davevoelker

The sunset wasn't as brilliant as I would have liked but the tree

added more interest than I thought it would. What do you think?

One of the things I have spent some time thinking about was how to use

the focal length multiplier effect of a digital body to my advantage.

I had taken a few images of the moon previously with my film body and

a 400mm lens with a 1.4 converter just to see what that did for me and

the answer was not much. With a new Canon 20D I tried the same

experiment tonight and this time stacked an additional 2x tele on top

of the 1.4 tele. The major problem of this setup is shutter speed,

working at an effective focal length of 1792mm motion blur becomes a

real problem and at this magnification you can actually track its

movement in the viewfinder. The shutter speed was 0.5 sec and a 100%

magnification reveals significant motion blur. Even so, I was pretty

pleased with the result after two passes with the sharpening tool in

CS2.

comments and critiques welcomed

All comments and critiques are welcomed. I am specifically interested

in what people think about the composition. This was cropped a good

bit from a more traditional shoulder length pose with the intent of

creating a more intimate mood.

I followed this guy around for a bit trying to get the right framing

and this is most of what I was after. Having his head turn to one

side or the other would have been nice, but he wasn't the most

cooperative model I've ever encountered.

caught leaping for the air

When I saw thi simage in the field I thought it would make a nice

print. After opening it in Photoshop it was clear that something was

missing so I decided to selectively desaturate everything but the

fern. The print now works much better for me but I am not yet sold on

the crop so I thought I would post here with pretty much the original

image and see what other thought.

For me this is a very well composed image, I really like how the lines move diagonally yet the trees are upright to tell us that it is not just a skewed image. The palette is very nice with bands of color accentuating the movement throughout the image.

 

Was this one image cropped or two composited? If I had to nit-pick it would be the area of relative dead-space just above the solitary orange tree in the lower left. Cropping this area out helps by removing a distracting element but hurts by losing the panormaic feel which I find very pleasing.

Panning during the 2003 Fort Myers Beach Offshore Grand Prix & Air

Show. Shot with a Canon Elan II and Sigma 400 5.6 with a 1.4 TC on

Provia F100.

My 'newest' daughter getting set for the ride home for the first

time. I am interested in feedback on the presentation, I continue to

work on my Photoshop portrait technique.

This one pleases on a lot of levels. My immediate reaction was to the color palette which is unique. I am also impressed with the overall technical merit of the image, exposure is dead on, composition is excellent, a complete photograph, very well done.

A chance meeting of a robber fly, a bumblebee and myself with I happy

to be on the other side of the glass. As I recall this was shot with

a Canon 85mm prime with an unknown amount of extension and fill flash

through the front window of my home.

A candid shot taken at the beach of one of my favorite models.

All -

I appreciate the comments everyone has made. TO answer some specific questions that were posed...

 

I probably had either an 81A or Tiffen 812 (very warm) filter on the lens as one is typically always there. For the shot my daughter was sitting atop her swing set slide and the background was open to a heavily wooded area probably 15 feet behind her. What appears as a neutral black background is largely a dark green background from the foliage behind her.

 

I took several shots during this time some with and some with fill flash. The ones with fill flash were universally better, not only for catch lights but also for filling out shadow detail under her eyes which gave really detracted from the overall appearance. I use the 380EX flash unit with the lumiquest promax diffusor (gold insert and the frosted transparent cover). When shooting my Elan II on aperture priority the flash is automatically set to fill-flash mode where the flash output is set to automatically fill in for the ambient light. I usually back off of this anywhere from -.5 to -1.5 stops of flash compoensation though I do not remember how this particular image was shot.

 

I did crop the resulting image from it's original horizontal orientation. I did not crop by the numbers looking for a certain ratio or to be square but rather, I cropped to draw sharp attention to her face.

 

The softening was done in photoshop using a technique that I have to give large credit for to Eddie Tapp http://www.eddietapp.com I have modified his selective portrait retouching technique but the basic principles I follow stemmed from his example. His '90% method of color correction' is also the single-most useful piece of photoshop wizardry I have found to date for very quickly restoring a scanned image to something closer to the original image in terms of color balance. I personally feel that this image is a little too soft and I am preparing a much larger version for printing which I will probably not soften as much, the 85 f/1.8 can be razor sharp and close-up portraiture is one area where a little selective softening can make a big difference.

A portrait of my daughter taken this summer outdoors in ambient light

with fill flash. I desaturated and softened in Photoshop to smooth

out the details and give a soft warm feeling.

Bald eagle on Grandfather Mountain, NC.

 

I was admittedly stretching the zoom lens well beyond it's optimal

range with the 2x TC but it was one of those occassions where I

valued softer and closer over sharper and farther.

 

Tech stuff:

Canon Elan II

Canon 100-300 USM @ 300 w/ 2x TC

Fuji Provia F100

Somewhat an architecture image I suppose. Shot midday under the Santa

Monica Pier. I venture under to se if anything interesteing was about

and these boats just glowed like the sun underneath. Hard to capture

the luminous nature of the here but the slide is nice...

 

I wanted to try and capture some movement in the water so I stopped

down for a long exposure.

I wanted to capture the mysterious in this fog shrouded bridge on

Grandfather Mountain.