by adecosmo

Afternoon Shading

Picture info: ISO 100, 36mm, f/13, 1/60 sec

Week 45 (6/92014 -6/15/2014): My Apartment

Picture taken on 6/15/2014 at 6:05 PM

Photograph description

A recent YouTube video gave me the idea about trying to photograph things in my everyday life. The challenge with photographing everyday life is finding ways to creatively photograph your surroundings. This past sunday, as I laid on my couch post Father’s day brunch thinking about what I could photograph, I realized my subject was literally right in front of me. Right next to the couch in my room is a 6 foot high inset window that captures the most amazing afternoon light. The time and angle of which the sun hits my window varies throughout the year, but during the summer it’s light starts around 5PM and lasts until about 630PM. As the sun moves left to right across the sky it’s light bleeds through the cracks of room’s blinds creating different shades of light minute to minute. Adding to the shading complexity is a tree that sits in my backyard. Depending on the day’s wind, the tree’s leaves are typically swaying creating a constantly shifting wave of shaded patterns. This daily afternoon dance of shade and light has captured my attention countless times and is ultimately why I chose to feature it as this week’s picture.

Photography concepts

Manual, manual, manual, that is how I was able to shoot this week’s image. Shooting in manual over the past few months has unlocked a whole new world when it comes to photographing light. It took a few times of shooting then adjusting to find the exposure that I thought best captured the moment. The tricky part was not moving away from an aperture that captured the sun’s light appropriately. In week’s past I’ve often spoken about what apertures are best for making the sun look a certain way. This week I didn’t wanted the sun to softly peak form the blinds so kept my aperture in the range of f/11-f/15. I’ve found that those apertures produce nice soft sun beams. Anything larger (f/1.8-f/10) starts to make the sun look like one giant blob of light, and anything smaller (f/16+) make the sun’s beam have a sharpness to them. I’ve taken a picture of the sun peaking through my blinds at f/22 and it didn’t create an image that’s true to the way I see it.

Old picture using f/22

The second half of creating this week’s image was done in lightroom. Raising the Highlights, Contrast, Whites, and Clarity while lowering Shadows, and Blacks is how I achieved this week’s image. The more you play with these settings the better you will become with knowing what to raise or lower to achieve your look. It can be intimidating the first time you use Lightroom when you see all of the adjustments at your fingertips, but trust me before you know it you’ll be flying through them and wish you had more ways to tweak your image. Lightroom has become my greatest tool for fine tuning an image to be exactly what I want. The only way you’ll learn is through practice, I’ve edited 1000’s of images since starting this blog and I’m still learning new tricks. If you haven’t already I highly recommend purchasing lightroom and trying it out today!

05.01.14

by adecosmo

Beaming

Picture info: ISO 250, 36mm, f/14, 1/100 second

Week 38 (4/21/2014 -4/27/2014): 9th & Park, Hoboken

Picture taken on 4/22/2014 at 6:40 PM

Photograph description:

If you have ever scrolled through my instagram gallery, you probably noticed that I enjoy taking pictures featuring the sun. When posting to Instagram, the sun is a little bit of a photo hack. What do I mean by photo hack? It’s been my experience that people tend to give more likes to pictures that have nice contrast, especially when that contrast is created from the sun’s beaming light. Featuring the sun might be a bit of a cheat, but there still is an art to it. I’ll give some tips on how I feature the sun with my phone and camera in the next section.

This week’s picture was shot while I was out hunting down material for my “Hoboken Streets” project. The biggest challenge of the project will be to find unique ways to photograph the “streets,” without featuring the sun in each picture. On top of avoiding too many sun shots I’m also going to avoid taking any of the pictures along the waterfront. Yes the waterfront is still in Hoboken, but I’d like this project to feature more of the interior sections of Hoboken. If you have any suggestions for locations shoot me an email. This project is all about exploring the streets so the more unique the better!

Photography Concepts:

The main thing you have to think about when you’re taking pictures directly into the sun is setting the right exposure. When you’re shooting the sun with your phone your exposure is typically locked to wherever your focus point is. My recommendation is to set your pictures exposure on a darker area. When you select a darker area your phone’s sensor will adjust the exposure to make the dark area evenly exposed. With the darker area exposed properly the sun should be overexposed and appear to be very bright. If you want to apply some kind of HDR setting to your picture in post, then meter the pictures exposure by focusing on the sun. This will make your image look very dark but the HDR will bring back most of the detail. I recommend going with the first exposure setup, overexposing the sun makes it look better.

Setting your exposure is obviously different with a DSLR and is done by making adjustments to your ISO, Shutter speed and aperture. When shooting the sun with a DSLR your ISO should be as low as it can go, which is typically 100. Choose your aperture based on how you want the sun to look in the picture. If you use an aperture of f/22 the sun will look almost like a star with very sharply pointed flares. The wider the aperture the softer the flares will become. This week’s picture was shot at f/14 which is a good middle ground. My beams (flares) have nice lines that fade into the picture smoothly.

Selecting your shutterspeed is easy if you’re in aperture priority, because the camera will do it for you. If you’re shooting in manual, like I did for this picture, then you should start with a quick shutter and work your way down until your image is exposed to your liking. The reason you should start with a quick shutter is so you don’t burn out your sensor with the sun. I can only imagine the damage that would be done to your sensor with a 30 second sun exposure….ouch.

Two more quick tips. One when you’re lining everything up, try to put the sun on either the left or right thirds intersection line. This not only follows the rule of thirds, it also will make for better sun beams shooting through your picture. My second tip is to find something like a tree, flower or cloth material that you can backlight with the sun. Backlighting things that let some light through give your picture some nice texture. If you backlight something that lets no light through, as in people, walls or buildings you’re left with a nice silhouette. The choice is up to you, get creative and more importantly have fun!

04.16.14

by adecosmo

Dealing with lines

Picture Info: ISO 1600, 36mm, f/11, 1/30 sec

Week 36 (4/7/2014 -4/13/2014): Tampa International Airport, Terminal A

Picture taken on 4/8/2014 at 6:37 PM

Photograph description:

While traveling it’s nearly impossible to avoid standing in lines. Typically a trip starts with the traffic you always seem to hit on your way to the airport. Once you arrive at the airport, there is bag check, security and finally the line for boarding. In addition to the standard lines you might also stand in line for a snack, the bathroom or perhaps to gain access to the highly sought after charging station. For so many lines, there is an equal amount of solutions that people come up with for dealing with them. Some people bring a travel buddy, some depend on an unhealthy amount of electronics (my father), while others simply pop a pill and fall into a manufactured state of calm. No matter how you slice it, everyone has to deal with lines.

Just like in traveling, in photography we all have to find a way to deal with lines. I was reminded of this topic while killing time in the airport waiting on my delayed flight. As you likely guessed my entertainment of choice while waiting was taking pictures. From a visual standpoint Tampa is one of the more interesting airports that I’ve flow into. Terminal A, my usual turnstop, is a long continuous room split by the Green Iguana bar. When you stand on either of the extreme ends of the terminal you’re provided a nice visual. There are many “Leading Line” types of visuals. Looking down you’re taken through the terminal via winding tiles, while looking up will provide you with a super straight light formation. All of these lines have always made it an interesting challenge to try and get everything lined up. This time around I decided to make good use of my delay time and try my best to properly line up the shot. Let me just say this week’s photo was the result of more than a few attempts.

Photography concepts:

As mentioned in this weeks description section, this week was all about dealing with lines. When you’re dealing with lines and multiple points of symmetry things tend to get complicated. There are a couple adjustments that all need to be balanced properly. First you need to center your picture, which if you’re observant doesn’t look like I did. Although the light was centered I was a few inches off with my physical alignment with the center tile. I wanted to use my mistake to illustrate the difficulty of dealing with so much symmetry. Through mistakes such as this, I’ve found what I believe to be the main adjustments to focus on while lining up a shot.

First, as I said center your image to the best of your ability, and more importantly make sure your camera’s lens is in the right position (where I failed). You don’t have to be perfect because once you start making other adjustments you’re going to lose the perfect center. The important thing it to take note of whatever you central reference points are (top and bottom). Second adjust your left to right tilt which is done by pushing either side of the camera more forward. While doing this try to recenter your image again using two center reference points. The third and last adjustment is your camera’s up/down tilt. Tilting your camera pointing up will forced 90 degree horizontal lines (such as buildings) to lean back, while tilting down will lean things forward. Completing all of these adjustments is a juggling act and may take a couple times of cycling through your steps doing minor tweaks. If you have a tripod, I highly recommend using one for these precise shots. Take your time and get the shot right. That was my issue, I couldn’t take my time. I rushed my shot a little because of the fact that I was in an airport. Sometimes people get odd when you’re using a DSLR in certain places such as airports or train stations. In fact, the person walking towards me in this week’s shot was a security guard. Luckily he wasn’t coming to yell at me.

Right after taking the picture I saw that it wasn’t perfectly lined up but I figured that was the best I’d get, and thought I could fix it via lightroom’s perspective editing. After importing my image into lightroom I realized that even though the perspective editor is good, you can’t fix everything. Because I positioned myself wrong there wasn’t much I could do. Based on this realization I’d say although you need to focus on all three adjustments (center, left/right tilt, down/up tilt) the most important is center setting that central pivot point (the line between your two center points). The down/up and right/left tilt perspective are easier to fix after the fact. This just goes to show you, you’re always better off getting it right “in camera.”

03.09.14

by adecosmo

Sounds like home

Picture info: ISO 3200, 36mm, f/4.5, 1/320 seconds

Week 31 (3/3/2014 -3/9/2014): Wood-Ridge NJ

Picture taken on 3/6/2014 at 6:59 PM

Photography description:

It all started about 26 years ago on one seemingly regular afternoon. I was too young to remember but I’ve been told the story hundreds of times. My mother left me (then a baby) with my dad as she went out to run some errands. A few hours later my mom returned to a house filled with the sound of music. Figuring I was asleep in my room she went to check on me, to her surprise I was not in my crib!? She scrambled around looking for me and immediately ran towards my father who was still playing the piano. “Louis! Where is Anthony?!” my mother said, as my father turned around from the piano to answer she saw that I was sound asleep strapped to my father’s stomach. I believe that in that moment my love for music was born. From that day on music has been a source of comfort for me and always reminds me of home.

As the years passed my father continued playing the piano and my love for listening never faded. Though I’ll admit there were times where I didn’t agree with the music selection which usually led to a clash between my father and I. Overall the amount of times I enjoyed listening to my father play far outnumbered the times I wanted to hit the mute button.

Fast forward to this past Wednesday, I was taken back to my childhood through the sound of the piano. Visiting my parents is always nice but this time was especially great. As my mother prepared a delicious meal, my father treated us to some musical entertainment. Talk about sensory overload. Between the sounds of the piano and the smell from the kitchen it was hard to not soak up the feeling of being home. Luckily I had my camera on hand to capture a moment that I’ll always remember.

Photography concepts:

Light and how it fills a room is something that I always try to focus on in my pictures. During my father’s mini concert all of the lights were off, with the exception of the one piano light. The single light source enabled me to focus in on my father with everything else faded to black.

Initially I set my camera to manual (M) to give me full control over the exposure. The picture that I had in mind was one where my father was surrounded by darkness with only him and the piano softly illuminated. While in manual I had two options for how to expose my picture. One option was the shutter speed, the other option was my aperture. The hardest part was finding the perfect equilibrium between the both the shutter speed and aperture. If I shot with a wide open aperture it was hard to keep everything in focus (small plan of focus). Meanwhile if I shot with a small aperture and a slow shutter my fathers hands began to blur. Although the motion blurred hands looked interesting, it wasn’t exactly what I was going for plus it was hard to keep everything else from blurring too. If I had my tripod I may have set that up and tried to get a nice motion blur image. Unfortunately I left my tripod at my apartment so long exposures were out of the question.

Alternate view

Eventually I flipped my camera into aperture priority (A on Nikon) and used the exposure compensation feature to adjust my image’s exposure. In order for me to get the picture to look the way I wanted, I had to underexpose the image by -2.3 stops. After finding the right exposure it was all about finding the best composition to capture the moment.

Keeping the rule of thirds in mind as a guide, I moved around firing off shots from different angles. I tried everything, directly behind my father, from the side, low angle, eye level, up close on his hands but nothing seemed to fit. Then I remembered one of the handy features of my D5200, the rotating screen. I flipped out my screen tilted it down and held my camera high above my head to line up my shot. Finally I found the right angle which captures everything, the piano, my father and the sheet music. This week I shot my picture pretty close to what I wanted in Camera so there wasn’t too much editing required. I’ve talked about editing a lot over the past few weeks so this week I’ll skip it. It makes me happy to say that thanks to the skills I’ve learned over the past 31 weeks, I was able to create the image that I originally had in mind.

Rule of Thirds

02.24.14

by adecosmo

Cameo

Picture info: ISO 160, 36mm, f/4.0, 1/4000 sec

Week 29 (2/17/2014 -2/23/2014): Wagner Park, New York, NY

Picture taken on 2/23/2014 at 5:13 PM

Photograph description:

There is a first for everything, and this week was a feast of firsts. For starters, this week was the first time that I didn’t post within my weekly deadline. After a busy weekend when it came time to write my post on Sunday night, I couldn’t resist collapsing face down on my plush tempurpedic. Other than my latent post, this week also marked the first time that my post’s picture was shot with something other than my Nikon 35mm f/1.8 lens. I still shot my picture at ~35mm but this time it was with a new Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8. I had been tussling with whether or not to buy a new lens for a couple of weeks. Last week I was finally able to validate purchasing a new lens. One of my stocks recently started to take a hit so I decided to cut bait and divert those funds to the investment of a new lens. Hopefully the lens will pay better dividends.

The last two “firsts” worth noting are locations based. This week was the first time that I visited Washington Square park and the nearby Stumptown coffee shop. I’ve been to the Stumptown on 29th street a few times but never the second and smaller location by Washington Square park. It was nice finally checking out the park even if it wasn’t the best time of the day for pictures. The sun was at about 45 degrees and blindingly bright. After walking around the park for a few minutes with my friend that tagged along we decidle split off from one another so we could each focus on finding the best shot. As I moved away from the park’s iconic arch I found a couple ways to use to the sun’s harsh angle. One was to shoot some reflection pictures using the wet ground. The second idea I had was to line the sun up within the street lights that littered the park so it looked like they were glowing in the daylight. Although both were fun ideas, they quickly grew old so I decided to find my friend and search for a better location.

Washington Square Park Light Post

With sunset approaching we decided to head to Wagner Park located at the southern tip of Manhattan. I shot at that location once before during week 16 but since it provides great sunsets, I knew there was no harm in taking a return visit.

While on our way south we seemingly stopped every couple of feet to take pictures. Since the purpose of our trip was to take pictures, frequently stopping wasn’t a problem, but it was threatening our chances of getting to the park at the right time. Eventually we decided to jump on the 1 train to expedite our journey.

Once we got out of the subway we made a beeline towards the park. When we finally cleared the tall buildings of the financial district, I yelled out “boomshakalaka” in excitement once I saw the beautiful evening sky. For the next hour or so my friend and I were treated to one of the better sunsets I’ve seen in a while. We both shuffled around the park trying to find the best shot. I eventually spotted a patch of tall grass which provided me with a good foreground subject and sealed the deal for this week’s picture.

Photography concepts:

Since this week is the first time shooting with my new Sigma lens it makes sense for me to talk about some of the advantages it provides. One of the advantages which benefited this week’s picture is the Sigma’s nice bokeh. As I talked about last week, bokeh is the part of the picture that’s out of focus. One thing I recently learned is that with nicer lenses the bokeh is smoother and although it’s a little bit of an oxymoron, the out of focus images are sharper. The nice bokeh worked well for creating silhouettes of the lamp post, railing and couple walking.

Another advantage the Sigma has is a low fixed aperture of f/2.8. Although the Sigma doesn’t beat my Nikon 35mm’s f/1.8 aperture it’s still large enough to make shooting indoor and night pictures easier. The Nikon beats the Sigma aperture but the Sigma has a 4-stop Anti-Shake feature which allows for slower shutter speeds. This means that although the Nikon can let in more light via a wider aperture, the Sigma can let in more light via slower shutters (without using tripods). The term 4-stops means I can go 4 stops lower than the recommended shutter speed for a specific focal length. When shooting at 35mm (52 with a crop sensor) it’s recommended that I stay at or above 1/100 of a second. Thanks to the anti-shake feature I can hit a shutter speed of 1/40 of a second, and possibly slower if I have any added stabilization. This is a moot point if you’re using a tripod but it’s very relevant when you’re shooting indoors or at night.

The last advantage I’ll quickly mention because it’s not one that can help me during my 52from52 photoblog series is that the Sigma is a zoom. The advantage of having a zoom lens is pretty obvious. With a zoom you’re able to recompose your picture without moving and hit targets that a 35mm prime can’t. Because it’s a zoom I might use my Sigma again in some upcoming posts, not to shoot my picture from another focal length, but so that I have some flexibility for the pictures not meant for this blog. The Sigma’s focal length range 17-50mm ( ~25-75mm) is very versatile. The lens moves from wide angle to a nice focal length for taking pictures of people, especially when I can maintain a f/2.8 aperture. The possibilities this lens has is exciting so stay tuned!

02.01.14

by adecosmo

Halfway there

Picture info: ISO 100, 35mm, f/22, 4 seconds, -2.1 ND filter, -.7 exposure

Week 26 (1/27/2014 – 2/2/2014) : Hoboken Uptown Pier

Picture taken on 2/1/2014 at 3:30 PM

Picture description:

This week marks the halfway point of my fifty two week photoblog series. Throughout the week I jumped back and forth a lot trying to decide what picture/subject to shoot for my twenty sixth post. In the end I decided where better to shoot than where I started twenty six weeks ago? That’s right, I returned to my favorite spot in Hoboken along the uptown waterfront. After I finally submitted to the idea I grabbed a coffee from bwè kafe and sat on “my bench” to think out how I could put a new twist on a picture I’ve taken so many times. As I mentally flipped through the various pictures that I’ve taken at the location I paused on one picture taken with a triple exposure. In the picture a runner zoomed through the frame and gave off a ghost like image. As I sat at my bench dwelling on the ghost image it hit me, what if I used myself to create another “ghost like” image and thus was literally halfway in the picture, or “halfway there.” This seemed like a cleverly fun idea and I’m glad that I was able to pull it off.

Photography concepts:

To pull off the “halfway there” image idea I had two options. My first option was to shoot the picture like the original “ghost like” image using a double or triple exposure. A multiple exposure picture would have been easy, so I decided to go with a more challenging option that utilized more of the skills/knowledge I’ve learned over the past twenty six weeks. What I decided was to shoot my picture using a long exposure and wireless trigger. This sounds straight forward enough too but the challenge was to do this during the day. In daylight long exposures are hard to execute, luckily this is something I’ve done in the past in a few of my posts. With the use of my handy neutral density filters, and a super small aperture of f/22, I was able to hit a shutter speed of four seconds. Four seconds was the perfect amount of time to create a “halfway there’ image. I stayed in the frame for 2 seconds then quickly jumped out of frame for the remaining 2. It took me a couple of attempts but eventually I nailed it!

Challenge number two of this week was how to edit an otherwise boring skyline. When shooting the skyline from Hoboken I typically wait for a day with interesting clouds, or wake up really early to shoot at sunrise. This time I had already missed my sunrise option for the day, and literally had too many clouds to work with. When I shot this picture it was a cloudy overcast day with a slight tint of blue showing up in the clouds. Here is where being able to edit an image in an artistic manner pays off. For this week I went with a dull look with some slight color tints. The way I achieved my final look was by first applying some of my usual edits such as lowering highlights, increasing contrast, clarity and color saturation, along with applying some sharpening. After getting my picture prepped I then applied a VSCO preset filter “Polaroid 669” which gives the image a film look. I also applied some presets to boost the blues and saturation even more in the image. The finishing touch was to add a slight vignette around the edges. As you can see from the before and after comparison, the right editing makes all the difference.