Category Archives: recent work

Two Hosers Photo Show- Evolution Of A Photo

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On Episode 21 of The Two Hosers Photo Show (available for free on iTunes) Adam and I discuss our entries for the week’s Photo Challenge. The topic was “Silhouette” and you can see both of our entries here.

I wish I could say I “pre-visioned” the final photo exactly as it ended up but, as is the case most every time, it was the product of the evolution of an idea. Here’s how it went.

Before I grabbed my camera I had the basic idea in my mind. Adam had already made an excellent photo down at the beach under ideal circumstances. Not to take anything away from Adam, but it’s pretty hard to mess up a sunset at Kits Beach. It’s one of my favourite places to be. On the other hand, he didn’t phone it in either. Instead he took a good situation and made it great by creating something really interesting and dynamic. Kudos to his subject as well for committing to the moment.

Sitting here in landlocked Germany I had to look elsewhere for inspiration and I had something specific in mind. Despite it being a silhouette I put on a suit and tie (it’s all in the details…..) and grabbed an old suitcase. My plan was to put the camera on a tripod and use the timer to grab this shot-

I knew this location would provide a bright backdrop with the foreground in heavy shadow- ideal conditions for a silhouette photo. Using full Manual mode I set the exposure for the graffiti wall and allowed the foreground to fall into shadow. My plan all along was to eventually crop it to give it a widescreen feel but this is essentially what I envisioned. However something wasn’t quite right so I made a couple of small adjustments by changing my pose and position.

The problem was that the story I had in mind was not being represented visually. The suitcase wasn’t translating and the whole thing was just rather flat. That’s when I decided to add movement to the image and I would walk through the frame.

This was ok but there was no way I was going to compete with Adam’s entry so I had to use the burst mode on my camera to ensure I got the right frame. To do this I needed to use a “Voice Activated Timer”. In other words, my wife. With Lena manning the shutter we shot a series of pictures of me walking through the frame.

Better, but something was still not right. I decided that I was walking a little too far away from the sunlight (i.e. too close to the camera) which caused my feet to disappear. By walking on the other side of the support beams I was getting closer to the edge of the shadow and including more of my feet in the sihouette.

Now this was more like what I had in mind but before we packed it up I decided to take it one step further. The camera was already set to the lowest possible ISO (100) so I dialled the aperture down as far as I could to f22 in order to achieve the slowest possible shutter speed I could get away with- 1/50th of second. Then we shot it one last time with me running through the frame (still using burst mode to capture multiple images).

In my humble opinion, a much better shot than I had originally envisioned.

Recent Work- Hilite Recovery

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Photographic technology is nothing short of amazing. But with great power comes great responsibility. Or something like that. Wait, did I really just quote a superhero movie?

My point is that you can achieve some incredible results not only with your camera but in post production as well. But it doesn’t always mean you should. Case in point for me has to do with the “latitude” of digital photography. That is to say, how bright your camera can see vs how dark. There are a lot of people who see blown hilites as completely unnecessary and downright sacrilege. I am not one of those people. I have no issue with underexposing some parts of the image and if some hilites go off the scale, hey, that’s life.

Now, that being said, I did a little work on a recent image I made. It started out of curiosity after I was speaking with Chris Marquardt the other day and I showed him this shot. I went into a little rant about how I did not care about the overexposed bits and while I could probably pull some back because I shot it in RAW I didn’t feel I needed to and BLAH BLAH BLAH. Chris agreed wholeheartedly but I got the feeling he was just being nice as anyone who has met him knows he is a good guy. So I got to work.

I went back into Aperture and brought back the overexposed bits. However, I made the decision that I did not want to bring it all back. For instance, the sky should stay where it is. But what if I recovered the reflection in the pavement? There are probably better ways to do this but here’s what I did- brought the new image into photoshop and laid it over top of the original and then just erased the parts I didn’t want from the new layer. The end effect is that most of the picture is untouched except for the reflection.

Here are the two images together in an “After and Before”. Which image do you prefer? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Recent Work- Shadows

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I haven’t posted recent work in quite some time so I’m going to make a conscious effort to do so from now on. Furthermore, I will try and spread the themes around a little because once the summer hits there is likely to be a flood of baby photos. Great, just what people need to see. More baby photos. I promise to keep that to a minimum. So…..

I was walking around town the other day, shooting photos for the weekly challenge that Adam and I engage in on The Two Hosers Photo Show, and decided to experiment a little with shadows in broad daylight. The sun was getting lower in the sky creating really intense light on the cobblestones streets. Rather than look for shaded areas or keep my back to the sun, I decided to shoot into it and see what I produce.

These shots were made with a Canon 5D mkII and a 50mm f1.4 lens. In order to get these exposures I dialed in ISO 100 and as fast a shutter speed as I could manage- sometimes up to 1/8000 sec in order to maintain a wide aperture and get some DOF.