Smoke Take 2

So this is the second time I have played around with doing smoke pictures. The photos from the first time I tried this were posted here and here . The method I used to take the pictures was approximately the same however this time I had a desk lamp to one side to light the smoke just so I could better focus on it, then the main lighting came from my flash set up to the opposite side. It does not show to much in this photograph but I need to get some black cloth for a background to absorbe the light that hits it better than the painted black paper I was using. Once I had some photos I uploaded and chose this one as it was the most interesting to me. Once uploaded I did a bit of post processing to it by adjusting brightness, contrast, colors to give it a cooler blue feel, sharpness, cropped and stamped out a few bits of smoke that I felt were too distracting. The result would be this image.

Glass

I have tried this type photo in the past but was not that impressed with the outcome of those shots. After reading on another site about doing these type of photographs I wanted to give it another try. The biggest thing I took from this other site was to light the background. According to this photographer by lighting the background you will not get all the ugly reflections that you get when you light glass from the front and the light bouncing off the background will light the glass. So for this photograph I had the glass sitting on some white Plexiglas, white foam core behind and I bounced the flash off the foam core. I like the look the light gives by passing threw the subject, especially the colored water. I think I still need to work on the setup to get it a little bit better, plus there are some other things that I would like to try like placing the glass on black Plexiglas.

More Blue Angels at The Reno Air Races

Here are a few more photos of the Blue Angels I have taken over the past few days at the Air Races. One of the days when Rachel saw the 4 jets flying in a real tight formation she said "daddy look they are all stuck together" HAHA.

Reno Air Races

Here are a few more photos I took while out at the Reno Air Races this week. The 2 prop driven planes were shot with a shutter speed of 1/200 sec. for the Breitling plane and 1/250 sec. for the Rare Bear plane so that I could get some blur on the prop. An even slower shutter speed would give a better blur on the prop however I would need a lot more practice to get some pictures that are not totally blurred. Rare Bear is one of the race planes and I believe it holds the course record for a prop driven plane at almost 500 mph.
The Air Force plane I believe is the C-17 Globemaster IIIs. They did a pretty impressive demo in that aircraft. Part of the demo was to show how fast it comes to a stop upon landing, very short distance for an aircraft of that size. I believe this was also the one that climes pretty fast at takeoff, mainly for when they are in battle zones this enables them to get out of range of enemy fire faster.

Blue Angels at the Reno Air Races

Today is the first day I went out to the Reno Air Races. The kids and I were only out there for a little bit however most the time we were the Blue Angels were flying around. I believe today was the first day they were flying at the races and from what I understand today is the day they mainly fly around spotting land marks to help them know where they want to be, line up, turn, etc. during their air show. Even though they do a lot more technical flying during their actual show they seem to be up in the air longer today as they get everything figured out. So these are a few photos I captured while they were up today.

Sunflower

As the sunflowers have progressed along I have taken a few more pictures of them at different stages. The bottom photo is one of the smaller flowers a couple days before it opened. The middle photo is the one that I had previously posted and now has all the pedals open. The top photo is the same flower a few days latter, you can see it's progression as the center increases in size. I have been thinking that I might put together the different photos at different stages together in a frame to hang as they should make a nice series of photos.

Sunflower

This is one of the sunflowers we have growing out back. It is the first one to start opening up. You can see not all the peddles have opened up yet. They make for some nice color in a photograph with the rich yellow of the flower, especially with the green of the other parts of the flower and the blue of the sky. I plan on taking some more photographs as it progresses along.