We bought an orchid at the flower show last weekend. There was some nice light coming through the window this morning, so I decided to photograph it. I spent a little time playing with the image in various ways. Here’s version 1:
I then went back and changed the cloth background and re-photographed it. Here’s version 2:
And here’s version 3 (a black and white conversion):
Disney has a “get in free on your birthday” promotion and Lynn and I used it when we went to Animal Kingdom theme park for my birthday earlier this month. When we checked in, Lynn made me wear the “Happy Birthday, Edward” button they gave me. Then, everywhere we went – all the Disney employees and characters were telling me happy birthday all day long. That’s probably more “happy birthdays” in one day than I’ve gotten in my whole life!
Animal Kingdom combines a “zoo without bars” with theme park rides and this results in a very well done attraction that has something to offer everyone. Lynn and I really enjoyed it and for me it definitely makes the Central Florida Photos must do list .
Animal Kingdom is located west of Orlando off of I-4. For more information, Wikipedia has a large entry, with articles on the various areas in the park and the animals you can see as well as the rides.
You might want to bring a variety of photo equipment. My 70-300VR zoom lens on a Nikon D90 crop sensor body (1.5 crop factor) was about right for the long shots of wildlife (but we never have enough glass, do we?). I also had my 16-85 zoom for scenic shots, and there are a lot of scenic shots. I saw one or two people with tripods, but I didn’t bring mine in to the park. I couldn’t have used it on the Kilimanjaro Safari ride, and it would have been in the way in many of the other places in the park. One other thing, even in early May, Orlando is already very hot and humid. Check the weather forecast and dress appropriately. Cool clothing and sun block are a must.
This close-up photo of a giraffe was taken from the Kilimanjaro Safari vehicle. Lynn and I went straight here when we got to the park, since it was at the top of our priority list and we didn’t want to wait in a long line. Even so, it took about 20 minutes before we could board. It’s a very nice experience, but photographically challenging. The vehicle almost never stops and the ride is designed to be bumpy and fun for younger folks, so you’ll have to make sure your shutter speed is high enough to freeze the vehicle’s motion. This giraffe crossed the road in front of us and they do have the right of way, so I made a nice calm portrait of it while the vehicle paused to let it pass. You’ll want to try to avoid the middle seats. I sat on the far left, but I think both sides probably have as good a view at different times.
This next photo is of a mother and juvenile elephant coming toward us along the elephant trail, also on the safari ride. I like the way the young one is kicking up dust out in front of Mom.
The next area we visited was the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail, where there are gorillas, meerkats, and a number of other animals. There’s a photo of one of the gorillas in an earlier post . Here’s a meerkat.
Another thing I liked about this park is the displays that are set up throughout the areas to give them some cultural ambiance. Here are two photos from the Maharajah Jungle Trek that I especially liked. This first one is a “water station.
This one is of a cart in the village area.
Finally, here is a photo of the center piece of the park, the Tree of Life.
I’ve posted a gallery of my Animal Kingdom photos at this location . Please visit and browse to get an idea of some of the animals and things you can expect to see. I haven’t been to Africa or India, but it seems like Disney has done a credible job re-creating pieces of those far away places here in Central Florida for us to visit and dream about.
2/9/2010 Update: I have some additional photos posted in this set on Flickr .
©2009 and 2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
For some reason, the shapes of trees appeal to me as a photographic subject. I think it’s at least partially related to their fractal nature. Here are two different views of a tree in the parking lot of my local library. The first one was taken back in 2003 with a Minolta 7Hi camera using an infra-red filter over the lens, converted to black and white. (Note: you can click on each of these to see a larger version)
This second photo was made yesterday in color. I like the way the blue sky showing through the clouds seems to follow branches in the top middle portion of the tree and the the green growth in the canopy behind the tree lines up with its branches on the right side.
The third photo is of a Ferris wheel in the parking lot at a local mall against the storm clouds this morning. Hopefully the storm will clear before evening or not too many people will be at the fair.
The fourth and last photo is a macro shot of an African violet plant. I had to take this hand-held, since I don’t yet have an l-bracket for my D700.
©2009, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
Well, we had a tripod swap this week, so I went out last night to try my “new” used tripod. I made this photo in my front yard using my D90, Tokina 12 – 24mm zoom, and my new Nikon wired remote release. I set the lens at 12mm, f7.1, and exposed for 25 seconds at ISO 200, using matrix metering. I also set Exposure Delay mode on, Active D-Lighting on Auto, and used Long Exp. NR on. I recorded it in RAW and processed it in Adobe Lightroom. If you click on it, you can look at a larger version.
I like the way the palm tree leads your eye to the constellation Orion in the top right part of the photo, and the wide angle distortion causes both trees to lean in and point up. I also think the dynamic range here is pretty impressive. The moon is completely blown out of course, but the detail in the trees (lit by street lights) along with the how the stars are captured by the sensor in this camera is something I’ve never seen in a photo I’ve made before. Especially with such low noise.
Also interesting is that at 25 seconds, star trails are already visible. 25 seconds = 25/(24*60*60) or ~.1 degree. At 12mm, this lens has about a 99 degree field of view, so .1 degree is about 4 pixels.
By the way, I found out recently that the reason the wired release changed from the D80 to the D90 is that the pin out had to be modified to accommodate the GPS unit. Otherwise I could have kept and used my D80 wired release.
©2009, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
We had tickets to see Leo Kottke at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart Florida on Friday night. It was a wonderful show – the first time I’ve ever seen him live, although I’m long time fan. In addition to some great guitar music, he told a few very funny stories and we were both sorry to see the evening end.
On Saturday morning we took our time coming back and drove the first part home on A1A up the Atlantic coast, stopping at a few places to look for pictures. I had my photo backpack and tripod with me, and Lynn was a very good sport and even carried tripods and lens hoods for me and helped me scout for photos. She noticed this interesting tree (I think it was a seagrape ) along the beach at one place we stopped at. The early morning sun shining through the combination of new and old leaves and branches on this seagrape tree against the bright blue sky was very colorful. (You can go to my gallery to see a larger version of the photos in this post.)
On the other side of these trees was a little play ground with what I think were some Parrot Fish toys to play on. They were also very colorful in the early light.
Further on up the road, nearer to Port Saint Lucie we stopped at another little park called “Bear Point Sanctuary ” and walked out a dirt road along a canal. This little park is along the Indian River lagoon, and I didn’t realize it stretched this far down the coast. We saw several birds – even though it was almost lunchtime, some calm, scenic water, and some pretty mangroves:
There are a lot of little parks like this in Florida, and if you have time when you’re driving around, it’s worth stopping and wandering around with your camera. You can almost always find a photo or two hidden away.
I used my polarizer filter to make the photo above. One of my friends asked me why they should get one and I wanted to show the effect, so I made a second version with the polarizer rotated 90 degrees. That’s my shadow at the corner of the dock. You can see a pretty dramatic difference between the two versions. Carry a polarizing filter. It’s one filter effect that is very hard to duplicate in post processing on the computer.
The birds were pretty shy and flew off whenever we tried to get close enough for a good picture. (I just had my 16 – 85mm with me).
All in all, a pretty nice photo excursion, and an unexpected bonus well worth the little time we invested.
I posted these photos and a few more on my website here .
©2009, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
Seaworld again graciously hosted the annual United Way Leadership Appreciation Event yesterday and Lynn and I enjoyed a few hours at the park. It was a very pleasant day full of sunshine starting in the high 40s, and warming into the 60s after lunch. Seaworld is a favorite of ours and there are lots of good photos there.
This year, I carried a quite a bit more photo gear, although I didn’t use everything. The equipment I enjoyed using the most was my Canon G9 inside the WP-DC21 waterproof housing. I brought this out at the stingray lagoon. The rays in this pool are used to people and will come right up to you when you put your hands in the water. This first picture is a close up of an approaching stingray.
And click on the link below to see a short underwater video of the stingrays swimming by and then trying to eat my camera!
Stingrays eat my camera!!!
I will post the rest of my photographs from yesterday on my website as soon as I finish editing them (hopefully later today – I want to try to process a 360 degree panorama). They will be at this link: https://edrosack.com/seaworld2008/
©2008, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
Mary asked if I would print some of the photographs I’ve made around Cincinnati for her condo association so they could display them in the building hallways.
She picked out these and I printed them on A3 glossy paper as 11×14 black and white prints using my Epson R1900 printer last weekend and mailed them on Tuesday.
They ordered silver frames with black and white mats to mount them in, and hung them yesterday (10/19).
You can browse through the full set of photos here
©2008, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
This is the story of a photograph that I made a couple of weeks ago when we were in Wisconsin at the Shalom Wildlife Sanctuary, and how I eventually made a print that I was happy with. Along the way, Lynn laughed at me for taking so much time to print a single photo and my photo friends gave me all sorts of suggestions on techniques to make this come out right (some of which I even used – thanks, Keith).
I knew when I saw this scene that there was a photo here. The lighting conditions were overcast and gloomy – exactly right for the kind of image I wanted, but this made capturing the photo a little difficult. And, it turns out – made printing the photo even more difficult.
I had my Canon G9 with me and used the built in flash in fill mode. I had visions of a 13×19 inch print, so I kept it in ISO 80 and saved it in RAW (like I always do). The skull on the ground looked like good foreground material, so I cranked the lens to the most wide angle setting and got up close to make this exposure (this is straight out of the camera, with no re-touching other than conversion from raw in Lightroom 2)(click on this image for a larger version).
This is an interesting scene, I really liked the concept of this photograph, but the initial image left a lot still in my imagination. The sky is washed out, the skulls on the pole are way too dark, and the foreground skull is too bright. Also, the grass in the foreground is too bright and distracting (among other things).
I tried various methods over several days to make it work using mostly Lightroom2 and some Photoshop tools. Lightroom2 has some very nice new local adjustment tools which I played around with along with the usual curves, etc. to darken the sky and lighten the pole skulls. I also used the black and white conversion tools in Lightroom2 and generated the version of the photo that is posted in my previous blog entry. This was a lot better than the initial photo, but I thought it could be better. Here’s where Keith comes in. “Why not run it through Photomatix?” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said. And so …
Here are the steps I went through over several days (some of the steps multiple times – it’s a good thing Lightroom is a non-destructive editor)
1. Basic exposure, clarity, curves, etc. adjustments
2. Create 3 virtual copies of the image – one for the sky, one for the skulls on the pole, and one for the foreground. Adjust each one separately: First adjust the exposure and then convert to Black & White to highlight the appropriate features. Export these as 16 bit .tiff files.
3. Use Photomatix Pro 3.0 to create a combined HDR of the 3 B&W .tiffs, then tone map the HDR file and save.
4. Load the tone mapped file into Photoshop. Clone as needed from the appropriate B&W conversion file to highlight the skulls on the poles. Clone out a portion of the horn on the foreground skull. Crop to the final dimensions. Adjust levels, sharpen for output.
Here is the final image (click for a larger version):
If you want more details on the steps I went through, I’ve posted the intermediate photos for each step at this link .
It is quite a bit different from the original, and it looks pretty good enlarged to 13″x19″ (especially for a point and shoot camera). So I think it was worth the extra effort. What do you think?
©2008, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
We were up early last Saturday, and on the way out to breakfast, I happened to glance up and saw the sun lighting up the pine tree in our front yard. The pine needles in the top of the tree were a glowing golden color, while the lower ones still in shadow were dark green. The contrast against the blue sky was very pretty. I went back in to grab my D80 and see if I could capture what I was saw. Here’s the result (click to see a larger version):
And here’s a different perspective:
After breakfast, we stopped at a little park in our neighborhood called the Bear Creek Nature Trail, and I took a few more pictures. They’re posted here. It sure felt good to make some photos. It’s been too long.
Now I need to figure out when to re-make this photo with the moon in the frame.
©2008, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.
I hope you were able to see the lunar eclipse last Wednesday. It was quite a show in Central Florida.
I used my Nikon D80 with a 70 – 300 VR zoom on a tripod in the driveway to make these photos.
It was quite cloudy at the beginning, but fortunately turned perfectly clear during totality. This first photo was made early as the earth’s shadow started to move across the moon.
The three photos posted here are all croped versions of larger files. 300mm is not quite enough lens to get full frame magnification. I had thought about trying to make some photos through my telescope, but I don’t have a camera adapter for it and didn’t want to try to hand hold an exposure. I used the spot meter mode in the camera and bracketed +/- one stop. The one stop underexposure was the best choice (as you might guess), since the meter coverage is a bit larger than the moon was in the sensor. I used both ISO 100 and 400. During totality, ISO 400 helped to reduce the exposure time and improved sharpness. I also played with turning the lens Vibration Reduction on and off , but I couldn’t see any difference in the results – which is good. I’ve noticed that the image stabilization in my Canon G9 will actually make a photo worse if left on when the camera is on a tripod.
The next photo was made during totality.
Finally, the last photo was made using a wider angle setting to also capture Saturn (lower left) and Regulus (above), which were especially impressive.
I have posted a few more of my eclipse photos
here.
©2008, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.