Tag: Photography (the subect)

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“The personality of the photographer, his approach, is really more important than his technical genius.” –Lee Miller

Sheila O’Malley has a typically amazing post about photographer Lee Miller, about whom I need to learn more because she is fascinating and because of photography:

Much of her history was erased through decades of obscurity and a total and shameful lack of a proper archive where her accomplishments get proper credit. Her son discovered a treasure trove of over 60,000 photos and negatives, and slowly but surely Miller is taking her proper place. More work needs to be done. There are biographies out now, and art books featuring her photos, and there have been a couple of very prominent exhibitions, heavily covered in the press.

Sheila outlines much of Miller’s life, and all of it is fascinating. I keep wondering: Why is this woman not a more household name? She was in Hitler’s apartment hours after his suicide. Her clothes were still spattered with mud from Dachau, and she wiped her feet on Hitler’s bath towels and took a bath in his own tub. Why had I never heard this?

Well, I’ve heard it now, and another name goes on my “Photographers to Study” list.

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Today in “Ya never know….”

Last Sunday morning I ventured out to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite local place of mine, to walk and do some photography. I wasn’t all that excited at the prospect, though, because the morning was quite cold and it was the kind of overcast that makes the light just dull and uninspiring. And it was something like the eighth, ninth, or even tenth day like that in a row. I’ll spare my long-time readers my rant about how the worst season in WNY is not Winter but rather Spring, but I did post a whine on TikTok and as a YouTube short about it. Anyway, the walking was unpleasant and dismal, with a constant breeze that was just enough to keep you cold, and of course by this time of year the trees still are bare so you don’t even escape the unpleasantness by going into the woods for shelter from the storm.

In short, I wound up staying at the park less than an hour, and I only took a dozen or two photos, most of which I didn’t even bother editing in Lightroom.

But…

…there was this bird.

 

Is this the best wildlife photo ever? Of course not. It’s not terribly sharp, and one photographer I follow on YouTube sometimes jokes about the ubiquity of what he calls “BOAS photos”: Bird on a stick.

This little bird (no, I’ve no idea what kind of bird that is, feel free to let me know!) sat in the tree above me long enough for me to get two photos, and then he flitted across the path to a birdhouse on a pole. I watched him there and I was happy to have snapped its photo twice, but then I realized that there was another bird inside the birdhouse, sticking its head out.

It’s nice to step back and look at my progress in photography and notice that I’m reaching a point where even when I’m not really feeling it and am in fact going to pull the plug and go home early, I still stand a good chance of getting something good!

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At the Gardens

Last week my Brother-in-Law visited us, and one of the things we did was go to the Botanical Gardens, which is always a terrific time, as well as a great place to practice photography! I organized my edited shots from that day into this Flickr album, but here are my favorites from that day:

 

From the front steps of the Gardens, you can see the looming edifice of Our Lady of Victory Basilica.
A mobile of Japanese umbrellas in the main rotunda. This took a bit of editing, but I like how it came out!
In the time we’ve been going to the Gardens, I’ve probably taken at least two dozen attempted mirror selfies in this wonderfully ornate mirror. Somehow they usually don’t turn out, mainly because I always try to do these quickly before someone comes along. This time I said the hell with it. I’ve really developed something of an ability to say “I have this camera and I’m getting my shot!” of late….
This Buddha statue, in the wonderful Tropical Plants room, is not only my favorite subject at the Gardens, but it’s one of my favorite photographic subjects anywhere in the area. I always take multiple shots of this statue when we’re there. This one turned out pretty well! The key here was the leaf in the foreground, partially shrouding the Buddha and giving the photo some depth. The fact that I’m getting shots like this is a sign, I hope, that I’m leveling up as a photographer!

I have a lot more photos from last weekend that I haven’t even edited yet! If you’re looking for a hobby that will eat some time, photography’s the one, folks.

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“I’ll take ‘KINDS OF RAMAS’ for $1000, Ken”

The answer: “This type of widescreen photograph can be created in Lightroom by stitching together multiple photographs from a single vantage point.”

“What is a panorama?”

Last Sunday I was at Chestnut Ridge park on a wonderfully clear day, and thus I was able to take a series of shots of the entire Buffalo-Niagara region, with visibility all the way to Niagara Falls, ON and beyond, and I was further able to experiment with creating a panorama in Lightroom. And here it is:

I know, that’s…tiny, as presented here. For the full-size enlargeable version, go here. I’m very happy with how this turned out! For one thing, I never realized that the OLV Basilica in Lackawanna can be seen clearly from up there.

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“The Promise of Spring”

Via Leanne Boulton, one of my favorite photographers working today. Boulton resides in Scotland and primarily produces street photography, which is one of my favorite genres. And as great good luck would have it, this photo appears on a day when it’s actually sunny and warm in Buffalo! Since we just had five inches of snow the other morning, I’ll take it.

(I am long on record as loving winter and snow, but my personal cutoff for when I get annoyed by it is St. Patrick’s Day. Once the Irish folk have calmed back down, I’m done with snow. In an act of climatic disobedience, I refused to shovel any of this most recent snow. Screw that, says I! My car can easily drive through it, and as I write this, my driveway is every bit as clear as the people who insisted on shoveling this weekend.)

 

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Astro

Photography, that is.

Last week I was blessed with (a) a clear night, and (b) very little moonlight. This led to a brief astrophotography session outside, where I set up my tripod right in my driveway, set my camera’s focus for “infinity”, bumped up the ISO a bit, set the shutter for various lengths, and took photos.

This resulted in a lot of clunker photos, but…not all! One thing I’m quickly learning is that the formula “take a bunch of photos during a session and maybe you’ll have a few keepers” is quite normal, even for really good photographers. I was happier with my star photos than with my moon photos; clearly I have work to do in that particular department. I still have quite a bit to learn, but for now, these are much better than my first efforts at astrophotography with this camera, last summer.

 

I really think my problem with the Moon is one of getting the right focus and light settings.
Orion and Canis Major, rising over one of the big trees at the end of the street. I love astrophotography photos that combine the sky with a terrestrial element, like this tree.
Just Orion this time, with other stellar friends.
If you follow the three stars of Orion’s belt to the left–“southwest” across the sky–you encounter Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, in its constellation home of Canis Major. If you follow those same belt stars the other direction, though, you’ll find a small stellar cluster called the Pleiades. That’s them near the center of this photo. The Pleiades are utterly stunning through a telescope, but to the naked eye they are very dim. Luckily this timed exposure captured them nicely!

Of course, there’s a major celestial event coming up in just a couple of weeks that will test my photography skills in a unique way that I’m not likely to get another chance to practice in my lifetime. I’m starting to get excited for the eclipse!

 

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The trains don’t run anymore….

Photos from a short walk at the Orchard Park Railroad Depot yesterday. The Depot, you may remember, has been lovingly restored after years of neglect after the trains stopped running, and the tracks are now a rail trail.

The glass insulators on the old railroad power line poles always fascinate me when they’re still intact up there, even after all these years. My father had a coworker years ago who loved railroads and he had a few of these insulators on the shelves in his office.
I hope this person properly penalized themselves a stroke! (The rail trail borders a golf course.)
My phone, taking a picture of me as I took a picture of it. Whoa.
I like how this turned out. I got the colors exactly the way I wanted them. This one, and the next, were edited in Snapseed; the ones above were edited in Lightroom.
I honestly think I nailed my personal appearance yesterday!

These weren’t the only photos I took! I actually took a bunch, but of those only these were the real keepers; some others were actually practice photos I really don’t intend to do much with. I was using a new ND filter that stops a ton of light, and I used it to practice a bit of shutter-speed work as well as a couple of shots of the sun, just to get used to using it before the Total Eclipse of the Heart–er, Sun happens on April 8.

Later this week, they’re saying we may get snow. I mean, fine, winter’s not technically over yet, but today, as I write this, is St. Patrick’s Day, which is generally my personal cut-off point beyond which I am pretty sick of snow. Though this year hasn’t produced nearly enough snow for me to be sick of, so…I guess we’ll see how I feel.

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Editing with Lightroom!

While studying photography this past year, I’ve learned that the most prevalent photo-editing software out there seems to be a program called Lightroom. (I don’t want to admit how long it took me to realize that this is a pun on “dark room”, where all the photographic magic used to happen.) I figured that eventually I would need to get myself familiar with Lightroom and start using it for my photo edits; I also figured that to get the best results from this, I would need to start shooting eventually in the RAW format. I’ve been shooting in JPEG up until now, because it’s just easier for me to use when I’m still learning the ins and outs of the camera itself. I’m a big fan of segmenting the learnings, and tackling one thing at a time; right now, I’m barely starting to get kinda good with the camera by itself. Besides, I got time!

Which isn’t to say I haven’t been doing any editing at all! No, I’ve been using a nice (and free!) app called Snapseed to do editing to this point. It’s nice because it’s mobile and it’s pretty powerful, so I’ve been doing all my main photo editing on that app, on my tablet. I could use Snapseed on my phone, but I like the bigger screen of the tablet. My plan was to sign up for a Lightroom subscription soon, likely in the spring.

Well, I just learned when my Flickr Pro account renewed that it comes with a free three-month trial for Lightroom. I got this all set up last night, and now, yada yada, I’ve done my first edits! What follows are the original shot, followed by my edited version. I didn’t go too dramatic with my edits, but I deepened and intensified the colors in some spots, added some vignetting (I love a bit of vignetting), decreased the detail sharpness just a bit for a slightly more dreamy appearance, and I upped the contrast a bit. I quite like the result.

(The picture was taken from Canalside in downtown Buffalo, where I was able to look through the space between the ground-level and the I-190 underpass for a bit of framing. I also like framing.)

 

Some photographers I follow are able to use Lightroom to get some fascinating and quite dramatic results with their original photos. This is an aspect of photography that I am greatly anticipating learning!

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Let the river run….

It is rapidly turning out that water is one of my favorite subjects for photography. It does so many fascinating things, and its relationship with light is particularly fascinating….

The top three are of Buffalo Creek as it flows past the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center. As the Creek tumbles over the rock beds there, it makes a nice bit of mild whitewater. The very first photo shows a phenomenon that whitewater boaters call a “hole”, when the water rushes over a rock in the stream and then falls back on itself, making a small water feature that looks like a pile of water flowing upstream.

The bottom two photos are of one of the many tiny streams that flow through Chestnut Ridge Park. The channel through which the stream is flowing in the first of these two photos is only about six or seven feet deep at that point, but just a few hundred feet downstream this small gully becomes a deep gorge that I assume to be at least fifty feet deep, if not more. The bottom photo is of one of the waterfalls that this stream plunges over. Note the ice crystals covering the far wall of the gorge, where the winter sun never shines….

 

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