Category Archives: Photography

Clouds and Dogs

Posted by dkrashb on

I roll out of bed an hour and a half later than usual this morning.  I am not a morning person.  In fact, I am so not a morning person that even as an infant I was cranky in the morning.  But, I’ve learned that if I give myself a lot of time in the morning, I am able to function without snapping at too many people.  Losing an hour and a half of “me time” makes this difficult.

Fortunately for me, my hubby gets up and takes the dog out.  This is due to a secret I will share with just you, my faithful readers.  We are thinking about keeping the dog.  However, because fostering was my thing, I was doing most of the care taking.  And, since I work from home and I’m hanging out with the dog all day, Tisen has particularly attached himself to me.  My husband decided he needed to take on extra dog duty to decide if keeping him is feasible.  I am relieved to have the additional help with walking, even if we end up not keeping him.  We are weighing the joy of fostering against the joy of being dog parents.

This morning, because my husband is now fully participating, I gain back a half an hour of the time I lost by over sleeping.

Once the coffee is made, I look out the window and decide to shoot some of the clouds hovering over the aquarium.  I’ve been having fun using my 100mm lens for everything these days, so keeping with that trend, I try shooting the landscape with it as well.  Although I miss the range of a zoom lens, it’s nice that the 100mm gets me over the nasty parking lot in the foreground.

After shooting for a few minutes, I decide I’d better pack it in so I have time to refill my coffee before my first meeting.  But as I turn, I see beams of light streaming through the clouds behind me.  Why is it that the light so often does the most interesting things when you have your back turned?

I fire off a series of shots at various exposures.  I know if I stand there for 15 minutes the light will change and the beams will become more distinct, making a more intense image.  But, alas, the clock ticks and I don’t get paid to shoot sun rays.

At the end of the day, the clouds have cleared and I turn to Tisen as my model.  He loves to lay on the couch.  He looks at me without moving except his tail.  I do my best with a long exposure to get his wagging tail in motion.  I can think of nothing in life that so consistently makes me smile–I never tire of a wagging tail.  Then, Pat comes home and Tisen demonstrates how much he’s come to appreciate Pat by curling up on his lap.  Who can resist taking a picture of that?

Rain Day

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The rain is back.  I have nothing against rain. I would just like to be able to schedule it.  For example, the summer afternoon thunderstorms in the Rockies are nice.  They roll in, drop their goods, and roll out like paratroopers on a daily exercise.  Having done their duty, there’s no need to linger and keep the sky gray for days on end.

While Chattanooga seems far sunnier than Columbus, the winter has brought a lot of rain.

Living on the top floor in a faux-loft apartment changes our relationship with rain.  I don’t have to look out the windows to tell if it’s raining–the sound of it hitting the roof gets so loud in a downpour that I frantically hit the mute button during conference calls.  In heavy rains, mysterious leaks start to appear that seem to be related to the angle and speed of the rainfall and can’t be pinpointed or recreated for maintenance men.

After a few hours, the rain drumming in my ears starts to fade into the background so that when it finally stops, it’s a similar experience to being in an office building when there is a power outage–the sudden absence of the white noise leaves the building in an eerie state of silence, often causing its inhabitants to start whispering.

While there is never silence here–there is always something making noise whether it’s a  delivery truck rumbling down the street, a car stopped at the intersection with its stereo blaring, people shouting and laughing over the sounds of traffic–there are moments of less noise.  When the droning of the rain suddenly stops, these other noises pop to the forefront and I find myself missing the buffer of the rain.  So, I have come to appreciate a slow, gentle rain that is just enough to wash away not only the debris in the streets, but also the noise pollution.

I have visions of shooting rain drops sharply in focus in the foreground with the blurred but recognizable backdrop of the aquarium across the river.  But first, our foster dog must go out.  After taking him out in the rain, drying him off, and setting up my tripod, it, of course, stops raining.  I shoot the aquarium in the mist.  Then, I aim for the clouds over the mountains in the distance.  Finally, I discover water drops forming on the balcony overhang and decide to try to get the effect I was looking for by shooting them falling.

An interesting thing about photography:  it’s one thing to envision an image and another to capture it.  After 30+ shots, I manage to capture the drops falling, but they disappear into the light gray background of the sky.  I cannot capture anything close to the picture in my head.

When I set my camera aside and buckle down to a hectic day at the office, it starts to pour.  If only I could schedule the rain . . .

Wine Shots

Posted by dkrashb on

I’m ready for the weekend.  But, my husband is working away at his new digs across the street.  I could walk over and check on him, and maybe I will later.  But right now, I take a little time for me.  First a glass of wine.  One small glass left from my birthday bottle of The Prisoner.

Inspired by a Facebook post by a good friend, I play some Etta James–it’s the kind of mood I’m in–and get out my tripod.  My beautiful glass of wine is going to be my first subject this evening.  I set it up on top of my iPad’s green cover.  I move a utility lamp over.  Then, I set up my camera with its 100mm macro lens about an inch from the glass.  I spend about a half an hour finding interesting shapes and bubbles and (ick) floaties in my wine.

Eventually, I get tired of looking at the wine and decide to drink it.  I move on to shooting close ups of an old nail file, a stuffed Brutus Buckeye bean bag (you have to be from Columbus to get that), my ear buds, and then I land on the utility lamp.  I stop myself after the lamp.

As I process photos, I find it hard to choose.  The more pictures I take, the harder it is for me to pick the handful that I like.  They run together in my mind and I cannot remember if the one I am looking at now is better than the one I was looking at 3 seconds ago.

It reminds me of the time I took my senile aunt bra shopping.  For those of you who have never been bra shopping, it’s not a fun activity no matter what you think.  Add to the mix an 85 year old woman who can’t remember your name and it quickly degrades into an exercise of frustration.

I will spare you the details, but when it came time to choose, I would say, “Do you like this one better or the last one better?”  She would look at me blankly and I would hold up the last one and say, “Do you like the one you have on now or this one?”  She would look at the one in my hand and say, “Oh, did I have that one on?”  Needless to say, I gave up and bought her a few comfortable looking sports bras.  She, of course, couldn’t remember they were bras and never wore them.

Since my memory is slightly better than that, I did manage to whittle down my shots to 4.  I particularly like the last one in terms of an interesting experiment.  I shot through the utility lamp with the focus on the mini-blind in the background.  The light created the effect of a moon behind the blind, which surprised me since the lamp was about 6 inches from the lens and the blind was more like 4 feet away.

Going Small

Posted by dkrashb on

Macro photography is one of those fun things I love to do but rarely find the time for.  This is not because it actually takes longer than shooting anything else, but rather because the possibilities expand infinitely as I keep finding subjects that I would never find interesting at a normal distance.  I have spent an hour shooting a single link of a chain.

Not only does shooting up close allow me to extract out a single shape from a conglomeration, but an extremely shallow depth of focus creates an even smaller view of what’s in focus within the frame, creating all kinds of interesting effects.  In “Spiny Plant”–only one small area of the top edge of the plant is in focus because I shot perpendicular to the plant:

“Blossom” also shows this effect:

I almost scrapped this picture because only the very edge of the blossom is in focus, but I kind of liked it after experimenting quite a bit with editing.  “Flower Cluster” shows how this effect puts only one of the berries (or whatever they are called) in sharp focus:

 

“08 The world in a single drop” is one of those shots I really want to be spectacular, but it’s not:

I would prefer to fill the frame with just the drop against the pink background.  I am excited to try some of the tools discussed in the workshop (a close-up lens and extension tubes) to see if I can, in fact, fill the frame with a water drop.  I suppose it will only reflect my lens at that point, though.

I’ve often struggled with the depth of field issue.  As much as I like the effect of a wide-open aperture in macro shots, when I’m shooting something living and moving this way, I find I often get the focus just in front of or just behind what I actually was trying to focus on.  I learned three important things about this last night:  1)  Don’t use autofocus when shooting macro, 2) Shoot parallel to the subject if you want more of it in focus, and 3) Make use of the diopter on the viewfinder if you need it.

The milestone of reading glasses is something that no one really celebrates.  I usually rely on autofocus to solve my vision limitations.  I found when I was shooting the moon (I love saying that) and I was forced to focus manually, I got my sharpest focus by using the LCD on 10x magnification and wearing my reading glasses.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t work well for a subject that moves faster than the moon or that doesn’t accommodate the use of a tripod.  I’m going to have to do some googling on photography, focus, and reading glasses.

Catch the Moon

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I have been using the moon as a model a lot, but I find it is not as cooperative as I expected.  While, like a model, it’s a heavenly body, unlike a model, it presents itself on a predictable schedule.  As such, you would think it would be easy to schedule a shoot.  However, I have learned that a) there is such a thing as cloud cover, b) the moon doesn’t always rise before I go to bed, c) the moon often rises out of sight from where I am looking.

As a result, I have started to worry more about missing the shots of the moon rising behind the Walnut Street bridge in August.  I now wonder if perhaps that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I missed.

Now that I have a lunar calendar that tells me what time the moon rises, a good tripod, and the ideal composition in mind, I just need the moon to return to it’s former position in the sky.  In doing a little research, I found www.photoephemeris.com for planning outdoor shoots in advance and even tools to figure out where the moon will rise and the path it will travel.  (Maybe we can all be Ansel Adams after all?)

However, this doesn’t answer my question as to how long it will be before the moon rises in the same location.  I am having some troubles finding an answer to this.  I have found articles on the difference in appearance of the moon at apogee vs perigee, the repeating cycle of maxima and minima delineation that takes 18 1/2 years, and calculating the differences in brightness, but I still can’t find how long it takes for the moon to rise in the same location.  I’m guessing that it will repeat within my lifetime, but probably not soon.  In the meantime, I keep watching the moon when it chooses to show itself and looking for opportunities to shoot it rising.

The shot here is a full moon rising through clouds, shot with my iPhone (which was convinced it needed to flash) from a rest area while driving back to Chattanooga from Columbus.  While this looks more like something I might, say, paint during a continuing education class on impressionist painting, I am still impressed by the improvements in the iPhone camera from the 3GS to the 4S–just don’t expect to get good landscape photos at night.

I am particularly impressed with the LCD flash on the iPhone 4S.  I was a little surprised by how brightly it flashed when I took a picture, but when I discovered the flashlight app now has a setting that lets you turn on the LCD light continuously to use it as a flashlight, I was amazed.  I was able to find my workout clothes in the dark this morning and successfully determined the difference between black and dark purple.  If you haven’t upgraded, it’s time.

Wind and Snow

Posted by dkrashb on

On January first, we turned on the heat.  It doesn’t actually kick on until today, the 2nd, since it was so warm yesterday our apartment was 72 degrees and the thermostat was set on 68.  However, the temperature starts to drop into the range of temperature even us Ohioans call “bitterly cold” by this morning.  In fact, when I check the weather in Columbus, it’s the same temperature there as it is in Chattanooga–a whooping 21 degrees.

We drive out to Lookout Mountain hoping I will have my first flight off the big hill.  We aren’t optimistic when we check the weather and see 15 mph winds predicted.  When we step outside, I figure our only hope is that the valley where the training hills are located is somehow sheltered from this wind.

But, it is not to be.  We set up my glider as the instructors watch the wind socks.  An instructor takes a test flight off the big hill and does so many dips and dives as the wind tosses him around that we all know I won’t be flying today.  Instead, I get a thorough lesson in glider preflight checks, so I at least it’s not a waste of time.

Pat helps me disassemble the glider and then we head up to the office to work on our written tests.

After spending the day working on our tests, I watch the sunset through the back door of the hang gliding office.  The door opens onto a deck that hangs over the valley.  The wind is blowing so hard the air coming through the crack around the door blows the hair back off my face.  I think about opening the door to take a picture of the sunset, but it is so cold in the office already, I can’t bring myself to open the door.  I shoot through the door with my iPhone.

When at last we leave for the day, snow is blowing through the beams of the headlights.  After a half mile or so, the snow disappears as we move into lower elevations.  We are relieved, having been forewarned that everything shuts down if there is snow on the ground–the area doesn’t have equipment to clear the roads.

We make our way home and are grateful we’ve turned the heat on already.  As we settle in for the evening, Pat looks out the window and says, “Look, honey, it’s raining sideways!”  When I look out the window, there is snow blowing so fast through the light from a street light that it really does look like sideways rain.  But, it’s snow.  Because it is only visible in the light from the streetlight, it looks like the street light is some kind of snow machine blowing snow onto the street.  It stops as suddenly as it started.  There is no snow on the ground.  Not even the grass shows a dusting of white.  So much for our first snow.

What About Paris?

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Good news!  I heard from the shelter and I get to pick up our foster dogs on Tuesday.  I have become obsessed with dog preparations.  It started with a stop at the local dog supply store, Bone Appetit.

I was only looking.  I just wanted to know what kinds of toys and tools were available for dogs these days since it’s been a few years since we lost our last dog to cancer.  We met an owner and she explained a new type of leash to us that is a thick, rubber leash that prevents jerking either the dog or the owner.

This reminds me that our foster dogs don’t know how to walk on a leash. I’m not sure if a gentle leader or something like this semi-stretchy leash is a better idea to start with.  I’m pretty sure that whichever route I go, we’re going to go through a lot of bacon in the process.  🙂

I look at the display of stuffed toys on the wall and remember my own childhood when I used to save up my earnings from mowing lawns to buy myself stuffed animals.  When we discover animals that look like pelts, I realize these are not for human children.

I can’t make fun of anyone for spoiling their dogs.  Besides working on not being judgmental, I was guilty of spoiling our dogs rotten.  We used to feed them a raw diet that involved stocking a huge freezer with whole chickens, grass-fed cow bones and stomachs, livers, and a variety of other “goodies” that we would never eat ourselves.

I check out the brands of dog foods offered by this store and am happy to see that several I’m familiar with are available.  I don’t plan to go the raw food route, but I would like to use a high quality food that will help with the house breaking.

The owner tells us that the store works with the same shelter.  I’m excited to meet people who love dogs and work with the shelter–it gives me confidence that the foster dogs are being treated well and will be OK.

I return home and dig out some photos of my best friend’s dogs.  One of her dogs, Bonnie, hates the camera.  I crawled under a table to try to get a shot of her and only got the back of her black head in an even blacker shadow.  I tried sneaking a shot from my iPhone and she was even savvy to that.  No pictures of Bonnie.

The other dog, Paris, just laid there and let me shoot her for as long as I wanted.  The lighting wasn’t great, but I managed to have fun talking to her like a fashion model while I shot.  “Paris, look this way.  Oh, that’s it.  Now tilt your head.  Now raise your eyebrows.  Perfect.  Play dead.  Perfect!”

I am sure I will be posting plenty of foster dog pictures in the near future–I hope Paris isn’t jealous.

Faster than a Foster Cat

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My sister-in-law likes cats.  However, she and my brother, like us, are at a place in their lives where they don’t want to tie themselves to an animal for the next 15-20 years.  My brother often jokes about looking for animals with a short life expectancy for this reason.

My sister-in-law, Megan, being more practical, has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to have pets without having a long term commitment.  She provides foster care for a local cat shelter.

Megan has fostered numerous pregnant cats who gave birth under her watchful eye as well as taken in young litters with no mother.  Keeping kittens with no mom fed, emptied, and cleaned up is a big chore that has to be performed diligently and regularly.  It’s not for the faint of heart.

Megan nurtures these kitties through the tough part of their early lives or supports their mom in doing so.  When they are weaned, healthy, and confident, they are returned to the shelter until they find permanent homes.  Megan takes a break from fostering if she has a heavy travel schedule or needs a break and then takes on another set when she can.

Other than the heartache of getting emotionally attached to animals that you will eventually hand off to someone else, it’s the perfect way to have pets without taking on permanent ownership.

Chibs and Clay, named by the shelter (perhaps by a fan of Sons of Anarchy?), are the current kittens staying with my sister-in-law (see photos).  Chibs needs to see Clay do something before he is willing to give it a try.  Even when he finally joined Clay in my lap and laid there purring, when something moved, he would dart off again to hide.

Getting even these few pictures was quite a chore.  First of all, they were doing something cute and my 100mm prime lens was on my camera.  While I really like this lens, I could have used the 400mm of my telephoto zoom given Chibs’s skittishness.  But, I started shooting and gradually crept forward, crawling across the floor slowly and shooting every few seconds so I didn’t lose out on a decent shot because I was holding out for a better one.

Here’s what I learned:

  1. Rapid fire shooting mode is a must.  The faster the better.
  2. Focus, focus, focus.  Rapidly moving critters in low light make this difficult.  I often end up with out of focus faces and sharply focused feet or rear ends or backgrounds.
  3. A little more depth of field is better–otherwise, I end up with just the eyes in focus and then the surrounding face is too soft (see the second photo).
  4. When flash is not an option, the animal is fearful of cameras, and the light is low, I just have to live with a shallow depth of field.
  5. Most animals will not pose.  Bribing domestic animals with treats and toys can be helpful, but requires an assistant.

Don’t Want to Miss This Syndrome

Posted by dkrashb on

Once again, I find myself shooting the sunset.  Every time I sit down to process photos of the sunset taken from our building, I promise myself I will find a new perspective and not create yet another 100 shots that look like the thousands I’ve taken before.  But then, I look out the window, see amazing things, and grab my camera.

There are several problems with this.  For one thing, I tend to get a very busy foreground with a lot of crap in it I’d really like to get out of my pictures.  I can’t crop the crap out because I would lose much of the sky, which is the whole reason I wanted to shoot in the first place.

The choices that must be made when shooting!  Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just arrange the buildings and landscape with a remote control to best fit my vision?  More realistically, I keep thinking I will run across the street and up the mound so I can shoot over the trees.  But do I ever do that?  No.  I panic when I see the sky and don’t want to miss the perfect color even though I almost always end up deleting the first 10 minutes worth of shots because the color gets better as the sun disappears.

I believe I suffer from “Don’t Want to Miss This” syndrome.  Besides shooting sunsets from bad view points, I also find myself eating foods that no human should ever touch, attending events that are of no interest to me, and taking unreasonable risks (ask me how I once ended up in an ultralight crash).  I wonder if I were in a flock of sheep I would follow them over a cliff just to find out what that was like?

Restraining myself to the subject of photography for the purposes of this post, I find the “Don’t Want to Miss This” syndrome causes an all or nothing kind of pursuit of photos.  It just depends on whether my phobia of missing a shot is outweighing my phobia of missing an experience because I’m too wrapped up in camera gear to participate.  What I need is balance.

The thing about sunsets is that it’s easy enough to find out what time the sun will set.  And, I’m getting pretty good at predicting when we’ll have a great one (which is pretty much about 75% of the time), so seems like I should be able to just plan to go across the street at the right time and shoot.  Perhaps scheduling shoots a few times a week would help balance out the equation?  While I might still grab shots when I notice a sunset, at least I wouldn’t always be shooting from the same place.

Is it too late to change my New Year’s resolutions?

Ghosts Among Us and Family Fun

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Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, a few creatures were stirring, using a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, stuffed to the brim ‘cuz Mom and Dad were already there.

The children were texting all over the house, while clicking on iPhones in browsers with a mouse.

And I with my camera, perched on a tripod, stealing photos, but leaving the iPods.

When off of the couch my nephew did rise, creating a blur right before my eyes,

I sprang from my seat to see what was the matter, adjusting the camera before my nephews could dash, I opened the shutter and turned off the flash.

The movement of people and an open shutter created enough ghosts to make me shudder.

When what to my jaded self did appear, but silliness, laughter, and even a happy tear.

While photography is a solitary past time for most photography addicts, there are certain effects that are just good family fun.  This Christmas, I set up my camera on my tripod (since I finally bought a good one, I thought I should get some use out of it) and used my remote to occasionally snap photos.  However, because I wanted to be stealthy about my shooting, I didn’t use the flash.  As a result, I had to use a slow shutter speed in the low light around the tree.  While I’m not sure my family has enough photo-tolerance to hold still for pictures anyway, the fact that they often didn’t know when the camera was shooting prevented them from trying.

As a result, I got a bunch of blurred shots that lead us to downright silliness in trying to create ghost images in the shots.

This turned into a game of trying to create the best ghost effect in the shot, at least for everyone except my oldest nephew, who was too busy texting to be silly.  The two photos included here were the best of the lot.  Both pictures have 7 people in them.  I like the first one because the “ghost” images on the left look like they’re dancing (or perhaps trying to dance but not exactly succeeding).  I like the second one because my youngest nephew successfully created a ghost boy looking over the shoulder of my older nephew.

Who knew photography could replace charades for family games?