I have not been playing around with my site or my camera much in the past few weeks because I have been helping Mark Barnes with his website for his campaign for University City, MO School Board. Take a look at the site and let me know what you think. What is good and what needs improvement. www.barnesforucity.net
I moved my servers over the weekend, so if you see a problems let me know.
Not a single photo here, but Cameratown is giving away a ton of great stuff, including a Pentax k20, my camera of choice. Here is the contest link or just visit their site.
Today I had great hopes for a nice winter wonderland photograph. The snow from earlier covered the ground so I took the dog for a walk with the camera slung around my neck. It was not too long before I saw a red stop sign standing out amongst the white and gray tones of everything else. I remember that cameras can be fooled by the bright white of a snow covered ground. To compensate you increase the exposure compensation a half stop or more. To me this is a little confusing, so I will do my best to explain at the bottom of the post. But now, back to the story.
I saw the stop sign and in my mind had a great photograph all figured out. Put the sign in the bottom right corner and it will be great. I just have to remember to dial in some exposure compensation. In reality it did not work out that way. I remembered the compensation, but did not like any of the photographs. I screwed up the composition.
Camera: Pentax K20 50mm prime lens ISO 200 Aperture f/4.0 Exposure 1/250
Lighting: Very overcast day
Post Processing: Adobe Lightroom
I don't want to skip a day or throw out the photographs, sot how do I turn nothing into something? That is exactly the answer! I will try to turn the crappy photo into a decent one. The end result is above, here is what I started with.
That photo and about 5 minutes in Adobe Lightroom gave me the photo of the day. Granted it is not an amazing photo by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a great improvement over the original. At least it is in my opinion. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Now for my explanation on exposure compensation for snow. A digital camera has to make a lot of decisions about the scene and lighting to figure out how to set the variables, typically aperture and shutter speed. To do this, it needs a reference point. For the camera that is 18% gray. I guess if we had to look at the world and find an average value, someone figured it out to be 18% gray. When the world is covered with snow, it is much brighter than 18% gray, but that does not stop the camera from thinking it is. Therefore, the camera closes the aperture and/or speeds up the shutter so it lets in the correct amount of light for a scene that is only 18% gray. That is why so many snow snapshots look gray and dingy. The camera made the snow 18% gray. Of course the snow is much closer to white so compensating by telling the camera to allow more light brings the snow up to white again. At least that is how I understand it. Correct me if I am wrong.
I had the honor of photographing Mark Barnes and his family for Mark's campaign. I made a bunch of photos (hopefully some will be useful), but this is quite possibly my favorite. It is just Mark sitting on the steps in his house as I was setting up all of my gear to try to get a good family portrait. When I saw Mark on the steps I thought it might be a good photo so I grabbed a light stand and fired off a couple shots. Mark was great because he did not try to pose or do anything special for the camera.
Camera: Pentax K20 Tokina 19-35, 3.5 lens ISO 200 Aperture f/5.6 Exposure 1/180
Lighting: SB-25 @ 1/2 power (I think) into a silver umbrella to camera left triggered with AlienBees CyberSyncs.
Post Processing with Lightroom.
Mark's campaign is one of the reasons I have taken so long to post this and Friday's POTD. I not only got to photograph Mark, but I also get to help on his campaign with the website, or as I like to say, New Media Management. My hope is to get Mark a website (www.barnesforucity.com - but not live yet), get him on Facebook, have his photos on Flickr, and create his own YouTube channel. Perhaps I will even get him to post on Twitter, but I am not sure if there are enough U. City residents who Twitter to make it worth the effort. Maybe when he wins, we will get Twitter going and encourage people to follow his progress for improving University City Schools on there.
I hope that I don't miss too many more days of photography, but the campaign is really exciting.
Plus if that is not enough, I have also started helping Steve Zwolak (a.k.a. Mr. Z) from UCCC with a video project he is doing. It is not being released yet, but if you are interested in early childhood education, specifically literacy, watch this five minute video, Developmental Lines.
See the rest of my Photo Of The Day posts here or just look at the photos on Flickr
Thanks for reading my ramblings,