Picture of the Week 21 – Chamomile Flowers

Posted on June 1, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 40D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/400s f/14.0 at 115.0mm iso800

Sorry, I’m afraid I’m rather late posting this Picture of the Week. The main reason is that I’ve been very busy working on a video of the Velveteen Rabbit play. More on that perhaps in another post soon.

This is a photo of chamomile flowers my wife Michele is growing on our patio. It was taken early in the morning, with the flowers being backlit by the relatively low sun.

The photo illustrates a lighting trick to isolate a subject from the background which often works particularly well for flowers. While the flowers are brightly lit, the background is still in the shade and hence very dark. You can barely see for example the outline of a big flower pot. Otherwise, the background would have been rather busy and distracting.

Note also that I’m using a small aperture (f/14) to ensure sufficient depth of field to have all the flowers in focus, even at a relatively short subject distance. Normally, I’d use a larger aperture (e.g. f/5.6 or f/8) to blur the background, but since the background is so dark, we don’t have to use blur to make sure it doesn’t compete for attention.

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Photo of the Week 20 – Solar Eclipse

Posted on May 20, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/500s f/9.0 at 200.0mm iso200

I admit that I had no plans for photographing the solar eclipse today. Here in San Diego, at the maximum of the eclipse 83% of the sun was obscured by the moon. A few hundred miles to the northeast of us, one would have seen an annular eclipse. The only difference to a total solar eclipse is that the moon is too far away from the earth, so its apparent size is too small to completely cover the sun, and a “ring of fire” remains.

When the eclipse started, I projected images of the sun through a pin hole in an index card. Nothing worth photographing, but at least I was able to see the moon taking its bites out of the sun.

As it was getting closer to the time of the maximum eclipse, the marine layer started coming in. At first I was disappointed, but then I realized that at times the cloud layer was of just the right thickness that it was safe to directly look at the eclipse! Sometimes, a presumed misfortune turns out to be a stroke of good luck!

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The Real Solution to the MacBook Pro Battery Life Problem

Posted on May 18, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

This post has little to do with photography (except that I use a MacBook Pro for all my computing, including photography and videography). However, this little nugget of information made a huge difference to me, and perhaps others will find this helpful as well.

Many people have problems with the battery life on newer MacBook Pro laptop computers. Instead of getting 6 or 8 hours as advertised, they might get 2 or 3, or perhaps even less. My boss called me a few days ago and said his brand new laptop’s battery ran out after 1 hour 40 minutes on the plane.

There are endless discussion threads about this online, but I finally found the crucial bit hidden deep inside one of them. The problem is the automated switching between two graphics cards. The more powerful of the two (“discrete”) is very power hungry and will make the laptop rather hot and drain the battery very quickly indeed.

For the astonishingly simple solution, read this article and then download the free app gfxCardStatus.

After installing it, switching to “Integrated Only” and watching a bit what programs are running needlessly in the background, my battery lasts indeed for 6 to 8 hours (instead of 2 or 3), and the laptop doesn’t get nearly as hot (the temperature reading at the CPU has dropped from about 150 F to 100F or less).

By the way, I find iStat Menus from Bjango a most useful tool for all kinds of system monitoring, such as CPU, memory, network, temperatures, fan speeds, and so on. However, it does cost $16.

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Picture of the Week 19 – From Another Planet?

Posted on May 16, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/640s f/11.0 at 130.0mm iso400

On last Saturday’s walk around La Jolla Cove I was looking for interesting photos, but didn’t feel inspired by anything that I hadn’t photographed before. Finally, I saw these patterns that look like a landscape from another planet, but actually are in the sandstone cliffs right by the beach.

I hadn’t noticed these shapes before, and I imagine they might be transient, perhaps formed by just the right tide conditions and the right amount of salt water left to evaporate. I had to wait a bit for the sun to emerge from behind thin clouds to give better contrast, and in the meantime tried to visualize a good composition.

In the end, I still cropped the photo somewhat to improve the composition and enhanced the contrast and saturation a bit to make the photo more interesting, but it had to start to keeping one’s eyes open for something unusual.

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Picture of the Week 18 – Real Love

Posted on May 7, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/60s f/3.2 at 200.0mm iso25600

This image was shot during a performance of The Velveteen Rabbit, the story of a toy rabbit that desperately wants to be real.

One of the key lines of the play happens when the toy horse explains to the rabbit: “When a child loves you, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.” This photo shows a mother interpreting this line in sign language for her deaf child.

It is often said that it is not the camera but the photographer that makes a great image. That is certainly true in the sense that even the best camera will produce rubbish if not used properly. However, on the other hand, we need to use the right equipment for the job, and sometimes it takes a certain camera to deal with a particular situation.

I find it amazing that I was able to get this shot at all. It was almost pitch black in the audience, and the only light on the subjects here was the glow from the stage lights. None of the cameras I own (and they are all fine cameras) would have been able to produce this image. However, I had rented a 5D Mark III, which just came out a little over a month ago. Some of its strengths are its high ISO (low light) performance and its autofocus. Indeed, at ISO 25,600 it had no problems with this scene at all.

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