Archives

The neighbors are having their roof replaced, and I have a good view of the activity from my upstairs, so I thought I would make a few images and share them.

Early this morning, the workmen lifted all the old tiles and arranged them into piles of four or five all over the roof. By the time I walked Megan to school, they were in the process of carrying tile piles over to the roof’s edge, and tossing them into the truck below, where they landed with a loud, shattering crash. I wanted to capture something of the movement and mass of the tiles (those suckers are heavy), which was apparent in the effort the men needed to hurl them over the side, and in the sound they made when they landed.

I shot through an upstairs window using my longest lens, a 300mm on a DX sensor, so the effective 35mm focal length is 450mm (i.e., it’s like I had a 450mm lens on 35mm film). And this is all handheld and through a window. So they are not the crispest photos ever made. Still, I was pleased with the composition I achieved on a few of them, particularly given the limited options I had for vantage point.

With the trees making the background cluttered, and the morning sky very bright, I found that converting to black and white with a red filter made the subjects stand out a bit by both darkening the sky and brightening the leaves. Gave the images a little more punch.

The kids are on spring break this week, and so we decided to do a little nature walk this morning over at Whiting Ranch, up toward the foothills a little ways from our house. We have had a lot of rain this winter, preceded by a really bad fire season a year or two ago, which collectively has wrought havoc on the trails. Indeed, we had a hard time toward the end following the trail at all. (For those who know the area, we were trying to make it to the top of Red Rock Trail — see the map of the general area below.) But all the rain also means there is a lot of green, as well as a lot of wild flowers, which combined with the red rocks made for a picturesque hike.

There are also plenty of warnings about mountain lions, but we happily did not see any of those.

Anyway, I’ve shared a few pictures from our walk here. I was particularly pleased with Butterfly and On the Trail.

For those interested, the map of the area is here. A is where we parked. B is roughly, though not exactly, to where we hiked.

View Larger Map

As a counter to last week’s DPS assignment on household chores, this week’s is leisure time.

After some mulling, and wandering around the house looking for something interesting that fit the theme, I noticed a couple of large, decorative chess pieces sitting on the mantle. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to mix these up with some normal sized pieces, and see what came out. The results are below. Click for uncropped view.

I played with the composition, trying to get an interesting contrast between the small king and his attackers. But I also spent a lot of time on the light. With the dark pieces on the black background, I ended up with both strobes slightly to the rear on either side, giving decent rim lighting for separation. I also used a lot of reflectors to fill in the shadows in the front.

Let me know what you think. I have submitted the one called “Chess” for the weekly assignment.

This week’s assignment at the DPS forum is household chores. After being selected as one of the winners last week, my kids decided they wanted to get involved as well. So we tried a few setups, shown in the gallery here.

The goal was to get something where the kids were doing the work, and I was decidedly not helping. I was going to try to have floor washing and vacuuming going on in the same shot, but it proved difficult to do that and get me in the shot as well, sleeping or reading or otherwise relaxing. So we went with vacuuming and dusting. The final shot, Sunday Chores 4, is the one I have submitted.

For the lighting, I put one strobe off to camera left, bounced off the ceiling. The challenge there was that too much light directly from the strobe was reflecting off the mantle and coming back to the camera, creating a bright spot on the mantle. I solved this with my DIY barndoor, which amouts to a Manfrotto dual-ended clamp holding up a piece of cardboard in just the right spot. The second strobe I put outside the sliding glass door just out of the frame to the right. The idea was to make it look like the sun streaming in the window on Sunday morning. Not sure I quite achieved that effect, but it works okay. Its a little hot on my left arm, but I like the way my feet get rim lit. And overall, the lighting is even without being totally flat.

Megan was quite a ham through all of this. You’ll notice in most shots, she is looking put upon, or forlorn, exactly as I asked her to look. She’s a little actress, that one.

Just a quick update: the photo featured in my previous post was selected as one of the winners for the weekly challenge at the DPS forum!

The latest assignment at the DPS forum was The Workplace. Since I work out of my house, I spun my wheels a while trying to think of something interesting to photograph that didn’t look like everyone else’s home office. My workstation setup is moderately large, in that I have three screens, a laptop and some iOS devices, and I began trying to capture all the screen real estate. But it was boring.

Then, I realized that one of my pictures contained a previously snapped picture from the same angle, and the idea hit me to show myself ad infinitum on the monitors. Gives the viewer a little more to look at than a bunch of hardware, although you can still get a feel for what the setup looks like. Click the thumb for a larger view.

.