Sunday, July 19, 2009

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Found in LACMA, these shots just hurt.

Stare at them for about thirty seconds and tell me if you don't agree:

and

While this one just hurts my social conscience:

It's cool to see just how far art has come from this:

and, even further back, this:

All photos courtesy of the Dp2. Check out the rest here.



Where the Dp2 just absolutely falls down

On the last night that my brother Paul and his wife Valerie were in town, they sold a copy of their print, America the Beautiful, to my boss/advisor/mentor, Daniel V. Daniel wanted a picture taken with them, and so I tried with the Dp2. This was the result:



Focus was off, and the thing just couldn't figure it out. I can only ask people to sit still for so long, and the back LCD was just painfully useless for focus finding in the relatively low light of my living room.

This was the result using the Nikon d300, 17-55 f/2.8 lens, and sb900 flash:


So, when compared to ~$3k of photography gear that I use to shoot weddings, the Dp2 is just not quite there yet. It's also one quarter the price.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Spp 3.5.2 is much better

My first few posts, I bitched about the quality of the SPP program. No more! SPP 3.5.2 has addressed all of my concerns except cropping. Sure, it slows down when I'm running massive matlab processing routines in the background, but if it didn't, then it would be violating the laws of computer science.

It's also easier to go from what I had to this:



from the first time I posted the shot, in this post here, where Thomas had Alien Eyes and the photo itself was very, very dark.

The more I look at these, the more I realize I really need to calibrate my monitor sometime soon.

Fireworks and the Dp2

Fireworks shots can be tricky. It requires timing and technique in order to get it right.

First, you'll probably want to stop down to f/8 or something like that. Fireworks are bright, and they will easily blow past your sensor's dynamic range if you leave the aperture at 2.8 and expose for a while.

Expose for more than a second. At one second, unless your timing is really, really good, you'll only get about half of any given burst. 2.5 or even 5 seconds is the right amount.

Because you'll be exposing for a long time, make sure to use a tripod. If you don't use a tripod, you still have to stabilize your camera; no stabilization makes for wonky trails effects.

If you can, try to frame the firework with something else. The shots I took yesterday didn't have anything to really frame with, except in one shot, by a lucky accident.

With that having been said, enjoy!







I like this shot, although you can see the need for a tripod here. Problem is, a lot of these shots were fairly well stabilized (even though a stroller hardly qualifies as particularly stable), so I can't really be sure if the jitters in this image are from wind or from the camera moving. Usually, when all the trails of the fireworks move together, it's from camera movement, but I don't think that's what happened here. I may be just fooling myself because I like the shot.



This last shot showed some very interesting postprocessing recovery. I don't know if the thumbnail production on the Dp2 is just really bad compared to the raw output, but the following image was just a mass of white where the large burst is. But, because I shot in raw, that white was easily recovered into some very cool trails:



And finally, the serendipetous shot of someone else in the crowd chimping. I would say something snarky like "Firewroks Watching: Yer doin' it wrong!", but I was guilty myself of chimping a fair share throughout the show.

Simpler Times

Ah, simpler times.
When a man could go to a beach and fly a kite.







When people would take black and white photos.

(gotta love that extreme detail...)

When a bunch of friends could gather on a beach...


... and drink a frosty beverage.


This July 3rd semi-nostalgia has been brought to you by the Dp2.