Learning from Failure

A local photography group had a themed shoot where the main focus point of the image should be the colour red. Being an inventive sort, prone to thinking outside the box, I thought I'd shoot in infra-red.

Well, too clever for my own good it seems. I'd scored a mint condition Nikon D1x (with buffer upgrade even) on eBay for pennies (literally, it was condition unknown) which I thought would make a perfect IR camera. Grabbed a 720mm IR filter and went to town on the shoot.

Sadly, the day was partially overcast and the IR-look I was after didn't quite pan out. There were several challenges in getting this shot, one, the bike was sandwiched in a parking lot between several large cars, so I had to decide how best to isolate it from the background clutter. This meant getting down low, so I broke out the tripod, set the camera for a 2 second exposure on my 17-35mm lens, and fired. 

I did this about 10 times from different angles and positions until I was happy with the result. A little post processing and here you have it. More Black and White than IR, but it was a learning experience. In addition, when I get the spare cash laying around, I'm converting the D1x to a pure IR camera so be on the lookout for some (hopefully) otherworldly shots.

How not to take pictures

So I haven't updated things in a bit, I've been busy with work (boo!) but I did get a chance to get to an Indian (are there any other kind?) pow wow this weekend.

Got there just as the ceremony was getting underway. Got a great spot to shoot from, got my camera out and started taking pics.

Only to realize I'd brought a semi-dead battery and that all my settings in the camera were wrong for outdoors work.

Way to go e! Nonetheless I managed to rescue some of the pics with Lightroom and PhotoShop and are posting them here for your approval.

A boy and his Tank

Or more like a boy denied his Tank. Okay, so the roll wasn't a total loss, this one turned out well in spite of the colour film (I'm going on the assumption it was some kind of Kodak 400 speed film, judging from the grain and the colour rendition)

Although this pic was taken well out of town, it turned out well enough that I'm not angry that I have to re-shoot most of it. I'd be ticked if I was in Spain or somewhere like that, but it's mostly Cemetery shots which are easily re-done.

Whoops

Notice anything different about this image? Anything?

Yeah, it's in colour, except I don't shoot colour film. Somehow or another I ended up with a roll of colour film I thought was my usual Kodak CN400BW film.

Normally, when I'm shooting film, I'm approaching subjects in terms of contrast and shades of grey. I didn't realize the roll in my Nikon F4s was colour so most of the shots didn't turn out the way I wanted them to, but this one...I think was an improvement, so here it is for your approval.

Pointy

This was an interesting accident. The last time I had used my dSLR, it was for some low-light work with lots of motion. In order to get acceptable images, I had to crank up the ISO to 1600. Pretty high. When I was done with that shoot, I forgot to reset the ISO rating back to 200 (the lowest it will go, which is kind of a weak point on the dSLR, but so it goes.)

So when I started at the falls, I noticed the shutter speed was too fast for the available light, but only after I had snapped off a few rounds. That's when I realized what ISO I was shooting with.

As it turned out, it made some rather interesting effects, this shot being a prime example.