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.

Soccer

Nikon D7000, 150mm (150-500), 1/800, f/9, ISO 400, cropped

As long as I have the State Fair series disrupted for sports, I might as well post some soccer shots. The afternoon was baking hot when I shot these from the sidelines of KCKCC’s home opener, so if I get too far into October before posting them I fear they’ll be badly out of season.

The picture at the top of this post is sports photography with all the elements in place. Details are clear. Framing is good. Motion is frozen. Body posture and facial expression tell a dramatic story.

Of course it’s easy to set up a shot like this when you know pretty much precisely what’s going to happen, where it’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen. Because sports such as soccer are generally more free flowing, you have to stay loose (frequently adjusting zoom and focus), look for good moments and shoot lots of pictures.

Here’s an example of a good moment captured without a lot of careful set-up:

Nikon D7000, 150mm (150-500), 1/800, f/7.1, ISO 400, cropped

For all their fun, sports tend to be serious business. However, every once in awhile you can catch some humor:

Nikon D7000, 400mm (150-500), 1/125, f/9, ISO 100, cropped

The main subject in this shot was doing some warm-up jumps, but his body posture and the apparent “reactions” to it come across as funny.

And of course a warning: when photographing sports, shutter speed is absolutely crucial. Compare the kick and head shots above with this picture taken earlier in the afternoon:

Nikon D7000, 150mm (150-500), 1/125, f/10, ISO 100, cropped

The difference in shutter speed is a small fraction of a second, but what a difference it makes in motion blur and the story you tell with your picture.

I should also mention that this week we added the very first actual instructional slide show to The Photographer’s Sketchbook web site. It’s an introduction to sketching color.

Omaha Zoo – Penguins

Nikon D7000, 32mm (28-200), 1/60, f/3.8, ISO 2500

If I had to pick one favorite part of the zoo experience, the penguins would be strong contenders. I could sit for hours and watch them swim gracefully back and forth.

As a photographer, however, they give me nightmares. The lighting is extremely tricky in Omaha’s penguin area. I was after a wider angle shot of the birds swimming, but even with the ISO cranked way up I was still at a 1/60 shutter speed. Any slower and camera shake would have been a problem, as would motion blur on the swimming subjects.

Also note the extreme hot spot in the background. Proper exposure of the main subjects underwater drastically over-exposed the brightly lit surface area at the top of the shot. And if I crop down (thus “enlarging”) the birds at the bottom, the ISO grain will become an issue.

Nikon D7000, 122mm (28-200), 1/250, f/5.3, ISO 2500

We were lucky to be there when the keepers came in to dish out the fish. This shot is actually part of a series in which the keeper gives the bigger penguin a gentle shove and scoots him back into the water so his smaller companions can get some fish. I love this frame the best because of the invisible leading line between woman and bird, giving the scene a strong sense of interaction.

Omaha Zoo – Sea Lions

Nikon D7000, 200mm (28-200), 1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 400, cropped and retouched

The sea lions were a study in harsh lighting. They’re outdoors in an area with little shade. Further, their tank was being cleaned (to the considerable chagrin of the largest among them), and with most of the water gone the sun reflecting off the walls and bottom of the enclosure made good exposures a real challenge. All the pictures in this set have been treated to a level adjustment of one kind or another.

Still, the sea lions make great subjects. Proper exposure brings out their textures, slick if they’re wet and furry if they’re dry.

Nikon D7000, 135mm (28-200), 1/1250, f/9, ISO 400, cropped and retouched

As with people, look for shots of animals interacting. It brings out personality that you might not see in individuals by themselves.

Nikon D7000, 42mm (28-200), 1/500, f/11, ISO 400, cropped and retouched

This was a fun shot. The water wasn’t quite deep enough for the large sea lion to make it back up to the rocks. Though his attempt made a splash. Literally.

Nikon D7000, 135mm (28-200), 1/800, f/5.6, ISO 400, cropped and retouched

The last one is my favorite of the set. This sea lion looks so comfy and happy swimming around.

Liberty Memorial

Nikon D7000, 130mm (75-300), 1/640, f/6.3, ISO 200

The Sketchbook staff were at the Liberty Memorial last week. The main target was Union Station, but we also noticed some workers cleaning up some of the bas relief sculpture.

The lesson here is a question of shot composition. Compare the “best shot” above with other framing options made possible by a 75-300mm zoom lens.

The next shot provides the best detail on the worker, but it doesn’t supply much context. The drama in the scene is how high the scaffold dangles above the ground. This shot does nothing to show the height.

Nikon D7000, 300mm (75-300), 1/1250, f/5.6, ISO 400

The next one’s a little better. The detail on the sculpture is good. Still, it doesn’t look all that high up.

Nikon D7000, 175mm (75-300), 1/1600, f/5.3, ISO 400

Of all the shots in the set, this last one puts the most distance between the scaffold and the bottom of the shot. But here it’s almost too much. The stairs at the bottom confuse the space, making it hard to judge the height. And the worker is now too small a part of the overall composition.

Nikon D7000, 75mm (75-300), 1/640, f/6.3, ISO 200

Playing with fire

Nikon D7000, 18-55mm lens at 30mm, shutter 250, f/8, ISO 100, cropped

Awhile back I was at a Chamber of Commerce presentation (don’t ask) waiting for a speech to begin when I happened to overhear a conversation between two photographers. One was boasting about how he knew photographers who shot hundreds of pictures and only got a handful of good ones, while he carefully picked his shots and got great pictures more than half the time.

In general I could take the boasting, at least in part because later I noticed that he had his flash at a 45-degree angle on a 20 foot high, irregular ceiling. In a future entry I’ll explain why that doesn’t work. The part of the boast that bugged me was the notion that great photographers get great photos every time they hit their shutter buttons.

Not so. For starters, even an experienced photographer can mess things up (see last week’s entry for proof). But more than that, one of the great beauties of digital photography is that it frees us from the obligation to be stingy with our shots.

A recent “photo safari” to the Renaissance Festival is a case in point. In all I shot more than 1600 pictures, including more than 340 of the troupe in this photo. Back in the film days, that would have been between 45 and 67 rolls of film, including the expense of buying it and the hassle of developing it. Just carrying that much stuff around the RenFest would have been a prohibitive proposition.

If I’d been forced to carefully pick and choose every shot I took, I could still have expected to get a few good pictures. But my chances of catching the exact moment when a fire trick looked like mushroom clouds? Odds would have been against it.

That’s why I encourage my students to shoot everything that moves and most of what doesn’t. This introduces the spontaneous into your work. You get the chance to catch anything you can see, all the moments that will escape if you feel obliged to dither about whether or not the shot is worth shooting.

Fireworks

Nikon D7000, 10mm, f/10, shutter 5 sec., ISO 200

I took this photo last week during the annual Fourth of July fireworks festivities. It has several things to teach us.

First, fireworks need to be facing up when you light them. We got three launchers lit at once, and you can see two of the three performing as designed in the middle of the photo. Unfortunately, the third one ended up sideways, spinning itself around as it shot flaming, exploding balls all over the neighborhood. You can see the light trail left by one that’s going off just out of the shot on in the lower right. In the middle right you can see one flaming under a truck in the driveway across the street. In the middle left you can see a big one in the street. And at the far left you can see one detonating in the bushes. That last one is also a lesson in the importance of raking the dead leaves out of your hedges, as it started a brush fire that took a few minutes to put out.

In the photography realm, the key teaching point is the importance of being in the right place at the right time with your camera ready. If my camera had been in a bag in the house, I wouldn’t have gotten the shot. Even if I’d been a little earlier or a little later with the shutter, the picture wouldn’t have documented the event as completely.

At least to an extent, photos like this are a matter of luck. But we can influence our luck greatly by taking steps to improve our odds. In class I nag students constantly about keeping their cameras with them at all times and getting into the habit of taking a ton of photos. Moments like this are the payoff for the practice.

You can also see some technical elements at work here. Normally shooting in extremely dim light with a low ISO would produce a big, black square. But the light from fireworks produces a strong lighting source. In this example, the loose pyrotechnics are sort of like having someone running around the shot firing a strong flash left and right. Because fireworks were the target of the shoot, I locked the camera down on a tripod and set the shutter for five seconds. This extremely slow shutter speed also allowed me to catch some more standard shots of explosions that went off in the sky like they were supposed to.

And for the more advanced photographer, I also followed some advice from Nikon’s newsletter and turned on the long exposure noise reduction setting.

Nikon D7000, 10mm, f/10, shutter 5 sec., ISO 200