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Plastic 52: A 2010 Project

Published on January 31, 2010 in photography. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Plastic 1: Trapped

I have decided to do a 52 weeks project this year (one photo each week for a year) and it’s been fairly enjoyable thus far. I had given brief consideration to a 365 (photo a day for a year) but quickly dismissed it for fear of it becoming an absolute bear. I enjoy photography, but it has its limits. Setting myself up for failure is something I strive to avoid.

There are a lot of approaches to this little project. Many people choose to do self portraits, some choose to do landscapes, a number of people choose an object to focus on. I’ve gone with the latter as you can see. Batman and The Joker are now on the loose!

You can watch my progress at my 2010 52 Weeks Set. I would also recommend checking out the Triangle 52 group and the Plastic 52 group.

I have more concepts for photography in 2010 as well. Hopefully I can execute and you will see more of that here in the future.

Plastic 4: The Streets

Canon S90 and Distortion

Published on November 30, 2009 in photography. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

All in the Family

I recently picked up a new Canon S90 point and shoot so I would have a nice little compact camera to carry around with me when I’m feeling too lazy to lug the 40D around. It’s been a real blast to play around with. One of the small drawbacks of the camera is that its fast and tiny lens does have a fair bit of inherent distortion. The camera fixes this itself almost entirely in the JPEGs. However if you shoot RAW you were stuck with using Canon DPP. A recent release candidate of Adobe’s DNG converter and Lightroom resolved this by adding distortion correction.

After all this we were left with only a tiny amount of distortion that Canon DPP was able to correct in addition to it’s base RAW conversion correction. This resulted in “perfect” shots with zero distortion. This was something we did not have the option of in Lightroom even with the release candidate. Until now…

PTLens has been updated for the S90. It has RAW and “standard” correction. If you are using LR 2.5 or DNG 5.5 release use the RAW option. If you are using the release candidates then use the standard correction. I’ll never have to use DPP again!

For the image below I used DNG 5.6 RC to convert the CR2 to DNG. Then I did all my editing in LR 3.0 Beta. Once completed I did an external TIFF edit in PTLens to do the final distortion correction. Thrilled with the results! The sign being dead straight made me quite happy.

Oh, did I mention that PTLens is only 25 bucks? It’s got support for nearly every camera and Lens you could imagine.

http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/

Note that I am not affiliated with PTLens in any way. I just think it’s awesome!

Little Boxes

Off Camera

Published on May 4, 2009 in photography. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

CANON INC.

Flash that is. I got my hands on a Canon 220EX Speedlite recently and it was a blast! I have never been much for flash photography but this was something completely different. I had a cable attach so that I had the freedom to hold the flash in my left hand and aim it wherever I please. The ability to bounce it off different walls, floors, and ceilings combined with bringing the light in from different angles was amazing.

I also combined this with the close-up lens filters that I have for my kit lens to do even more cool stuff.  Macro photography is much easier indoors when there is lots of available light from a flash.

I’ve been on a real kick lately to spend more time with the photography toys I already have.  Borrowing, begging, and stealing is also allowed in the case of the speedlite.  Overall it’s just cool to see how much there is out there in photography land that I have yet to investigate.  So cool!

Plugs

Raleigh Time Lapse

Published on April 30, 2009 in photography. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I recently got the bug to try and do some time lapse photography when I saw this post over at Digital Photography School.  It’s a good intro to what you are getting into and links to various attempts around the web.  I had considered doing this previously but never really got around to it.  This work by Ross Ching is pretty much the ULTIMATE time lapse I have seen out there.  It’s combining the use of tilt shift lenses and telescoping mounts along with crop panning to create an even more unique and dynamic experience.  Amazing.

I don’t own a dedicate intervalometer at the moment.  I will soon.  Using my laptop with the Canon EOS software hooked up to my Canon XSi allowed me to employ the basic concept of doing time lapse.  The result is interesting, it does not really meet my artistic vision though.  The biggest issues was that the fastest interval I could accomplish was a shot every 5 seconds.  This combined with a 1-1.3 second exposure time just didn’t give me the shutter drag I really wanted.

So there will definitely be more to come on this topic.  I have a big plan in my head of exactly where I would like to go with the concept.  I’m looking forward to implementing it and sharing it with everyone.