can you see the geese? you can explain why i used a color balance filter like this? its probably nicer than the yellow green color the sky really was. i took this on top of a parking garage at sacramento city college. made the pano in photoshop with 7 images. full size its 25000 pixels wide. but this is really boring for how big it is. need to work harder on panos. peace.
so i’m feeling like more of a street photographer these days. this shot was taken a couple of weeks ago with my 200mm zoomer. since then i’ve decided that using that lens is sort of creepy. today i’ve been walking around with my mamiya 645 with the waist level finder on, and i’m shooting at 80mm on that guy, which is something more like a 50mm. i think that focal length is actually too long as well. i think if i had a 45mm on the mamiya that would be best. for the dslr, i think the 50mm FD lens is good, but its maybe too long a focal length. the reason why its still good is that it is much more descrete and small than a super big and heavy zoomer. as much as i appreciate telephoto, its sort of preverted, and sort of over compensation. a nice little lens is good because i can walk right up to people with it and go for it. which is sort of weird too, and i’m working on getting over it. i’ve been inspried lately buy the digital rev TV guys and this other street tog named eric kim. these guys have made loads of youtube videos about street photography and how to do it. i’ve learned alot from their videos about how to approach the streets, and what camera settings and cameras yield the best results.. so time to put it into practice. too bad i can’t show you guys my film shots that i just took. we’ll have to wait a few days/weeks for those. but i’ve goto to say that i’ve learned how to scan film with my DSLR… you can watch the digital rev TV video on how to do it, or probably read an internet article. but imagine not paying for labs to scan in sort of small images in TIFF, when you could be going 25MP in RAW! and be able to toy with the white balance and so forth. so yeah, i need to get some film developed and i need to take photos of it. well folks, i need to get back outside. ttyl.
so if you have followed my blog at all you’ll know that i’ve already posted this photo in color, and that its a camera phone shot of some gnocchi that i made at work. but this time i’ve edited the photo with silver efex pro2 and now it looks a little better than before. my free trial of silver efex pro 2 ended today so i’m making my last silver efex pro 2 post today. i’ve decided to not buy the software because i’m savy enough in photoshop to make my pictures look like this anyways. plus when you don’t have preset choices, i tend to think that you can make better choices. but on second thought, silver efex pro has taught me a thing or two about the goals of black and white processing on photos. and what tones are classic and look good together. but for me i need to be able to control this down to the level of the subjects and i cannot have a program making choices for me. that is why i’m going back to pure photoshop from here on out, unless i try another program 
. or plugin rather.
ciao.
so here is yet another clique shot of the tower bridge this time from maybe the most interesting angle i’ve attempted so far. why? because the water in the foreground shows those ripples in the sand (i mean sandy-mud/agricultural runoffpolutionbyproduct). and then there are those other clique old rotten marine posts that used to support or mark something. landscape guys love that shit. i’m thinking that i’m maybe not cut out for landscape photography anymore, but that i’d like to keep it as part of my journey.
Okay, okay, enough b.s. lets talk about the photo and the title of the post for the day for a second. What is a Big Stopper? It allows me to reduce an exposure by 10 stops. Its a neutral density filter that is so thick you can hardly see anything when you look though it. but it allows me to take a 4 – 15 second exposure in broad daylight between f11 and f22. I have some ideas for using flash and shooting wide open with it for some interesting portraits with some captured motion, yet during daylight. so we’ll be seeing more of the big stopper photos soon. the bad news about the big stopper is that it threads onto my lens so its hard to keep the lens focused while adding the filter – because you cannot focus with the filter on. hence why this shot sucks. perhaps the solution is to use a few different focus(es) focii ? kind of like bracketing when i’m running this filter. ?
well thanks for tuning in.
yup, its a pink rose. i took this with a kit lens when i was in a beginning photography class and today there is a print of this hung on a hallway wall in the office of California State Governor Jerry Brown. So you never know what is going to happen when you go out macroing. Even if they are just flower pictures. What would be even better would be if I accidentally took pictures that i got loads of money for. One must have goals.
running a lot of light for the few people out there. but, c’est la vie. i’m working on my panorama skills. i’m going to make some big ass panoramas. i’m going to take a trip to mount diablo, which has the second largest panoramic view of earth in the world.. mt. Kilimanjaro is number one. the diablo is only 2 hours from my house….
here is a picture of mt. diablo…
i took this photo standing really close to where i took the photo in the stadium, at least on a scale like this… i was about 100meters away as a crow flies. notice you can see the stadium lights in this picture as well, as i was shooting over the stadium. if i drive to mt. diablo what is going to happen is something like this: the park will only open during normal daylight hours plus maybe just a little bit of sunset. so that would be fine for normal daylight panorama which is what i want to do. but, imagine the crazy star pictures you could get up there, plus having the city lights below… so what i’m really going to do is drive to somewhere nearby il diablo and park, then ride in on my bicycle, so i can evade parking lot authorities telling me when i need to leave. i think part of the fun of good landscape photography in my area of california is that you have to break the rules. in order to get camera equipment into the really good scenes you are going to have to trespass, violate park hours, go into restricted areas, and so forth. for me those are the photos i love the most because i know a lot of other landscape photographers (not all, but alot), would follow the rules, and berate me for breaking them. i have this thing for getting different pictures, and breaking the rules is part of that in every picture that i like of mine, it somehow breaks a rule, or follows it so much that it is like a misinterpretation of the rule in that it was taken completely literally yet also simplified. but i look at our landscape more as a photo journalist. for one because our land (northern california) is really torn up and brutalized, so its hard to make a beautiful landscape, the added element of breaking the ‘law of the land’ gives the landscape photo such an extra special quality. because those photos are illegal, but they are usually the better ones i get, and that is sort of a puzzle, as if its a banned book or something. i’m just a photographer, i’m not going to hurt anything, or leave anything behind. i’m just in it for the pictures.
more macroing. had to use 1600 ISO to get reasonable shutter speed while sitting indoors in my living room. wonder what i could do at ISO 100 with some lighting? stop down the aperture more and get some more clarity. i think this is as far as i can zoom and still get detail with my 200 mm lens. the eye will print at 10 inches at 300dpi, so that is nice but i probably won’t go so large given the shitty ISO; this was just practice anyways..
today i received a 10+ Close up filter in the mail from china. this one fits on my 200mm zoomer, so yeah, macro central right…. well, as it turns out, it is very difficult to shoot macro at more than 100mm. plus the depth of feild becomes so shallow, and the light starts doing crazy stuff in the lens, so i’m pretty much limited to 100-125mm anyways…. which is much better than the 50mm i was limited to before with my other close up filters….
okay, so this was really hard with a moving subject, and i had to take about 20 bad pictures to get this bad one. i needed to sit there for 100 pictures. but i have to goto work. maybe more tomorrow
i took this photo at lufenholz beach a few months ago
i also spent the day making a smugmug page in order to sell pictures so i can pay for all the camera equipment i buy and so forth.
if you’ve ever wanted to buy a print from me, now you can at your own whim.
check it out: http://brianhawley.smugmug.com
