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Tag Archives: Photo tips
Mill Road
Along the banks of the Mascoma River not far from the lake itself is Mill Road, a Lebanon, NH municipal trail. Permitted uses include walking, horses, bicycles, and snowmobiles. It forms a nice loop with parts of the Northern Rail Trail. My wife and I took shorts walks along Mill Road two early mornings this week. The first time I didn’t bring a tripod, shame on me, but managed to photograph the river with complimentary early golden light and blue shade. 
On the return trip I made a photo of Mill Road with just a piece of the river in the background. The river reflected the golden light on the late fall foliage and the blue of the sky a bit further along the road. This photo was taken at 1/6 seconds to blur the water. I braced my camera against a tree when I made the photo.
For the second hike I brought my tripod. This meant that Jann and I really didn’t walk together except at the start. I set up to take a photo, then another, and another. After what seemed like a very short time she returned down the road having gotten a lot more exercise than I did. We walked back together, but then there was another photo to be taken, so she finished without me.
Here are some of the photos I took. You will see three version of one of them; I fiddled a bit in Photoshop with a few home-brewed techniques.
Posted in Hike, Photography Tips
Also tagged hiking trail, Lebanon, New Hampshire, reflections
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Long-tailed Weasel
A photo-hike to French’s Ledges in Meriden yesterday produced a wonderful surprise. The light was flat—the overcast sky was great for photography in the woods. The polypodies were glorious on the rocks. Here is a photo of a “polypody garden”.
As I returned to my car I spotted a white tail with a black tip just exposed near some rocks. I figured “cat” since there were houses not far away. But I waited until I could get a good view of the animal. When a curious face peeked over the rocks at me I immediately started photographing the “ermine”. But upon studying my photos I have concluded that it was not a short-tailed weasel, a.k.a. ermine, but a long-tailed weasel. A photo, not included here, shows a tail nearly as long as its body. Here are two photos followed by a slide show of 4 more. You can see it’s coat has not yet turned its pure white for winter camouflage.
Posted in Hike, Outdoors, Photography Tips
Also tagged French's Ledges, Long-tailed Weasel, Meriden, New Hampshire, weasel
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Photography in the Rain
Many avoid taking their cameras out when it is raining. I relish a light drizzle for photographing flowers, fall foliage, forests, moody scenes, moving water, and even people. The low soft light can be wonderful, wrapping the subject in even illumination. And since I feel moving water is best photographed with a tripod and long exposure times, low light levels help get to longer exposures.
It was raining lightly yesterday morning when I headed to a favorite spot near my house that I have not visited in several years, Mink Brook. I wish I had left earlier because I only got in 20 minutes of photography before the rain became too intense to photograph. Light drizzle is great—heavy downpour is very challenging.
Even though the light level was low I added a polarizer to my lens for two reasons. First, rotating the polarizer does a wonderful job at controlling reflections. As you slowly rotate it you can adjust the amount of “shine” from the water and rocks. I normally reduce the reflections to their minimum and then back off just a bit. Second, a polarizer reduces the light intensity by about two stops. This allows the shutter speed to be lengthen by a factor of 4. I wanted to take images with exposure times of around 5-6 seconds to really blur the moving water.
When I looked at the scene of the brook everything but the water looked quite dark. The camera naturally produced a lighter image but it was easy to process the RAW images to achieve the moody darkness I saw. Although I do not do Black-and-White often enough, I decided to do a conversion to Black-and-White on some of the images. Having a color digital file is a wonderful starting place for B&W since you can use the color information to control the tones in the B&W image—something Ansel Adams and others had to do painstakingly with filters, guessing at the results.
Here is a brief slide show with four B&W and two color images from Mink Brook yesterday morning. It is a followed by a panoramic image you can click on to get to a version that you can explore in detail.
The image below is composed of 23 separate overlapping photos combined in Photoshop CS5 resulting in a 160 megapixel image. Because such a wide view distorts the scene, the wall looks much smaller than it actually it. Please click the image below to explore the scene in considerable detail.
Posted in Hike, Outdoors, Photography Tips
Also tagged Hanover, Mink Brook, Moving Water
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Fabulous Fifty—In Praise of a “Normal” Lens
Not all that is old should be dismissed—in photography or in life. In olden days back when film reigned supreme—actually not that long ago—cameras most often came with a “normal lens”, not a zoom. A normal lens is one that gives a perspective that generally looks “natural” to a human observer under normal viewing conditions. It looks at the scene much like the human eye rather than producing the distorted wide vision of a wide angle lens or the compressed and magnified view of a telephoto. The most common normal lens that came with the 35mm camera was the 50mm f/1.8 lens. When you bought a camera back then, this is what you got. That is, before everyone got all excited about zoom lenses.
So now few photographers use 50mm fixed focal length lenses. And few realize what they are missing by not having a fabulous fifty in their tool kit.
Consider the positives of a 50mm f/1.8 or f/1.4 lens.
- It is fast. This means a faster shutter speed at lower ISO and hence less noise. It enhances your ability to shoot in very low light conditions.
- Wide open it has a very shallow depth of field. Great for blurring backgrounds, especially when you are close to your subject as in this photo I took at a guitar building school. (Click the image to see more from this assignment.)
- It will most likely be the sharpest lens you own.
- With the sub-full-frame sensors on the cameras most people use, it makes an excellent portrait lens with an “equivalent” focal length of 75-80mm (or 100mm with some).
- It is very small and light so it is easy to carry as an extra lens.
- Coupled with inexpensive extension tubes it makes a great macro lens.
- It provides a normal distortion-free image.
- Since it opens wide, it is very bright and hence focusing is easy, even in the dark. Since the depth of field is shallow, you can manually focus with precision.
- It is remarkably inexpensive—just a bit over $100.
I prefer the 50 f/1.8 lens to the f/1.4 variety. It is only a half stop slower and it cost about one third of what a typical f/1.4 lens does.
Here are two images shot wide open with my fabulous 50 lens of a contra dance in dim light.
Here are two images that show how you can control depth of field with this lens.
And finally an uncropped macro shot of a dime.
