Fall Colors

Last weekend when my dad and I were out photographing fall colors I came across this little brook running threw a grove of the aspen trees, at least I think they are aspen trees as I honestly don't know the difference between aspens and alders. I thought that it might make for some nice photographs, all I needed to do was find an angle that did not have to much of the bright light coming straight into the scene as most the area was in this nice diffused light as it was filtered threw the leaves of the trees. These are 2 of the photographs I took in that location. I really like how the green moss on the rocks looks. I will post a couple other fall color pictures later on.

The Stump

I was out taking pictures of the fall colors and came across this stump. I thought the lines and tonalities in the wood would work well for a black and white photo, therefore, in the post processing for this image I did a simple black and white conversion and this is the result.

Galena Creek Park

Went up to Galena Creek park last week to try and photograph some fall colors. Several trees in that area already had the leaves gone however there was still some stuff to work with. These are a few of the photos I took that day.

Old School Light Meter

I have a small collection consisting of a few old cameras as well as a couple old light meters. This one, a Weston Master light meter, is probably the older of the 2 as from what I can tell this model was produced from around 1939-1945. I also have an old Sekonic L-86 "Auto-Lumi" that I believe was produced around 1963 - 1978. I was looking at them the other day and was curious about how to use these correctly and though for the most part they are not to difficult to figure out there were a couple things about them I was wondering about. After searching the internet I was able to find a site that had PDF copies of the original manuals so I could look over the original instructions and after that I gave them a try. From what I can tell they seem to still work pretty good but may be off a stop or so but I need to try them out some more in different conditions like out side in better light. Not that I would ever use them and when I do need a light meter I use a more modern Sekonic L-308B that I bought new several years ago but it is interesting checking them out and knowing how to use them. The other interesting thing I found was the Weston Light meters were one of the brands Ansel Adams used especially before spot meters came about.

Apple Me

2 blog posts in one day! You may have seen this on my facebook page as well but I figured I should post it here also since I did some setup for this photo. This was something my kids decided to make me to show their appreciation of their teach, who is me as I home school them. So Beth helped them make this wonderful likeness of me, well maybe a little to much hair on the head! For this photo the apple was sitting on a piece of white foam core and another piece standing up behind for the background. The flash was pointed straight up with a diffuser dome on it, so you get some light from the side, and their was a reflector above it and the apple to bounce light back down from above.

Mushrooms on a Tree

Well we don't seem to have to much for fall colors around here yet but I did go ahead and drive up to Galena Park to see if any of the trees were at least starting to change colors and so far they are still pretty green. I am thinking in the next couple weeks they will be showing some nice yellows so hopefully I will get some photos then. If it works out I may go down to Bridgeport Sunday afternoon and stay the night and try to get some photographs of fall colors down there.
That would bring us to these two images. While I was up in Galena walking around I was looking for some other photo opportunities and one of the things I came across was these mushrooms growing in a couple trees. Not sure that I have seen this too much but I thought they might make some nice subject matter. As the sun was still pretty high in the sky I filtered the hard sunlight with a Photoflex 12" translucent LiteDisc to get a much softer light. I had to handhold the camera as I had left the tripod at home thinking I would not need it and this was one outing where it would have been nice to have it......oh well lesson learned.

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.