Picture of the Week 44 – Grape Leaves

Posted on November 10, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
1/320s f/8.0 at 23.0mm iso200

After a wine tasting near Los Altos last weekend, I was trying to get some interesting shots of the vineyards. In the area that was immediately accessible to visitors, I couldn’t quite come up with an interesting composition on a larger scale, so I decided instead to try a close up shot. The result is this Picture of the Week.

The colorful leaves are strongly backlit by the sun, such that the sun shines directly through the leaves and turns them into a translucent object. This really brings out the colors. At the same time, however, it is very important not to get any direct sunlight onto the lens, since that would lead to a dramatic decrease in contrast, would wash out the colors, and most likely result in ugly flare artifacts.

The solution was to carefully position the camera such that the direct sun is blocked by one of the branches. Post-processing of this image was fairly modest. I actually slightly decreased the overall contrast and boosted the shadow exposure, since otherwise some parts of the leaves would have come out too dark.

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Picture a Week 43 – Sunset Silhouettes

Posted on November 2, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/8000s f/14.0 at 200.0mm iso800

At the end of another walk at La Jolla Cove, I was pretty much done taking photos. However, when I looked around, I was struck by the shape of the tree, and the fact that I could probably place the sun right behind the tree trunk to get both a sunburst effect and lots of silhouettes of people against the sky.

The silhouettes are caused by the fact that the background is so bright that any reasonable exposure for the background will render the people just a black shape against it. An interesting variation of this can be seen with the people closer to the foreground. They are just as strongly backlit, but they are against a dark background, so they display a little bit of rim lighting, a bright seam of light that outlines them. The yellow color of the sky is partially caused by a weather condition called “Santa Ana”, when we get hot dry winds blowing from the east and carrying desert sand out over the ocean.

I’ve been posting the basic camera settings with each photo. If you look at them for this shot, you might wonder if they make sense. Did I really need such high sensitivity of 800 ISO, or such a short shutter time of 1/8000s? Of course not. What happened is that I had been taking photos in the shade just before this, where I did need 800 ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed. I simply forgot to review my camera settings when I took this shot. Fortunately, the camera was forgiving. In particular, I had it set in a kind of “safety” mode, where it will overwrite my aperture (which was probably at f/5.6 or f/8) if the shortest shutter speed (1/8000s) would still lead to an overexposed image. Moral of the story: Look at your camera settings more often!

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Picture a Week 42 – Honey Perfume

Posted on October 21, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
with Canon 500D close-up lens
1/500s f/11.0 at 78.0mm iso400

Flower pictures are hard. Quite hard, in my opinion. Most of the time, something is wrong. A blossom is too far open, or too far closed. The way they happen to be arranged doesn’t yield a good composition. The light isn’t right. The background is too busy. The list of potential problems goes on.

Last week, I was already out the door on my way to work, when these Honey Perfume roses on our patio caught my eye. I instantly knew I had something good.

The first thing that attracted me was the rose blossom that was about half way open. It virtually begged to have its picture taken (incidentally, the day turned out to be really hot and by evening the same rose was way past its prime). However, everything else came together as well. I liked the overall composition, the light was good, the background (still in the shade) was perfect, and little details such as the morning dew on some of the leaves (and even on the yellow rose petals if you were to see the original in full size), just added an extra touch.

I didn’t do much in terms of processing, but I did darken the bottom part of the image a bit because I felt that otherwise it would have distracted from the center of attention.

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Picture a Week 41 – Blue Angels

Posted on October 20, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/1250s f/8.0 at 200.0mm iso400

Life is still super busy, so apologies again for a late post. So, here comes another double header: week 41 today, and week 42 tomorrow.

Almost every year, I take photos of the Blue Angels as they fly over our neighborhood, but I usually don’t post them. This year, we had particularly clear blue skies and I got a few nice shots.

You can see a small gallery of photos I took this year. Some of the shots were taken from a much closer distance, and therefore required much less cropping and have much higher resolution. Others show multiple planes in formation.

However, I still like the shot posted here in particular. I think the glint off the wing and tail section just sets it apart from the other photos. The plane was making a fairly rapid turn, and the reflection happened for probably just a second, so I just had to be fast. I did have this particular effect in mind beforehand, so I was just waiting for an appropriate maneuver, and then took multiple frames in high speed mode to make sure I got just the right moment.

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Picture of the Week 40 – Little Girl

Posted on October 13, 2012 by wolfgangbluhmphotography

Canon EOS 5D ,Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 Macro II USM
1/60s f/8.0 at 40.0mm iso800

I was at a party, and someone brought his 16 month old daughter. She was definitely cute, but also shy, and quite self conscious.

In order to get a picture of her, I needed to catch her off guard. The dog provided the perfect opportunity, but it was a very fleeting moment. Just a second or two after I took this shot, she looked at me with a “what are you doing?” look. I think she probably heard the shutter sound.

What I love about this photo is the multitude of connections: The girl is holding on to her daddy, he’s petting the dog, and she’s almost touching her, too (the dog). Finally, of course, the dog is connecting with … right, the food. Well, at least mentally… 🙂

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