Landscape with Trash

Nikon D810, 35mm (18-35), 1/125, f/16, ISO 100

While out doing some landscape photography (limited, because we were stuck on campus) with my students, I noticed an opportunity for a depth of field teaching moment.

In the shot above, the narrow aperture gives me a wide field. I can keep the whole scene in focus at once. Aside from the vertical orientation, this is a standard landscape shot.

In the shot below, I’ve opened up the aperture. That narrows the focus down to the discarded bag in the foreground. Now it stands out, because the blurry background is easier to ignore.

They also have a slightly different emotional feel, though that’s likely to be subjective and harder to define.

Nikon D810, 35mm (18-35), 1/1250, f/4.5, ISO 100

Full disclosure: I used Photoshop to align the two pictures, so they’ve both been adjusted slightly.

Bell Mountain HDR

Nikon D7000, 10.5mm, HDR composite

My first-ever solo backpacking trip was to the top of Bell Mountain, the second highest point in Missouri. My campsite provided a particularly good view of the sunrise, so I decided to get a picture of myself watching the day start.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a single shot that was properly exposed for the sky, the ground and me all at once. Fortunately, I brought along a small, lightweight tripod that allowed me to shoot a series of pictures at different exposure levels, including one in which I sat on a rock and triggered the shutter using a remote.

Nikon D7000, 10.5mm, 1/2, f/2.8, ISO 100

Nikon D7000, 10.5mm, 1/2, f/2.8, ISO 100, taken a little later

Nikon D7000, 10.5mm, 1.3 sec., f/2.8, ISO 100

Then when I got back home I used Photoshop’s High Dynamic Range option to combine the three pictures. As I was in only one of them, I copied myself from the original photo and pasted myself into the HDR combo, making a few adjustments to make me match the rest of the image.

As is common with HDR-generated images, the result isn’t precisely faithful to how the world actually looked at the time. Normally I’m not fond of the “are you just high all the time?” look, but here it works for me. The sunrise looks somewhat like the first seconds of a hydrogen bomb detonating, which for some reason strikes me as so out of keeping with the moment that it seems paradoxically appropriate.

VLA

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/400, f/10, ISO 100, cropped and adjusted

Earlier this month my wife and I took a trip to New Mexico. Amy was there to work, which left me with some time on my hands. Figuring I might not make it back to this part of the country again anytime soon, I picked a couple of destinations I’d been meaning to visit.

The first was the Very Large Array radio observatory, 50 miles west of Soccoro, New Mexico. I’ve loved astronomy ever since I was a kid, and though I don’t have the math skills to pursue it seriously, I still like to visit museums, observatories and the like. If you’re into this sort of thing, the VLA is definitely worth a trip. It’s refreshing to see a government operation that’s actually open and accessible to the public. The tour was excellent; the guide even sounded like Carl Sagan. Just don’t trust Apple Maps to tell you where the turn is.

I lucked out in the timing department. The dishes were in their A configuration, which meant that they were as close together as they got. If they had been in the D configuration, they would have been more than 20 miles apart and not such an awesome photo op.

Even so, photographing them was a challenge. To convey a sense of the scene, the photo had to do two things: show all the dishes (or at least as many of them as possible) and convey just how big they were. Accomplishing one of the two tasks was easy. I used a wide angle lens to take the picture at the top of this post. It caught the whole array. But the scale is hard to read. Without something familiar for a scale reference, these could be no bigger than the dish currently serving as a weed arbor in my neighbor’s yard.

Getting in closer and adding some people to the composition helps establish the scale. But now you can’t see the array.

Nikon D7000, 32mm (18-55), 1/1000, f/16, ISO 800

Of course I could always piece a pan shot together. This does the job if you can view it at full resolution. But shrunk down to a web-friendly size, it isn’t much better than the first picture.

Nikon D7000, 50mm (18-55), 1/800, f/14, ISO 800, pan

Here’s about as close as I could come to a good compromise:

Nikon D7000, 36mm (18-55), 1/1000, f/16, ISO 800

Kansas pans

I went a little pan-happy during a recent trip to Hays. Kansas landscapes – from the Flint Hills to open pastures – invite extra wide compositions. I managed to get some good results even without a tripod. As usual with pans, you’ll get a better sense of the full effect from the larger view you get by clicking.

The first one is unusual. Most pans are created by panning (so it isn’t just a clever name) from a single point, typically the head of a tripod. But for this image I shot several photos while walking past a series of headstones in a graveyard. The result required considerable adjustment (Catherine Mary’s stone is still a bit more distorted than I’d like). But it’s still awesome how a set of five crudely carved rocks can tell such a poignant tale of a family’s tragic losses.

Here’s something more traditional (and less depressing). This pan covers 180 degrees along the side of the road near a large wind farm. I liked the contrast between the solitary, traditional windmill and the acres of giant wind chargers. This one’s more fun at full resolution than it is on the Blogger screen (though you can get a slightly better look at it by clicking on the image).

This is Fort Riley viewed from atop Atomic Annie Hill. The view extends beyond 180 degrees. Shooting down into the valley also caused the series to arc rather than line up straight, which cost a lot of picture at the top and bottom. Thus the narrow image.

Little Bighorn

Canon EOS 10D, 17mm (17-40), 1/180, f/10, ISO 100, edited and altered

As I was working on the Photo Safari board on Pinterest last week, I noticed a serious omission: I never blogged any of the photos I took at the Little Bighorn battlefield in July 2011. The rest of that journey was reasonably well represented with entries on the Black Hills and Badlands, but the main point of going up north to begin with somehow managed to slip into a crack between the floorboards.


Problem rectified. I took this photo looking down from Reno-Benteen Hill into the Little Bighorn valley. From this spot the units of the Seventh Cavalry who weren’t killed with Custer held off the Sioux (who bought time for their families to escape by keeping the troops besieged). The cenotaphs mark the spots where some of the cavalry’s Indian scouts died.

This photo went through standard edits to bring the colors out a bit more, which I kinda hated to do. We were there on a scorching hot summer afternoon very much like the day the battle was fought more than a century ago. So the colors here are more vivid than I remembered them.

I also removed a “keep off the grass” sign. The original photo looked like this:

Canon EOS 10D, 17mm (17-40), 1/180, f/10, ISO 100

Wells Overlook again

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/400, f/10, ISO 800

Though we were a little early for good fall colors (especially with the lingering summer heat and dry weather), a Saturday in late October proved to be our best opportunity to return to Wells Overlook to shoot some more pictures. This time I brought more equipment, including a tripod and a range of lenses.

My favorite of the set was a 10.5mm shot taken from the KU side of the tower (see above). I’m especially fond of what happens to the horizon when it’s positioned at the curving edge of the fisheye frame.

At the opposite end of the focal length spectrum, here’s a 500mm shot of the south side of KU’s main campus more than four miles away.

Nikon D7000, 500mm (150-500mm), 1/80, f/16, ISO 100, adjusted

Even with level adjustment in Photoshop, the colors end up somewhat washed out by the dust in the air (courtesy a stiff breeze and of course the distance from the subject).

Also note how flattened the perspective becomes at this focal length. It’s hard to judge the vertical distance between objects. Are the buildings in the foreground right next door to the dorms, or are they blocks away? That smokestack that looks like it’s part of the left edge of McCollum Hall is actually more than a mile behind it.

And to round things out at the end, here’s a view of the overlook tower taken from the bend in the road visible in the first shot:

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/800, f/14, ISO 800, cropped

The K at night

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/25, f/2.8, ISO 800

No sooner do I get the State Fair series going than I have to interrupt it for “breaking news.” With the end of baseball season fast upon us, I took advantage of our final Friday night at the ballpark to shoot some pictures.

I tried a few traditional shots of the game, but the longest lens I brought with me maxed at 200mm. From the back of the stands, it wasn’t exactly producing Sports Illustrated cover shots. Likewise my attempts at street photos of the crowd weren’t working. Perhaps I was in a moody mood, but I wasn’t feeling the people thing.

On the other hand, I found myself captivated by the light. I can’t remember the last time I strolled around the ballpark after dark. Usually by that point I’m in my seat watching the game. Thus the results I got tended to emphasize light and architecture.

The picture at the top of this post is my favorite of the set. I love what the 10mm lens did with the sunset. I also love what it did with the curving lines of the ramp. The shot has a range of elements from the industrial stuff at the bottom to the isolated people going about their business to the city in the distance and the sky above.

Funny how the ramp looks different depending on lens and perspective. Here’s another view:

Nikon D7000, 56mm (28-200), 1/60, f/5.6, ISO 800

From the back row of the upper deck, this is what the ballpark looks like:

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/60, f/2.8, ISO 800, adjusted

When I’ve shot this view in the past I’ve gotten closer to cut out some of the roof, but this time I thought it might be fun to include it. Besides, the large crowd prevented me from setting up much closer.

While I was up top, I noticed that the lights were catching smoke or steam or mist or something:

Nikon D7000, 100mm (28-200), 1/80, f/5.3, ISO 800, adjusted

This shot of the escalators gives you a nice sense of vertical space:

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 1/25, f/4, ISO 800

For perspective, note the size difference between the people on the closest escalator and the person next to the bottom.

I was a little disappointed by the Fan Zone (again, maybe I wasn’t in the mood for people shots). But I did manage to capture some fun motion blur from the carousel.

Nikon D3000, 10.5mm, 0.3 sec., f/8, ISO 800, cropped

Despite the absence of a tripod, I got the slow shutter speed to work by bracing my elbows on a rail. Note that the still parts of the shot (such as the picture of the bats in the center) are clear and the moving parts are streaks of light and color. That’s what you’re after in a shot like this.

Wells Overlook

Nikon D3000, 50mm fixed, 1/1000, f/18, ISO 1600, edited

Another photo expedition, this time to Wells Overlook just south of Lawrence. The landscape naturally suggested a panoramic photo, so I shot a series of 30 or so pictures and combined them in Photoshop. I didn’t have a tripod with me, and the uneven frames shot by hand cost me a bit on the top and bottom. But with the jagged edges cropped away, the pan looks fine. As usual with extra wide photos, it will look better if you click on the image to enlarge it.

Rain fell for most of the morning, and it had let up less than an hour earlier. The haze was still fairly thick, which you can clearly see in the photo. Compare the vivid greens of the trees in the foreground with the faded greys that almost blend into the sky along the horizon. Normally I’m not a big fan of haze, but here it gives the image a pleasant sense of depth.

Of course I could have eliminated some of the murk by adjusting the input levels, as I’ve done with this photo:

Nikon D7000, 55mm (18-55), 1/320, f/9, ISO 100, cropped and adjusted

You can see KU in the background and a hawk of the non-jay variety riding the drafts toward the top.

For the record, this is what the overlook tower looks like:

Nikon D7000, 20mm (18-55), 1/250, f/8, ISO 125

And by coincidence, I shot exactly 61 photos with both cameras. Weird.