2018 Project - Focused picture a week (WoodButcher)

Week 22 - Took a while to choose a picture for this week. Debbie (Snoopster) contacted me on Thursday night and said she'd be in town over the weekend and was going to do a guided bird walk Saturday morning and asked if my wife and I wanted to join. Of course I did and much to my surprise, so did my wife. So we met up and I got very few bird pictures. Bird watchers and bird photographers are a bit incompatible...they just need a glimpse to identify and they are ready to move on. Photographers want to get closer and get a perfect shot. End result was I got more flower shots than birds.

That evening, Debbie and I decided to try another place in town on Sunday morning. My wife declined to come with some comment along the lines of having done her life limit of bird walks.

The place was called Commons Ford Ranch Metropolitan Park. It is 40 acres of recovered grasslands and riparian terrain. The local Audubon society club did a lot of the work. Here's a link: https://travisaudubon.org/conservation/commons-ford So lots of wildflowers growing and that means birds and bugs too. As the morning progressed, we started to see more and more bees and butterflies on the flowers so I switched to a macro lens and started shooting them. Here's one of my favorites from the day, a bee on a thistle bloom.




Some cropping was done on the image, but not too much.

CAMERA Canon EOS 7D Mark II
LENS Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Macro
ISO 100
FOCAL LENGTH 105.0 mm (374.1 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/5.6
EXPOSURE TIME 0.0025s (1/400)

Week 23 - Republic of Texas Rally. Every two or three years, Scott and I go down to photograph the parade down Congress Avenue. This year the word was that this could be the biggest so far. Plus I've been playing with long exposure shots and the thought of being able to stand in the middle of Congress avenue surround by bikes and getting a shot of the Capitol was too much to ignore.



I had a tripod with me and used the camera's light meter to get me close in exposure time and then tweaked it from there. At 20 seconds, you can see ghosting from slow moving people and there are a couple that didn't move at all. However, the ones moving at normal speed are gone.

CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM or Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG OS HSM | A
ISO 100
FOCAL LENGTH 70.0 mm (70.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/16
EXPOSURE TIME 20s (20)

Having red and green traffic lights at the same time is sort of fun in this. Nice capture.

I figure I caught the red to green transition instead of the green, yellow, red or I would have had some yellow. If I had noticed that at the time, I would have tried again.

FYi, I'm on the road and still taking pictures, but might be late posting. I'm still keeping up though.

Time to catch up. My wife and I headed off in the car for a couple of weeks, with the purpose of heading east to our nephew's wedding in Rhode Island. We wandered the Blue Ridge Parkway, Gettysburg and Acadia NP before the wedding.

Week 24 - First day on the BRP. Not spectacular, but my mission that day was for my wife to see the parkway since she never had and work with her on taking photographs. We had a good time that day, but things took a somber turn that evening. More on that in my next image.



CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM or Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG OS HSM | A
ISO 100
FOCAL LENGTH 27.0 mm (27.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/9
EXPOSURE TIME 0.01s (1/100)

Week 25 - So, as we checked into our hotel in Asheville, NC, we got a call that one of my riding buddies, who is also my brother-in-law, had a massive stroke and it didn't look good. He passed away soon after we got the call. Over the next few days, funeral plans were made and I was going to need to get to Phoenix four days after the wedding in Providence. With this hanging over us, it took a bit of fun out of the rest of the trip up to Providence. However, we did make the wedding and had a good time.

On the way we stopped in Gettysburg and toured the battlefield. Being in a somber mood already, the sheer number of deaths at the battle really has us pretty quiet all day. My wife took a nighttime walking ghost tour and I opted to go photograph sunset. Had some fun with a new polarizer filter and ND filters. This image is a stacked, HDR (bracketed) shot. Three images were taken and combined. I set the f-stop and ISO and let the camera modify the shutter speed to give a standard exposure, then -2 stops and +2 stops. So when you look at the shutter speed below, that is for the fastest shot. What that does is capture the bright and dark areas so you can add them into the main shot and have a range of exposure that is closer to what the eye sees instead of the lower range the camera catches in a single shot. On top of that, the polarizer brings out the clouds and the graduated ND filter I used darkened the upper part of the image to even it out some also.



CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM or Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG OS HSM | A
ISO 400
FOCAL LENGTH 28.0 mm (34.2 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/7.1
EXPOSURE TIME 0.0004s (1/2500)

Beautiful moment.

Week 26 - I had a hard time picking a photo for this week. I had one from the funeral and just decided it was too depressing. This is one I took and on brief hike when I detoured down the Natchez Trace. Evidently no one had been down that trail yet that day. Every 20-30 feet I'd walk through a spider web. Finally gave up and started waving a branch in front of me.



CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM or Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG OS HSM | A
ISO 1250
FOCAL LENGTH 24.0 mm (24.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/6.3
EXPOSURE TIME 0.025s (1/40)

Week 27 - Happy 4th. This is a composite I did in Photoshop with three different fireworks explosions. It wasn't too hard to do with my limited PS skills.

Really like that sunset shot.

The others are cool as well though.

Week 28 - A wedding shot. One of my daughter's best friends through middle school and high school just got married. I had my camera along to get a shot of my daughter all decked out since she was in the wedding party, but ended up with a decent cake cutting shot.

All natural light. I got in position before the cell phone paparazzi so I had a good angle.



CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM or Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG OS HSM | A
ISO 1250
FOCAL LENGTH 70.0 mm (97.8 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2.8
EXPOSURE TIME 0.008s (1/125)

Week 29 - Car show. I met Scott (M38A1) and Mark (GravelGuy) in Georgetown for breakfast on Saturday. Scott had driven his jeep down for a car gathering on the town square. I took the opportunity to shoot some images. Here's one of Scott's jeep I liked.



Not too much processing. I just darkened the background on the left side slightly so that the guy back there was less obvious.

CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM or Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG OS HSM | A
ISO 100
FOCAL LENGTH 35.0 mm (37.1 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/2.8
EXPOSURE TIME 0.008s (1/125)

Thanks Rusty!

Anytime you want to shoot the jeep in a controlled setting just let me know. Becca (who was floating around the show and does pinup) is still game for 'any' kind of shooting.