As you may have gathered, I have been taking pictures of some local glassblowers and the work they produce. I have also been trying to take pics of the guys in action, but I was missing one key piece of equipment - a proper lens filter.

The glass that these guys use for their artistic glasswork is called borosilicate. When it is introduced into the flame, you get a very long sodium flare, as illustrated by the photo at left. The best way to counter this effect is to employ a Didymium filter. The glassworkers have eyewear made from it, and you can order large square pieces of it to use as a type of shield for a glassworking station. But you cannot easily find a camera filter made from this stuff. So I contacted the company that the glassworkers get their eyewear from. Turns out that Aura Lens, based in Minnesota, can take a normal UV filter, remove the filter element, and replace it with Didymium treated glass. Mine arrived last week (cost was roughly $70).

Friday I went to the glassworkers studio and took about 150 shots. The picture at the top of this article was shot through the Didymium filter. Compare that to the unfiltered shot further down and you can really see the difference.

Lighting these situations can be pretty tricky, depending on what you want to show. For a few of the pics, I wanted to be sure I got the workers hands in the image, or part of their workspace. To accomplish this, I placed my homemade softbox on my Olympus FL-36 flash, mounted on my Gorillapod and fired with the Cactus remote triggers. I moved it around a bit during the shoot, and was pleased with the results.

I love the doors that photography and website management and consulting have opened for me. I have been able to travel to some interesting places (Detroit Auto Show, Toronto) and also meet interesting people and learn about new things (the glassblowing, a recent photo shoot about wine). I am especially pleased to be involved in the main project these glassblowers are working on - The Community Carbon Project. Cool glassware that is recycled and useful. Can’t beat that.

Just a little picture, I much prefer the look of silken water, but I also like a touch of texture when shooting a roaring river. The water gets too silken and it is transformed into a peaceful setting which isn’t very realistic.  

This was shot f 22 at 1/4s Slower speed would have made the water much smoother and faster would have made it much more choppy.

Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop your digital photography talent, by Jeff Wignall, is part of a new series of books by Wiley. Suitable grouped as Photo Workshop, these books add a modern twist on the classic photography topics we all hold dear. Topics like exposure, composition, lighting, portraits, macro and more, this series will be applicable for years to come.

The reason they will remain applicable is that they have been written specifically for the digital age. In this book, Exposure, the author goes to great lengths not to identify his equipment (at least the body), telling the reader that it doesn’t matter what your gear is, the concepts are the same. One thing I particularly liked about the book (and the whole series follows this pattern) was that, at the end of each chapter, the reader is given a “homework” assignment based on what they just learned. Following this, they are encouraged to upload the photo to a central site where all readers of the series can post and critique photos. For someone too intimidated by places like the dpreview forums, this can be an invaluable experience.

This book covers all the usual aspects you would expect, from light controls, aperture versus shutter speed, depth of field, low light, flash, etc. It even went so far as to talk briefly about off camera flash. There was a lengthy discussion about taking photos of neon at night, which I might use to start a photo book project.

All in all this book is well worth the $29.99 cover price ($19.79 at Amazon) and I look forward to reading more from this series.

Photo by bridgepix
I have been reading a lot lately - books, magazines, online articles and blog entries (always been a voracious reader really). I have been noticing a trend in all the materials I have been reading - composite images are ok.

When I say composite, I mean images that are created using pieces of other images. For example, there is an article(PDF) in this months AfterCapture about a well respected (and well paid) photographer who is creating wonderful compositions (the theme in the article is Halloween related).

A book I have been reading recently, Shooting & Selling Your Photographs, also has a couple of examples where the author has sold composite images for respectable sums of money.

I am sure this has purists screaming, and artists gleaming. It’s the perfect hybrid for this medium though, in my eyes. You can still deliver an image that people want. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is really what it is all about - deliver what the customer wants. And that is why the purists scream. But I am not making images just for myself, to remember something exactly as it was. And if I do, then I don’t really modify it that much.

I see a lot of potential here. I think real estate photographers have already been doing this for some time, and clearly advertising does it. So if it will help me to make more marketable images, who am I to argue. I have a Photoshop class coming up soon. I hope it will give me the skills needed to make these images look natural. Can’t wait to try it.

Last week in Beaver Creek I was able to take advantage of the great surroundings to do some practice photos for real estate purposes. At the same conference, I met with the manager of a new property in the mountains that is wanting some photography done. They don’t have a budget per se, but do love to trade. So I am planning on trading my photography for a couple of nights in the property during ski season. Should work out well for both of us.

The picture above, while not quite what I wanted, was generated on my laptop from 5 exposures (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) combined in Photomatix. It is my intent to do a full on review of Photomatix in the next couple of weeks. But all in all, I am happy with the result here. I’d like to lighten it a bit of course, but it does give the feeling of the view you get from my room at the Park Hyatt. I think that the next time I do this, I might be inclined to take 9 exposures, shooting at -2, -1.5, -1, -0.5, 0, +0.5, +1, +1.5, +2 and seeing if that results in a better image. I need to go back to my notes from the HDRI book I read so long ago.

I could probably hang my shingle out for this now, but I want to get it right before I start expecting people to pay for my time.

When you are shooting a room with a great view, it is a good idea to show that view, if you can. But that is more complicated when you think about the exposure levels outside versus inside the room. Since I was in an awesome location recently (the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado), I decided to use the property to do some practice on. I have posted a few images from this test in the Photography For Real Estate Flickr group (yes, it is a Flickr complement to Larry Lohrman’s excellent site/ blog) and have received some useful feedback from it.
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Photography is all about light. Exposing a sensor or strip of film to light is how an image is made. So one can only imagine the number of books written covering this very subject. Add one more to the pile with O’Reilly’s Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers (Practical Artistry) by Harold Davis.

This book is specifically geared toward the digital photographer, but almost all the ideas can be used for old school film photogs as well.

The book covers a lot of topics including evaluation of light, aperture and shutter speed and an explanation of ISO. There are also chapters on using a digital darkroom and some post processing tips.

Overall the book does a fine job of explaining the basic techniques of lighting and exposure, but it really does try to cover a bit too much. The book does not go in too much detail on any one aspect which left me wanting a lot more.

Understandably the book is a light read with some amazing images (and each image has a brief explanation of settings used to achieve the image) and a good refresher for someone who already has a grasp of lighting and exposure, but if you are looking for a good starting point on lighting and exposure, this may not be the book for you.

Originally posted on 2*3 Photos

My background in photography is that of a complete layperson. I started out in middle school with the Kodak equivalent of a Polaroid. Eventually I graduated to a 35mm point and shoot. Following that was an Olympus D-490Zoom. All cameras that didn’t allow for a lot of tinkering with settings. Since that was all I knew, I still took pictures that way when I moved on to the more capable Canon Powershot G5. It has full control over aperture, f-stop, etc. But I was very intimidated by trying those kinds of things out. Over the years I had managed to get a few pictures that I was really proud of, and even some that garnered compliments from total strangers.

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