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2018 Project - Focused picture a week (WoodButcher)

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WoodButcher

WoodButcher

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Rusty
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Myers
Wait, what? Focused? aren't most pictures focused? Well, I'm thinking concentrated or with a defined goal. Scott and I were kicking the thought of another photo project around, but neither of us wanted to do another 365 project. That project was good for training your eyes to see potential photo ops, but tended to just be a "get a shot" project many days. So what I'm going to do is at the beginning of the week I'm going to come up with a certain shot I'd like to do and shoot it before the end of day on Sunday. I'll post soon after, but I suspect the routine with be define the shot Sunday-Tuesday, shoot Monday-Sunday, process and post Sunday-Monday. The end result will hopefully be a set of 52 images that are done like a mini assignment. It may be an architecture theme, but to get an abstract image. It may be a sunrise at a particular location that I haven't been so that I'll to research the place and get there in time. Hope that makes sense. I will do one post for each image with the assignment and how I did it. And, of course, the final image.

I'm not sure if Scott will take this on or not, but he might. Anybody else is welcome to try too. I sat down with a piece of paper last night and came up with about 30 ideas and a handful of modifiers. Like planning the image to be a black and white from the inception. Or a telephoto for a particular landscape. I tried to put things on the list that I don't normally do, or I'm not good at, just so I increase my skills and step out of my comfort zone. So I'm planning on a portrait for one week. Getting a picture of a stranger on the street. Things like that.

Watch this space for an image and story on Sunday.
 
Re: 2018 Project - Focused picture a week (woodbutcher)

:bow::clap:
Tom
 
Okay, first the story. Plan A was to reshoot something I'd shot a couple of years ago and by dumb luck (okay, some knowledge) got a good shot. However, the lighting was bad and time of day was wrong. As of Monday, my plan was to drive out to Inks Lake early Saturday and do it right. However, life started getting the way on Tuesday. I'm one of the two IT guys at the company so there are certain things I get early warning on. In this case it was a layoff. Planned for Tuesday...then moved to Friday and then bumped back to Thursday. That bit of fun impacted almost everything I did all week. To top it off, I'd been sneezing a bit as the week wore on and figured it was cedar pollen, but the Friday news said there was none? However, they did mention early morning fog on Saturday which, if low, could mean my planned shot would be epic. By late Friday night, I realized my health issue was not cedar, but at the minimum a bad cold coming on fast. So I'm thinking about plan B, which was also my plan if the fog was really just low clouds and it meant a quick drive into Austin. Each time I woke up Friday night/Saturday morning, I felt worse and worse. So Saturday was scratched off the list and I hoped for a chance on Sunday. I also started planning on a plan C. Good thing because by Sunday morning I was running a fever, am still am. Nice.

So enough of the whining, on to the image. I had bought a Lego BMW R1200 GSA back in the fall and documented, via cell phone camera, the build process, but had never done a good shot of it. So I got out some flashes and other stuff, including a light box. My thinking was to do a product shot of it. Turns out I really like the looks of the wood grain on my desk. I shot both ways and like this best. So, still fits my criteria of a "planned" shot, but I hate that I had to reach into my stash of emergency ideas the first week.

IM5_0831-XL.jpg


Two flashes, on key light, upper left. One as a rim light, far right, low power. One white foam board reflector, front right. Black background that was darkened in Lightroom with a gradient filter. If you have an overly bright monitor that might show. I'll check on my phone to see since it seems to show thing too bright also. Canon 5D mark 4, Canon 24-70 lens at 57mm, 1/60 of a second, f9 ISO 100. Process was to take a couple of test exposures to make sure it was all black, ie no ambient light from the room. All light came from the flashes. Added the key light and got happy with that, then the rim light and finally the bounce.
 
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Long story . . . Nice first shot!

:)
 
Maybe do another "adventurized" shot of it later posed in some dirt ;-)
 
easy to get a sharp shot when the target and the camera aren't moving. :-)
 
Okay, Week 2. Continued to be a "sick" week. Finally got to feeling normal today. Was okay yesterday and hung out with Scott. However, being run down meant not getting up early. My hopes had been to go back to my Plan B from last week, but that was an early morning shot. I experimented with some drone stuff today, but didn't feel that my results were that good. So off to see the sunset at the local lake and maybe get some bird shots. Well, ended up missing my prime sunset location because I got to talking to another photographer who was shooting birds. Turns out he had recently upgraded to a full-frame Canon like mine and I ended up teaching him some tricks. Oh well, anybody that knows me will know that helping somebody else out tends to take priority over my needs. I did get some sunset shots after he wandered off. And some birds, but the good bird shots would have been while we were talking and before.

So I give you sunset at Brushy Creek Lake park.

IM5_0853-XL.jpg


CAMERA Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
LENS Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
ISO 100
FOCAL LENGTH 75.0 mm (75.0 mm in 35mm)
APERTURE f/9
EXPOSURE TIME 0.01667s (1/60)
SIZE 6720 x 4480
 
Indeed, that was a nice sky this evening. :clap: And the lack of clouds and that calm as glass surface tells me tonight is going to be quite chilly.....
 
Week 3. Still haven't hit my stride yet. I've got to work out a rhythm to plan out shots better. I actually had hopes for something else, but it didn't work out. However, I did work on a project earlier in the week. The results weren't spectacular, but it was just the sort of thing I had in mind when I started this project. The weather was cold enough in Austin that I could actually attempt it. The idea was to photograph a soap bubble as it froze. Much research on youtube was done. As I headed home the evening before the storm, I stopped at a couple of places to buy children's soap bubble toys. No dice. I wasn't about to head to the HEB the evening before a storm. It would have been a nightmare. Fortunately my neighbors have grandkids that live with them and they had gallons of the stuff and lots of wands for blowing bubbles.

The next morning, 24 degrees for so, I headed out to shoot some pictures and quickly learned what the youtube vids said. No wind or it won't work. So I struck out. In the evening though, it cooled off again and the wind died down. So I used a clamp to hold a bubble wand and blew bubbles with another one. I'd catch a suitable one (learning curve) and transfer it to the steady one. I had the camera on a tripod with my macro lens and it was pre-focused on where the bubble would be. I found that I didn't get good ice crystal formation, probably because there was still a very slight breeze and it would break as it got stiff. Here are before and after shots. You can see where it is freezing in the lower left area.

IM5_0978-XL.jpg


And a second later...

IM5_0986-XL.jpg
 
Nice try though.... I tried for about 45 minutes with no-joy myself. Certainly cold enough at 14*F, yet the wind was the deal breaker for me too. There's always this winter? lol
 
Cool attempt :-P

I saw that time lapse vid that was going around on Facebook that showed a bubble freezing. Maybe you need to go visit Justin up in Ten Sleep :eek2:
 
Something different...?

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEdT1E1tfk"]I Photographed Boiling Water – Very Surprising Results! - YouTube[/ame]
 
His first series at 1/160th was too slow was my take-away right off the bat. Those bubbles are moving rapidly as well as changing shape. I would have started at the 1/250th or 1/320th (but my flash trigger sync runs out about there....) Pretty cool concept which reminded me of my vegetable dunk shots a while back.
 
That would have been a cool shot (no pun intended) :rider:
 
M38A1 said:
His first series at 1/160th was too slow was my take-away right off the bat. Those bubbles are moving rapidly as well as changing shape. I would have started at the 1/250th or 1/320th (but my flash trigger sync runs out about there....) Pretty cool concept which reminded me of my vegetable dunk shots a while back.
Click to expand...

I would get away from flashes and go for fixed lights so higher shutter speeds could be used without the sync issue. I might also try to find a container with flat sides and without all the visible scratches.
 
Week 4

Okay, I held off on this because I thought I might use the same picture I'm using for the Smoke photo contest and didn't want to have discussions about it. I've decided to use a smoke picture, but not the one I'm using in the challenge.

Basically I spent the week looking for fog/cloud/steam or smoke shots. I had one from the week before I thought I might use in the challenge that was steam and smoke, but really wanted to concentrate on the smoke aspect and minimize the rest of the content. This picture I picked for my weekly images caught my eye because of the many shapes I saw in it. Kind of like cloud watching, the more you look at it and let your imagination go, the more you see. Between two cameras, full frame and crop, three lenses (macro, 24-70 and 100-400) I took about 50 pictures. This one is a tight crop of one area and was taken with my full frame sensor camera with a 105mm macro lens. I've cropped down to about the middle 50% of the image. ISO 400, f4, 1/500 second exp. In processing, I increased contrast, clarity and blacks to get the smoke to stand out more. I've shot smoke before and lighting makes a huge difference. This was early morning with little wind. The sun was behind me, but diffuse due to early clouds.

IM5_1069-X2.jpg
 
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I see a couple animal heads in there..... wow. or does everything still look like a duck to me? lol
 
That is really a cool looking picture. Nice concept.
 
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