Well this morning, my car reeked of fish!!! Yuk!! The first thing we did was to take the car to the car wash again and spray under it and in the fender wells. We aren't sure if we got it all. By tomorrow we'll know. If it still stinks, I'll be taking it to a full service car wash place to have it detailed.
After the car wash ordeal we went to our favorite place, "The Market Basket". We go there about once a week for coffee and a scone. We sit outside in the sun and people watch while we enjoy one of the best scones around. After a relaxed morning, we headed back to camp to do our "work".
Right after finishing work, I get a text message from one of my best friends, Heather. The message, "Free 5-day cruise leaves Sat for Bahamas. My roommate has to bail. Will you come with me?" Being the friend that I am, I couldn't possibly let her go on the cruise without a roommate. Now could I? I was thrilled, to say the least. I booked my flight and will be flying out Friday to Jacksonville. The cruise departs on Saturday. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it! I've never been to the Bahamas.
Back to the activities of today. We drove to Deer Isle. An island about 1 1/2 hours away. The "town" of Deer Isle consisted of one street with 3 galleries, a diner, a book store, the post office, the library and an inn. I wondered through the galleries while T & Molly sat on a bench. We then drove around the island, took a few pictures and headed home.
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| View of Deer Isle |
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| View from Deer Isle |
On the way home we stopped at a place called, Tashafer's Take Out. I took a picture, so we could remember where NOT to go the next time we are in the area. The fries were over cooked and the BBQ chicken sandwich T had was nothing more than a piece of chicken dipped in BBQ sauce. It wasn't even cooked in the sauce. Another dining disappointment.
After fitting the misquotes for six weeks, we finally said, "Enough is enough!" We bought a screen room. It's wonderful!!!! We can sit outside and enjoy the evening without the suckers buzzing around our ears and bitting the hell out of us. Why didn't we do this earlier? Who knows, but now we'll enjoy the rest of the summer.
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| A place NOT to eat at again. |
Nice shots, again, you balance and frame things very well.
ReplyDeleteOne tip on the landscape and horizon shots: balance your light among the different areas in the picture to bring out shadows and colors in the forest, trees, clouds and rocks by dampening down bright light. You can do this simply by limiting the amount of bright area in your frame, or by using your fstop to control the aperture opening in your camera. With lots of sky, texture, or anything bright, I err on the side of "stopping it down" a bit (closing the aperture by choosing a higher fstop number).
Think... make it harder for light to get in the picture and blow out white everywhere. If you go to a f20 instead of f4, you will begin to notice more shape and shading added to your clouds. This can also be useful if you are shooting when the sun is very high in the sky during the middle of the day. For context of application of when to stop down, thinking of endless sky deserts of the Southwest, this is also a good way to get the nice pinks and blues that sometimes hang on a late afternoon horizon, especially if the clouds are good or there's a dark storm in the distance with the flat dark bottom raining down and the tops of the clouds white like cotton balls with so much shape and texture. Stopping down here would add texture, because if you let the camera choose for you it will only try to select for bright white and make it too dark and you’ll never be able to see the lower half of the frame, or select for the dark storm and end up blowing out whites, washing colors out, and losing all the nice texture in the cotton candy clouds.
Anything really bright will be toned down by closing your aperture, and will actually bring out a lot of shading and make dark colors darker. Ocean waves or ripples in the distance may add subtle texture, which can be a good thing to play with in a picture. Therein, it becomes a game of what shot gives you the best for each different layer of light in the picture.
Let's use your "View from Deer Isle" picture as an example, with land in the front, then ocean in the middle-ish, and sky on top. All three of these layers (moving up) get much brighter, so how much sky you include or cut out of the frame may often depend on how much you are willing to sacrifice in shading of the foreground. I am just guessing, but I bet your fstop was low, below 5, maybe even f3.4 or f3.6, and your shutter speed was very fast, above 1/3000th of a second, maybe even 1/5000th depending on the lens and your ISO. I am just guessing and may be totally wrong, but with an ISO of 200-400 using an 18-55mm lens, this would be a common setting, especially if using autofocus and light metering on the rock in the foreground to get the focus nice on the textured rock and moss. If you went for f8 or f14 then you may notice more texture and shadow.
If this doesn't make sense now, I think it will the next time you shoot a big landscape.
Now, shutter speed is important in this change of F-stop... so in the landscape panorama shots, if you were shooting in the neighborhood of very fast, like 1/2400th or 1/3200th of a second and up, by going with a very small aperture opening, say an f24, you now may be shooting with a shutter speed much slower, around a 1/300th or 1/400th of a second. With an f4, your aperture is wide open, so you have to snap the shutter closed real fast to not blow out the clouds with and bright areas with white, and now, by closing down the aperture to f24, the natural balance with your shutter speed is to go slower to let enough light in so you don't turn the darker foreground of land into a black blob of darkness. It's all in the balance. You want a slow enough shutter speed to let the right amount of light in, but fast enough to get it crisp, so no hand shakes or windy days will alter the focus on you, because in shooting on the low end of shutter speed, you run the risk of fuzzy, or soft focus, in your pictures.
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This could also apply to other subjects you are shooting, like to bring out texture in the flying buttresses of a building, but that is a case by case scenario. Anytime you are shooting outside with a horizon line, though, or shots with lots of bright areas and texture, think about stopping it down.
ReplyDeleteSo that's what to do for experimenting next time, as for the pictures you have already taken, there is a way you can play with some of the settings to reduce brights and enhance shadows, depending on what software you are using. Essentially, if it is white or black in the picture, it will probably be forever white or black, but all the other colors you captured are yours to play with and the light you are allowed to adjust afterwards is dependent upon software. iPhoto, Picasa, Photoshop, all good, but vastly degrees of manipulation are available within each. Look for Contrast, Light Attenuation, etc, usually there are sliders you can pull back and forth to change a preview of how it will look.
I hope all of that helps and isn't just a repeat of the class you were taking.
looking great! keep on shootin'!