Month: February 2011

I spent the day with Linda booking accommodations for Italy. After 7 hours of looking at hotel websites, Trip Advisory options, customer reviews and comments, and comparing prices and amenities, my brain is fried. I just want to go to bed. But, oh yes, that picture of the day thing. As I poured some fresh coffee beans into my burr grinder to get my morning coffee ground and ready to brew, and I inhaled the intoxicating aroma of those luscious beans, I knew it was this or nothing.

Lens at 130mm
ISO 3200
f/5.6
1/30
WBA
SOOC

I’m making Butternut Squash Soup today. I thought the ingredients would make a nice composition.

It took me almost 30 minutes, though, to get the lens to start to focus properly. This happens to me occasionally with the auto focus lenses, usually if I’m too close to a subject. I don’t know what was happening today, but no matter what I tried, the auto focus mechanism in my 35mm lens was constantly seeking correct focus and it wouldn’t allow me to take a photo. I can usually overcome this annoying problem by turning the camera off and on again but today, that didn’t seem to work. I changed aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, my position, and my distance from the subject, to no avail. I was about to set the lens to manual focus when it started to function properly. I don’t know what was happening but I’m adding that puzzlement to my growing list of puzzlements about the camera.

35mm Lens
ISO 800
f/1.8
1/80
White Balance set to Incandescent
SOOC

I love Fuji apples. As I looked at the apple after taking a huge bite of it this morning, I immediately thought, “photo op!” and grabbed my camera which was miraculously mounted with my 35mm lens and set with ISO, f/stop and shutter speed close to what I needed. Even the White Balance was set to incandescent. When will that ever happen again? I flipped the lens cover off with my right hand, turned the range hood light on, focused, and took a few shots.

The shots weren’t perfect. I needed to tweak the exposure a little and I cropped this shot but I managed to avoid getting sticky on my camera. And there’s bonus bokeh! I couldn’t ask for more. And it looks good enough to eat, which I did.

35mm Lens
ISO 400
f/1.8
1/80
White Balance Incandescent

Cropped photo and increased exposure +.85.

I start off every morning with coffee and the newspaper and that includes my daily dose of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle which gets progressively more difficult each day the week. On Friday, the puzzle is exponentially more difficult than on Thursday and on Saturday, it’s impossible. When I started it this morning, I quickly filled in part of the upper right quadrant, unusual for me on a Friday and equally unusual, it seemed vaguely familiar. I looked at the puzzle number, 0121, and realized that was the puzzle originally printed in the Times on January 21. I work the puzzle in the Sacramento Bee, printed five weeks after the original is printed in the New York Times. As it happened, on that day, I bought a New York Times at the Houston, TX airport and worked the puzzle while I was on an airplane for several hours, plenty of time to figure it all out.

Since I had already worked the puzzle, I didn’t complete it today. But I thought it would make an interesting white balance challenge. It proved not only interesting, but difficult. The paper was under incandescent light with natural daylight from a window. I tried Cloudy, Sunny, Incandescent and Auto white balance settings with slight changes in the color graphs but all were unsatisfactory. I used the Incandescent setting in this photo, but I still had to warm it up in Aperture.

35mmLens
ISO 800
f/1.8
1/60
White Balance set to Incandescent

I thought a good photo for the day would be the 55MPH speed limit sign because today is Day 55 of this project. However, that seemed a little dicey, what with having to stop on the freeway and all. Plus, it was miserably rainy. I met with my tax guy this afternoon and he suggested I photograph their sign. I took a couple of shots but was not happy with those. On the way home, I approached the Roseville Rail Yard and a long string of bright yellow Union Pacific engines appeared, stopped in their tracks so to speak. The color was bright and cheerful and I quickly forgot my tax concerns. I pulled over and took several photos. If it hadn’t been pouring, I would have walked down the road to get the full effect of the long string of engines setting there, but I wanted to stay dry. As it was, the rain blew in through my open car window and quickly puddled around the window and lock mechanisms in the door and blew onto the camera lens so I abandoned the effort. When I got home, I realized that one of the engines I photographed was No. 5050, as close as I was going to get today to 55. So, here is Union Pacific Engine No. 5050. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling, especially in front the brown parts of the engine.

I increased exposure, highlights and shadows in Aperture to bring out the clouds and brighten the engine a little.

Lens at 48mm
ISO 200
f5.6
1/160
AWB

After stopping at the IRS (aarrggh!) to pick up some forms, I found myself near a park we used to ride our mopeds to in the spring. I hadn’t been there in over 20 years so I pulled in and thought I’d try to get a few photos of the mallards. A couple of California gray squirrels were frolicking nearby so I took a few of them, too. This guy really hammed it up for me.

Lens at 200mm
ISO 200
f/14
1/60
White Balance set to Sunny
SOOC

I’ve been thinking about George Washington today. Yesterday was Presidents’ Day and poor George has been lumped in with all US Presidents, great, good, mediocre, and forgettable, and he is no longer given individual national recognition as he once was. Today is the 279th anniversary of his birth. I’ve always liked old George and the cherry tree myth (or was it?) and I thought I would honor George myself by photographing cherries. I brought home dried cherries from Wisconsin and I have a large jar of sour cherries that might some day become a cherry pie that I bought at Costco. The dried cherries are shriveled and look like raisins, not cherries, so that didn’t seem appropriate. The jar of sour cherries is from Bulgaria, not the USA, and I didn’t want to use a former Soviet republic to represent George. I thought I might have to photograph a hatchet instead— well I still might!— and then I remembered a framed painting I had of some cherries with water drops. I painted it nine years ago as practice for a project I never completed and ended up framing it because I needed something to hang on a wall. Clearly, my obsession with water drops predates my current obsession with photographing water drops!

My challenge today was to photograph this painting without removing it from the frame so I had to contend with glare from the glass. I used my polarizing filter because I read that it reduces glare off reflective surfaces, allowing you to see beyond the glare. I laid the painting on a table and placed a shade above it to keep reflections to a minimum. And I set the White Balance to shade. I took several photos with the polarizing filter set one way and several set the other (dot up, then triangle up) not knowing which setting was the polarizing one (do I need help?). Photos taken with the triangle up show the rough texture of the paper; photos taken with the dot up still show the texture but not in as much detail. Hmmm. I think the polarizing filter works. But not for this situation. Showing more detail in the textured paper seemed to wash out the background. So I chose a photo with the polarizing filter set with the dot up. To make sure which setting was which, I went outside and took six photos of the white pear blossoms with the blue sky in the background, three at each setting. The sky in the photos taken with the triangle up is much more intense than in those taken with the dot up. I finally have my answer about the polarizing filter. My other issue was depth of field. The painting was on a horizontal surface and I was not standing directly over it, so, because I was using a large aperture, parts of the painting tended to be out of focus. I focused on the middle cherry so the droplet at the top of the painting is very slightly out of focus. The photo also shows all of the spatters and smears of paint that are in this less-then-perfect depiction of cherries.

35mm Lens
ISO 1250
f/1.8
1/50
Cropped

Well, I’m not Dion or a Belmont or a wanderer exactly, but this variety of hardenbergia violacia is called the “Happy Wanderer.” The flowers look like cascades of tiny sweet peas. This evergreen blooms briefly in late winter on my fence and is a welcome harbinger of spring.

Today, I experimented with white balance and once again am puzzled by it. It was overcast when I took these photos so I set the WB to cloudy. The colors look washed out in the camera’s LCD viewer, so I changed from the default Cloudy and fiddled with changing the colors within the Cloudy setting. This one had the most realistic colors but in some shots I took, the colors varied quite a bit at the same WB settings. Sigh.

Lens at 200mm
ISO 200
f/5.6
1/160
White Balance at Cloudy, A1, M3
SOOC

My friend, Linda, and I are going to Italy in September. Today we started to make hotel reservations and have booked accommodations in Zurich and Chur, both in Switzerland and in Milano and Sinio, both in northern Italy. We’re meeting again on Wednesday and hope to finalize our hotel reservations in the Cinque Terra, Firenze, Sorrento, and Venezia. We went out for a celebratory lunch after making so much progress on our trip planning. Of course we had to have our vini rossi e bianchi (I’m the rossi, Linda’s the bianchi).

Lens at 32mm
ISO 400
f/4
1/40
Cropped

Or polarizing filters, either. I thought to try out my polarizing filter to see how it intensified the blue sky and brightened the clouds. I learned nothing because I couldn’t figure out which way to turn the filter to achieve the polarizing effect and I couldn’t see the difference through the lens, I presume because the sky isn’t blue enough today nor the clouds white enough. The filter has a dot and a triangle which signify something. I just don’t know what. The clouds were quite striking, though, and I ended up tweaking this photo in Curves, increased the contrast just a bit, and moved the color levels a bit to intensify the blue. I’ll figure out my polarizing filter another day.

70-300 mm lens set at 70mm
ISO 100
f/22
1/100

Somebody stop me! It’s 10:30PM and I’ve already posted twice today and here I am again. I came upstairs to go to bed and looked out the window which was covered with raindrops and the street lights were glowing and I ran down and got my camera to take yet more water photos.

I switched lenses to see what a difference it might make. The 35mm lens had wider view so I was able to get more bokeh but I didn’t like the look of the drops as well so I chose the one taken with my 18-200 mm lens. I published a couple others I liked on Flickr.

18-200mm Lens at 200mm
ISO 500
f5.6
1/60
SOOC

Errands had me out in the ridiculous rain this afternoon. When I got back into my car after one of my errands, I noticed the car windows were covered with drops. I had my camera, so whoever was waiting for me to vacate my parking spot had to wait another ten minutes for me to finish taking drop photos. I experimented with ISO and shutter speed and got some interesting results.

I took these two shots facing the passenger window using different shutter speeds, focal lengths, and ISOs but the same aperture.

Lens at 200mm
ISO 200
f/6.3
1/160
SOOC

Lens at 112mm
ISO 500
f/6.3
1/320
SOOC

I find them both intriguing; the second shot is closer to the actual lighting but I like the darker one. You can see a splash on the windshield in the lower right quadrant of the second photo. And they both have a little bit of bokeh. But the bhe best part is that I took these shots in just a few minutes.

Yesterday, I had pull-outs installed in place of the cupboard doors and shelves in my upstairs linen cabinet. Ever since I remodeled my kitchen and installed pull-outs instead of shelves and doors in my lower kitchen cabinets, I have wanted to do that because they are so much more convenient. Now, having to kneel down to see what’s in a cavernous lower shelf is a thing of the past, upstairs as well as down.

The hardware I installed was leftover from another project. I think the shadow they cast is interesting and I like the depth of field in this photo. What gave me trouble, though, was the horizontal plane. In almost every shot, the cup pull appeared to be falling forward, probably because of the wood grain. I kept changing angles but still ended up with the same result. I had to straighten every photo in Aperture.

I adjusted the White Balance in the camera to Incandescent and made a slight change in the incandescent color graph to get the exact color of the wood under the lights but I had to increase the exposure just a little (+.32) in Aperture because despite the colors being correct, the overall photo appeared too dark.

35mm lens
ISO 640
f/1.8
1/60

I spent hours today trying to take well-focused water drop photos. It was not an easy task and I failed at it.

I took 461 photos over almost 6 hours and completely ran down my camera battery trying to get decent pictures. It was raining hard and I was trying to focus on random splashes from drops falling from the eaves outside my front door. I was on my knees (ouch) just inside the open front door, with a telephoto lens mounted on the camera that was attached to the Gorillapod. I’m not sure I learned anything today except that it’s very difficult to get good water drop photos in an uncontrolled environment.

Almost every aspect of picture-taking was at odds with me today. Because of the storm, the natural light was dark. I kept the lens wide open to let in the most possible light but probably should have used a smaller aperture for a deeper depth of field. I changed lenses after an hour thinking that the 70-300mm lens was more up to the challenge than the 18-200mm lens. I started with a slow shutter speed and gradually increased it moving from 1/80 to 1/1000 and back down, settling on about 1/500. I varied the ISO from 100 to 3200 and back down to about 800. At one point I used a flash to try to stop the drops. But I didn’t make any adjustments in the other settings and none of those shots were any good. I fiddled with the focusing settings and the metering settings and during my twiddling, I managed to inadvertently reset my exposure compensation to -.67. That didn’t didn’t help anything since it was so dark already. Fortunately, I downloaded photos from the camera to my computer after every 30 or 40 shots so I caught that mistake after only 132 shots. And the Gorillapod was giving me fits; I have found that if I make certain adjustments to the legs, the entire mechanism collapses.Because the setup was so iffy, when I pressed the shutter release the Gorillapod would sink a little. I finally got the shutter release remote. But I had trouble getting it to trip the shutter and it was only after many missed opportunities for good shots that I discovered that the remote sensor is very sensitive and the remote has to be held at a precise angle. In addition, the sensor is on the front of the camera, so I had to hold it awkwardly over the camera. And, of course, it was blustery and cold and leaves and rain were blowing into the house and onto me and the camera.

I am nothing if not tenacious. I took the first photo this morning at 7:50 AM and the last photo at 1:08 PM, when the battery was almost completely discharged. It’s taken me another couple of hours to review the photos and do some tweaking. I used the Aperture preset tweaks recommended by my dear friend and fellow photography obsessed person, Melinda, to make corrections to these photos. Thanks, Melinda. I chose these three because they are similar (each is a crown of sorts) but each looks very different due primarily to the changes in shutter speed and aperture. I’m not sure which I like best, but one thing is for sure. I could have stopped taking photos at 10 AM!

Lens @ 250mm
ISO 800
f/7.1
1/400
Melinda presets
Taken at 9:50 AM

Lens @ 300mm
ISO 2500
f/5.6
1/160
0.67 ev
Melinda presets
Taken at 8:32 AM

Lens at 220mm
ISO 1000
f/9
1/80
Melinda Presets
Taken at 9:12 AM

Rosemary is used for landscaping here and my gym landscaping is no exception. When I left the gym today, the sun had finally emerged and the rosemary was particularly lovely because it is in bloom. This was the second shot I took of dozens. The remainder were either washed out due to the angle of the sun, or uninteresting composition. I like the dark background, the shallow depth of field, the slight bokeh effect, and even the focus of this shot. However, I realized after I stopped taking photos that my metering was set to center weighted average instead of spot metering, which is my preference. I am coming to the conclusion that I need to develop habits for resetting my camera at the end or beginning of each session so that my random exposure experiments don’t adversely affect my photos. I make adjustments in ISO, aperture, and shutter speed with most shots but I forget to double check my metering settings and my white balance settings. This photography thing is turning out to be more taxing on my feeble brain than I ever imagined!

Lens at 200mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/100
SOOC

I’ve been busy all day on non-photography obsessions and I suddenly realized I hadn’t taken my photo of the day. It’s threatening rain outside and nothing caught my interest until I looked at my crape myrtle which has interesting bark. As I looked through the lens, an entire bokeh world opened up and I took several photos with my primary interest in the bokeh, not necessarily the bark. When I downloaded, I noticed that some of the bokeh changed colors. It was the traffic light over the wall and I had captured green, yellow, and red bokeh as the signal cycled through its “Go,” “Caution,” and “Red” lights.

All three photos:

Lens at 200mm
ISO 800
f/7.1
1/25
Auto White Balance
SOOC

I had my camera with me at the gym this morning and I grabbed it when I noticed that three of my friends were walking on the treadmill in unison. My goal was to get their feet and legs blurry and the rest of the scene in sharp focus. I used a gym bench to steady the camera. I Iike the identical position of the three sets of feet but the background is a little distracting and the focus isn’t crisp. I wasn’t careful about my point of focus and I realized too late that the lens was automatically focused on the red strap in the middle in front of the magazines. Since the treadmills vibrate with each step I’m not sure where the best point of focus would have been for this shot.

Lens at 60mm
ISO 1250
f/9
1/10
Slight crop

This is Day 44 of my 365 project and Day 1 of my limoncello project. I had to do something with all those lemons! Today, I zested the peel off 30 Meyer lemons and immersed the zest into a vat (well, a 3 liter French canning jar) of Everclear. Everclear is 151 proof grain alcohol. In three weeks, I’ll be ready to continue making limoncello and better than limoncello, I’ll make some crema di limoncello, too. That all needs to mellow for about year, so I guess I’ll be giving it as Christmas gifts. I tasted crema di limoncello in a pasta class I took at Whole Foods about a year ago and the instructor, Dennis Kercher, was kind enough to share his recipe. Today, when I asked him a zillion questions on Facebook, he linked me to a video he made on how to make it.

I chose this photo as my photo of the day because I tried to get a clear focus on the Everclear name on the bottle, since I am still struggling to get things in focus. I think the A might be in focus.

35mm lens
ISO 1250
f/1.8
1/160
Auto White Balance
SOOC

Not Joplin, MO. Not Janis Joplin. Scott Joplin. I love piano music. I love to play piano music. And I espcially love to play Ragtime piano music. And Scott Joplin is the king of ragtime.

I haven’t played the piano much in the past couple of years, but every once in a while, I sit down at the keyboard and let ‘er rip, playing as loudly as I can. Today was one of those days, perhaps inspired by my trip to hear some jazz at the Mondavi Center last evening. What I really missed about the performances last night was a keyboard; it was all strings and drums. So I had my own jazz concert today, playing some boogie and some ragtime.

It occurred to me that I could use this as an opportunity to continue white balance lessons (the piano is in a different area from where I took the lemon photos yesterday) and I could blur some motion. This was tricky since I was going to provide the motion, so I had to set the camera on the Gorillapod and use the remote shutter release set to timed release so I could trigger the shutter and start playing. That was as much a challenge as was figuring out the white balance settings. So here I am playing Scott Joplin’s “Elite Syncopations” ( at least a few bars):
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I had trouble getting the correct white balance settings. I was trying to get the piano the correct color, a rich reddish walnut color without making the skin tones too red. This photo could use some white balance adjustment but this is straight out of the camera. I also had trouble getting enough blur (this is marginal) with keys depressed so it was obvious I was playing the piano and not just shaking my hands above the keyboard.

Lens @ 200mm
ISO 640
f/10
1/5
SOOC

Yesterday, my friend Barbara gave me a huge bag of Meyer lemons that she picked that morning from the tree in her backyard. The aroma of those luscious fruits is intoxicating and beckons me to make lemon curd or lemon tart. My mouth waters just thinking about the possibilities. Since they will soon be disappearing from my kitchen, I decided to take a few photos while they are still around to be photographed. I put them on the black kitchen table with lots of natural light from the window and artificial light from the kitchen fixtures. I was surprised to see that in the first couple of shots, those gorgeous golden Meyer lemons appeared to be greenish yellow, not the deep golden yellow that separates them from the common, and much tarter, Eureka lemons.

After yesterday’s class where we learned a little about white balance, I immediately reset my camera back to Auto White Balance, fearing that having to set the white balance for every set of shots would be too complicated. And, despite my mantra that I want to learn to take photos that I can use directly from the camera without tweaking them later with software enhancements, I justified my decision to do this with the knowledge that I could easily make white balance adjustments in Aperture or Photoshop Elements.

After seeing the greenish Meyer lemons on the LCD screen, I changed my mind about always using Auto White Balance. Here was a clear need for intervention. I changed the camera’s white balance setting to incandescent lighting. That helped a little, but not enough. I discovered a color grid that allows me to fine tune the white balance along the Amber-Blue axis or the Green-Magenta Axis. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I moved the pointer toward the Magenta section of the grid so that the resulting photos of the lemons tended more toward golden yellow.

Here are the results.

35mm lens
ISO 800
f/1.8
1/400
SOOC

Here is what the lemons looked like using Auto White Balance