Category Archives: ObG Thursdays

ObG Thursdays – Mary Hill Blues

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Today’s Oldie-but -Goodie comes from summer 2007 when Jeff and I took a night-time photo trip out to Mary Hill, Ontario. We were drawn to the church, since it’s a landmark on the trip between Waterloo and Guelph. Since I’d brought along my tripod I thought it would be fun to take some moody long exposure shots of the cemetery next to the church, made extra moody by the moving clouds. I tried out a few long exposure (2-8 seconds) and found that, while the sky and church looked just as I had hoped, the figures in the cemetery were lost.

What I needed was flash. Unfortunately, both of us had forgotten to bring any batteries for the Vivitar 285HV. Jeff had the great idea of using his camera’s on-board flash to light paint the cross figure during the long exposure. We set out testing. While I took a long exposure image, Jeff walked around the figure taking pictures of it with his camera so that his built-in flash would put light just where we wanted it (more on the right side and less on the left). The image below was the best out of a half-dozen.

I finished the image with some colour/contrast enhancement and local dodging and burning to bring out the cross figure even further.

Pentax *ist DS with DA16-45mm f/4 @ 16mm f/6.7 8s ISO 200:

Mary Hill Blues

ObG Thursdays – Photographing a Jaguar E-Type in a Barn

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My good friend Portt was asked to photograph a fully-restored Jaguar E-Type for an Ebay sale. Being the “guy with the lights” and also a car nut he asked me if I wanted to come along and meet the fantastically beautiful work of art, perfection on wheels. “Yes”, I said.  I was fully expecting to park the car under a tree, near a fence, with a picturesque farm scene behind. Or on a twisty road, tunneled by tall trees. But in reality it was sitting in a dark and dusty barn basement under a tarp, boxed in by a bunch of other stored cars.

We set up the lights as best we could to not create too many hot spots and blown-out specular reflections. The key was to have the light sources as large and diffuse as possible. Since I don’t own and giant car-length softboxes or strip lights, instead I brought my umbrellas and brolly-box as close to the car as I could. For lights I used my two Alien Bees B800s and a Vivitar 285HV, all remote triggered by Paul C Buff Cybersyncs. The camera was a D300s with AF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17mm f/6.3 1/60s ISO 200.5608737566_032338f1c5_o

ObG Thursdays – Top of the Great Wall

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Today’s Oldie-but-Goodie post comes from a year ago this week when I was high up on the Great Wall of China. I was in China for work (lots of photos here) and stayed for a few days to meet up with my friends Mark and Ling in Wuqing, on the south side of Beijing. They were wonderful hosts and on the second day of my visit they hired a car to take us to the Great Wall north of Beijing. The driver got a little lost and ended up taking us to a different section of the wall than we’d intended but we didn’t complain. This mountain pass, known as Juyongguan Pass, had a great ring of wall that went up the north side (Badaling) and back down again, across the valley and then up and down the south side. The climb was steep and grueling.

I had with me the D300s, AF-S 35mm f/1.8, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 and a borrowed AF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 and made good use of them all. The day was extremely hazy and visibility was a lot worse than the photos make it out to seem. When editing I added a huge amount of contrast and saturation to keep them from looking washed out.

The shot below was with the 11-16mm at 11mm 1/125s f/9 ISO200. Although it doesn’t look it, I composed this as a 4-shot high dynamic range (HDR) image. Each of the images that went into it were separated by a 1EV exposure difference. I found that the HDR process brought out a richness of colour that wasn’t there in the individual shots. To add separation between the individual mountain peaks and the foreground I did some dodging and burning with the curves tool and blending duplicate layers with soft light and screen modes. I used added a bit of glow to add an ethereal feel.Great Wall of China

ObG Thursdays – Fox in the Fog

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Here’s a photo I took at Halloween in 2011, late at night on our way home from a party. Mitzy had spent a solid week making her Fantastic Mrs. Fox costume and I’d had a hard time getting just the right photograph of it. It was a misty night, and cold, but I convinced Mitzy to stay in the parking lot across the street from our apartment while I grabbed a tripod. I positioned her under the street light and took just one shot.

D300s on tripod with AF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 38mm f/4 1/4s ISO400Late Night Fox

ObG Thursdays – Sweeping the Sky

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I took this shot in the Summer of 2009 during the Kitchener Blues Festival. The reflecting pond water feature outside of city hall had been drained and a beer tent set up. Unfortunately there had just been a torrential downpour, flooding the pond. The surface is very flat and level (since it is also used as an outdoor rink in the winter) giving the water not much place to go.  A group of people armed with squeegees started pushing the water away from the beer tent. I caught these two taking a break, where the smooth still water was incredibly reflective.

This was shot with the Pentax K20D and Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8 at 1/50s f/8 ISO 400. Yes, there is a bit of Photoshop to remove a few unwanted objects.3809986392_d5ccfe1d6f_o

ObG Thursdays – The Wrestler

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I’ve decided to start a weekly post called Oldie-but-Goodie (ObG) Thursdays where I’ll revisit an old photo of mine and explain a bit about how/why it was taken. Last week’s post was technically the first installment, so here’s the second!

I call it The Wrestler and it was taken when a friend, Colin Hunter, asked me to cover a wrestling match for a book he was writing on the world of amateur/semi-pro wrestling. He got me full ring-side access at Club Element, in Kitchener, and free reign to set up lights (incidentally, Element is kind of sketchy, as I found out when entering the washroom with my camera around my neck and getting harassed extensively by the manager. I think he was worried I was going to document the washroom!).

I set up three lights around the ring, each pointing into one side of the ring. This gave me the opportunity to have rim light at nearly every angle and still have fill in front. I triggered the flashes (2 Vivitar 285HVs and a Pentax AF-500FTZ, all at 1/2 power) with cheapo ebay triggers that were about 80% reliable.  As It turns out, it is quite difficult to juggle fast moving action, slow Pentax autofocus, flash refresh times and unreliable flash triggers… but I’m happy with the results that I got! There are a lot more from the day here.

Pentax K10D, DA 16-45mm f/4 @ 21mm, f/4.5, 1/80s, ISO 200.2917792968_540de20153_o