Photo tips Archives

January 12, 2013February 21, 2015

How to Shoot an Ice Storm

From the look of the Cape forecast, you might be able to use some of these hints this week. I never was all that great at shooting ice storms. First off, I was lucky enough not to encounter all that many of them. Secondly, what you see is not necessarily what you get. Your eye sees things your camera may not be able to record, particularly if you leave it set to automatic. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

RULE 1: Move in close

I used to tell reporters and amateurs that the easiest way to make better pictures is to compose the photo until you think it looks perfect, then take one GIANT step closer. (If you have short legs, make that TWO steps closer.)

There are two things that make ice photos interesting: the detail of the ice buildup on leaves and plants and / or the magic that happens when the sun hits the glaze. That leads us to…

RULE 2: Shoot into the sun

You probably have had drilled into you that you should always have the sun or other light source behind you. Well, that’s the SAFE thing to do, but it almost always makes for a dull photograph. That’s particularly true when you want your ice to sparkle.

This shot of our back yard is far from spectacular, but it gives you a clue of how the light coming from behind the trees causes the ice to light up. You can tell from the gray skies in most of the frames that I didn’t have much help from the sun. That’s another reason for shooting the closeups.

Remember RULE 1

This shot comes close to working, but it’s still pretty dull. Notice how I followed RULE 2: you can see the sun peeking out from behind the pole. I did that so the direct sunlight wouldn’t cause lens flare.

See, Closer IS better

This is the same ice-covered fence, but shot from closer. It’s still not a stunner, but it’s a better photo than the long shot. I like the way it looks like a honeycomb.

Sounds of an ice storm

I know that ice storms can cause a lot of damage to trees and power lines, but they are still an awesome event. There’s nothing like the sounds of the ice clinking together when the wind blows, punctuated by cracks that sound like a gun shot when a branch breaks. The negative sleeve was undated, but I’m guessing these were take somewhere around 1964 or 1965. One frame I didn’t bother to process had a mailbox that read L.D. Smith and the address 168.

2010 ice storm story

I ran some other ice photos about this time of year in 2010. If you compare them, I used some high-contract printing techniques to make them more interesting. That’s usually a good sign that the photo wasn’t all that good to begin with. Notice, though, that RULE 1 was definitely followed in the closeup photos of the ice hanging from the fences. Looks like that storm lasted a little longer than this one and it was a little bit windier. The icicles are longer and point away from the wind.

January 8, 2013

Photo Accidents Happen

Wife Lila took over what had been a gardening blog from Son Matt. She does a really good job with her Canon point-‘n’-shoot camera and her cellphone camera, but today she came in to say she couldn’t quite get the photo she wanted of some poinsettias growing in the corner of our yard.

I handed her my Nikon D3100 camera with a Hoya polarizing filter on it and explained how to rotate the filter to kill the reflections on the leaves to make the colors more vivid. I also showed her where to adjust the exposure, explaining that most of my photos are usually underexposed anywhere from 1/3 stop to as much as 3 or 4 f/stops from what the camera wants to set automatically.

She came back saying that the pictures still weren’t right.

I forgot to change the color balance

She was correct about that. I usually leave the white balance set on AUTO, but I had been shooting under tungsten light and had moved it. That gave the photo a blue cast in sunlight.

On second glance, though I LIKED this shot. I played a little with the levels and contrast to produce a photo that isn’t the literal representation she wanted, but is still striking. It really didn’t take much tweaking. That’s pretty much how it looked coming out of the camera. Click on it to make it larger.

You’ll have to wait until she gets around to writing about her poinsettias to see the real thing.

November 10, 2012

James McMurtry Concert

I like to listen to music while I’m working, and I like artists who use words well. When I saw that James McMurtry, son of Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry, was going to be in St. Louis, I polled Brother Mark and Friend Shari to see if they’d like to hear him. Mother said she was in until she found out that the show wasn’t going to start until 9 pm, so she bailed, leaving a ticket for Friend Shari’s BFF Linda. Mark invited Friend Robin.

I hadn’t planned to take any photos – I explained to Shari that I can either work or I can watch, and tonight I wanted to be a civilian and enjoy the show – but Robin said break-ins were common and I should take my camera with me.

The show was going to be in The Duck Room at Blueberry Hill. When I booked the tickets, it assigned us a Section, Row and Seat, but it also said Standing Room Only. Boy, was it EVER. (As always, you can click on the photos to make them larger.)

Where are the exits?

The first thing I do when I go into any room is to locate two exits. When we went down the narrow steps into The Duck Room, I couldn’t locate a second exit. Then, I looked up and saw the floor above us was wood, there was no sprinkler system and the audience was standing – not exaggerating – shoulder to shoulder. I elected to take a place where I could lean against the wall about 15 feet from the exit. That also kept me out of the traffic of people going back for drinks.

Unfortunately, the four guys who were standing next to me consumed four pitchers of beer after I started counting. They weren’t mean drunks, but they bobbed and weaved so it was almost impossible to keep anything close to a clear line of sight, and as the evening wore on, their loud talking and hooting drowned out the show.

How did I take the photo?

I mentioned that I like music with words. Unfortunately, the guy running the sound board thought louder was better. He cranked up the mike so loud that McMurty’s distorted lyrics sounded like Dylan gargling with a mouth full of marbles. I had a digital recorder in my pocket and it confirmed what my ears heard. McMurtry and his band play some mean guitar and drums – Choctaw Bingo had the crowd rocking – but you’d have been at a loss if you didn’t know the words.

I couldn’t resist banging off 36 frames during the show. I was pretty far back, and catching a view of McMurty between the bobbing drunks was like threading a needle with mittens on. Still, I like this shot of the performer framed between a shadow on the left and a ghostly face on the right..

From a technical standpoint, there was so much dark in the photo (this is a pretty tight crop) that the automatic meter wanted to open up the lens to let in more light. The part of the photo I was interested in, though, was McMurtry, who had a spot on him. I underexposed the shot about two stops or more from what the meter was calling for. That gave him the right exposure and caused everything else to go dark.

An interesting oops

I normally have my camera set to operate at 200 ISO, with the ability to go automatically to higher speeds when the exposure drops below 1/30 of a second. The other day, though, I wanted to shoot some interiors at the highest possible quality, so I locked the ISO at 200 and put the camera on a tripod. The shutter exposure was so long that I even used the self-timer set on 10 seconds. After I pushed the shutter release, the camera counted down 10 seconds before making the exposure. That allowed any motion from the button push to die down.

While our party was walking to dinner, I thought I’d try some street shots. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put the ISO back on “float” mode. I composed this shot, squeezed off what I thought was going to be about a 1/8 second exposure, then started to put the camera down. Because the film speed was so slow, the actual exposure was 4 seconds, creating these streaks of light. Except that my friends (and brother) were hungry and there was a cold wind blowing, I would have experimented more with this.

Bottom Line on The Duck Room

I’ll never go there again.

Putting a bunch of drunks in a dark room where I could spot only one exit is a good way to kill folks. I don’t intend to be one of them. I’m not going to say that there WAS only one exit, but I’m a guy who looks for them and I didn’t see more than one.
The sound was lousy.
Two-plus hours is too long for my old legs to stand. It’s a good thing Mother bailed.
For the price of the tickets for a bad sound and uncomfortable surroundings, I could have bought multiple copies of McMurty’s CDs for the group and we could have enjoyed them in Mark’s living room.

November 5, 2012

Dutchtown Straw Poll

Tuesday is Election Day. Mother’s phone here in Missouri has been ringing constantly with political robocalls. Because she is one of the few people left in the world who actually gets legitimate phone calls, she answers it. If she hears silence, she hangs up. This afternoon I even heard her mutter something when she hung up, but I was blessedly too far away to hear what she said. From the tone, I don’t think she wished them a nice day.

Went hunting nuts

Sunday afternoon, to keep from going nuts, we decided to go hunting nuts. Well, we didn’t actually start out that way, we just ended up there. We drove down a lane in Dutchtown next to our property and scooped up about a quart of pecans. They were a little on the small side, but they cracked easily and tasted pretty good.

Dad used to spend half the winter sitting in his recliner picking out pecans. We set up his old nutcracker in the basement workshop vise and even found the cigar box he used to put the cracked nuts in. It even had his old nutpick in it.

She’s got all the entertainment she needs to carry her through to warm weather.

The Dutchtown Straw Poll

On the way back down the lane to go home, I noticed the late afternoon sun lighting up the weeds. Like the polls driven by the robocalls, the Dutchtown Straw Poll was flicking left and right in the wind. The Undecideds were definitely driving.

The 2012 Election may not be decided by Tuesday night, but the phones will be a lot quieter. I share the hopes and prayers of all the election supervisors all over the county: please, please, please let it be a landslide for one side or the other.

Photo tips:

What makes the photo work is the backlighting. I exposed for the highlights, letting the backgrounds go dark to provide contrast. Most snapshooting guides will tell you to have the sun at your back. That makes for evenly-exposed, but deadly dull photos. Most of my scenics use strong sidelighting or backlighting that brings out the texture of the subject.

All of the weeds aren’t sharp because the depth of field is very shallow in a close-up. On top of that, there was a stiff breeze that kept whipping them around. Some of the blur is movement, other is because the subject kept moving into and out of focus. I like the horizontal shot because all of the out-of-focus stalks are bending to the left (that’s not a political assessment), taking your eye to the weeds that are in focus.

As always, you can click on the photos to make them larger. If you suffer from allergies, though, you might want to leave them small and keep your distance.