Practicing Photography

I have been an amateur photographer with various levels of enthusiasm for some decades. This blog consists of selected photos that I hope I can learn from as well as photos that I particularly like. I invite constructive comments on the posts which will help me improve my photos. If you want to drink from the firehose, you are welcome to visit my Flickr photostream and comment on those photos. Unlike this blog, that stream is somewhat unfiltered.

[snarlingpuma]

Halema'uma'u Caldera at Night by Gavin Kingsley

The steam and low clouds are lit by the lava within the crater. The foreground leaves are lit by my headlamp that I accidentally left of for this exposure. Light drizzle and crowds of people (but actually, not from this vantage point which is a little further away than the museum and observatory) but still wonderful, alien and just a little scary.

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Vanishing Point by Gavin Kingsley Via Flickr: The shadow of Mauna Kea at sunset. You have to be somewhere pretty special to get a view like this.

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Mauna Kea Observatories by Gavin Kingsley Via Flickr: Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope 3.58 m telescope and the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope 8.19 m telescope. Visiting the top of Mauna Kea was a definite highlight for me of out holiday. Freezing cold but insanely beautiful.

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Flying Hawaiian Garden Spider by Gavin Kingsley

The light striking this spider gives her a fantastic bejewelled appearance. She has built her web between bushes in a garden maze and she seemed to leap out at us as we navigated our way around. To both the naked eye and the camera she appears to hover suspended in the air.

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Christchurch International Airport by Gavin Kingsley

This photo may not be the best photo I have ever taken technically but to me it captures really well the beauty of the dawn at Christchurch Airport as I did a morning bicycle ride. The image is noisy from the iPhone 4 struggling with the lighting conditions but the fact that the image could be captured at all is thanks entirely to that device which has revolutionised modern photography.

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Kaikoura by Gavin Kingsley

While sorting through some older images, I found this one taken while walking on the Kaikoura peninsular. I love the colours and composition of this relatively uncluttered image.

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Christchurch before the rain

This photo was taken from the lookout overlooking Christchurch, New Zealand, near the Sign of the Takahe. It is several shots taken at 17 mm (non-full sized sensor) and stitched together using Photoshop Elements.

I stopped the shutter down a little to f5.6 to minimise vignetting and lens defects and used an 8 second exposure. This has given an effect that appears quite natural. Later in the same session I took an image on a different lens that was stopped down to f16 at 30 s which gave a star effect on the lights which looked good (even if less naturalistic). So I wonder what this photo could have been if it was stopped down more.

To take this series I also turned off automatic focus and the vibration control (as the camera was tripod mounted with a remote shutter release). This proved to be my downfall when I zoomed in to 50 mm to take some images of the central city. I forgot that zooming changes the focus, resulting in a useless series of photographs.

Just to observe that Christchurch is still being rebuild following a devastating series of earthquakes that started in September 2010 and unfortunately climaxed with a deadly earthquake in February 2011 that severely damaged the central city. So you don’t see too many tall buildings in this photo but if you look closely you can see a few cranes (I think you’d need the full sized image from Flickr to pull out this level of detail).

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Hamner Springs by Moonlight by Gavin Kingsley Via Flickr: Moonlit view of Hanmer Springs township viewed from the lookout of Conical Hill. This image is constructed by averaging three exposures to reduce noise. I’m pleased with the result and I wonder how it would compare to a longer exposure at a lower ISO rating.

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Whitetail on Flickr.

This photo is now being exhibited at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand as part of their DeCLASSIFIED! Nature’s secrets exposed exhibit. The photo is part of an observation at Nature Watch NZ that was included in the Spiders with Te Papa project. From there it was selected to be displayed for two weeks on a small screen.

This photo exceeds my "comfort" threshold when dealing with spiders, so this image was taken while the spider was captive under a drinking glass. I used bounce flash and my trusty 90 mm Tamron macro lens at f13.

[snarlingpuma]

Milky Mesopotamia

Looking south-east from Mesopotamia station, this composite image shows a stack of 5x 15 s exposures (total 75 s) revealing the Southern Cross, the Coal Sack Nebula and the Milky Way, while the foreground shows a single starlit exposure of 300 s.

I have long wanted to take a really good milky way astrophoto and I think this is a step along the way. A key ingredient here is Regim, free cross platform software which aligns successive frames of star photos so that the stars do not appear to move. It is similar to having a tracking mount for your camera, This is the tool used to stack the five individual exposures.

I have previous had some success with manually aligning the images which is difficult and I have never stacked more than three frames this way. The software most commonly talked about for aligning astrophotos is Deep Sky Stacker but that is Windows only. Regim seems an excellent substitute.

Getting the colour balance was difficult. I don't think I am there yet. The Milky Way should be a pale yellow colour.

I still have a way to go. I did not take dark frames nor calibration grey frames. I did not process RAW images but rather lossy jpegs. The existence of the longer exposure for the foreground component was not part of a master plan. I’d also like to try more shorter exposures to get less star movement. Still, I think this is an interesting step along the way.

[snarlingpuma]

Mesopotamia Nightfall

I created this video from still images I captured during a weekend stay at Mesopotamia Station, Canterbury, New Zealand. I set the camera to automatic exposures at -1.3 f-stops and used an external intervalometer to capture one exposure every thirty seconds. I used the exposure compensation because I did not want the night scenes overexposed. I'm not sure if that was necessary since I'd forgotten that my camera will not set the automatic exposure longer than 10 s, plenty short enough to ensure a black night sky.

Once back home I used Aperture to adjust the exposure of the RAW images back up so that the day-lit scenes looked natural. Once the sky was dark, I pumped the images up by +2. I then used Time Lapse Assembler to create a high definition time lapse video.

Once I had the video, I used iMovie to add titles and credits and a creative-commons soundtrack by Meletric from Soundcloud.

The exposure from the starting frame to the final frame varies by 19 f-stops, or by a factor of half a million. 

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Star Trails and Clouds on Flickr.

This is one of my (relatively) popular photos on Flickr. It was taken on a small compact camera mounted on a pocket sized tripod running the Cannon Hack Development Kit. This enabled me to set the focus to infinity, set a manual exposure and run a script to take photos at regular intervals (intervalometer).

One of the problems with the image is the purple haze which is a camera artifact captured in the top right. I was able to greatly reduce this by

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Daddy Longlegs with Egg Cocoon on Flickr.

This is a macro shot that all seemed to come together for me. I used flash to get some depth of field and the colour of the picnic table makes a great background. I am very pleased with this shot.

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Hurrying Ladybug on Flickr.

I took this shot in December 2010 when I was out in the garden playing with my macro lens. This ladybird was scurrying across the concrete driveway and I was very pleased with this panning shot as I followed the insect with my camera.

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Colours in the Sky on Flickr.

I was out for a walk when I saw some incredible colours in the dusk sky. However, these are not those colours (this is enhanced through Photoshop). So this image captures the feeling of the sight without being accurate as to the specifics. To my eye there were greens here, so may another attempt at the processing is in order.

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Cape Foulwind on Flickr. This the photo I used as an experiment following through a Photoshop tutorial on the web. Taking advantage of the original RAW file, the sky is underexposed compared to the foreground. Also, the entire photo has been run through a warm filter and then a second layer of strong warm filter has been added with the soft light option. This really makes the clouds pop. The resulting image is pushing the envelope in terms of how the photo looks versus how it appeared to the naked eye, but I like it. It transformed a rather average capture into something interesting.

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Lake Poaka Reflections on Flickr.

And here is the other photo I have chosen to decorate this blog. Lake Poaka (Lake Pig) is a small lake in the Mackenzie Basin in the South Island of New Zealand, a starkly beautiful part of the country. The lake is tree lined so I had to poke my camera through the foliage to take this shot. I'm really pleased with the outcome except that I should have cropped out the couple of sticks on the left. I guess my wife's scrapbooking skills have made me lazy. I have read some opinions on the internet about how true to life these sort of landscape photos should be. This is pretty much true but I have taken the saturation settings and nudged them up a notch or two. Nothing drastic, but I like the colours in the image and I want to emphasise them. I'd be interested if anyone else has any opinions on this.