I found this little guy sitting on a tree on the way out

I got to make another trip to Robinson Preserve a couple of days ago, this time with a friend specifically to go photographing.  I only shot with my 70-200 f/4 this time, and it turned out surprisingly well, for the short focal length.  Hopefully next time, though, I’ll have access to a 400 f/5.6 again, which will give me an awfully better view of the wildlife.  In the meantime, I made do well enough at 200mm, just had to be a little bit sneaky with the assorted creatures (birds, mostly).  And, of course, there was a little bit of cropping involved in post processing, but I guess that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

A bee taking off from a flower

The trip was good fun, and I managed to make an entire circuit around one side of the park (the one that stretches out to Tampa Bay).  Perhaps next time we can go the other way, down to the causeway to Anna Maria.  Towards the entrance of the park, there isn’t a whole lot in the way of tree cover, so we mostly stuck to photographing the insects that flew around the various flowers and grasses.  Moving on a little further, we came to the watery part of the park, where we managed to catch some birds hanging around the water, and even a couple of them in flight, skimming over the water or soaring up in the skies (the former proved easier to photograph).  Then we trekked on through the mangroves and marshey areas, and found a nice little flock of ibis pecking their way around in the water.

A white heron, flying just above the water

The park itself is still looking just as pleasant as always, and they seem to be making process on the visitor center (which they’re putting in an old, dilapidated house) and the camp site.  I also noticed that they’ve added dispensers with doggy bags, which I’m pretty sure was my mother’s doing.  Apparently she took the dogs for a walk there one day, and they did their business, whereupon my mom realized she was out of bags.  By amazing coincidence, she ran into a woman who took issue with the situation, and despite my mom having gone to her car to fetch a bag with which to clean up the mess, managed to get a park ranger to issue her a ticket for failing to pick up after the dogs.  So, in any case, she complained about it, and got them to put in dog bag dispensers.

A great blue heron, framed up by mangroves

And, with the exception of the dog bag drama, I don’t believe anything else of any great consequence has really been going on.  Robinson preserve continues to be awesome, just like always, and with any luck I’ll get a good chance to thoroughly explore the other part of the park sometime later in the Summer.  The other way isn’t circuitous, but rather lets out onto the causeway to the island, so I’m thinking some sort of a switchup with vehicles might be ideal.  That is, park one car at the park entrance, put two people in another, drive it down to the causeway entrance, walk all the way through to the main entrance, and then drive back to the other car.  Or something like that.  I’ll leave that planning to another day, and for now settle with the images I have.

A quick portrait of my grandpa. The detail in the full-size image is unbelievable.

My grandpa got a copy of Canon’s 5D Mk II lately, and I got a chance to play around with it.  It’s truly difficult to describe just how incredible this thing is.  It does ISO 25,600, and does it better than my 20D does 3200.  That, with 21 megapixels of resolution, incredible detail, and an utterly spectacular field of view and depth of field, just make for an unbelievable camera.  I’d love to pick one up myself, but of course it’s a little cost prohibitive.

I did a couple of portraits of my grandparents (quick ones, don’t look to these as models of perfect portraiture) at ISO 400, to see what it would be like to make a couple of frames and work with the RAW files out of it.  For starters, these things are huge.  We’re talking 20MB RAW files.  The speed boost I was getting out of RAW processing on my new desktop is pretty much gone when working with something like that, but it’s completely worth it: I can make ridiculous crops out of these images and still have perfectly viewable/printable images.  And with a little bit of USM applied, the sharpness is just astonishing.  Admittedly, this is the first camera I’ve used since my 20D, so I’m looking at several years of improvements all at once, but still, this is impressive.

A quick portrait of my grandma. At full resolution, I could fill most of my 19" monitor with an eye, and still see excellent detail.

Unfortunately, the video features weren’t quite as impressive as the still.  Yes, it does record excellent video, and with a small monitor for focusing and some big CF cards, it would make a pretty great platform for recording video.  However, the video stream it outputs is only 480p (while it can record 1080p to the CF card) and includes the focus guides and other information, effectively killing its usefulness in live video, and precluding the use of an external recording device (which would be exceptionally useful, since it can only record 12 minutes at a time).  That being said, the quality of the video is astounding: it’s full HD from a 35mm sensor.  Just needs a little improvement on the connectivity, and the recording length, both things I’m sure will be addressed in later versions.

And speaking of cameras, I’m actually going to finally get out and shoot again soon, albeit with my rusty old 20D.  Sometime this week I’m going to make the trip out to Robinson Preserve for the day, and go shooting with a friend.  Gotta love Summer.  Hopefully in a couple days I can come back to make a trip writeup with some nice photos.

Danielle and I

So I’ve been dating Danielle for two years now, and got to come back to Bradenton for a couple days for the occasion.  Hung out for a while today, and then went to Ruby Tuesday’s for dinner.  Of course they had to pick March 4th to have their 2 for 1 entree special, so we got a nice long wait, but all was well: some bunnies were munching in a retention bond nearby, so we had something to watch during the wait.

After that we came back and I set up a quick photograph, as you can see.  Set up some lights in my dining room, and got my dad to trip the shutter.  Nothing too fancy, but got an image I like pretty quickly.

Cat in a bag

And then, of course, my cat showed up, so I photographed her some with the same setup.  Afterwards she climbed into my bag and sat there for another photograph, which turned out mighty funny.  Other than that, not too much to talk about, so off I go.

A shot in front of the pond. Lit by an SB-25 in a shoot-through umbrella to camera left, and a bare gelled SB-26 to camera right, for hairlight

Got a light meter recently, and I must say, incident metering is absolutely, immensely awesome.  I can now just stick the meter right up in someone’s face and get a perfect exposure straight-off: no chimping or guessing.  And as an added bonus, it even tells you how much of the exposure is made up by flash and ambient.  So, new meter in hand, I took a trip out to the recently opened Robinson Preserve, to give it a little test run, and have fun in the park, of course.

Strictly speaking, I guess you could say I took two trips to Robinson Preserve.  My girlfriend, Danielle, oh-so-nicely agreed to help out for both of them.  The first time we went out, it was already getting close to sunset, so I set her in front of a pond, on a rock, with some trees in the background, threw up an umbrella and hairlight, and just got in some relatively quick shots.  And then it rained.  Thankfully, nothing got too destroyed from the water, and as it turns out, photographic umbrellas will, in fact, shield you, your girlfriend, and your equipment from rain.  As near as I can tell, there haven’t been any adverse side-effects on the umbrella, other than it having been a little damp for some time.

A shot from the second session, atop the observation tower. Lit by a single CTO-gelled SB-25, to camera right (and firmly secured to the railing, of course)

A couple days later, we came back an hour or two before the sun went down, so we had a little more time to work with.  My first idea was to put her up on top of the observation tower with a light up there, and shoot from down below (you gotta love Pocket Wizards).  The shot sort of worked, but the sky, unfortunately, was in no mood to give up any sort of decent looking background: nothing but bleak, pale-yellow, hazy sunset sky.  So I just more or less ignored those shots: a couple are still sitting on my hard drive, but they’ll probably be there forever.  I would definitely like to retry the concept, but with better skies.  Also a longer lens, as I was just barely getting a decent full-body shot at 200mm.  It sure would be nice to give it a try with the 400mm f/5.6 I rented up in Canada, but those are mighty expensive, so it’ll have to wait, for now.

A more pensive Danielle. Same lighting setup as before, this time shooting at a steeper angle.

After that, though, I went back up and shot from the deck, which worked much better.  Also, since we were on the middle level of the tower, I was able to climb the stairs a little to get up higher and shoot down, which you’ll see in the second shot, to get a nice watery background (the entire tower is surrounded by water).  I should note that the meter worked exactly as expected in both situations, which is to say excellently (for anyone wondering, it’s the Sekonic L-358 I’m talking about).  Now I just have to hold off on the urge to buy the Pocket Wizard transmitter add-on for it, so I can go totally wireless with just the meter, and not have to worry about manually tripping my lights.  In the mean time, though, it’s working fine,  and Danielle is proving to be an excellent model: and you can’t beat one that’ll work for dinner.

Robinson Preserve is definitely showing promise as a portrait location.  These two sessions are the only ones I’ve really done since the park has opened, and I’ve already found two excellent locations within a 15 minute walk of the parking lot (one within a half minute walk).  There’s still a lot of awesome locations that I saw when I initially visited, and no doubt many more that I haven’t seen hiding in all the miles of trails.  My biggest problem will be taking note of the ones closest to the park’s entrances (apparently there’s another entrance further South that I’ll need to investigate), as it can be a pretty long walk to get back into the trails.  While I can certainly drag myself back there, it would be pretty difficult, I’m sure, to get a paying client back that far, unless they were a particularly intrepid outdoors-person.  That’s all a matter for a different day, though.  For now, I’m extremely satisfied just with the couple of locations I’ve scouted out, and excited to find more.

Product shots, of course, are always a little tricky, especially when you have things like shiny screens to deal with.  Most of what I know about lighting things like this I learned from Light: Science and Magic, which teaches the fundamentals excellently, but also teaches them in a studio setting.  For someone whose entire lighting arsenal consists of three speedlights, two Pocket Wizards, some stands and umbrellas and cheap little accessories, working in a cramped office/bedroom—read: me—that doesn’t always work out so well, unfortunately, so for this shot I had to improvise.

The first thing to decide was what setting to put the phone in.  The typical look for product shots, of course, is an endless field of white, but somewhere between “Holy over-used clichè, Batman!” and “I really don’t feel like busting out my seamless paper today,” I decided to try making it look at home on my desk, instead.  So I cleared off a little space, and set the phone up, along with a couple odds and ends.  I left the wallet and keys in, as the obvious tip-offs to the desk setting, and decided to go ahead and leave some empty film spools and my old camera on the other side, framing the phone, and adding just a little (or, maybe a ridiculously obvious) hint of my photographic inclinations.

A natural light long exposure, to capture the screen

With the composition in place, I set the camera on a tripod and left it there, so that I could light the scene.  I stuck a single speedlight in an umbrella just forward of the scene, to try and put nice, big specular highlights on just about every reflective surface in the scene (which, my desktop included, was more or less everything).  With that accomplished, it was time to set about making the photograph.  My plan was to composite three images together, so I shot them one at a time.  The first image was a long exposure, using only natural light.  This showed just about nothing in the way of surroundings (and you can see how awfully lit what did show up was), but it did give me what I needed: the screen showed up beautifully.  With that out of the way, I was free to move on to the rest of the image, and not worry about whether or not it would be possible to make out the image on the screen.

The capture used for most of the phone's surroundings

The next step was to capture the phone’s surroundings the way I wanted them to look, as well as getting the phone the way I wanted it to look.  The trick here was to manipulate the specular highlighting, which would normally be done either by altering my light source, or by blocking out parts of it with a specially cut gobo.  Lacking space and materials, though, I had to settle for my general-purpose small piece of black foamcore, which acts as my gobo whenever I need one.  Rather than take extraneously large amounts of time to figure out exactly where to place it, moreover, I decided to just take the shotgun aproach.  The camera and umbrella were close enough together that I was able to simply hold the card in hand and move it around to different locations, blocking different amounts of specular reflection, while motoring my way through lots of exposures.  When I was finished, I just chose one  for the way the phone’s surroundings looked, and another for the “gloss line” that it put across the phone’s screen.

The exposure used for the phone itself, as well as some of the desktop area

With all the exposures ready, it was just a matter of performing the RAW conversions, and loading them all into GIMP.  I put all three images into a single file as layers, going from bottom-to-top in the order they appeared in this post.  First I put the second exposure on top of the first, lined everything up, and then layer masked out the screen area, so that the illuminated screen showed through.  With that accomplished, I layered the third exposure on top of the second, and lined that up as well.  With this one, I set the layer mask initially to full transparency, and then masked in the phone, as well as some of the desktop, because I liked the look of the right side of it from that exposure.  For the screen, I used a dark gray on the layer mask, so that the screen showed through, but the gradient created by the gobo also showed up nicely on top of it.  With that done, it was simply a matter of cropping the image, and I was done.  Here’s the final composited image, which will head up my upcoming review.

My Neo Freerunner: the ultimate phone

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