Heyya, I've been shooting, but not really posting.  Here's one I took the other day with my new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens.  It's a pretty cool lens, but way unforgiving.  You have to have the focus bang on to get anything worthwhile.  But when you do, it's nice and crisp.  Way clearer than the kit lens on the XTi. For the money ($80 retail), it's probably the absolute best "bang for the buck" that you're gonna find.

Monday, April 30, 2007 6:23 AM

I shot this at the United States Navy Memorial the other day after a morning at the office.  It's kind of grainy because I had to boost the ISO a fair bit (800).  I wanted the ISO high enough to let me use a faster shutter speed than I normally would.  I wanted to "freeze" the water from the fountains.  It was overcast enough that a lower ISO would have required a much lower shutter speed.  I like the overall "moody" atmosphere of this shot.

Thursday, April 26, 2007 1:06 PM

I took this the other day...

The only real reason I took it at all is because I remember taking this a few weeks ago...

I may make a new "project" of sorts where I'm doing a specific shot in the same place every time I walk past it.  I just haven't decided if I want to keep it "plain" or if I want to "spice it up" a bit.  Lemme Xplain...

A "plain" version would be me taking the exact same picture from the same spot, using the same lens, same exposure, same focal length, etc.  Of course, I'm not going to drag a tripod with me every day, so there will be minor variations due to my positioning, but essentially, I'll get roughly the same shot throughout the entire year, which should give a pretty nifty example of how everything changes throughout the seasons, due to both weather and any hooman intervention.  The downside to this... I have to keep the same lens on me all the time, which means I probably won't bother taking anything else with me.  That's MAJORLY limiting!

"Spicing it up" is basically me taking the same shot from the same place, but sometimes a lens is going to be different.  I doubt I'll swap around that much, but I may change focal lengths, apertures, lenses, filters, etc.  Same basic effect as "plain", but I think it would be a bit more interesting, even though it won't be as "smooth" when you view all the shots back-to-back. 

I'll think about it.

Thursday, April 26, 2007 7:29 AM

Ok, enough of the bee stuff...  time I posted up some pictures again.  I may do a few a day to catch up, I may not... we'll see how it goes.

I thought this first one was cool just because of the lights that were here...

I snagged that one about a week ago when I ditched out to take some night shots around DC.  Not many came out well because I didn't feel like toting around my tripod.

This next one is kind of cool because of the colors and composition, but it didn't come out like I was hoping it would...

I had my 18-55mm lens with me and took that shot at f/3.5.  I also pushed the exposure up a stop or two to get the blue color in the sky instead of just plain black.  When I took the shot, I was thinking that the 3.5 aperture would throw the monument out of focus a lot more than it actually did.  I wanted the little fountains to be crisp, but the monument and flags to be WAY out of focus.  The 18-55 just doesn't have the depth of field needed to get what I wanted...  maybe a 50mm f/1.4 would do it. ;)

Friday, April 20, 2007 9:17 AM

Ok, I'm just about done with my recent bee shoot stuff, but there's one post I wanted to make on the whole thing.

The last post was about the process of setting up the hive, but I specifically avoided talking about the photography side of things.  I'm going to go into that now.  This ain't about bees, it's about what I learned taking the pictures of them.

• First...  as with anything that you plan to take decent shots of, know what you're shooting!  In this case, I didn't really have a clue.  I was expecting maybe a few bees to be flying around and as long as I didn't move around too much, I'd be fine.  Oops!  I did NOT expect them to be EVERYWHERE and I didn't expect them to be as active as they were.  Honestly, if I had known, I would have probably used only the 75-300mm lens and the tripod from quite far away.  The whole up close thing was really pretty freaky and is not something I'd want to repeat without some protective gear.
• Second...  know your lenses.  I actually learned a lot about my two lenses after processing all the pictures.  I only had a vague idea of how the lenses behaved before this.  I'll go into detail about the differences I noticed between the two lenses a bit later in this post.  Had I realized how much of a difference there was between them both, I would have made some totally different choices about what shots I was taking with each lens.  Suffice to say for now, the Tamron 75-300 would have gotten a LOT more use on this shoot if I'd done some real comparisons beforehand.
• Third...  Expect the worse to happen.  There were two things I could imagine going horribly wrong with this process.  This first is a trip to the emergency room when someone got 200 bee stings.  The second was a dead or broken camera.  Luckily neither happened, but going into it expecting to get stung made it a lot more bearable when I did get my one sting of the day.  I'll go into that in more detail some other time.  The camera did it's job and didn't give me any hassles.  That's a good thing, because I can't even afford lenses, let alone a backup camera.  Had it failed, I simply wouldn't have been able to take any more pictures.
• Fourth...  Bring lots of memory.  I started with an empty 2Gb card, which I filled up about halfway through.  I then had to dig for my 4Gb card and use that for the rest of the shots.  I should have started with the 4Gb.  I had really considered ONLY taking the 2Gb card in the morning, but did snag several others as I ran out the door... "just in case".
• Fifth (and finally)...  Know your gear and keep it handy.  I had NO chance to use the tripod for half the shots, mainly because I'd chosen a bad spot to set it up and partly because I abandoned it when the bees started bouncing off my head.  I'm really glad Rob rescued it for me, as it's really hard to get crisp shots on that 75-300mm lens without the tripod.  Also, I'd set my camera to 100 ISO.  This is mainly because I always try to shoot 100 ISO unless I'm doing night shots...  That whole "fear of noise" thing.  I should have bumped it up to 400 right off the bat.  The sky was overcast, we were under trees and the lighting generally sucked.  Bumping up to 400 ISO would have gotten me much clearer pictures and I'd have more of them.  I ended up tossing about 150 shots because the shutter speed wasn't high enough to stop the camera shake.  I'll be taking a lot more shots at 400 ISO so I can figure out it's limitations and get used to change in shutter speeds and aperture.

Ok, let me talk a little about the lenses here.  I started shooting relatively close to the hive with my kit lens, a Canon EF-S 18-35mm f3.5-5.6.  It's a cheap lens, but it's fairly flexible.  Compared to my other lens, this one lets in a lot more light, so I can get a higher shutter speed.  It's also much faster to focus than the other.  The depth of field is also easily managed...  I can blur out the background when I want to, but still have a fairly decent range that's in focus.  The problem with it is that it's REALLY soft.  This isn't apparent until you compare it to the Tamron.  The Tamron is an AF70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD.  Here's an example...

The picture on the left is done with the Canon 18-35, the one on the right is done with the Tamron 75-300. You're probably going to have to click on them and show all sizes in Flickr to really see what I'm going to talk about.  I'd recommend the large size to see what I'm talking about.  For this discussion, just ignore the brightness... that was my choice of camera settings and post-processing and has very little to do with the lenses.

The Canon shot (on the left) has a wide (or long) depth of field... shorter lenses generally do.  You can see that almost everything from the front of the hive box all the way to Rob's gloves and jeans are pretty much in focus.  You can see a bit of a blur in front of the box opening, which is a bee that's between me and the hive box.  You can also see the ground behind the hive box is somewhat out of focus.  You can tell there are leaves and twigs and a driveway behind that, although it's not at all sharp or crisp.  At full size, you can see there are a few spots on the driveway and can probably make an educated guess that they are leaves.

Now let's take a look at the Tamron shot (on the right - again, I recommend you open it separately and view the large size).  Notice how the corner of the hive box is in focus.  Some of the bees on the shipping box are in focus, but as you get near the entrance, they start going blurry pretty quickly.  You can see there's a bush or something behind the hive box, but after that it's just a green blur.  This is a narrow depth of field, which is normal on long lenses.  It's not a problem (and I quite like it most of the time), but you have to keep in mind that this will happen in order to plan your shots. 

I knew about and was prepared for all the DOF stuff I just talked about.  What I didn't know and wasn't prepared for was the lack of clarity on the Canon lens.  If you look at both images at large or original sizes, you should be able to see that the parts of the Tamron shot that are in focus are really crisp compared to the Canon shot.  I'm finding this more and more as I shoot with the Canon lens.  It's really starting to bug me.  The odd thing is that I think the Canon should be sharper than the Tamron.  Shorter lenses generally take much clearer pictures, simply due them having less to cause any kind of "pollution" to the light coming into the camera.  Both lenses are "cheap" - pretty much bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but I really expected the Canon to blow the Tamron out of the water when we're talking about image quality.  Not so at all.

That kind of sucks for a couple of reasons.  The first is that the Tamron does not do well in low light scenarios, which is what I prefer to shoot.  It can only go down to an f4, and it really needs a tripod to get rid of camera shake.  The second reason is that the Tamron is just really hard to shoot with.  It's such a long lens on my camera that it's nearly useless unless you really WANT to zoom in. My camera is a 1.6x crop factor sensor, which means that the functional focal length is basically equivalent to the lens focal length multiplied by 1.6. So, that 75-300mm lens becomes a 120-480mm lens.  We're getting into long-distance wildlife shooting ranges there!  Great if you're on safari somewhere, but lousy for walking around town with.  "Hey, that's a neat statue I want to take a picture of... let me walk 2 blocks away from it so I can fit it all in the frame."

So, what's the solution?  Probably just save my pennies and get a 50mm f1.4 lens.  That's pretty much a compromise between the two lenses I have.  Since it's a prime lens (no zooming), it should automatically be clearer than both of my existing lenses, just because it has much less glass.  Also, prime lenses generally have better glass in them to start with, which increases the image quality even more.  The 50mm on my camera will effectively act like an 80mm lens, which I think is a good "walking around, shoot everything" length.  Plus, being able to go all the way to f1.4 means I'll be able to take some crazy night shots. ;)

In the mean time I'm going to take a lot more test shots with both lenses.  I plan on checking each lens at different apertures in order to see if they have a "sweet spot".  It's possible the Canon can get a lot sharper, but maybe only at f4 or so instead of wide open at f3.5.  That will give me a much longer depth of field (not always a good thing), but it'll be nice to know if I can use the sharpness when the DOF doesn't matter.

Summary

I learned something about how my lenses behave and I figured out what I want to do to explore them some more.  That's kind of what it's all about. ;)

Posted by smthng | 0 Comments [Edit]

Filed under: Photography, Tamron, Canon, Depth of Field, Lenses, Thoughts, Bees [Edit Tags]

Friday, April 20, 2007 9:12 AM

Executive Shadows

Time to try getting back to my semi-regular pictures.  Here's one from this morning...

I know it's crooked AND it has some barrel distortion, but I still kind of like the shadows and harsh highlights.  I'll post up another one from the same spot someday when I get some good light and maybe do a side-by-side comparison.

Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:09 AM

Here's a rundown on my bee installation adventures last weekend.  I won't go into any of the photography thoughts on this post, it'll just bee about the bees.  I'll follow it up with a separate post about the actual photography a bit later.

Note: I'll be using small images here.  If you want the full sized images, just click the image and view All Sizes in Flickr.  If you want the full blow-by-blow description of all 220 pictures, you can view the entire set directly here.

The Objective

The whole goal of this process is to get these...

Into this (the hive body)...

It seems like a fairly simple task until you consider that every one of those little critters has two native abilities that we humble hoomans do not... they can fly and they can sting. :-S

Prep Work

First, Rob preps the frames by spraying them with sugar and water (bee fewd).

Then our fearless warrior dons his armor and prepares to do battle.

Then, we go to work on the Box O' Bees...

...by first pulling out the queen bee and her attendants.

The queen's little prison gets tacked into place in the hive...

...and then we dump all the rest of them on top of her!

Time For Fewd!

The next part of the exercise is to get the bees down in the hive and load it all up with lots of food.  Rob started with the task of getting them all down in the hive itself (instead of on top of the frames)...

That wasn't working so well.  They were beeing quite uncooperative no matter how much we explained the process to them.  So, Rob decided to just dump the food in and let the bees figure out where they needed to go.

The bags are filled with sugar water, which is what the bees will slowly consume.  After getting the bags in place, a slit is made in the top of each bag to allow the bees access.

Building It Up

Once the food's taken care of, we still need to finish off the upper portion of the hive.  The first step in that process is to install the "super"...

...And that's followed up with the lids.  One internal (the "top cover")...

...and an external one ("telescoping cover") weighted down with bricks to stop it from blowing off if there's a storm or anything (a nasty one was on the way).

Miscellany

There were still a few miscellaneous minor tasks to complete, but that was pretty much all the hive work that needed to be done.  A number of bees are still out flying and crawling around and it took them a few hours to start working their way back into the hive...

A couple hours later we were down to this...

Of course, there were casualties in the process...

The Finale!

But, at the end of the day, we ended up with a relatively happy beekeeping family...

Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:04 AM

Another deviation from my regular stuff (although I'm not entirely sure what "regular" actually is yet)...  I spotted another Flickr user carrying this profile widget thing and I kind of liked it, so I snaked one myself...

The cool part is that it's dynamic and it's rebuilt every hour or so.  If you're a Flickr'r, you can snag your own here at BigHugeLabs.com.  They've got a bunch of other nifty Flickr toys, so check them out.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 5:58 AM

Ok, this is kind of off my usual range of topics, but it's a little too odd for me to ignore without posting about it.

As some of my previous posts have alluded to, I spent last Saturday taking pictures of a friend setting up his new bee hive.  I'll be posting up a separate (and long) entry about that soon enough.  If you want the entire process, you can check out my 222 photos over on my Flickr set titled Beekeeping 101.

What I find a little odd is that even though I have no real interest in bees and I don't subscribe to any bee-related RSS feeds, newsletters or websites, a lot of my feeds have been suddenly flooded with bee posts.  A prime example is this one over on The Online Photographer (I'll post some comments over there when I'm done with this).  The author (Mike Johnston) goes into some hypothetical questions about what we as a society would do if it was proven that cell phones are causing the decline of bee populations.  I have to note that this is not some chase of fantasy, as several other sites have mentioned the same thing...  CoolSmartPhone, Engadget, Sci Fi Tech (Sci-Fi Channel), Tribe, etc.  I'm guessing a vast majority of these started up because of the article that ran in The Independent on the 15th (although other major rags have run similar ones).

Anyway...  Stories like that have been popping up all over my RSS subscriptions over the past few days.  I just thought it was rather strange that I'd just finished shooting the install of a hive right before all these starting flooding in.

So, what do I think about the whole "bee death" issue?  Well, I don't really think about it at all.  Honestly, this is just not something I really care about.  I'm not saying that I won't care in the future, it's just not really a pressing concern for me (yes, I'm kind of shallow at times... this is one of them).  Personally, I don't like bees.  They sting (duh).  They're not cute.  They interfere with my outdoorish activities.   Seriously, what's to like about all that?  Sure, the whole pollination thing is going to be an issue, but it's not enough of an issue (to me) to get past my whole general dislike of bees. 

Don't get me wrong, the whole bee photography thing was kind of cool (even though I did get stung), and there are a few shots that I'll probably always be relatively proud of, but it didn't make me a "bees are cool" convert or anything. 

Ack, I'm rambling again.  Ok, I'll sum it all up...  The whole bee death phenomena and the timing of it in regards to my recent photo shoot is weird.  It'll suck if bees everywhere start dropping dead and it'll probably have a huge impact.  But, I just don't care that much about it... yet.

Note: In case you want to comment on this, rest assured that I'll approve any comments from unregistered users as long as you keep the following in mind...  If you use fowl language, I'll edit it.  If you use enough foul language, I'll just nuke the post.  If you are selling something or want me or my readers to go to another site not related to this topic or my blog, I'll nuke the post.  If you enter the same comment multiple times, I'll nuke the post.  It's my blog and I can manage it however I see fit.  Deal!  My family reads this, be reasonable.  Disagree and post your opinions all you like, just don't be a jerk about it.  I'm pretty liberal, so chances are I won't nuke anything that doesn't directly go against the above. I'm only posting this because I used far more external links than usual and Google seems to really pick up on that, so it's possible a number of people who normally wouldn't come here will want to flame me based on this one post. All your bee are belong to us!

Monday, April 16, 2007 9:55 AM

Ok, first the short post... here's my semi-regularly scheduled blog picture:

Yes, those are bees.  I took a ton of shots a friend's place this weekend and this is the one I like best so far.  I'm going to finish processing the rest of them (about 150 or so to go) and I'll post up a much longer entry when I can kind of go through the entire process.  See ya!

As you've probably figured out by now, I'm pretty much playing around with macro pics this week.  There is a method to my madness (in other words, I have my reasons), but you'll have to wait to see them.  Say, next week'ish. 

Anyway, here are some white flowery things that didn't turn out horribly.  Although, if you view the large version, you'll hopefully learn what I did...  macro photography either requires a LOT of light or a tripod.  I had neither.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007 2:39 PM

Lack of recent posts... First excuse: it was a Jeep wrenching weekend.  I got my new springs, suspension and steering installed on Saturday.  Second excuse: I cleaned the Jeep and recovered on Sunday. ;) Third excuse: Monday was "alignment day".  After gutting the entire front end, it takes a LONG time to do the alignment.  Fourth and final excuse: I had to go to a PVAS meeting, since I hadn't been in forever. 

The combo of all those pretty much blew any chances I had for posting.  I did take some pictures, but didn't post (didn't get many worth posting either).  So, here's a few macro shots I took this morning in order to make up for it...

Ok, the metal isn't really falling, it's a sculpture on the National Mall...  I just thought the whole thing looked kind of cool.  Turned out to not be one of my better shots, but it's still kind of interesting. 

I'll post up more later this afternoon, I hope (and maybe I'll pontificate on my lack of posts if you're exceptionally lucky).  ;)

Ok, my Flickr stream is now thoroughly hosed up with tons of Jeep (and other 4x4) pictures...  356 of them to be exact!  If you really want to check out what a bunch of Off-Camber Crawlers members do on weekends, go check out my stream right here.

But, I gotta toss out a disclaimer...  I sucked these puppies directly off the camera, ran them through Elements to resize them and exported them.  I shoot in RAW mode, which means there is absolutely no post-processing here...  No sharpening, no white-balancing, no auto-leveling, no exposure compensation or anything else for that matter (digital cameras generally do all that stuff unless they're shooting in raw mode).  What this means is that most of them won't look very good...  colors will be washed out, some pictures will look over or under exposed, etc.  I'll reprocess them all later, but I wanted to get them up real quick like so the OCC member could tell me which ones to process first.  As I get them fixed, I'll replace the ones up there.

Just to whet your appetite, here's my little beastie...

...and here's a bit of trail carnage to go with it...  ;)

Back to werk for me, see ya!