Photography

Today is the 3rd Worldwide Photowalk, hosted in cities everywhere. I participated in the downtown Durham, NC one.

I chose to travel light and I took only one lens on my T1i and carried it on my R-strap. That was a good choice as it was hot as hell and I was happy not to be lugging a lot of gear around. I did miss my macro lens a few times but I’ll go back to get some of those shot another day. The other gear I brought that I would highly recommend for anyone doing this in the heat were a wide brim hat and a camel back for water – those made all the difference in making it a great walk and not a hellish one.

The whole walk was great and we had a pretty nice crowd. I’ve shared my favorite shots from today on Flickr.

Well, I’m past the half way point for my Project 365! Even to my own surprise, I haven’t missed a single day yet.

It’s been a great way to force me to explore new techniques and subjects. One of the coolest aspects is that I can remember something about every single day this year by looking at the photos. It also reminds me that time moves far too fast!

The other aspect that I haven’t done enough of is the great community participation. Other people doing these projects contribute to flickr pools and we comment on each other’s work. That’s been helpful motivation to keep going and also provided some inspiration to try new shots. For the second half of the year I’m going to try and browse and comment on more of other people’s work.

Practice makes perfect, right? I’m embarking on a year long “project 365” to take a photo every day. I’ll be posting them on Flickr.

Shooting macro photography without a tripod is hard. You need a lot of light and you’re trying to balance the depth of field with a fast enough shutter speed to get a sharp picture. Bump your ISO up too high and you loose detail and get noise.

So here’s a little trick I picked up. Set your exposure compensation down a stop or two. You’ll under-expose the shot but the detail will be there. Back home you can push the exposure back up in post processing the RAW file.

I got this little guy hand held at ISO: 400, Exposure: 1/45 sec, Aperture: 8.0 with -1 stop set. It works!

I plan on posting more on some of the features that those of you with digital SLRs should learn how to use and get off of that blasted full auto mode… however, let’s start with a basic thing: RAW.

If you’re not shooting RAW, that’s an easy one to turn on. If you’re nervous about it, most cameras will let you set RAW + JPEG and you can at least have the option of the power of RAW files. Granted, it will take more storage on your card but it’s worth it. Trust me… here’s a good article on RAW vs. JPG.

I’ve been showing a few of my HDR photos to some friends and one of them suggested I post an example of what the images would look like without the HDR process involved.

So, here’s an example of a sunset at the beach while we were on vacation with an average exposure:

We can go two stops over or under exposed but as you see we have to give up something to do that… either the details in the sky get lost or the details in the sand get lost:

After combining all three images into an HDR photo, you can see that all the detail is there in the sky and in the sand. Here’s that final image:

HDR for the win!