Recording The Light

Canon EOS 5D ,Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM
1/125s f/11.0 at 24.0mm iso400

The Getty Museum is one of my favorite places in Southern California. It’s at once both grand and playful, an enormous building complex that yet offers an endless supply of intriguing details. It surely is a photographer’s paradise–one of those places I’d pick if I had to teach a class on composition.

This photo shows the basement (terrace level) of the entrance hall. I love how the sunlight fills the interior in this shot. The starburst of sunlight in the upper right corner is a nice touch. Notice, by the way, that it results in no lens flare. High quality lenses pay off in situations like this. The two people inside are kept to almost a silhouette. The exposure is well balanced such that some details on the outside patio are still barely discernible through the window, but they don’t distract from the image.

The photograph was taken with only available light, i.e., no fill light of any sort (such as a flash) was used. However, I used some adjustments both in the raw conversion and in Photoshop (such as curves), to bring out the light and airy feeling of this image.

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
1/400s f/11.0 at 42.0mm iso200

UCSD is an ongoing construction site. Just when you think they’ve run out of space, they sacrifice another parking lot for a new building. This one is going up right next to the building where I work.

The key to this image was proper composition. I initially tried to include too much in the image, such as the full height of the crane. The result was a photo that was far too busy. I really wanted to bring out the forest of vertical steel bars, and zooming in helped focus on that idea. Yes, both the steel cable (left) and the crane (right) are now cut off on the top, but I think they add an element of intrigue to the image.

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 Macro II USM
1/320s f/5.6 at 88.0mm iso800

We had been watching these seals being nice and dry for about half an hour, until the tide started flooding their rock. It’s so funny to watch them curl up trying to keep as much of themselves dry as they can, attempting to avoid the inevitable. A few minutes later, the seal to the left decided that it was fighting a losing battle and went back into the water.

On the technical side, this was a fairly low contrast scene and I slightly increased contrast in post-processing, something that should be done only with special care in my opinion. The shutter speed is middle of the road, assuring that there is no motion blur of the seals, and yet not freezing the water completely. I probably could have experimented with longer shutter speeds, perhaps down to about 1/120s, since the seals were holding fairly still. Anything even longer, and hand-holding the shot would have become difficult.

For the pixel peepers, I suspect that the old Canon 28-105, which I love as a walk around lens on my 5D, isn’t quite up to the much higher pixel density of the 60D. Several shots I took yesterday with this combination seemed to be lacking just a touch in sharpness.