Picture of the Week 13 – Angel Wing Begonia

Posted on April 4, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
1/40s f/8.0 at 55.0mm iso3200

Angel Wing Begonia

The superposition of the flower against the champagne flute caught me eye immediately when I glanced over to the kitchen counter. I can’t always explain why I find a particular composition appealing, but this one really attracted my attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t spoil it by trying to be too analytical.

However, let me use this opportunity to say a few more things about depth of field (DOF). DOF is the range of distances from the camera at which objects are going to be reasonably sharp in the photo. DOF is affected by a number of factors, including the aperture and the focal length of the lens. Larger apertures (smaller f-stop numbers) and longer focal lengths will result in less DOF.

Here, we have a middle-of-the-road aperture (f/8) and focal length (55 mm), and yet the depth of field is very shallow. The reason is the third and often strongest factor in the DOF equation, namely the distance to the subject. DOF can be remarkably shallow at close distances. Here, the focus distance to the flower was about 10 inches, so even though the glass was only a couple of inches further away, it is already rather out of focus. The rest of the background, which is just a few feet away, is pretty much unrecognizable. That’s a good thing, because the cluttered kitchen counter in the background really would have been distracting if it hadn’t been so out-of-focus.

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Picture of the Week 12 – San Diego Science Festival

Posted on March 29, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
1/80s f/5.6 at 55.0mm iso3200

San Diego Science Festival

I was helping with a booth for the Protein Data Bank at the San Diego Science Festival, an event at the downtown ballpark that attracts tens of thousands of visitors. One of our activities was to fold the three-dimensional structure of a protein from wire. (The other was building a DNA model from toothpicks and marshmallows.)

While this child was proudly posing with his model for someone else, I quickly snapped this from a different angle. What makes the picture, other than the great smile that says “I’m really pleased with this”, is the superposition with the image of the protein on the computer screen in the background.

This photo incidentally also illustrates a lighting principle often used in posed portraits, called “short lighting”, which is usually more flattering to the subject. It means that the main light is on the side of the face that is away from the camera. Also, the light here was soft and indirect, coming from the area to the right that was beyond the open but covered portion of the grandstand. Soft light means that there is a soft transition rather than a hard line between the light and shadows on a person’s face.

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Picture of the Week 11 – Meet The Cheetah

Posted on March 18, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/100s f/3.2 at 200.0mm iso3200

Meet The Cheetah

We went to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park (formerly San Diego Wild Animal Park) today, thinking that with the windy and rainy weather it wouldn’t be so crowded. We were certainly right. I’ve never seen so few people there. However, what we didn’t know is that the weather also caused lots of events to be cancelled. No bird flight show (too windy, the birds would have been blown out of the amphitheater, no cheetah run (too soggy, the cheetah would have hydroplaned). Instead, they had some close animal encounters in the enclosed Hunte Pavillon, including one with the cheetah.

Technically, this was a rather difficult photo to take. The cheetah was quite skittish and hardly ever held still. Flash was out of the question out of consideration for the animal. It was quite dark and the scene was very strongly backlit.

The ways to compensate for these challenges is to make sure the main subject is properly exposed (the background will be blown out), to increase local contrast in post-processing, and to use a large aperture.

On technical merits alone, it is certainly not the best photo I’ve ever taken, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances, and how often does one get this close to a cheetah? I do like the composition, the expression of the cheetah, and also the out of focus trainer in the background with his head turned away.

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Picture of the Week 10 – San Diego Botanic Garden

Posted on March 13, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 Macro II USM
1/400s f/14.0 at 38.0mm iso800

Last Sunday, on a stroll through San Diego Botanic Garden, I found this plant, or more precisely, this branch of a larger plant. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a name tag, and I didn’t inquire about it, so at this point I can’t say what it is.

This photo illustrates an excellent way of isolating a subject against the background. The scene was naturally lit such that the plant in the foreground was in bright sunlight, but the bushes or trees in the background were completely in the shade. I purposely underexposed by 2/3 of a stop in the camera to make sure that there would be no blown out highlights on the plant.

I didn’t do any further adjustments to exposure or contrast in post-processing. I could have easily darkened the background further to make it uniformly black, but I like the hint of texture that is left in it.

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Picture of the Week 9 – Cormorants in Breeding Color

Posted on March 4, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/1250s f/6.3 at 150.0mm iso400

Cormorants in Breeding Color

Yes, even the cormorants, who most of the year are anything but colorful, are trying to look their best during mating season.

The photo as displayed here is a significant crop from the original out of the camera. I was aiming for a larger composition with more birds to the right and to the bottom of what you see here. However, I decided that the blue throat pouches would have been too small to have enough visual impact, so I cropped the image, effectively zooming in further.

The good news is that the high megapixel counts of most modern digital cameras easily allow for plenty of cropping. The 60D outputs 18 megapixels and this cropped version is still a 6 megapixel image, more than enough for a good 8×10 print, and of course one needs less than 1 megapixels for a web sized photo as you see it here.

To continue the discussion about depth of field from last week, I actually did not get it quite right in this photo. It’s good enough for this web sized version, but if you looked at the full size, you’d see that only the closest two bird are well focused, even the next two with the blue pouches in the center of the photo are slightly out of focus. This happened in part because in my original composition I had focused on even closer birds (which you don’t see any more in the cropped version). Also, I could have easily used a smaller aperture such as f/8 or f/11.

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