Enough with the Flowers Already!

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/200 sec., on-camera flash with -1.0 or -2.0 stops exposure compensation.

OK! the last two pictures in my Flower Power series, my life should be a little more relaxed after tomorrow. If I'm good I'll find the three decent photos out of the six hundred-odd photos I took at Barkus (the Mardis Gras dog parade) I took last weekend and post those tomorrow night.

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/1000 sec., no flash. Levels adjusted in Photoshop.

White Orchids

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/125 sec., on-camera flash with -1.0 or -2.0 stops exposure compensation. Photo was underexposed – adjusted post processing in Photoshop. 

I think I annoyed a lot of people with this photograph. These white flowers were the very first orchids you come across when entering the MOBOT orchid show. Naturally, many people that go to the show want to smell every single flower. It's difficult to smell a flower if a big guy fiddling with his camera is blocking your way. I was fiddling with my camera here because I thought, "meh, white flowers, boring, no one will mind if I take 20 photos of this thing to get my settings right." I was wrong. I don't apologize though, there were hundreds of other orchids smell.

Orchids smell like flowers. 

Coffee and a Blog Post

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/4000 sec., no flash.

Did I just break my perfect 2014 blogging streak by missing a post yesterday? No, if professional athletes can use performance enhancing drugs, and don't kid yourself – most professional athletes use them, I can back date my posts. I'm a winner. 

What happened is we went out to celebrate our friend Manda's huge-numbered birthday last night and I plum forgot about orchids and blogs and things. Until this morning... Katie asked me about it and I did a spit take with my coffee (oh noes I neglected the blog!) and I sprinted off to do some back dating. 

These are some of the few orchid photos I took without a flash, I didn't want to disturb the natural lighting.

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/2500 sec., no flash. Photo was underexposed – adjusted post processing in Photoshop. 

Superfly

Since the flower pictures (omgerd flower pictures!) that I was going to post tonight somehow got posted on Saturday, I had an open blog post to play with. Katie found these lovely sunglasses while we were looking at Mardi Gras paraphernalia at Johnnie Brocks yesterday. They are a party for your eyeballs.

Computer Down Typing on iPad

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/100 sec., on-camera flash with -1.0 or -2.0 stops exposure compensation

Which is a horribly tedious thing to do...

MOBOT Orchids

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/160 sec., on-camera flash with -1.0 or -2.0 stops exposure compensation

It is going to be a busy week. On Friday I am giving a department-wide seminar over my research for the past 10 months. Preparation for the talk shouldn't be too onerous, but I do tend to underestimate the amount of time it takes to prepare for such things. Because I anticipate having less time to spend with the blog until then I decided to go after some low-hanging photography fruit this morning – purdy flowers at the Missouri Botanical Garden orchid show.

Well, the flower show wasn't purely low-hanging fruit. Now that I have a rudimentary understanding of exposure I decided to add some flash in the mix. Using a flash well is not an easy task. In fact, one of my guilty pleasures is watching amateur photographers, with more money than sense, use the flash on their expensive DSLRs inappropriately. Now that I have my expensive DSLR I don't want to make the same mistakes. The orchid show was good practice. 

You'll note I've added the technical details of the photo in the caption. I think I am going to start doing this so that I can quietly critique my technique without rambling on about it in the blog posts. 

A Premature, Anachronistic, Posting (???)

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/160 sec., on-camera flash with -1.0 or -2.0 stops exposure compensation

I just checked my blog and I don't know how these photos got posted already. This was supposed to be Monday night's post along with some terribly witty prose. Honest, you wouldn't be able to stop reading it.

Oh well, this has already been posted and I don't want to be accused of de-posting anything. I'll just have to find something else to put on the blog Monday night...

Nikon D5200, 50 mm, ISO-100, f/1.8, 1/80 sec., on-camera flash with -1.0 or -2.0 stops exposure compensation

Burnin' LaFarge

Pokey LaFarge was the headliner at Burnin' Love. The band is a fantastic ragtime ensemble with a well-practiced old-timey shtick. Getting a decent photo of the group proved to be a challenge. Everyone in the group was reasonably lit for a tripod photo except for Pokey, his face was lit up like the sun. To get a picture with any detail in his face I had to ignore the light meter and dial down the shutter speed more than 5-stops below the suggested exposure. I know it was more than 5-stops because that is the limit of my exposure compensation tool and 5-stops 'underexposed' was no where close to correct. I just thought it was interesting that I was able to handhold these these pictures and I was at least 50 feet from the stage in a pitch black field.   

Burnin' Love at Warp Speed

For photographing Burnin' Love I dutifully packed my tripod to take night shots but was surprised how little I needed it. Apparently, things that give off a lot of light give off a lot of light — go figure. Despite being blurry these shots were taken on a tripod. To make them I adjusted the exposure to have a slow shutter speed, focused the scene, then quickly zoomed in during the exposure. It's a bit of a corny technique, but what the hell? The heart-shaped stage lights seemed made for it. Although, to be honest, I like the amorphous middle image the best.

Burnin' Love St. Louis

At Burnin' Love St. Louis was lit up brightly and had an American flag as a backdrop. This makes me curious how they store gigantic American flags. Is it folded in a triangle?

Burnin' Love

St. Louis is celebrating it's 250th birthday. The events will continue all year but the festivities kicked off this month because in February of 1764 a 14-year old Auguste Chouteau, at the behest of the Laclede, Maxent & Company, planted his feet on the ground that has become St. Louis. 

To kick things off, Art Hill in Forrest Park hosted Burnin' Love. The event had a 20-foot tall burnin' heart, an Elvis impersonator who sang the eponymous song, young lovers getting engaged, local ragtime favorite Pokey LaFarge and fireworks. As you might expect the outdoor event was supposed to happen on Valentine's Day, last Friday. As you might also expect, the weather was horrid on a Friday in February so the event was postponed four days. Luckily, the weather was quite warm on the rescheduled day so all of the snow and ice that had threatened the festivities the first time around had melted. That is to say, Art Hill was a mud pit.

I had foreseen this mudscape so had asked Katie to put snow boots in the car despite the balmy weather. For some reason, however, I lacked the sense to put the boots on when we got there. So about 10 minutes into the show my shoes were soaked through and my toes were freezing. We lasted a couple of hours, because we wanted to hear Pokey LaFarge (who is excellent live btw) but I wasn't stout enough to pull through to the fireworks. 

But let me reiterate: Who plans a large outdoor event in February? Surely there would have been better attendance, and more beer sold, if they had postponed it a couple of months. I realize the organizers were scheduling for a historically significant month but a semiquincentennial event is a rare thing. I don't think anyone would have minded if this had been held in April.

More Stan Musial Bridge More Harder

This is a bit of a photo dump. I had several photos from the Stan Musial Bridge opening that I liked but never got around to posting. It's been a few weeks now so the up-to-dateness of this blog is in considerable question. Not that I ever made any promises, but I should post these before I forget about them. So without further ado...

Iceberg Straight Ahead

I have no love for this fountain. I pass it regularly on my commute and because of the picturesque setting I am often inspired to photograph it. Many, many people are. The problems are, the ruins are fake and nearly every photo I take of the thing is boring. I thought the accumulation of blue ice at the base of the fountain was interesting though. Icebergs are not something you see very often in St. Louis.

Update: One of the advantages of having a queue for blog posts is that sometimes a scene evolves over the course of days. The weather has remained cold since I took the photo above and the fountain has increased its surrounding ice mass during that time. I wanted to get a picture of the fountain today because rest of the week is supposed to be warm. Who knows if I'll see this again? Unfortunately, I didn't get off work in time to catch the best light. Doubly unfortunate, I didn't have the right lens with me to get a close up. 

So, I made do and used it as learning experience. The picture below was shot in RAW so that I would have all of my 24 megapixels to buffer a generous crop. The RAW file also gave me more information to correct the difficult exposure in post processing. The end result? Not too shabby.  

There is one significant problem with this photo, however, that I didn't catch when I was on site. If you look closely at the tree limbs in the upper-left hand corner they appear to have a green tinge. That tinge is chromatic aberration (CA) which manifests as a fringe, or halo, of off-color on the boundaries of high-contrast transitions. The fountain ice has it too, a purple fringe in this case, which makes the ice look like its coming off the page in an unnatural way. 

Somewhat ironically, the CA in this photo is likely noticeable only because I was shooting RAW files as opposed to JPEG files. The reason for that is when the camera creates a compressed JPEG file it corrects for CA automatically. That process is not always completely successful but it does decrease the problem. To my knowledge, automatic CA corrections do not occur when creating a RAW file. Of course, it is possible to correct CA in a RAW file during post processing but I didn't have any luck with that with this photo.   

At some point, for my own benefit, I should write a geeky post on the science of chromatic aberration, what the camera does to prevent it and what the photographer can do to avoid or correct it. For now it is sufficient to say that the problem typically occurs when the photographer is shooting a high-contrast scene with a wide-open aperture. My bad, I must remember to close that thing more often. 

More Bridge

With half the people on the new bridge over I70 taking the same pictures I spent a lot of time looking for something unique to shoot. In the first photo Katie and I were leaving the bridge and heading back to the shuttles for a ride downtown. Pedestrians on a freeway are always an unusual site and I liked how they give a sense of distance to the shrinking bridge in the background. In the second photo, while all the dignitaries were making empty comments, a news helicopter hovered above the bridge and maintained position for several minutes.  

New Lens

 

I'm out of town and I've depleted my posting queue so I'm going to have to go on autopilot for the next couple of days. On the opening day of the new bridge on I-70 I was playing around with my birthday present, a 55 mm f/1.8  prime lens. Vincent's first prime, ah-coochie-coo. Since focal lengths are extended on cropped sensors, and I'm shooting with a Nikon D5200 which has one, the 55 mm focal length is a little long for general purpose shooting. So I missed several things on the bridge that I couldn't back up far enough to capture.  Why I wanted that specific lens first, as opposed to a potentially more practical 35 mm lens, was for portraiture. In short, the 55 mm lens, in my price range, has a far superior quality of blur in the defocused areas. Better ''bokeh' so photography geeks say. 

Here are Yours Truly above and Wife Face K below captured with the new lens. While I'm not thrilled with my double chin and I am quite happy with the photographic results.  

nb: I am working anachronistically, the squirrel cookie jar photos were the first to show up on this blog with the 55 mm prime.

Orange Trim

Warning, this post is dry. If my motivation for this blog is to improve my photography overall it would be useful to get a little geeky about what specifically I'm doing right and wrong and how I could make the image better. I won't being doing this very often but it's something I'd like every now and then for my own benefit. 

Today's image is similar to yesterday's in that it is a picture of a house through a wet car window. I decided to photograph the house because the bright orange trim with the baby-blue Virgin Mary caught my eye. In general, composing a photo like this, with the subject in the middle would be a mistake. I think it worked in this case though because the edges of the field are white enough from the snow to give the house a pleasing frame. Including the saturated stop sign in the frame also keeps your eye moving around the picture. 

In addition to the framing, the visible water from the car window helped establish the appropriate atmosphere for the photograph. The water conveys that the day was cold, wet and generally crummy, and indeed it was. The water is too focused though and it detracts from the primary subject of the picture, the house. 

Concerning the subject, the house and the Virgin Mary are more underexposed than I intended. Much of the detail I would like to see is obscured in the shadows. If I exposed the house more though the snow-white edges of the picture would likely be overexposed. I think I intuited that during post processing when I applied a subtle white vignette to the photo. The vignette worked to brighten the snow and draw focus to the house, but it doesn't compensate for the lack of fine detail. Because the Virgin Mary was important for my composition I did try to correct that element of the frame by using the Photoshop sponge tool to saturate her blue robe. That helped, but it would have been better, obviously, to get the exposure right in the first place.  

Finally,  the overall picture is noisy. This with the underexposure of the house and the over-focused water on the car window make this photograph visually muddy.

Looking at my shooting parameters, the ISO, shutter speed and aperture for this photograph are 1000, 1/8 sec and f/25 respectively. Lowering the ISO to 800 or less would help control the digital noise in the photo but would also decrease the overall exposure. To compensate I would need to decrease shutter speed or open up the aperture. The 1/8 sec shutter speed is already slower than I want for a handheld photograph so I'd want to open up the aperture. The added bonus to opening the aperture is that I could put the focal plane more on the house, or the water, and blur the other. So if I were to try this photograph again I would probably try it from the same vantage point but I would set my camera to something like ISO 800, Shutter speed, 1/16, aperture f/13 or less.  I'd also play around with the shallower focal point, i.e. placing the sharp focus on the window or the house, to see which variation is more appealing. 

Condemned Roses

I'm relatively new to the world of DSLRs so still enjoy fairly-regular, easily-achieved, epiphanies about the how's and why's of photography. This image represents one such epiphany.  Since opening the camera box in November my mind has been focused on trying to achieve the shallowest depth of field possible to isolate my subject and blur unnecessary detail. That requires a wide-open aperture so most of my photographs have been taken with wide-open aperture. Of course, there are plenty of situations where that is inappropriate and I can think of several of my postings that would have benefited if I had been thinking differently.

The picture above is an extreme example of attempting to do the opposite by manipulating the camera settings to maximize depth of field. The photograph is of a condemned house taken through a wet passenger side window. I was drawn to the image because I thought the plywood painted with roses and doves was a clever way to beautify urban blight. I couldn't think of an exciting way to frame the image though so I wanted the water on the windshield visible to add textural interest. To achieve focus on both the far away building and the close-up window I set the focus in between the two and stopped the aperture all the way down.  Looking at this photo again, I wish I hadn't taken it quite to that extreme but the idea is now something in my toolbox. 

Squirrel

One of my sisters has a thing for squirrels. Nutty. For Christmas last year she received this antique squirrel cookie jar with evil eyes. Because large ceramic cookie jars don't travel well on planes we somehow took custodianship of the thing. It gives the dog nightmares...

Safety Is No Accident

So if I refer to the passages between buildings and above ground as hamster tunnels, how should I refer to the underground corridors? The subterranean tunnels on the Wash U medical campus are as you would expect. They are long, sparse, hot and have plenty of exposed wiring and plumbing. Mostly, they are used maintenance personnel, hence this lovely safety tryptic, but I did find a room down there that is used to store euthanized research frogs. It smells how you would expect. 

Hamster Tunnels

The main thing that I dislike about St. Louis is the weather. I realize we are in the middle of a particularly cold winter but, in general, the summers are wretched hot, the winters dreary and the nice days of autumn and spring are too few and far between. 

The people that designed the Wash U medical campus must feel the same way. The medical campus has a high density of architecturally mismatched buildings spread over 17-city blocks. If you know the way you can get from one building to another without ever stepping foot outside. Unfortunately, because of the interconnectedness of the buildings, it can be difficult to know which building you are in at a given time. So good luck following or giving directions within this complex.

These photos are a sample of the hamster tunnels that connect many of the buildings at Wash U. There are many more not shown. 

Red Shirts on Beach

If I have one photography goal this year it is to get over my hangups about asking people if I can take their picture. 

I saw these two on the west bank of the icy Mississippi River the other day. They were young and healthy romantics with good hair and were wearing red. They were gorgeous. All I wanted to do was say, "hey, you're gorgeous, give us a pose eh" then pop off a few shots. Instead, I let them be, because who wants to be complimented? 

I did take one creeper photo for the blog. I like it, but it could have been so much better if I had decided to bother the couple. 

Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge

The brand new Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge for I-70 was open today for pedestrian traffic. Secretly, I was concerned about the event because Katie mentioned there was supposed to be something like 20,000 people in attendance and the guy planning the event had only rented 15 porta potties as of a couple of weeks ago. According to the United Services Porta Pottie Calculator you should have 128 porta potties for an event this size. I ran out of fingers to do an official count of porta potties but I'm confident there were more than 15 but less than 128 today. Whatever the number, it seemed sufficient for the crowd. Really, it was too cold to pee. 

St. Louis Fab.

There is an episode of the Simpsons where Homer takes Bart to a steel mill to teach him how to be manly. Much to Homer's dismay it out to be a gay steel mill where they work hard and they play hard. I would like to think that St. Louis Fab is really St. Louis FABULOUS but I'm guessing this fabricator doesn't turn into a disco after hours.  

Crates!

What are these crates used for? 

They are colorful buggers, and small as far as crates go. I've never seen anything like them. If you zoom in a few have the words 'Ford' and 'automotive' written on them but also 'tare weight'. So what do you need to weigh accurately, in the crate, that goes with cars? 

Another clue. The crates have a stated maximum capacity of 6,000 pounds. If I'm being generous and estimate their dimensions at 1 meter x 1 meter x 2 meters, for a volume of two-cubic meters, that means each crate could hold about 2000 kilograms (~4,500 lbs) of  water. So, the crates aren't likely holding water (duh) or any organic fluids which are less dense than water. That is, they are not holding bulk motor oil. Of course, these crates are not barrels, so I probably could have figured that out without the maths. Er derr. 

But 6,000 lbs? Most whole cars weigh less than 6,000 lbs. So this is overkill no matter what they are used for. 

My guess? These crates are for precision engine parts that need the extra protection of a sturdy crate. Or cup holders, these crates could be for cup holders. 

Sculpture in BFE

Kickham Boiler and Engineering is in north St. Louis next to a truck stop. The business has a sparse and expansive lawn in the middle of which is a welded-eggish sculpture.

So, here is a little public art in the middle of nowhere.  

Car Show

While driving around the other day we came across a car show. Car lust isn't really my thing, so we didn't go in, but there is no denying that  pretty cars are pretty. Besides, there were plenty of high end sports cars in the streets.

There was also a free demonstration in the streets where two cars turned tight synchronized doughnuts. How does one even acquire that skill set? The result was a lot of smoke and eight ruined tires. The black debris in the bottom two photos is tire dust. 

I do have to be a fuddy-duddy and question the safety of this event. Were these orange plastic barriers between the cars and the audience filled with water? If not, that's not much of a margin of error. This is a recipe for catastrophe.