Some New Lenses
I was fortunate enough to be able to purchase a few new lenses for my camera bag this week. One of the new lenses is a Sigma 150-500mm telephoto zoom lens. I decided to take it to the park for a while late this afternoon and give it a try. I was quite impressed with the results. This lens is rather large and heavy, so I mounted it on my monopod and took a walk around the park...
There are always a lot of ducks and geese at the park, and today was no exception. I shot quite a few photos while testing out the new big lens. This lens has the OS function (optical stabilization) which helps out a lot with camera shake at slower shutter speeds. I had good sunlight today, so I didn't really get a great opportunity to try out the lens hand-held in low light, but I will do that soon...
Georgia Aquarium with the SX20IS
My short trip to Atlanta was a blast. We had a good time and visited some interesting places. We went to the Federal Reserve Bank, CNN, Chick-Fil-A Headquarters, World of Coke, and the Georgia Aquarium. One of my personal experiments on this trip was to give a workout to my new small camera, the Canon SX20 IS. I wanted to put it through its paces as a point and shoot camera, so that's exactly what I did. I put the camera in fully automatic mode and left it there all weekend. I didn't touch a single setting on the camera. As I was scrolling through my photos from the trip, I didn't find any that had any problems at all until I got to my images from the aquarium where it was pretty dark for everything I shot. Shooting in the dark with telephoto lenses usually creates a really tough situation with camera shake, but this camera performed as well as I could have asked for. The image stabilization worked beautifully and I came home with a ton of great images from the visit to the Georgia Aquarium. HERE are a few samples of those if you want to take a glance...
I'm really happy with this camera. I bought it because I wanted a small camera that had a good zoom, and at 20x, this one works well. I still have my Canon G9, but the SX20 IS is going to become my front-runner camera for non-sports photography now...
Tornados and Indians
ISO 1600 - 1/320" - f/2.2
Tonight was the first night of conference play in the Catawba Valley Athletic Conference for the 2008-09 basketball season. I went out to cover the Hickory High School Red Tornados hosting the St. Stephens Indians...
ISO 1600 - 1/320" - f/2.2
Interestingly enough, I ended up with two photos from two separate games that look almost identical. I guess that is because I park my butt on the baseline and shoot most of the game from that vantage point. I need to change up a little bit this season. I'm also going to have to quit using my 50mm lens for basketball. The 50mm f/1.4 lens has definite advantages with its performance in low light, but it's definitely not designed for sports applications. I like to use the AI servo focus mode for most sports, and the auto focus on the 50mm lens is not quite fast enough to keep up with the action. I'm going to have to shoot with one of the f/2.8L lenses and try to get more consistent focus accuracy. The light in the high school gyms where I have to shoot is consistently poor as detailed by the exposure information posted with these photographs. With my 30D, I can't shoot at ISO 3200 and get printable quality photographs, so I'm going to be underexposing significantly if I stop down any more. I haven't been using the flash with the 50mm lens, but I'll have to get it back out of the bag if I change lenses. Some of the gyms I shoot in are a good bit darker than this one. One of these days I'll be able to afford the Canon 1D series camera and shoot at ISO 3200 and 6400 and get usable images. That will be a big relief for me in the dark netherworlds of high school sporting arenas :)
Grypton
I have been eyeballing this little tripod for a while since I purchased the Canon PowerShot G9. It's a perfect companion for this camera. This model is the Targus Grypton XL and I purchased it at Wal-Mart for $17.97. It's rated at up to 3.3lbs capacity, so it will hold my video camera also. It's not quite enough to hold the SLR with a lens, but I can't really imagine wanting to use it for that purpose. The flexibility of this tripod will allow me to set it up on just about any surface. The tripod also has a quick-release plate that mounts to the bottom of the camera for a rather secure camera connection. The name-brand equivalent of this tripod sells for $40 and it's not rated for quite the weight this one is. This should be fun to play with :)
Toning Curves
Over the last few years, I have come up with a set of curves for use in Adobe Photoshop that mimic some of the darkroom print toning techniques. The above image is a simple photo that was converted to standard black and white in Photoshop using the channel mixer at 100% on the red channel.
This is the same photo with my Silver Gelatin curve applied on a curves adjustment layer. The curves adjustment layer can have an opacity modification to adjust the intensity of the color toning after the curve has been applied.
This is the same photo with my Silver curve applied...
This is the same photo with my Sepia curve applied...
This is the same photo with my Selenium curve applied...
This is the same photo with my Platinum curve applied...
And finally, the same photo wtih my Palladium curve applied...
If you want to try out these curves, CLICK HERE to download the ZIP file that contains the .acv files that you can use in Adobe Photoshop...
Time Lapse Car Wash
I decided to play around with the time lapse photography function of the Canon PowerShot G9 camera this afternoon. I needed to wash my car, so I figured that would be an interesting test of the capabilities of the system. I set the camera on my tripod and configured the time lapse system to make a photo once per second. The camera performs this task and builds an AVI video file that plays back at 15 frames per second. This video clip of less than 90 seconds shows about 18.5 minutes of activity. The G9's time lapse system can also be configured to shoot an image once every two seconds as well. When the G9 records time lapse video, it does not record sound. After I created this clip with the camera, I produced it with Cyberlink's PowerDirector v7 to add the title frames and the music soundtrack. I think this feature is quite entertaining and I'll probably look for some additional subject material that would make for interesting time lapse studies...
ScribeFire
I just wanted to take a moment to pass along this information to any of you who have your own blogs. If you are using the FireFox web browser, you might want to take a look at ScribeFire as a tool for your blogging. I have been using it here on this blog consistently for several months now and I'm quite happy with its capabilities. The blogging utility runs completely inside of FireFox, and it makes it very easy to create your entries. The software is being updated quite often and new features are being added. ScribeFire works with multiple blogging platforms, but my personal experience has been with WordPress.
Infrared Photography
My Hoya R72 infrared filter finally arrived yesterday. I used to have one of these filters when I owned the Sony CyberShot DSC-707 camera, but I got rid of it when I moved to the digital SLR camera. Infrared photography didn't work as well with the SLR and I had no use for the filter after I got rid of the Sony camera. With the purchase of the new Canon PowerShot G9, I decided to give it a try again. None of the US-based camera retailers had this filter in stock, so I went to Ebay and found a good deal on one from a vendor in Hong Kong. Luckily, the filter arrived here in 11 days, which was better than I expected on a slow mail trip of that distance.
This photograph was made at ISO 80, f/2.8, and 8 seconds in manual exposure mode on the G9. I don't have much sunlight to work with today. The skies are partly cloudy, but the effect of the infrared filter is still definitely visible. The first issue I encountered during this test was that the Canon G9 seems to max out at a 1" shutter speed in the aperture priority mode. I had to switch to manual mode to get a long enough exposure with the infrared filter in place. By nature, this infrared filter blocks all visible light below 720 nanometers, which equates to nearly 12 stops of light in most cases. Longer exposures are normal for this type of photography with digital cameras.
This particular photo has no real intrigue on its own, but it's just a test. Now that I know I can get the results I want with this camera and filter, I'll shoot some more interesting photos with it in the near future...
American Legion Baseball
It's that time of year again... All of the local high school baseball players who want to play this summer have been divided up into their local American Legion regions and play has started. My coverage of these games usually falls with three teams... the Hickory, Lake Norman, and Caldwell teams. As far as sports is concerned, it's pretty much baseball for me from now until late August when football starts back up.
My first set of minor league baseball cards for the Hickory Crawdads this season is finished and I got a couple sets of them last weekend. They look great. This first set was sponsored by the Disabled American Veterans. I provided the photos for this set, and their graphic designers cut the players out of those photos and put them on a graphic background along with the player name, position, and team logo. This is always a fun project, because these cards are very often the first baseball cards some of these players have ever had. HERE is a link to the photos I provided for that card set.
Back to the new Canon G9...
My infrared filter that I ordered on Ebay from Hong Kong actually arrived in the mail today... 11 days after I ordered it. I hope to try that out this weekend. I bought a Hoya R72 58mm filter. I had already purchased the lens adapter for the G9, so it's all ready to try out :)
Slim Line Battery Caddy
Occasionally I stumble across something cool for my camera bag, and it happened again this week, so I just thought I woudl share my experiences with the Slim Line Battery Caddy. I purchased several of these from Tools Aviation recently and I'm very happy with them. I carry AA rechargeable batteries in my camera bag to power my external flash units, and during fall and winter sports seasons, I fire a lot of flashes, so having power on hand is critical. These battery holders are quite efficient and don't require opening and closing like some of the traditional cases I have used in the past. I don't find myself fumbling around with a battery case and spilling batteries out all over the place when I have my hands full. One of the other nice things about this type of case is that it's easy to keep groups of 4 batteries together. The batteries will go in the holder in either direction, so you can put charged batteries in one direction and depleted batteries in the other to keep track of which need charging when you get home. At $4.95 each, they are as cheap or cheaper than most other decent battery cases. I think they are definitely worthwhile if you carry batteries...
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