17 Nov
Posted by Stephen as Distorted Images, Photography
I had planned to post some night time photography shots I took earlier today but they turned out terrible (It was my first shot at shooting in the dark), so instead I’m posting an image of an everyday object, with a difference. By fiddling with the manual settings on my camera (exposure compensation, ISO sensitivity etc) you can create some very vivid imagery. During postprocessing in Photoshop I underexposed it by 4EV and it turned out as you see below. I think it looks pretty awesome. Can you guess what it is?
Click for larger resolution image.
14 Nov
Posted by Stephen as Photography, Site Updates
Firstly, apologies for not posting any super duper photos of late - college has been hectic, the days are getting shorter and colder; I’ve just not been able to squeeze and photography time into by crazy schedule! I vow to get back to posting on Monday.
But I digress, I want to talk about Entrecard - I’ve given up on it. It’s a futile endeavour really. Visiting websites, 99% of the time to simply drop your Entrecard and then leave without even seeing what the site is about?! And of course the exact same is happening to my site also - that’s not what I want! I want people to visit my site because it offers something of value (check out a wonderful shipwreck, a tree battered by nature, or my very first nikon D300 image!), not to drop a stupid Entrecard!
So, I’ve got 6300 Entrecard points to give away to one person. The question is: Do you want them?
Leave your answer as a comment below and I’ll pick a winner in the next few days.
Even though my VR 18-200mm Nikkor lens’ aperture only goes to F5.6 and so doesn’t focus over very long distances, I like the contrast between the sharp blades of grass and fuzzy treeline background.
Click for larger resolution image.
While over on InisOirr for the Halloween weekend I travelled around the island until I came to the Plassey Shipwreck that features at the beginning of Father Ted (irish TV show). The ship has been sitting in its place since the 1960s and I suppose it’ll be there for some time more. I only wish I had had my D300 ith me when I was there - I think some great HDR shots would have come from it.
Click for larger resolution image.
I spent Halloween weekend over in Galway (West Ireland) and also on Inis Oirr (stupidly small island, population around 300, three pubs.) and I was idiotic enough not to take my D300 with me! The scenery was amazing and I’m still really annoyed with myself. However I did bring my Olympus 850 SW along for the ride so got some holiday shots. Here’s an attempt at a macro image.
Click for larger resolution image.
02 Nov
Posted by Stephen as All, Photography
All that you see here has been deemed junk. I don’t know exactly how old those computers or monitors are but surely they would find use somewhere? Actually I might just run back and grab a couple now - ciao!
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
01 Nov
Posted by Stephen as All, High Dynamic Range, Nature, Photography, Photomatix
Now this is the natural stance of this tree; there was no wind blowing when I took this shot. It’s a paradox in my opinion - on one hand the trunk is leaning to the right, indicating that the wind blows from the left, but looking at the leaves and branches the situation is reversed! In any case I love the overall shape the tree has - beat that anyone!
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
31 Oct
Posted by Stephen as All, High Dynamic Range, Photography, Photomatix
I always seem to take wide angle shots of landscapes or general openness / so today I decided for something different. Ivy grows in abundance around my campus but if you don’t look down once in a while you wold never see it. I’m terrible for overlooking the macro shots in nature - here’s some of my few attempts. Not close enough?
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
This is me again trying to be creative in how I capture a scene. In every picture there are lines but I never really noticed until recently. Here I’ve lined up the horizon diagonal with the picture frame and the pathway bo be aligned vertically with the frame.
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
I remember taking a shot of this scene once before but was never happy with it (check it out here). So I took another stab at it with my Nikon this time, hoping for something a bit different. I threw in the angle because I was a little bored just shooting straight ahead as per usual. You have to experiment if you’re going to grow as a person. So what do you think? An improvement over the last? Or do you prefer the ultra high temperatures of the original?
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
For the past few days I’ve walked pasted this row of bikes covered in leaves, and everyday I’ve said to myself; “I have to get a shot of this scene before the leaves are blown away”. Eventually my luck would have run out though and I’d find my procrastination would cost me so I finally got around to it today. I set my equipment on autofocus since I was using a Gorillapod and couldn’t look through the viewfinder as the camera was almost on the ground, but I’m happy enough how it turned out.
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
Technorati Tags: Gorillapod
The sky was looking particularly cloudy today so I grabbed my D300 and snapped this shot. It turned out rather darker than I expected when I opened it in Photoshop (I’m still experimenting with the camera), so I decided the best thing to do wold be to do away with most of the colour and leave it as a B&W shot. I added the blue swirls in the sky by saturating some highlights because I think they look great. Disagree?
Click for larger resolution image.My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
I’m home for the bank holiday weekend (in Ireland the last Monday of October is a bank holiday, giving everyone a long weekend, WOOHOO!) and I don’t have my S9600 or D300 with me so instead I’ve spent some time changing the site format to make it a little more user friendly.
Is this a big improvement or was everything OK before? Do full / summary feeds decide whether you would subscribe in general?
I’ll write a little about this photo in a few hours - right now I’m in the middle of making Guinness Stew… well that was nice, now on with the show. There’s one rather unique spot on my campus near its library where lights have been installed along rows of plants and on overhead balcony connecting the library to another building. I had to try out my D300 here so I brought it over alog with my gorrilla pod and took a metered shot along with two under- and two overexposed shots (±2EV). Like my first post on using the D300, I did nothing to optimise the settings (excepts setting aperture priority). I’m slowly reading through the D300 manual so over time I should become more familiar with all it’s wonderful abilities but for the immediate future I will continue taking shots in its default settings (or near enough to default) and post them here daily.
Click for larger resolution image.Yesterday I bought a Nikon D300 with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens for a rather hefty €2000. Being a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of settings available on it I decided the best thing to do was head out and take some shots with the camera in its default settings. This was just to see how it shoots. I wanted to create some High Dynamic Range pictures so I looked a little into the D300’s auto-bracketing features. Equipped with my new knowledge I headed out this morning at 7am (It was freezing and still pitch dark) to wander around my campus grounds. Below is the one shot I took - five exposures using the D300’s interval timer functions. For this shot I left absolutely everything the way it way when I took it out of the box - I didn’t set any aperture, shutter speed, manual focus, white balance, I didn’t check any histogram, I just wanted to see what the camera would do on the fly. I also left the lens to swirl about and choose its own focal length. I’m currently at a loss as to how the lens aperture is set; the body aperture setting ranges from F3.5 to F22 but the lens is only for F3.5 - F5.6 so I’m not sure what’s going on there yet. Maybe setting the aperture on the body will set the lens aperture also?
Click on image for 1200×797 pixel resolution
I’m pretty happy the way this photo came out - it was very dark when I took these exposures yet the tone mapping is applied quite evenly. I had set the camera to take 14bit uncompressed NEF files, I’ll be experimenting with 12bit uncompressed and 12bit lossless compressed etc to see what difference each one gives. If you want to buy a camera I suggest right now that the D300 should be top of your list!
