Bubbly

Took this at lunch yesterday, just some carbonation to keep my post afloat. xD

こんにちは！

This has been a very busy semester so far! Homework for hours, working, and Japanese! This is a shot from our dry erase board today in the apartment. My friend Paul's fiancee is teaching all of us in addition to our class. It's pretty fun ^_^.

Reading in the rain

I snapped this quick candid while waiting for the bus. This girl stuck out among all the other people, just sitting calmly reading while everyone else danced in place, peering for the next bus. It was rather peaceful to see.

As always, click for a larger image.

Vicki Photoshoot

Little late post, but I still made it before the end of Tuesday!

I didn't want to post high resolution photos of Vicki, but I did want to highlight the photoshoot we did over the summer. So I tossed together this small collection of photos and crammed it into a single photo. For those of you who know her and want to see the full size photos, she's posted them on her facebook page. The image is a little squished, so click on it to make it bigger. The 'original size' was justttt beyond the range of the posting area of the blog.

Flowers! It's summer!

So I wandered out to the Horticulture Garden on campus and snapped some photos. Not too much in bloom, but I found a few flowers that were really pretty. I also have a fun example below that I'll explain.

So these red flowers were incredibly bright, I'm not a fan of how strong the red is, it's overpowering, but I had trouble reducing it to a decent level. Still, a very pretty red for a flower.

It's hard to tell in this photo, but these flowers are actually blue and purple, I almost missed it when I was walking by.

Raw photo     /    Edited photo

Now these two are the exact same photo, and it's tough to tell without a full screen version, but this is one of the advantages to shooting in 'raw' format. Most cameras just save photos as JPEGs, but most DSLRs also can save in a 'raw' format. For my Canon, it's .CR2. The benefit is that I can edit a much wider range of settings than a JPEG without losing quality. Some of the major edits that are present: color correction, light balancing, lens correction, noise reduction, sharpening, detail recovery, and fill lighting. All of that comes together to tweak parts of the photo that were slightly skewed.

Open up both of them in tabs and click back and forth between then and you can see the major changes.

To list a few fixes that you can look for yourself: The flower petals on the left side were overexposed and too bright, I tried to restore some of that color and detail. The center of the flower was too bright/saturated with color, I reduced that and balanced it to be more appealing. I also added some light to the right side to give it a bit more balance across the flower. It's not a great photo, but it's a good example of how a 'meh' photo can be improved with RAW editing.

I've been gone a while!

Ladies, gentlemen, children, I have been away for far too long!

I apologize for not keeping a steady posting schedule with my photos, but to be honest, without having a daily schedule of classes to get me out of the house, I've found it very hard to maintain a constant shooting regiment. I have collected a few photos over the course i've been gone from posting, and I will begin to post those soon. However, I will NOT be posting at regular intervals until school starts again, since it's harder to manage a timeline without a regular schedule. I will definitely try to put out 2 photos a week though, and like always, the facebook page will post a notification as well. ^_^

To satisfy you all for now, I have a few photos I have finished editing to post!

In the effort of saving time, I'm not going to upload them to blogger, they are already on flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nosjojo/5815793018/

A decent flower spread that you can use as a background if you so please. (if you want to use it, i can make a more exact resize for you, just ask.)

From that same photo, in the center is a bee on the flower. It's a tiny little guy to spot given the size of the photo. But here he is as well:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nosjojo/5815224919/

The last photo is a fun example of depth of field and bokeh all rolled into one. Taken as close as I could go, you can see that the front pines are out of focus, and so are the pines a few inches back. Taken at f/1.8, my depth of field is extremely small at close ranges. This allows me to do extreme levels of isolation. Additionally, you can see the rings of light in the top left, which is a nice example of smooth bokeh. The more circular, the better 'quality' the bokeh is. Mine is a middle range quality, but at this focal distance, it's pretty smooth.

Slusher Tower

I snapped this photo at Relay for Life at about 11:30pm, while it was raining. They had cut off all the lights on the drillfield and it was almost impossible to see, so I photographed the only thing I could see! Photo settings are f/1.4, 1/60 shutter, ISO 3200.

I'm going to start working on a larger photography project, which hopefully will develop over the summer. I'm looking for people who are going to be here this summer to model for it, I've already got at least 1 person, but I'd like to have a larger cast if possible. Story telling ftw! I'm going to try and write the script soon, that way I can explain it to my models better, plus it helps me work on it.

Anyway, as always, if you want to see a shot on here, let me know and I'll try to take it. If you want to learn your own camera, I can always help with that too. ^_^

Behind the Scenes

I wasn't sure what I should post today, since I try not to recycle photos from shoots to keep things different on here. I'm obnoxiously picky though, and couldn't decide what, if any, of my photos to use. I spotted this one though, and thought some of you might like to see it. If you remember on Tuesday I showed a compare and contrast of my photo vs. Kristen's photo. This photo here is a behind the scenes shot of Kristen taking (possibly) that same photo from Tuesday. She's crouched so that she can get the strong light source high on the right side of the photo, while still giving a good angle for the photo.

We are planning to do another photoshoot this sunday, so keep an eye out on Tuesday for the results of that shoot!

Interpretations

I had a great opportunity to join Kristen on a photoshoot she wanted to do with some friends, and I learned some interesting lessons for future shoots. Nothing important to share with you all, just small useful things. Since Kristen and I were taking photos of the same subject from different angles, the results of our photos took drastic turns once we got them to our computers. I prefer realistic, clean photos, with strong colors if possible. Kristen's interpretation was more vintage and takes a different appearance all together. I personally love her style, although it doesn't reflect my own views. For your viewing pleasure, I have my photo and her photo below, so you can see the different styles and angles. It's pretty awesome. For some reason the compressions used during upload drain a bit of the warming filter out of my photo, so I will have to look into that. Mine is supposed to have a sunset colored glow to it, similar to what you see on the stone, but stronger. Oh well!

The Most Familiar Nightmares

So this photo is actually really interesting for multiple reasons. It started off as a stitched panoramic, so I took about 8 photos of this tree in series, hoping to stitch them all together to form a wide angle shot of this area of the duck pond. The stitching went very well, but after closer inspection, I realized my photos suffered from very extreme chromatic aberration, which is when colors don't line up. To put it simply, the edges of tree branches had glowing lines of magenta/cyan.

While I was attempting to fix this, Kristen suggested I put it into black and white, which would completely hide the aberrations, and it looked alright. While she was showing me a technique she uses, we accidentally inverted the photo, giving it a photo negative look. I immediately knew what I wanted to do, and set about editing this photo into what you see here. I won't go into the details about what I did, but if you're curious, you can always ask. I enjoy sharing.

Prone to moodswings

Blacksburg weather is prone to mood swings, as noted in these two photos. I took the first photo while on campus last Tuesday in anticipation for this week's photos. Monday, on the way to class, photo number 2 was what I saw as I walked. Spring? What Spring?

Yay flowers!

Flowers are blooming, birds are waking me up early, and tests are sneaking up on me. Must be the beginnings of Spring.

Lane Stadium

Sorry this is so late guys! I spent forever trying to edit this into something decent, I'm far too picky to post before I think it's ready. This is a composite of 4 different images, which I used to recover details that normally get washed out. I won't point out the parts that I had trouble getting the way I wanted, if you can't see it, then I'm just too picky.

Light painting and a note

So I was going to scan a comic I drew, but I saw this posted on the VT Creative Photography Flickr page, and thought ya'll would get a kick out of it. This was taken at last night's meeting. For those who don't know, that's me :P 


http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkurlak/5474986281/in/pool-885132@N23/


Starting work on my post that I described in this post: http://sketchedndericious.blogspot.com/2011/02/padapas-pond.html . I don't know how quickly i'll finish it, i'm hoping to be a bit more detailed than just saying "do this, do that." So I'll probably break it down into multiple posts detailing each step and how each function on the camera works so you all can use the techniques yourself. Stay tuned!

A storm is coming...

I took this picture on the way back from class a few days ago. The ridiculous contrast across the sky is why I chose to saturate the colors so heavily, I thought it looked kinda cool. ^_^

Also, this picture helped me discover the significant color difference between my desktop and laptop screens. This is actually toned down from what i was originally going to post, because the saturation was so intense in the first image I had. I'm doing my best to not post the same subject twice, so I'll 'try' to spare you all the 80+ pictures of ducks I took the other day xD I make no promises though!

Drillfield Panoramic

I took this while the weather was nicer a few days ago. It was a little longer but the sun really tore up the last two sections, so I removed them to improve the overall image.

Blogger/Flickr won't let me upload a full res copy for you guys, so if you want a copy, just drop me an email or leave a message and I'll send it your way. Full res is 18526 x 2144.

Ghosts on the Drillfield

Temporary fix for enlarged images until I can relink them:
Image #2

Image #3
This week had some terrible weather, snowing and raining and generally not wanting to be nice for outdoor photos. Hopefully I won't get behind on my photos again!

So to explain these three images: Image #1 is a quick snapshot of the drillfield on campus as students were crossing between classes. You'll notice slight blurring, that's because of the long exposure required at the aperture I was testing (f/22 in this case). Image #2 is after I placed +7 stops of Neutral Density filters on the lens, effective requiring a full 20 seconds to properly expose the image, instead of 1/6 of a second in Image #1. This length of time resulted in almost nobody appearing in the photo, although it suffered from a loss of sharpness. Image #3 is just something I did for fun, which was to photoshop all the people that were 'ghosts' in Image #1 back onto Image #2.

This is a concept I'm going to play around with, so expect more long exposure results in the future. If you've got an idea for a long exposure I should do, let me know!

Also, another photo will be up tomorrow to make up for missing tuesday!

Quack Quack!

Quack Quack, i'm a duck! xD

A Dangerous Path

I walked over to the Duck Pond the other day to find it almost completely frozen over. I spotted this trail of footprints from the shoreline to the island and back, less than a few days old. I don't know who managed to walk there and back without falling in, but they sure have some guts.