Self-portrait

Photo of the week #18: A self-portrait that I shot this week for a Camera35 competition. The photo was taken in our office using a white bed sheet draped over the window for a background. The shot was lit using one flash pointed at the background to turn it completely white and another flash pointed through a white shoot-through umbrella to light up my face:

This photo was a previous attempt at the shot, which got slightly sidetracked by Geoff being a sweetheart:

Geoff also had some great entries for the competition, which you can find on his blog!

Waterford River

A bonus post! Last Sunday, Geoff and I headed to the Waterford River waterfall to try out my new ND110 filter. An ND filter works like a dark pair of sunglasses in that it reduces the amount of light that passes though the camera's lens. In order to get enough light for a properly exposed photo, the shutter must be left open for a longer period of time than what would be necessary when no filter is being used. This means that any moving elements (in this case water) will become blurry, while the rest of the photo stays properly exposed.

Rose

Photo of the week #17: Macro of a late Valentine's Day gift from Geoff:

Not as sharp as it looks!

Photo of the week #16: A macro shot of the necklace that Geoff gave me for Valentine's Day. I took this shot using my 50 mm lens reverse mounted onto my 55-250 mm lens (at 250 mm). This technique is great in that it allows you to take photos at a very high magnification (5:1 in this case, which is much higher than the 1:1 magnification that I get using my macro lens). It is however very difficult to focus when using a reverse mounted lens since the depth of field is extremely shallow:

Flames

Photo of the week #15: A triptych of images that I shot while experimenting with our Lampe Berger. I had originally only intended to post the image on the right. But, I really liked the one on the left too, so I decided to post that one as well. The center image was added for balance.

Smoke Curl

Photo of the week #14: This shot of candle smoke from an extinguished tea light was taken using a snooted flash (not to be confused with a snooty flash!). Here, my snoot was just a sheet of black paper that was rolled up and taped onto my flash. The snoot causes the flash to give very directional lighting, which in turn helps the flash to be bright enough to illuminate the smoke without losing the details in the whites of the candle:

Also, for interest sake, here is the candle before Geoff blew it out:

When life gives you lemons...

... grab your macro lens! Photo of the week #13: A shot from the inside of this lemon:

Despite the fact that focusing on the bubbles was a bit time consuming, these shots were not particularly difficult to take. Post-processing on the other hand was a real test of my patience. I think the calibration may be off on my monitor again, which lead to crazy colors when the photos were viewed on another monitor. Eventually I just ended up processing the photos on Geoff's computer, but I'll definitely need to look into my monitor issue again as soon as possible. Here are a few extra shots that I liked: