Flash

I was invited to a club to shoot some models there. I'd never worked with on-camera flash (preferring remote strobes) and I was unsure of what I'd get.

Naturally, my flash unit failed within the first flash, and I had to rely on the built in one on my Fuji. So for running live, with no experience, I was pretty darned nervous, fortunately the club was nearly pitch black and much of the flash was lost in that, so the models turned out well, as you can see here.

I'd dearly love a bette flash unit, but the prices!

Silly

Just a bit of whimsey on my part. I belong to a photography forum where a new topic is posted weekly. It's supposed to encourage us to go out and shoot something we don't normally do and this week's topic was "candy."

To be perfectly honest I've been busy this week and really hadn't had the chance to do something, so I combined two of my favourite things (chocolate and monsters) into a quick photograph.

I don't normally put a title on my work, but in this case I think it should be "AvP 3: The fight for GuyLian"

Dialogue could go something like this: Predator "Grrclckhss snrgllr, tckhtck!" (translation: "Stay away from the human sweet, foul beast!")

Alien "Hssssssssssss" (translation: "Hssssssssssss")

I think it'll be a blockbuster of a movie. Hey, can't be any worse than the last AvP flick.

Glow

Visited some great friends for July 4. Brought the Fuji just in case. Didn't get much in the way of fireworks, being in a heavily wooded neighborhood, so with a stack of glowsticks, I made my own lightshow.

Toy

Got a new lens for my birthday. It arrived two days early which was great so I had to go out and try it today after work. It was a perfect sunny day too.

Local park, sleeping girl and colour images converted to BW.

As an aside, I found out why the Ilford film I shot kept turning out sepia. Turns out the local 1-hour joints re-use their developing chemicals. No big deal (supposedly) for colour film, but it does something weird for Black and White. I like what it does, and the trick will be to catch them before they change out the chemicals. I like the sepia look.

Sheboygan

Believe it or not, this is a real flower. It's from something called a "passion flower" or as I like to call it, "The Plant That Ate Sheboygan"

My parents had one of these in their front flower garden. It was a climbing vine and as soon as it found purchase, it took over the garden and grew at a rate that, and I am not kidding, you could watch. I would go to school in the morning, and went I got home, the plant would have grown several inches. Crazy crazy thing. Cut it back and it re-grew at twice the original rate. And then one day it sprouted these crazy flowers, all at once.

This one was growing wild at the local botanical gardens, and needless to say, taking over everything. When I got close for this picture, I swear it asked me for a cigarette.

Pushing

This is a detail of one of many butterflies that were on display at the local botanical gardens this weekend. I was using ambient light, which while good, was filtered through heavy plant growth and in an effort to make sure I got the shot before the butterfly took off, I used too shallow a depth of field (as evidenced by the top of the picture) but I did get the eyes and mouth in focus, which helps offset the top somewhat.

Fuji dSLR with Nikon lens.

Chaos

Nothing will tax a camera system like trying to capture butterflies, especially in motion. Their Brownian motion in flight is all but impossible to predict and capture, at least with the gear I have. But as they land, things change. Here is one of the better ones I caught this weekend.

Fuji dSLR with Nikon lens.

Fixed

As you can see, the colour profile issue has been fixed. I was partially correct in my assumptions about what was wrong, but with the help of some kind people, fixed the underlying culprit, Adobe colour profiles. By default Adobe uses some advanced profiles (for professionals of course) and programs like Internet Explorer cannot handle them. So without losing too much data, the profile is converted to something that IE can handle. And thus the images turn out like i took them.

In this case, a forgotten firetruck in a field.

Moral of this story? Learn your software.

Plain

This is not what I shot. Well, the flowers are, but the colours are not. I've been shooting in RAW recently, which captures each colour channel individually and allows me to work with each one.

The problem here is that although the image looked great in PhotoShop, here on the 'Net it's washed out and faded. Not certain what I can do about that, it may be a limitation of the journal's image recognition capability.

In any case, pretend the colours are more vivid.