Here’s a variation on slow photography using a slow(ish) shutter speed, but with a moving subject. Using my variable ND filter, ISO 50, and f13 I was able to get this shot down to 1/5th of a second. By panning with the runner I was blurred her arms and legs keeping the body and head relatively steady. The bright sun reflecting off the bay provided a great opportunity to turn the runner into a near silhouette.

I tried longer exposures, but with the bright background, the runner’s arms and legs were largely lost in the light and almost didn’t register in the image. The notion of a head and torso hurtling down the beach didn’t really work with the image I was trying to create…

 

 

Just a few days ago on the beach, taking this picture, I was wearing a fleece hoodie trying to stay warm in a cold southerly wind. Today it’s 36C! Despite the heat, we took the kids to the zoo for a few hours before it got really hot. Tomorrow … 41C. Going to be chasing the air conditioning…

Anyway, the picture above is another long exposure. This one was 30s at f16 with the variable ND filter cranked up. Again, the water was pretty rough, but the long exposure smoothes it right out.

 

 

Another in the slow photography category. The sun was still up for this one so I used my new(ish) Marumi variable ND filter which goes from a single stop to about 8.5 stops (ND2-ND400) by including two linear polarizing filters that rotate 90 degrees from parallel to perpendicular. When the two filters are aligned, the light goes through with just one stop of light blocked. When the two filters are rotated 90 degrees to each other, the combination blocks a lot of the light coming through. I used to do this with two linear polarizers back in the old days before most polarizing filters were circular. Thankfully though Marumi was prepared to trade me some of my hard earned dollars for this handy filter.

With the sun still firmly up in the sky, I closed down the variable ND filter to its darkest point, then dropped the ISO to 50, closed down the aperture to f22, and squeezed out 13 seconds of exposure before the highlights were getting too out of hand.

Today, I’m pleased to share my first image from Melbourne since we arrived in August. I captured this image on Saturday night in a suburb called Middle Park in Melbourne. It’s right next to the much more well-known and more popular St. Kilda. The sun hadn’t quite set yet, but it was low enough for me to shoot this at f16, ISO 100 and 30 seconds. The water was quite rough, in fact it was spraying up over the end of the pier (hence all the water), but the long exposure smoothed it right out. This view is looking south out across Port Phillip Bay.

Hopefully this will be the first in a long series of much more frequent posts this year. It’s all easy while on vacation… I’ll see if I can keep it up once I’m back to work!

Here’s one last shot of the Remarkable Rocks…

Back in 2000 I was lucky enough to travel to Israel for work. I couldn’t very well go to Israel without seeing a bit of the country so we stayed a couple of days extra to have a bit of a look. This image is from a hill above St. George’s Monastery (home to Greek Orthodox monks) as we concluded a tour from Tel Aviv through the Judean Desert to Jericho. If I recall correctly, the tour wasn’t actually meant to get to this point, but soldier turned us away from Jericho. The city wasn’t stable at the time of our visit and everyone was being diverted away. So we missed out on Jericho, but we got to see a pretty amazing monastery built right into a cliff wall. Come back tomorrow and I’ll post a picture of the monastery!

Sorry folks, but I’ve been off skiing at Sunshine Village in Banff National Park where they’ve had 9m(!) of snow this year. I even took a break from photography and left my camera at home.

For my first day back from vacation, rather than working on this blog, I worked on a post for Digital Darkroom Techniques (DDT). If you’re curious how I do textures in my images (like the one above), pop on over to DDT for a look. If you have suggestions on how to approach textures differently, I’d love to hear from you.

Since I have no new pictures (did I mention I’ve been skiing without my camera?), I’ve pulled an image from my Salt Spring Island archives to do a little texture work. While the base image is old, the textures are new and I’m sharing if you’re interested. When I was recently in Arizona, we visited the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix. At the MIM, they have an extraordinary collection of drums and I shot almost every one of them for my texture collection. I’ve shared nine of them in my post on DDT just in case you want to add them to your collection.

I can’t speak for the rest of the tours of Upper Antelope Canyon, but our tour felt like a bit of a frenzy of must-have shots. Everyone else probably thought it went at a nice leisurely pace, but I was trying to squeeze every shot I could out of this short one-hour tour. The guide tries to make sure that you get every great shot they know about from George Washington’s face, to the eagle, to the wolf, and to many other shapes and images that you can imagine emerging from the rock. While you listen to the tour guide’s suggestions and try to see what they’re seeing, you try to see some of your own images in the canyon before you’re led to the next stop on the tour.

This image, was one of the tour guide’s suggestions and is shot straight up to capture this silhouette which is somewhat reminiscent of a sunset in Monument Valley. I’ve left this image virtually as shot. The auto white balance didn’t choose wisely, so I shifted it and I also cropped out the deep, dark shadows to make this a wide shot.

Despite heading south to Arizona for a week’s vacation away from winter, I found snow anyway. It seems that at 7000 feet (average elevation of the south rim of the Grand Canyon), it can get pretty cold in the winter. For the two days we were at the Canyon, the temperatures were exactly the same as they were back here in Edmonton.

I capture this image around sunset at Hopi Point. For sunsets, I really like Hopi Point because you get a great view to the east and west and because there’s lots of room for all the people. With all the room, you don’t have to just stake out a spot at the railing and stay there the whole time. You can move around and get different angles.

For this image, I really wanted this scrubby little bush in the foreground, but there was a sign in the way and two photographers with tripods, one on either side of this sign totally blocking my access. Thankfully, I’m not too concerned about what people think so I got down on my hands and knees and crawled under the sign. I sat on the ground with my tripod splayed out to get down really low. With my camera lens sticking out through the railing I managed this unobstructed view of the canyon.

I’m back online and all ready with some new travel pics. The family and I have been down south in Arizona for the past week visiting my folks. After an easy flight down to Phoenix, we did a little 1,600 km (1,000 mile) road trip from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon to Lake Powell and back. We saw a few highlights along the way like the eye-catching red rocks of Sedona and the very popular Antelope Canyon. Needless to say, once I’ve sorted the images, I’ll have a few to share here over the next week or so.

My hope is that I’ll have improved over my previous set of Arizona images that featured way back in ancient history on Day 41 of this humble, little blog.

This image is of sunset from Hopi point on the southern rim of the canyon looking north. I really liked the way the clouds were caught on the peaks rising from the canyon.