Shooting For The Moon

 

It has been much too long since I've posted new content here - nearly 5 years in fact.

I'm starting out 2022 with putting more effort into my photography. This involves a few key things that I've done or intend to do.

• Getting out more with the camera - at least once a week.
• Posting more on Instagram and my Facebook page (from these more frequent outings).
• Refreshing my website.
• Creating a new YouTube channel with the intent to begin posting content.
• And, might as well include, posting on this blog.

The above photo is a recent one that I posted. I received a question on lens and camera settings, so I wanted to go ahead and expound a bit on the answer here.

The Total Experience

So, this past Monday, August 21, 2017, there was a total solar eclipse across the United States. Like any good photographer, I saw it as an opportunity for photos.

Since Monday, I have seen a lot of amazing images of the eclipse. Sadly, mine really don't measure up fully. Living in the path of totality is great, but despite my initial aspirations of heading somewhere scenic for the event, all the hype surrounding it helped make the decision for me to stay home.

My family and I sat in the backyard and watched the whole thing. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the moon start to cover the sun, and then to experience the moment that it fully covered the sun. The drop in temperature and light levels as the sun was more and more covered were amazing to witness. My children even went in to get blankets as things started to cool off.

I started taking photos from the very beginning, and didn't stop until the sun was completely uncovered once more. I didn't have a set interval for the photos, and manually triggered the camera when I felt I should. I had decided that, as much as I would love to get some amazing photos, that I was going to concentrate more on just experiencing it, while getting some photos along the way.

My setup was fairly simple. I don't have equipment to auto track the movement of the sun, although that would have been helpful. I shot with my 70-200mm lens with a Tamron 2x teleconverter, and obviously used a tripod. I had purchased, from Amazon, a small sheet of solar film that I made into a filter for my lens. For triggering purposes, I use an app call DSLRDashboard on my phone. This allowed me to remotely trigger the camera, as well as access a live view image to assist in adjusting the camera as necessary. I used auto exposure bracketing, to help ensure that I would get a good exposure. By setting the 2 second self-timer on the camera, it automatically fired off all 3 exposures each time.

The above GIF is the result a quite a bit of work in Lightroom and Photoshop. Much of that work was manually aligning the images since I don't have a tracking device. It's not the spectacular images or videos that you've seen elsewhere, but it is something. The file size is larger than I had expected, so hopefully it loads well for you.

The Facebook Ad Experience

On April 8th of this year, while wasting some time on Facebook, a notification popped up. Facebook was offering me a $30 coupon to "boost" my post of the photo seen here. Well, if they're going to let me do it for free, then I'll definitely take them up on it.

I set it up to last 7 days and use the full $30. If nothing else, it would give me a chance to see whether or not boosting a post was worth it, and it could provide some material for a blog post, this blog post.

Natural Light Photography, Good or Bad? | Part 1

The other day my wife and I were discussing, in a round about way, portrait photography. She mentioned a photographer that many people she knows have used to take portraits of their children and/or family. My wife pulled up this photographer's facebook page to show me some of the photos presented there. This particular photographer stated that they were a "natural light" photographer. It got me to thinking what this means, and whether or not that was a good thing.

My Experience With A Borrowed MeFOTO Tripod

Recently my wife and I made a trip to our nation's capital city, Washington, D.C. While my wife was going to take part in a conference, I was going to be a tourist and, hopefully, get some great photos along the way.

I knew that I wanted to take a tripod with me, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to take my trusty old (but big) Manfrotto. With that in mind, I asked my friend, and local photographer, +Marty Hegr, if I could borrow his MeFOTO tripod, which I had seen him using on a few photowalks that we had attended together.

Below are my thoughts:

Children's Portraits | Hannah and Preston

Tuesday evening I had the opportunity to make some outdoor portraits of these two young children. I thought I'd go ahead and share a few favorites, giving their mom a chance to see some before the final product is delivered.

Anatomy of a Portrait | Off Camera Manual Flash

One of my favorite techniques, now that I understand it and realize how easy it is, is off camera manual flash. My eyes were opened to this technique last September when I attended WPPI U in Portland.

This is something that I can use for a more formal portrait shoot, or I can use it for the casual playground portrait such as the one above. It's quite simple and something that I am happy to have in my arsenal.