Single-Serving Photo

I feel like I’ve been on a streak of article writing lately, which is good, but I’ve also been neglecting the original charter of this site—to post experimental and spontaneous photos. Fortunately, I’ve been taking a lot of experimental and spontaneous photos, I just haven’t been posting them. So, without further ado… the New London Pier on a foggy morning.

This first one has a pretty wavy tone curve applied to it (in Lightroom), which brings out that great bit of light in the sky while not plowing all of the foreground shadow into an inky black mass. There is also a split tone (blue for highlights, brown for shadows) that I think gives it a very interesting feeling.

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This one is almost my favorite minimalist composition ever, and that’s saying something. I’m a big stickler for minimalism (if you didn’t know), but what really grabs me about this is the wonderfully placid reflections in the water on the left and, if you look closely, the ever so subtle and soft point of land coming out on the right edge.

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Enjoy.

There’s been more talk than usual lately about keeping a camera with you; taking it places you might not normally take it; the disappointment of missing what could have been a great image if only you had; and the question of whether having the camera with you, though not at the ready, would even help.

Opinions differ, but you can’t lose by having the camera around even if you don’t think you’ll use it. I happened to be driving around Narragansett Bay (actually, across it) in Rhode Island this weekend and, because I was there specifically to take some family portraits, I thankfully had my camera with me and was able to capture this scene.

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This was taken from the Newport side of the Claiborne Pell Bridge, which connects Newport (on Aquidneck Island) in the west to Conanicut Island (chiefly the town of Jamestown) to the east.

The following evening, I took some advice to heart, took the battery grip off of my old Canon 10D, strapped on my 50mm f/1.4 (my smallest lens), and went for a walk by the city pier. I enjoy walking down there because it’s quite scenic and with the harbor and train station in close proximity you never know what you’ll be able to see.

Here is an 8:15 Amtrak Acela departing for points unknown (probably Boston, eventually). I braced my camera against one of those I-beams you see ahead of me. No tripod necessary!

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A close-up of a vendor’s cart parked along the side of the pier, probably left over from Sailfest. I liked the reflection in it and the texture of it.

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A handsome public observation binocular lit by the lights on the pier overlooks the Thames River and the General Dynamics building on the far shore. General Dynamics, previously known as Electric Boat, is a major submarine defense contractor and a significant source of income for the southeast Connecticut shoreline.

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General Dynamics itself glimmers against the water. I was shooting JPEG (the 10D is so slow with RAW) and I set the white balance to “cloudy” for this shot to enhance its redness.

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On my walk back home, this sailor’s monument caught my eye.

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I think the moral of the story is that it’s better to have your “second string” camera with you, stripped down to its most convenient minimum, than to have no camera at all!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, well, you know, photographs here on my photo blog, but I think you’ll agree it was worth the wait. I spent a day in rainy Boston last weekend with my Lensbaby 3G, introducing it to the charm of beantown.

This was the first time I took the Lensbaby out in the city and I am very pleased with the results. It’s extremely challenging to focus by sight without a proper focusing screen, and being locked at f/2 probably doesn’t help either, but I wanted the most dramatic depth of field and also the most flexibility in varying light conditions. I made several of these shots by “bracketing focus,” which is to say I would make several exposures rapidly while very slightly moving the Lensbaby’s front ring toward and away from me in the range where it appeared to be in focus through the viewfinder.

A few shots that I thought I nailed were completely blurry, and others that I wasn’t sure about came out very well, so that’s a testament to practice… Which I lack. Without further ado:

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Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

I went back to Mohegan Park after being told that there was an “abandoned zoo” on the premises. I didn’t recall seeing what might pass as a zoo, but I had to go check it out anyway. As a bonus, it was a beautifully warm day and there can be no excuse for not going outside and enjoying it.

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Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

With these two, I was experimenting with the tip I gave you on Wednesday. I set my auto-focus point to the one on the far right, which at first can feel a bit strange, but it does force the composition to be somewhat more interesting.

The first one here is with the 24-70mm f/2.8 (at 70mm), and the second is using the Sigma 105mm macro (a very fine lens, if I do say so myself).

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Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

The Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration (or MAIFE, as they abbreviate it) is located smack in the center of Mystic, Connecticut, and the area they call Old Mystick Village (that’s not a typo…). The whole Mystic area is one of the hottest tourist spots in Connecticut (it wouldn’t be a reach to say it’s the only tourist spot in Connecticut), and the Mystic Aquarium and nearby Mystic Seaport are popular summer destinations for Connecticut families and visitors from out of state alike.

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The aquarium is ripe with photographic subjects. Tank after tank of exotic, colorful fish; beluga whales; touching tanks filled with sea stars, coral, and so forth are all dying to be made into beautiful images. On a busy day like Saturday, the first day I went, you’ll be surrounded by people wielding their point-and-shoot cameras like claymores, blasting their body-mounted flashes directly into the tanks.

The greatest challenge to photographing at the aquarium (this applies only to the indoor tanks) is getting enough light. Even the most brightly lit tanks provide much less light than you think, most often because your eyes have become accustomed to the darkness and your brain is working to normalize everything you see.

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For this trip, I brought only my Canon 50mm f/1.4, which I kept at f/1.4 almost the entire time. I often had to push my 5D to its highest sensitivity, the equivalent of ISO 3200, and even then I couldn’t always get a shutter speed fast enough to handhold for the shot, much less to freeze the motion of a quickly swimming fish. The aquarium will definitely put your skills and your equipment to the test.

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In an ideal world, such as a sponsored shoot (not to imply that assignments are often, if ever, ideal), much brighter lights and possibly even softboxes might be employed to make the scene more technically feasible. If I had my way, I would place a single softbox or flash with diffuser above the tank where the standard light source is located and fire it with a PocketWizard or similar. Light that comes through the surface of the water has a wonderful, shimmering quality to it that most people recognize immediately.

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Of the 180 or so photographs I made on this excursion, only about five of them were good enough to toss up here. The major problem was, as I said before, not getting enough light. Even when the classic “focal length reciprocal rule” indicated that I should be able to handhold the shot, the fish I was trying to capture was moving too quickly. My problems were compounded by the 50mm f/1.4 being a fairly mediocre lens and suffering from a good deal of chromatic aberration and vignette (which I don’t mind too much, but it bears mentioning).

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I attempted to use Lightroom’s “lens correction” features to fix the chromatic aberration, but rather than having one of the two “classic” (and somewhat subtle) forms of aberration, the lens demonstrates what is often referred to simply as “purple fringing,” which means you’re basically out of luck. Add to that the fact that most of the images were pretty blurry and you can see where I’m going with this. That having been said, I think these five photos are fairly nice catches (no pun intended) out of a big group of rejects.