My style of photography seems to prefers a dominant color in the frame. I'm catching up with photos taken in the last month.


Caustic Drips: 1/1000s f/5.0 ISO400 200mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, adjusted, cropped

These are drips on a gutter two stories up. I like how the metal crystals are visible and the light forms spikes as it passes through the water. If you turn it upside down it's almost impossible to figure out what it is because so little in the image is recognizable and the shading is unexpected.


Sunlit Gulls: 1/2500s f/5.0 ISO400 200mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, adjusted

I adjusted this image of gulls flying overhead to keep the detail on the wing and other brightly-lit areas but did not attempt to brighten the rest of the image. That draws the eye to the bright parts and provides something to look at when it gets there.


Twisted Cloud: 1/125s f/3.5 ISO100 173mm, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, unadjusted

I'm not sure what cause the odd twisted cloud to form, but its shadow was projected onto the underside of the cloud by the setting sun. The colors were very vivid and required no adjustment. The 30D had no problem focusing on the clouds, but I found later that the clouds were actually out of focus and the tree was in focus.

Tags: Photography, Color, Sunset, Drips, Birds

Flower and Sunset: 1/8000s f/3.5 ISO400 50mm -0.7ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

A Thanksgiving trip to Monterey Bay Aquarium gave me some interesting photo opportunities, not all of them involving sea creatures. Sitting down to lunch, I snapped the photo above, just after the table has been relaid, and just before people were shown to it.

I literally snapped it, picking up my camera and pressing the shutter to seize the moment. Only later did I get chance to view the result and see how the camera had been set up at the time. This is what I had:

Since I was shooting RAW, the tungsten white balance could easily be adjusted out. The image had been underexposed two-thirds of a stop on top of metering on the bright sky, so the detail on the table was lost in the shadows.

After adjusting the white balance I increased the saturation to 1.8 and then started on the levels. By boosting the shadows with the Highlights and Shadows control and making some heavy changes to the Levels control, I was able to obtain a much better image. But the shadows, now light enough for detail, showed some very ugly blotches of color caused by chroma noise (100% crop):

Chroma Blur to the rescue. Chroma Blur is one of the RAW Fine Tuning settings hidden behind a disclosure triangle at the top of the adjustments pane and is normally set to 2.0. I boosted it all the way to 10.0 to achieve the result I was looking for:

A side effect of this adjustment is that the flower petals have dark edges -- that's not as the scene actually was, but in the final image if helps make them stand out against the light background.

Here are the final settings:

Notice that I changed the levels by moving the top triangle controls, not the lower markers. I find this often gives better control.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Chroma Blur, Sunset

There has been a lot of smoke in the San Francisco Bay Area these past few days from a couple of large forest fires. As a result the sun has been sunset orange hours before it sets, turning to a deep red color as it nears the horizon. The color of the sun in the photo below is straight from the camera:

Smoky sun: 1/800s f/5.6 ISO200 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, unadjusted

I took that out of the bathroom window of my house: the only place I could get an unobstructed view through the trees. You can see the haze across the face of the sun. I took it with the camera in manual mode after finding the sun too bright at the metered shutter speed (I think 1/200). I took some more at 1/400 and 1/800 and it was the latter that was the best setting.

Another handy setting I am using at times is Custom Function 4 set to 1. This sets the * (asterisk) button to autofocus and lock and leaves the shutter to set exposure and take the shot. This lets me set focus once -- on the sun in this case -- and then keep taking shots without the focus changing. Since I was in Manual mode, the exposure wasn't changing either.

Tags: Fire, Sunset, Canon, 30D, Custom Functions

I'm finding that RAW lets me do some pretty wild things with images. This is a fountain back-lit by the sun:

It came from the image below by setting the Exposure to -2 and the Saturation to +2:

I also took this terrible sunset-ish photo by pointing the camera in direction of the setting sun and clicking the shutter:

By cropping and playing with the adjustments so that they looked like this:

I was able to get a more artistic result. Notice how the exposure is set below -2. How did I do that? The slider only goes to -2, but if you keep clicking on the triangle in the numeric control or type a number in you can go beyond the sliders.

The only real details that are visible are the power lines, so I called it Electric Sunset (click to see full size).

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Sunset, RAW, Fountain

This picture story concerns a sunset. It's a rather unusual sunset in that instead of beaches and strolling couples it features rush-hour traffic. In fact if it were not for the rush-hour traffic it would never have been taken at all. It's a story about taking advantage of a unique opportunity.

Tags: Picture Story, Sunset