Week 25 - Macro Photography

Spring is finally here (sort of) and I have more reasons to take my macro lens out of the bag!  Macro photography is such a great challenge because of the incredibly short depth of field (and the fact that almost everything I want to use the macro lens on is within 6 inches of the ground).  Hand-holding that camera is almost futile (but I do it all the time anyway) because either the camera or the subject can move enough to get out of focus in the time it takes to click the shutter.  Lighting on the other hand is usually quite easy since the crappy overcast days make for great even light for macro subjects.  All I can say is, it's great to start seeing bugs and flowers again!

The first picture is some little blue flower growing in the front yard, maybe 1cm across.  The second is a little yellow spider maybe 1/2cm long.  Who knew spiders had dimples on their backs?

Canon 20D, Sigma 150mm lens,
ISO 400, f/16, 1/40s

Canon 20D, Sigma 150mm lens,
ISO 400, f/11, 1/160s

Week 24 - Portrait Landscapes

I love the look of landscape pictures taken in portrait format.  They feel more like it felt being there.  Whether it's the sky dominating the picture or the foreground, formatting the picture this way tells the story I was trying to tell far better than I could have achieved taking these photographs in landscape format.  I love the irony of that.  I think if I were taking portraits I would have to take them in landscape format just for the symmetry.

Canon 20D, Canon 17-85mm lens,
ISO 400, f/16, blend of 3 exposures

Canon 20D, Canon 17-85mm lens,
ISO 400, f/16, 1/200s

Week 23 - Life Gets in the Way

Between my car dying and me getting a root canal (and the inevitable pain that follows) I haven't had much energy to put into photography this week.  I did manage to take pictures every day but that was about the most I can say for this week.

American Goldfinch
Canon 20D, Canon 100-400mm lens,
ISO 400, f/8, 1/320s

Week 22 - Fake Miniatures

This week I learned a technique for making a scene look like a miniature model.  The idea is to take a photograph with an extremely short depth of field that would normally be associated with a macro lens.  There are a couple of ways to accomplish this:  get a field or view camera or a tilt-shift lens and angle the film plane across your image so the plane of focus is on a very small portion of your photograph; or what I did... use Photoshop.  The Photoshop approach was by far the cheapest as a tilt-shift lens can run you $2500, and I already have Photoshop Elements.


Canon Rebel XTi,
ISO 400, f/8, 1/400s

Creating this effect in Photoshop is quite simple.  Copy the layer, apply a Gaussian Blur and a layer mask to the copied layer and selectively mask out the parts of the photo you want to remain clear.  The only trick I found to the whole process was that I needed to apply effect and then do something else for a little while before looking at the picture again in order to see the miniature I was trying to mimic and not just a blurry picture.



Canon 20D, Canon 17-85mm Lens,
ISO 400, f/16, 1/160s



Other advice I found when looking up this techniques was:  boost contrast and saturation, take a picture from above and scenes with cars or people in them work well.  I would add to that, take pictures of clean and un-worn scenes.  I think the cross-walk lines that have been worn out and the spring grit partially covering the centre line in the image above detract from the idea that this scene is a model.  After all, no one is going to make a model that looks a little old and tired.

Week 21 - Best of Project 365 - March

March was a tough month to pick a favourite from my Project 365.  Partly because the month ended on Thursday and I post on Saturday but also because I like so many pictures for so many different reasons:  The picture of the squirrel gives me hope that spring might actually be here for real; the picture of the fork reminds me that there can be great photography in the most mundane things; and the Trumpeter swans because I've never photographed them before and, man, are they big!  But in the end, here is my favourite.

Canon 20D, Canon 17-85 lens,
ISO 400, f/16, 1/40

Why is this my favourite?  Probably because it's my wife's favourite.