Melissa Popping Out

Tonight I played with a technique called “Popping Out of a Photo.”   I took a somewhat ordinary photo

and turned it into something interesting:

This is the same photo I made interesting by tilting it a bit.  I got this technique from the book, Photoshop CS Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby.

Bud Parker

Tonight I took a picture from yesterdays post and photoshopped it a bit.  I kept Mike in color and turned the background into black and white.  Sort of reminds me of the movie Pleasantville.  Bud Parker was the name of the Tobey Maguire character in Pleasantville.

Michael Is Blogging!

I talked Micheal into trying out blogging his freshman experiences at EKU.  Let’s see how long he lasts.

Here is his blog:  Mike's Blog  

In order to do it, I promised to give him my SD400 camera so he could take pictures to post.  I suspect he will get bored and I will get the camera back soon.  But if not, Canon came out with a couple of new Elph’s, the SD450 and SD550.  I will probably get the SD550 just because my brother got a SD500 to one-up my SD400 so it is my turn and I need to one-up him.

 

Lexington Legends

Last night Melissa and I went to see the Lexington Legends baseball team play.  The game was suppose to start at 6pm.  It was rain delayed for 2 hours.  Melissa and I showed up at 8pm and there were plenty of seats. We could just walk right in since the ticket takers had already left.  Free night at the game — woot!

when we first got there — I fell in love!   Check out that lens!  Woo boy.   Melissa cringed when she saw that lens.  She figures that one of those will be in the house soon   Even though it said Nikon on the plastic, I think that is a Canon hiding under there due to its distinctive white color. 

Actually, we went to the game to see Michael work at the game. 

Mike is part of the Mac Attack squad.  What they do is provide entertainment whenever there is a stop in the action — mostly when the teams switch up on the field.  It was a hard time keeping track of Micheal as he was all over the stadium.  When he wasn’t on the field, he was interacting with the fans.

Or he was waiting for a break in the action and talking with fellow staff members.  Mike sees me taking his photo and then tells his coworker who hams it up for the camera and then gets Mike to join in.

Of course there was baseball going on….   I tried pretty hard to get a bat-on-ball picture, but alas I didn’t.   I think I need a faster camera (and that lens from above) in order to get a better shot at getting a bat-on-ball picture.

During the game, some guy proposed to his girl friend.  I think she said yes.  I love the expressions on her face.  All smiles!

Mike with some kids on top of a dugout.  He seemed to enjoy his work most when he was dealing with the little kids.

Below our seats the Maker’s Mark girls were getting their picture taken.  I have no clue what this girl was thinking, but her expressions are priceless.

Some more pictures of Mike working.  The crowd wasn’t loud enough.

But the best part of the game was at the end when Mike came up and sat with us for a bit.

 

Georgetown Baptist Church At Night

Way back on August 14th, I took a morning picture of the Georgetown Baptist Church.  In that post I thought about what it would look like at night and I found out last night. I was not disappointed.  The church is lit up nicely and I am very happy with the photo.  But between the two, I think I like the morning photo better.

First Try At Off Camera Flash Outside

First, I missed yesterdays blog entry because work got in the way!  How dare it! 

This evening Melissa and I went up to the park and I took some pictures of her with an off camera flash.  Even though I have very little clue as to what I am doing, I am pretty happy with how these turned out.   It is pretty clear to me that the flash was a little hot for these pictures, but I still like how they turned out.  I can see that this is going to take some practice to get it right.  I think I like the 2nd one the best.  I think once I get it all figured out, that I am going to be able to take killer shots at dusk.

Melissa Is In The Paper .... Again!

Back on the 13th of October, I blogged Jazzercise Back To School Donation which was about Melissa’s Jazzercise class collecting and donating school supplies to the local schools.   Melissa submitted the picture to the newspaper as a way of recognizing the tremendous generosity of her students.  Whenever they get behind a cause, they always go above and beyond what is called for to give back to the community.  I am always happy to help by taking their picture.  The fringe benefits I get is to see “Photo by Jim Cook” in the newspaper. 

People may not realize but our school teachers purchase school supplies with their own money for the kids that can’t afford them.  Some teachers have told Melissa that they easily spend $400 to $500 a year. Yikes!  There are lots of kids in the community whose parents can’t afford to purchase their school supplies.

Here is a photo using my night flash technique of the photo in the local paper, The Georgetown News-Graphic.

 

More Info On Digitizing Photos

I had an epiphany last night and I really do know how I came up with it.  It just popped into my head somehow.  I figured out a new way to transfer old photo’s that works at night when there isn’t any good daylight like I talked about in my post Digitizing Old Photos Using A Digital Camera. I found an old picture to give it a try and see if my idea was worth a pile of beans or not.  It is really simple actually. I just used my a flash on the camera.  Not the one that comes with the camera, but an external flash, in my case a Canon Speedlight 580EX. 

With this flash, you can direct the flash anywhere you want, so I just pointed it straight up from the camera to bounce the flash.   As I took the picture of the old photograph that was lying on the table, the camera was pointed down and the flash was pointed at a nearby wall.  I took the photo and the light bounced off of the wall so there is an even light on the photo and no harsh lighting issues on the photo.  Since the color on the wall was beige and wasn’t white, there was a slight color shift in the photo which I quickly corrected for in Photoshop.  Here is the finished result. 

This is like a 10 year old picture of Mike (left) and Rob (Right) on a water ride.  If I am not mistaken, it was a Geauga Lake (which I think was bought out by Sea World) in Aurora Ohio.  I think they enjoyed getting wet much more than I did.  Luckily I had this small waterproof camera which worked quite nicely to get this photo. Rob got the worst of it and was pretty much drenched.

Melissa Art

This is a picture that I tinkered with of Melissa driving my car.  I took this shot shortly after the Horse Park shot from a few days ago on our way home from Moe’s.  I didn’t care for the picture at first and figured that I wouldn’t use it for anything.  But I started to play with it to see if I could create something more interesting and came up with this image.  I love it.  I am finding that with a little work, average images can turn into something interesting.

But good golly I need to wash my dirty window!  The effect really brought out the dirt on my window.

Melissa In The Park

Melissa and I went to the Scott County park Sunday after we ate at Moe’s.  I wanted to try out some new shots with some interesting angles.   We didn’t really plan on taking pictures, but it was a gorgeous evening and I had my 10D in the car, so I figured what the heck.  Melissa was kind enough to pose for me as I took the pictures.   I really like the way they turned out and the cross processing effects I applied to them.  The modern look of these photos has me really excited about my photography as it seems to have taken a step to a whole new level. I am looking forward to Rob or Mike’s next girlfriend so I can apply this affect to couples photographs.  They are gonna rock! 

 

Moe's Southwestern Grill

Tonight Melissa and I had a craving for Moe’s.  So we jumped into the car and drove into Lexington to eat at Moe’s.   Moe’s is in Hamburg Place and it has the best Mexican food.  Ok, they call themselves a southwest grill, but any place that serves burritos is Mexican in my book. 

Melissa had a buy one, get one free coupon so we both ordered an Art Vandalay.  You see, Moe’s has funky names for their food.  But don’t let the names fool you, the food is awesome.  It just tastes so fresh that one would swear that they grew all the ingredients out back.  An Art Vandalay is a vegetarian burrito.

The cilantro salsa, which they call salsa verde, is our favorite.

And Melissa loves the guacamole, so we always get a side of guacamole.  Ok this picture, and the next one especially is a little out of focus. I was taking the pictures with my SD400 without flash and I wasn’t too steady with the camera.  The smell of Moe’s was getting to me and I really wanted to eat, so I rushed the pictures.

Here is a picture of my burrito after I took a bite out of it.  Now I have a pretty big mouth and you can see the size of my bite, so that tells you how huge the burritos are. I really wish this was in focus as the picture just doesn’t do the burrito justice.

On the way home driving up I75 we go right past the Kentucky Horse Park.   I took a picture out the window as we were going by.

Sloppy Borders In Photoshop Made Easy

In my last post, Photoshop Scripts, I talked a little bit about a Photoshop script I created to automatically add sloppy borders around my images like this:

This journal entry will be the details of what I did so you too can use my script and produce your own sloppy borders instantly.

Before I go into the process, you may be wondering why I didn’t create a Photoshop action to produce the sloppy border.  While actions are nice, they are limited in power and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it using just Photoshop actions.  That forced me to learn the much more powerful Photoshop Scripting.

The pre-requisite knowledge for you to be able to do this as well is just a limited computer knowledge (how to create directories and edit files) and knowledge of Photoshop.  You really don’t need to know the scripting syntax, but looking at the script should make some sort of sense.  The basic process that the script does is this:

• Enlarge the canvas of the active image by 10 pixels so that there is some room for the sloppy border
• Open the sloppy border template and resize it to the exact same size of the image
• Select all of the border template, copy it
• Close the sloppy border template
• Paste the copied sloppy border template on top of the original image
• flatten the layers

You could do all of those steps by hand and not use a script.  But if you do this often, it becomes pretty tedious and the sloppy border script comes in handy.

Here are the steps to produce your own script and sloppy border. 

(1) Make a directory (also known as a folder) in which to store your sloppy border script and psd file.  The directory name should be sloppy.  The location of the directory needs to be in the /presets/scripts directory where you installed adobe Photoshop.  On my windows system, the full path is:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Scripts\sloppy

(2) you need to design your sloppy border template.  Create a .psd file called Sloppy-1.psd which has the border that you want to outline your photos.  Here is an example of what the file should look like in Photoshop.

Basically you have a border around the outside and in the middle you have a deleted region so that there isn’t anything. Save this in the sloppy directory.  My image is about 500 pixels by 300 pixels in size and it seems to work well.  However, I think any sized image (within reason) should work fine. If you want to be lazy, just copy the above image into Photoshop, place a selection around the checker box area and then delete it.

(3) With a text editor, create a sloppy1.js file in the sloppy directory which has the following contents:

var curDoc = app.activeDocument; curDoc.resizeCanvas(curDoc.width+UnitValue("10 px"),curDoc.height+UnitValue("10 px")); var sloppyDoc=open(File(app.path+"/presets/scripts/sloppy/sloppy-1.psd")); sloppyDoc.resizeImage(curDoc.width,curDoc.height); sloppyDoc.selection.selectAll(); sloppyDoc.selection.copy(); sloppyDoc.close(SaveOptions.DONOTSAVECHANGES); curDoc.paste();curDoc.mergeVisibleLayers();

You can just copy the above 10 lines and paste into the .js file to quickly create your script instead of typing the whole thing.  You may need to adjust and change the 10 px values in the script on line 2  if your border is either larger or smaller than mine to make it work correctly.  You will know when you run your script and see the results.

Your contents of the sloppy directory should be:

(4) Finally, it is time to test your script. Restart Photoshop if it is already active.  Then open an image that you want to put a sloppy border around.  Then select file -> scripts -> sloppy1 to execute the sloppy1 script.    Your photo should have a sloppy border around it.  If the border crops out too much of the picture, adjust the 10 px to something larger in line 2 of the sloppy1.js file.   If there is some gap between the border and your image, decrease the 10px values.  Use trial and error till you get something nice.

Some caveats.  I am new to Photoshop scripting and I haven’t performed extensive testing, so it may not work in all cases.  But feel free to play around with the script and modify it to your liking.   You can easily scale this to other border types by just making a Sloppy-2.psd sloppy2.js (and editing line 3 to point to Sloppy-2.psd) and storing it in the sloppy directory.  And finally, this sloppy border script follows a programming design philosophy of  “do the simplest thing that could possibly work”.  It doesn’t do any advanced calculations that would be required to perfectly fit the border on top of the image. While not perfect, it works well in practice. 

Have fun scripting and if you make any significant changes or improvements to this script that you want to share, please post a comment here so that others can benefit. 

 

Photoshop Scripts

I do most of my photo editing in Photoshop.  The sloppy borders that I placed around the artsy photos in Michael Goes To College took many steps to do.  It took me about a minute to apply the effect for each picture.  10 photos took 10 minutes.  Tonight I created a script that does it all in a few seconds.  If you have a good foundation in programming in JavaScript, then you are 90% of the way to being able to program scripts in Photoshop.  The other 10% is just learning the Photoshop specific objects, properties and methods.   You do so by reading the Adobe Photoshop JavaScript Scripting Reference which is located here -> http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/photoshop/sdk/JavaScriptReferenceGuide.pdf

I am still learning the ins-and-outs of this, but I am finding scripting to be a very powerful tool to automate my workflow.  Here is a picture I took a few years ago that I randomly chose from my photos and I applied the sloppy border in an instant.  Scripting rocks!

 

Michael Goes To College

Today, Michael moved into his dorm at Eastern Kentucky University.  Here is a picture of him in the morning around 7am just before we left the house for the 45 minute drive down to Richmond, Kentucky.

Before I continue with the story, I just wanted to let you know that all of the pictures are majorly photoshopped to give them the “hip” look that a college guy deserves.  Actually, I am starting to love this cross processed look and  I suspect you will see it quite a bit in my future picture postings.

Boy, things have certainly changed since Melissa  and I went to college.  We remember the old days of pure chaos.  People arriving simultaneously, standing in line for hours to get checked into the dorm and then the bazillion trips in 100 degree heat getting your stuff from the car, which was 10 miles away, into your room.  

Well, let me tell you that EKU’s process should be the model for the world’s universities.   Students were assigned a particular time to arrive to even out the flow of students.  The parking in front of the build was designated a drop off zone so you could unload your car. And get this, they have tons of students there with orange vests on whose job it was to help unload the car and carry Michael’s junk to his room.   What a fantastic idea. 

Here is a picture of the unloading process and a couple of girls in the orange vest.

Michael is unpacking in his room

Melissa and Michael coming out of his dorm.

Next thing that EKU did that was fantastic was let Michael pre-order his books over the Internet.  Then all he had to do was go and pick up his books that were already boxed and waiting for him.  This process of picking up the books was literally less than 5 minutes including the 2 minutes we were in line.

Melissa with a glow effect on the image coming out of the Student Services building where Michael got his parking permit. I was sly and took the picture with the camera down by my hip.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the cafeteria where we ate lunch.  I was just so excited to get to eat at 11am (I skipped breakfast) that I forgot to take any pictures.  The all you could eat buffet was amazing and Michael will enjoy eating there.  The campus was beautiful and his dorm is centrally located for easy access.

Here is a picture Michael and Melissa hanging out in the commons area of the dorm.  We are waiting for a rain shower to pass before we head out to get him some last minute necessities at wal-mart.

Here is a picture of Josh Chenault.  Josh and Michael are friends from Georgetown.  Josh stopped by his dorm to say hello and check out Michael's room.  Josh was all smiles and we asked him why he was so happy.  He responded that he just found out that the ratio of girls to guys on campus is 4 to 1.  Look out ladies!

And here is my final picture — Michael Cook — BMOC.

I called him to see how he is doing and just got off the phone. He said he has met several girls and already has a phone number.  I told him that he need go get 3 more to keep up with the 4 to 1 ratio.  He told me that Josh had heard wrong.  Michaels RA told him that the ratio is actually 6–1    I guess Mike has his work cut out for him!

Cross Processing

I have been playing with cross processing in photoshop tonight. I have been scanning the web looking for different techniques.  Cross processing is an old film term.  What they would do is take pictures with one type of film, and process it with chemicals like it was another type of film.  This would produce artsy types of photos.   Here is an example of a picture I took of Michael and the resulting cross processed picture.

 

The 2nd photo sort of looks like the photos that appear on Saturday Night Live.  There are numerous looks one can achieve with cross processing.  I plan to continue to play around with them.

Melissa The Photographer

I think I am about to lose my big-boy lens and 20d camera.  Melissa has been stealing it to take pictures of her back yard critters.  I must confess, she has an awesome eye for photography and I love the pictures she has been taking.  I have been so busy playing with my 16–35mm lens on my 10D body that I didn’t realize all the pictures she has been taking.  Thank goodness this is digital and not film otherwise I would be in the poor house.   Normally I only post my photos on my blog, but I think that could be changing with some occasional Melissa pictures.  If she wants them posted more than occasionally, then she needs to get her own blog because I already lost my camera to her and I am not going to lose my blog!

Melissa is very health conscious and is always reminding me to eat many different colors of fruits and vegetables for a healthy diet.  Well, not only does she insure that I have those options to eat, she makes sure her critters have those options.  She is constantly putting out fruits and nuts for them (besides the normal store critter mix) to give them variety and provide healthy choices for their diet. Unlike me, her critters seem eager to make healthy choices.  Here is Salem Squirrel eating one of the strawberries that she put out for them.  By the way,  did you know that possums love carrots.  Anyway, I am really proud of the fantastic photograph that she took and the deftness of her photography.

 

 

Bruster's Real Ice Cream

A new ice cream place opened up in town, Bruster’s Real Ice Cream.   It opened Saturday and the few times Melissa and I drove past, it has been insanely packed with people. Tonight after supper, Melissa and I drove over and got ourselves some cones.   We give Bruster’s a big thumbs up.    Their ice cream is most excellent and we are sure to be frequent visitors.

Georgetown Baptist Church

Georgetown, like most other towns I suspect, has some absolutely gorgeous churches.

I took this picture of the Georgetown Baptist Church the other morning when I was out and about.  It was a gorgeous morning and the church is situated for morning light. I think this church may be a good candidate for a night shot, but I haven’t attempted one yet.  I suspect this picture would have been a little better if I took the picture in the spring when the grass didn’t show the effects of our current drought. Speaking of the grass — I see a sideways cross imprinted in the grass. Is this a miracle? Not really, it is the shadow of a telephone poll and telephone wires that are just behind me as I took the picture.

 

Brooklyn Pizza

Right now, Brooklyn Pizza is probably our favorite pizza place in town.  They make very thin crust pies.  Melissa and I are currently in our less-is-more pizza eating phase.  We used to mainly eat pizzas loaded with veggies, but now we are more likely to eat a cheese pizza or a pizza with one topping, usually onion.  Funny how our tastes change over time.  Anyway, last Friday we ate at Brooklyn.  Here is a picture of the pie we were eating.  It was 1/2 gone before I thought about taking a picture of it.  In the 2nd picture, Melissa is demonstrating the proper way to hold one of these New York style pizzas — folded so that the end doesn’t break off.

 

 

Katie Cook is a Blogger

My niece Katie is now blogging, http://www.katiecook.us/blog . She is producing some amazing photos on her blog.  Her butterfly photos are like looking at the real thing.  They are freaking awesome. 

Her first post talks about how she ended up with a Nikon D100 and how I liked to help her spend her money.  I do freely admit that I do like to help her spend her money.  I like to spend her dad’s money as well.  If you are reading this, I would probably like to spend your money too. Anyway, Katie only told her part of the story. Well, here is my part of the story that she didn’t tell…

So she arrives at my house showing off her brand spanking new camera.  WOW — once I got my hands on the camera I had some serious envy.  That camera felt solid like a camera should, not the light weight plastic camera I was using. The frustration of pushing the shutter and waiting 1/2 second before the camera took a picture was gone!   The D100 instantly took pictures.  And it took many pictures in a row as fast as I could press the shutter.  And the photos she was getting out of the camera was just down right insane.  And...and…and…  yeah yeah I could go on forever talking about her camera. Well she left for home after the Rolex weekend, she took her camera with her.  How rude!  She could have at least left it with me for several months don’t you think?  But she didn’t.

I started to jones over missing her camera.  So I started to investigate digital SLR’s.   At the time, you really only had 2 choices, unless you wanted to hock your house for a high end professional camera.  The two choices were the Nikon D100 and the Canon 10D.  I searched the Internet trying to figure out which one was better. The bottom line kept coming down to if you had Nikon glass, get the D100.  If you had Canon glass, get the 10D.  Glass is slang term for a lenses.  Well, the only glass I had was the kind you drink out of.  So the recommendation to me was get either — you can’t go wrong.

So that said, I went down to the local camera store in Lexington, Murphy’s.   I talked with the knowledgeable sales guy who pretty much said the same thing, get the camera for the glass you already have.  If no glass, it didn’t matter.  But he did recommend Canon for two reasons.  (1) he was a Canon shooter, although he wasn’t digital and shot film, and (2) they didn’t have a D100 in stock, but did have a 10D in stock. After playing with the 10D for a little bit, I was sold.  So I bought the Canon 10D, a case, 1 GB 32x flash card, and a Canon 28–135mm IS lens.  The charge as I recall was a little over $2600 — or about 5 times more than any other camera I have ever purchased up to that point. 

To re cap; I was fat, dumb, and happy with my digital camera until Katie came to visit and show me her D100.  Since that date, she has cost me a small fortune in photography equipment.  But even so, she helped me rekindle my love of photography and added quite a bit of joy to my life.  My photos and I are in her debt.

 

Tai Chi At The Yuko-En

After I took the picture at Jazzercise I spent a few minutes taking some pictures around town in the mid-morning light.  On the way home, I stopped by the Yuko-En to check out the mid-morning light.  I think in general, the morning is a better time to go take pictures at the Yuko-En.  While I was scoping things out, I saw a Tai Chi class.  Ok, I don’t know if it really was a Tai Chi class, but they were doing things that I imagine a Tai Chi class would do.  So, until I find out otherwise — it is a Tai Chi class.   Here is a photo of the class.

Jazzercise Back To School Donation

The Georgetown Jazzercisers are at it again.  I have said it before, but they are the most generous group of people that I know.  They are very community minded and always are donating to community causes.  Melissa asked me to come by Jazzercise this morning and take a picture of all the school supplies that were donated by her students.  These supplies are donated to the local schools to help underprivileged children obtain the supplies that they need for a good education.   Melissa plans to submit this photo to the newspaper in hopes it will inspire other organizations to collect school supplies.  

From left to right: Karen Tackett, Michelle Ligon, Melissa Cook, Maggie McGuire, Debbie French, and Rhonda Winters.

 

Georgetown At Night #7

This is the last day in my Georgetown At Night series – well at least for the time being.  I am certain I will post some more photos I take at night from time to time.  Since this is my last, I will finish with a bang of 4 photos. 

 

BlogJet Rocks

Ok, I have used blogjet for the last 30 days – trial over.  I love it.  I purchased it.  It rocks!

Georgetown At Night #6

The banks of Georgetown Kentucky.  No… not river banks, but banks that hold your money, savings, checking, mortgage, etc...  

Georgetown must be the banking capital of the world as it seems like there are a bazillion banks in town.  They are all over the place, but probably the two most photogenic for night photography are the Whitaker Bank building and the Central Bank building.  Both are located downtown at the corner of Main and Broadway.  In the bottom picture you can see the Whitaker bank on the right in the distance. The Central Bank building is relatively new.  The building is old and was most recently an antique store. However they remodelled and refurbished it to something that looks very attractive.  I had a hard time choosing between the two on which one to post, so I just punted and posted both.

Majorette Melissa

Here is another picture I converted to digital by taking a picture of it.  Melissa was the head majorette for her high school band (Thomas Walker High School in Ewing, Virginia). When I first looked at this picture, I thought the temperature on the bank was 13 degrees.  Yeow that would be bitter cold to be out with no protective clothing.  However, after looking at the people on the street and seeing what they were wearing, no way 13 degrees would be correct.  Well, it is 13 degrees — just 13 degrees celcius which about 55 degrees fahrenheit.  Much warmer, but still too cold to be out with no jacket.   I believe this is a picture of her band performing in Middlesboro Kentucky.  If I am wrong, she will tell me and I will change it.

Well, I was wrong!  Here is the real scoop from Melissa.

Location Barbourville Kentucky, Daniel Boone Festival Parade, took place sometime in mid to late October 1979.  Their band won first place every year that they participated.  There were 100 people in the band and 400 people in the school. Band director Joe Weis was totally awesome and was the reason the band was always so good. And 55 degrees is perfect weather to march in. 

Georgetown At Night #5

Giddings Hall, on the Georgetown College campus, is home to administrative, development and public relations offices.

This is one of three antebellum buildings on the campus.   This was an interesting picture to take at night. There is an extremely bright light hanging just beyond the pillars and before the entrance door.  You can see the bright light being reflected off of the brick turning the brick white in some areas.  I needed to hide the light in order for it to not overpower the photo and hide the details of the building.  So I took this shot at a 45 degree ish angle and used one of the columns to obscure the light.  This permitted me to take a longer exposure, 14 seconds, in order to properly expose the rest of the image. 

A technique of taking photos when there is a harsh light source is to actually take 2 photos, one underexposed and the other overexposed.  Then in photoshop, or your favorite image editor, you blend the two photos together.  I plan to try this on a future photo and see how well it works. 

Georgetown At Night #4

This is a picture of Georgetown Kentucky City Hall. This was taken (as all of the other pictures in the Georgetown at Night series) with my 16–35mm lens.  This was taken at 16mm.  There is no way that I could have taken a picture of the whole building with my 70–200 lens as there isn’t enough room to back up without running into a building.   The 16–35mm lens is performing flawlessly and permitting me to take the kinds of pictures that I knew it would.  No buyer’s remorse here.  The 16–35mm F2.8 L and the 70–200mm F2.8 L IS are a nice pair of lenses and they really compliment each other nicely.

This picture is a 12 second exposure which really illuminated the face of the building.  Compare it with my 3 second exposure of the Courthouse.   By over exposing this picture somehow it just looks more spooky to me.  The overly bright light and the long flagpole shadow may have something to do with.  Or it maybe it is the editorials in the local paper criticizing our city government that is frightening me.

 

Scott County Courthouse In Evening Light

I thought it would be interesting to take a picture of the Scott County Courthouse with an evening setting sun.  I took the picture this evening at about 7:30 according to the clock on the top of the tower.  Even though this picture was taken at about same angle and at the best time to take a picture of the courthouse, I like the night version much better.  The night lighting just really makes the picture more interesting to me. 

Another Georgetown Blogger Likes My Photos

Mark Wielgus, a fellow Georgetown Kentucky blogger, posted some kind words about my Georgetown At Night series on his blog.  Here is the link:

http://www.markwielgus.com/permalink/Georgetown-Kentucky-at-Night.html

Thanks Mark for the kind words.

Georgetown At Night #3

Here is a picture taken at night of the entrance to Yuko-en on the Elkhorn.

Yuko-en is a Japanese Garden in Georgetown.  This photo was taken when it was really dark out.  The only lights were from behind me from the parking lot and entrance to Cardome.  This is a 3 minute exposure which made the photo look like a dawn/sunset type picture.  However, tree shadows are being cast by the parking lot lights behind me instead of the sun.  In fact, the shadows are being cast in a southern direction so one would never see this image in the morning or the evening in Georgetown as the sun is never in the north.  I guess if we transplanted this garden to Antarctica this would be what it would look like during the day. 

Georgetown At Night #2

Georgetown is the county seat for Scott County.  In the heart of Georgetown is the Scott County Courthouse. The courthouse is probably the prettiest public building in Scott County.  They did some major renovation on it a few years back.  This picture really shows off what a 16mm lens can do.  The ability to capture this whole building from just across the street still amazes me. 

 

Georgetown At Night #1

I went out last night a little before 11pm and took some night pictures of Georgetown.  I plan to post one a day for the next week. Here is a photo on the Georgetown College campus.   The is the Anna Ashcraft Ensor Learning Resource Center.  A building like this was just called a library when I was going to school.

 Taking photos at night has unique challenges that you don’t have with normal daylight photography. I think night photography makes you acutely aware of lighting and how lighting affects your pictures.  I believe because I am leaning how to do night photography, it will certainly improve my natural light and flash photography as well.

Many of my night photos are exposed over several minutes.  This one was a 2 second exposure.  When I am doing long exposures it gives me time to just think about the pictures I am taking. It lets me have time to predict what I think the photo will look like.  My predictions are still not as accurate as I like — but they are getting there.

Digitizing Old Photos Using A Digital Camera

Some people have scanners that they use to digitize their old photos.  I do not have a scanner, but instead I use a digital camera to transfer old photos into digital format.  This is a picture of Melissa when she was playing basketball at Thomas Walker High School in Ewing Virginia that I digitized today. It is really quite easy to do this and here are my steps:

1. Take the photo you want to digitize and put it on a flat surface with good lighting. I typically put my photos on a table near a window during the day to get natural light. I do not put the photo in direct sunlight, but instead where there is reflected and diffused light. The key is to make sure that the photo is flat and there isn’t any glare on the photo from your light source. If the photo isn’t flat (most old photos tend to curl a bit), then the curvature will show up in the digitized image and look distorted.  Scotch tape the back of the photo to the table works nicely if you have a curled edge photo. If you can see glare, so can the camera, so inspect the photo for glares carefully.

2. I have performed this with many different types of digital camera and they all work very well.  The main thing is that you must turn off the flash so the picture is taken without flash.  Flash will produce a very harsh glare on the photo.   If you can’t turn the flash off on your camera, try covering the flash with a piece of paper. 

3. In addition to keeping the flash off — try to make sure that the picture is square in the camera viewfinder.  If you are off by even a little bit, it seems to magnify it when you look at the digitized image.  This is easily correctable afterwards using a rotation and crop tool in your photo editing software at the cost of losing some of the image at the edges.

That is all there is too it.  Practice makes perfect and once you get the hang of it, you can capture pictures pretty quickly.

 

Night Shot Trial #1

I went outside tonight and took some pictures around the house to get some practice taking shots at night.  Most of them turned out pretty lousy actually.  However, this one showed a little promise.   I still need to work on my technique.   I used a flashlight to illuminate this photo which I think works out pretty well in this case. The flashlight didn’t work in some other photos I took.  This is going to be fun experimenting with night photography.

My new lens

Today I received my new lens.  It is a Canon EF 16–35mm L .  Here is a picture of it.

So far I love it.  It is a great compliment to my 70–200mm L IS (big boy) lens.  I am still getting use to it. Here is a picture I took of Melissa’s flowers. 

This was taken at F2.8. I love the bokeh of the lens.

I really think this lens is going to rock at taking portrait, landscape, and architectural photographs.    I am planning on taking some night shots this weekend and will use this lens.  I hope the weather will cooperate.  If the pictures turn out decent, I will be sure to post some.  If I don’t post anything, well, then you know how it turned out.

I am planning on putting this lens on my 10D body and leave my EF 70–200mm L IS lens on my 20D body.  I will probably look like a real geek carrying around two cameras.  Maybe I can convince Melissa that hot girls look extra hot with a camera around their neck and she will carry one for me.  Somehow I think I am going to end up with both of them.

Animated GIF's With Photoshop

This evening I played with the animated GIF creation function in photoshop and created this GIF:

This is from a sequence of photos I took at Morgan’s Raid in June this year.  I took several pictures of the cannon’s firing. I took pictures of cannons with my Canon.  Get it?   Ha ha ha  – I just crack myself up sometimes.  I did this by pressing the shutter as fast as I could.  I probably should have used the motor drive on my Canon 20D to get a much smoother set of pictures.  But at the time I was just playing around with it with the thought of doing some sort of animation in the future.  Well about a month and a half later I got around to doing it.   I still haven’t figured out all of the bell and whistles of doing animation with photoshop.  This was produced more or less by trial and error.  But now that I know I can do it and it is pretty easy to do, I may do something more creative in the future.

Melissa's Squirrels

Melissa has a collection of squirrels in the back yard.

She keeps them well fed and they are fat.  They provide us with much entertainment.  She originally had one squirrel which she named Salem.  We don’t know exactly how many squirrels we have. We mostly see about 3 squirrels at a time.  I think 6 was the most we have seen at one time, but that is rare. I like taking photographs of the squirrels.  Sometimes they do some amazing things which I haven’t yet had the opportunity to catch with a camera.  Every once in a while possums and raccoons come to visit and feast on the squirrel food.  The raccoons tend to be more camera shy.

21 Years Of Jazzercise

Tonight Melissa celebrated her 21st year as a Jazzercise instructor.  She celebrates every year with a pot-luck dinner after class.  It seems like each and every year the food is better than the year before.  Here are some photos of the awesome spread before people started to feast on it.

In the next picture, a  camera shy person — or a person  not wanting to reveal how much food they are about to eat — you be the judge.

In this last photo I tried something that I saw on one of the photography forums that I read.  I held the camera high over my head and took a downward shot.  Maggie at the end of the hall is mimicking me.  I really like how this shot turned out.  I will remember to do this again.

A complete set of photos is located on my pbase site at http://www.pbase.com/jimcook/jazzercise/picnic2005 .

As usual I stuffed myself.  Where is the Alka Seltzer?