood of 2009 by now. This photo was taken two days before the flood happened. It had been raining for five straight days for a total of about seven inches so far, according to my rain gauge (a large bucket) in my front yard.

My youngest daugher, Tannah, was attending her best friend's birthday party. It was supposed to be at a petting zoo/animal ranch, but the rain had forced those plans to be canceled and the party was now at their home. When I dropped her off I saw their beautiful flowers on their front porch. I got this picture when I came back to pick her up.

The sky was completely overcast (and dark, too, because it was raining as I took this). While kind of gloomy, it offered a very even lighting. I made sure to take this in RAW format so I would have plenty of processing options later on when I loaded it into the computer. And I shot at f8 to have a good depth of field in the photo, which helped more of the flower be in focus.

I pumped up the exposure and contrast in Adobe Camera Raw, while also darkening the blacks a little bit to help keep the background dark. I didn't really like the flower in the background in the upper right, so I burned (darkened) that quite a bit to make the main flower separate from it more.

So what do you think? Overall, I think it is pleasant, but not a knock-out. The overcast skies provided even lighting, but I wouldn't consider it dynamic. I am worried I darkened the background too much and affected the overall mood of the photo. I also didn't have an umbrella as I was taking the photos, so I was a bit rushed (it wasn't a light rain!) and I didn't take my time. Ideally, I would love to find some flowers like this immediately after a storm is over with the sun coming out.

PS &mdash I would really like to know what kind of flowers these are. Anyone know?

September 18, 2009 - Joshua's black and white

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I finally got my oldest, Joshua, to pose for me at the same window, so this completes the set I wanted to do of all my children. And just like the others, everything I said about the first photo applies here, too.

I'm going to break with my traditionally explanation and talk about what I don't like first — that finger resting on his upper lip! I really like the pose, but the finger is very distracting. He was moving around as I was taking the photos (almost like he was modeling for me) and I tried to get him back into the same pose but with his fingers resting on his chin instead, but I was unsuccessful.

Having said all that, I like this photo. The lighting for this portrait is probably the best of the bunch. One thing I did differently is I put my 52-inch round white reflector just out of the picture to his right. This bounced a little bit of the window light back into the darker side of his face, which really helped lighten up his eye.

Now that all five are done, Rachel and I aren't sure we like all of them. There are a couple we feel really capture the kids' personalities (like Leigh Ann and Tannah), but we worried some of the poses are too similar (Rachel wants variety in each kid's pose). We will probably take some of these again until we feel we have what we want.

September 17, 2009 - Slight reprieve in the rain

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The rains held off for a while, and the tree guys came out to make good on their promise. While it is not perfect, my yard looks a lot better now. And since it wasn't raining, they went ahead and cut down the last tree.

Since the ground was still wet and borderline soaked, they cut the tree up into pieces and used a rope to lower each part to the ground. This technique was also used to make sure nothing fell on the power lines going to my house, which were only a few feet away. It also allowed them to haul the trunk off in pieces instead of having to use the same logger truck from the day before (the owner told me he wasn't going to use that guy again).

To help properly illuminate this photo on such an overcast day, I used my dedicated flash. The camera was being fooled by the bright white sky, so I told it to over-compensate on the flash by one full stop. I thought this did a nice job of brightening up the photo without making it look unnatural.

This is a great example of why you shouldn't be afraid to use your flash in the middle of the day. Without it, the photos turned out much darker. Why? I was aiming up into the underside of the tree, and just 25 feet away was my dark brown house (which was acting more like a light sponge — soaking up the light).

Before using the flash, the tree and the tree cutter were much darker and lacked detail. With the flash, everything looks more like you would perceive it with your natural eye.

September 16, 2009 - What a mess

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Between cutting down four trees yesterday and this morning, we must have had around three inches of rain fall. And it was still raining. So I went to work, thinking surely there was nothing that would happen today with the tree cutting.

Oh, how I was wrong.

My wife, Rachel, called me around 11 a.m. and said the logger truck showed up and they hauled away the tree trunks that had been felled from the day before. She was busy upstairs when they must have arrived because she didn't realize they were there until the last log was being dragged through the mud to their truck down on the street.

When I got home, this photo shows what greeted me.

I called up the tree cutting service, and the owner apologized. Profusely. He said the logger truck (which is run by a sub-contractor) had permission to pick up the logs yesterday (before the rain started coming down) but he shouldn't have come today. Not after all the rain. And he was especially wondering why in the world the guy tried to do it while it was still raining.

So for my photo today, you get something more like a snapshot. I took a bunch of photos to show what kind of damage was done in case I wasn't going to get any relief from the tree service. This was taken as I was standing in the street where the truck had been, showing how all the logs would've been pulled towards down the slope in front of my house.

They promised to come back out tomorrow, rain or shine, to get this cleaned up.

September 15, 2009 - Up in the trees

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f4

ISO 800

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We had a tree cutting service come out today to take down some dead, diseased, and damaged trees. There was a lot of activity and they were under the constant threat of rain, which made them work even faster.

The guy who climbed the trees had been doing it for years, and was very good. I got up on my roof to take this photo. By getting up on the same level as him, it allowed me to put a background of treetops behind him instead of the overcast sky. Our front yard slopes down to the street (by about 25 feet), so he was about 40 feet off the ground as he was making this cut.

I used my 70-200mm f2.8L lens so I could get a good, up close shot of him with all of the chips flying. I set the white balance mode to cloudy, and then added in more contrast in Photoshop Elements. And the shutter speed was in that magic range where most of the falling chips were frozen in air but the chips coming right off the chainsaw are slightly blurred. This really conveys the action of the photo.

I love how I caught a look of utter concentration. I also wanted to leave some negative space at the bottom (to help convey how high he was) but was careful not to include too much (which would have made him smaller in the photo).

I really like this photo, and I not sure if there is anything I would have changed. What do you think? Do you have any suggestions on what could have made this better?

September 14, 2009 - Biscuits

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ISO 800

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Today I made one of my favorite foods — biscuits! I took photos of both the preparing process and the finished product. Since I just recently put up a photo of making cinnamon rolls, I decided to post the golden brown finished product.

I shot this at a shallow angle so I could get the full range of focus zones in the photo. There are out-of-focus biscuits in the foreground and background surrounding the in-focus biscuits in the middle. This gives more depth to the photo and adds to its visual appeal.

I used the rule of thirds by putting the area of sharpest focus in the lower right third of the photo. I also cropped it in close to give more attention to the area of sharpest focus. Finally, I corrected the white balance and pumped up the contrast and color saturation.

I only have one regret &mdash I wish I hadn't eaten so many of them!

September 13, 2009 - Twilight overcast sky

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f5.6

ISO 400

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JPEG

I had been inspired recently by Bill Warren's outstanding photo collection of the world's largest tourist trap (called South of the Border on I-95 in South Carolina), so when I saw a chance to get a similar photo, I jumped at it.

I took this on an overcast day right as the sun was setting. It was bright enough to see, but dark enough that many businesses had their colorful lights and signs on. There was a balance to how bright the sky was compared to the business lights.

After I loaded the photo into Photoshop Elements, I lowered the exposure, increased the contrast, and pumped up the saturation a little. Even though I accidentally shot this as a JPEG (I had left it in JPEG mode after the tennis match the day before), I still used Adobe Camera Raw to edit the photo. How did I do that? I just selected 'Open As...' from the menu in the Editor, found my JPEG image, and chose to open it as a Camera RAW image in the dropdown menu at the bottom of the 'Open File' window.

The hardest thing for me was getting the photo to appear straight. I hadn't brought a tripod along, so I had to hand-hold the camera as I was shooting. The light was fading fast, so while the pictures I had started taking a few minutes before at ISO 400, I should have adjusted to ISO 800 for this one.

To make things harder, I was standing on the tall cement base of one of the light poles around the station so my angle of view would be a little higher and I wouldn't be aiming the camera up so much. I had to hold onto the pole with one hand while shooting with the other. It's amazing that a photo came out clear at all. I guess that really speaks to the technology put into these image-stabilized lenses that Canon is producing now.

I wish I had waited around a few more minutes and gotten another set of photos when it was almost dark.

I also want to go back and see what I can do to dial down the blue in the sky. I think if it was more grey, then with a little selective burning and dodging (lightening and darkening) I could make this look like a real stormy sky.

September 11, 2009 - Studio 1A at HowStuffWorks

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f3.5

ISO 800

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There's a good chance some of you have heard of HowStuffWorks.com, which is where I work (especially since I know some of my co-workers are following my 365 project). We have several outstanding podcasts, including one by Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant called "Stuff You Should Know."

(If you haven't heard it, you should check them out. They are available in the podcast section of iTunes. You'll probably find them in the Top 10 list.)

Anyway, yesterday Chuck asked me to get a photo of the recording studio. It seems some of the listeners wanted to see where they recorded their show. He also had received a wooden sign from a fan that depicted the name of the studio, and he wanted a shot so he could put it on his blog post. This way he could accomplish two things at once.

Today's photo is the result. After seeing how dark the studio is, I kinda wished I had brought my tripod to work. So I pulled out my image stabilized lens (which also happens to be my widest lens), set the ISO to 800, and played around with the aperture until I got a shutter speed I knew I could shoot with while hand-holding the camera.

I noticed the lights seemed to be all florescent bulbs, so I waited a few minutes until they all got as bright as possible (sometimes the CFL bulbs take a few minutes to reach full capacity). I shot it as RAW so if there were any problems with the coloring (even after putting the white balance to florescent) that I could have maximum control in correcting it.

While the photo may make the studio look fairly nice and orderly, it is quite the opposite. To the left of the table (by about three feet) is the sound engineer's work desk, complete with all of her controls, computers, screens, and everything else she uses (Jeri, you do a great job!). To the right of the table (and behind the thick woven fabric hanging over the wall) is the green screen portion of the studio where they shoot their video podcasts. It is a mess of cords, lights, stands, and other studio gear.

Because I was selective in what I excluded from the photo, the resulting shot is much stronger. I always try to keep that in mind when I shoot. Sometimes you can't help but have distracting backgound elements, but when you can minimize or eliminate them, your photographer will be much stronger.

Finally, I regret not being able to talk Josh and Chuck into sitting at their chairs for the photo. Both of them love what they do (after all, who doesn't like to just sit down with a great friend and just shoot the breeze about current events?), but they don't always like the publicity and fame they are getting. Ever the humble journalists, they turned down my request.

September 12, 2009 - Emma's first tennis match

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ISO 400

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Emma and Leigh Ann got to play in a practice match today. This was the first time for Emma. She is just starting to learn the game, but she does a really good job of hitting the ball. She just needs to keep working on getting into position to hit. She did that here.

I shot in JPEG mode so I could get a bunch of shots (my camera in RAW mode will shoot only six successive photos whereas JPEG mode gets somewhere around 20). I also put the camera in "sunny" white balance mode since most of the tennis court was in full sunlight. Finally, I put the camera on my monopod to help support the weight of my 70-200mm f2.8L lens.

As I followed Emma around with the lens, I kept the zoom a little wide so I wouldn't have any problem keeping her in the lens. I shot horizontally because I feel that works very well for tennis, especially when a player is swinging at the ball (like Emma is).

Because the aperture is set to a wide f2.8, the background is slightly out of focus. Emma was close to the sideline when I got the shot, so that is why the fence isn't more out of focus.

In the final print (which is what you see), I cropped the photo in quite a bit to focus the attention on just Emma and the tennis action. The inside of her forearm was overexposed, so I tried to back off the brightness there. This is one area where shooting RAW would have helped. RAW contains more image data in the bright areas, which allows you to pull back from overblown hightlights when you use something like Adobe Camera Raw (which you can find with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements).

The 1/3200 shutter speed did a great job of freezing the ball on the strings of the racket. One thing I could have done differently is slow the shutter speed down. It can be tricky to do this, but there is a balance where you have a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the player, but slow enough where the ball is still a little bit of a blur. This effect does a great job of conveying the idea of motion in the photo.

The better the skills of the players (and the harder they hit the ball), the easier it is to find a slow enough shutter speed to do this. However, since Emma and her partner are just getting started, the game was very slow and it might have been impossible to achieve this effect.

September 10, 2009 - Homemade cinnamon rolls

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ISO 800

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RAW

As you might be starting to tell, my wife and I love to cook. Today, she made some simple cinnamon rolls. I got this photo as she was using dental floss to cut each one away from the big roll of dough.

I used my 50mm f1.8 lens in order to get a fast enough shutter speed in the weak light under the table's lampshades. I also knew that this lens produced an extremely sharp photo, which I wanted.

I got in pretty close to Rachel's hands to concentrate on what she was doing. I wanted to include the tray of cinnamon rolls in the background, and I also liked the splattering of flour spread around the work area.

But I didn't need to include anything else in the photo. This was definitely a case where leaving out stuff was as important as what you leave in.

Even with setting the camera to tungsten lighting (to match the bulbs over the table, I still had to adjust the lighting in Adobe Photoshop Elements so the flour would look white.

The one thing that I wish I would have done is move the little red cup that she used to mix up the cinnamon and sugar. She emptied the cup, so you can't tell what it was used for just by looking at it. Worse yet, it is really red, which makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

But I also didn't have a lot of time. Rachel usually doesn't want to wait for me to make a photo perfect, so she just keeps working when I pull out my camera (sometimes I think she works even faster). She had already gone through one roll of dough and was starting on the other one when I pulled out of my camera. I got only five or six shots before she reached the end of the roll.

Sometimes if you think too much and try to make a perfect shot, you wind up missing the shot altogether.

September 9, 2009 - Morgan in black and white

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f2.2

ISO 1600

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RAW

Here is my fourth child, Morgan. She was excited when I told her it was her turn for a portrait by the window. Just like the others, everything I said about the first photo applies here, too.

While I like the photo, I am not sure if does a good enough job of capturing her personality. But it was the best of the bunch. Morgan likes it, however, and so does Rachel.

I do like how the lighting turned out on this one. The light seems to wrap around her face better than the other three, and I think I did a better job on the black and white effect this time.

Having said that, you may be seeing another photo of her coming soon. And then we'll pick which one is better.