Behind the clicks

Roses!

2013-06-03T00:55:00.002-04:00

A quiet afternoon at the Portland International Rose Test Garden....

About 50 attempts before getting one to stay still..

Logan Pass

2013-06-02T23:08:00.001-04:00

In my opinion, the best views along GTTS road is near Logan Pass. This panorama is taken from near the visitor center parking lot. The full size turned out to be about 80 MP, which shows far more details compared to the tiny image here.

Logan Pass (80 MP stitch pano)

Logan Pass visitor center

Sun Point nature trail at GNP

2013-05-22T02:05:00.000-04:00

A short hike with spectacular views (just like any other place at Glacier NP). We did this 1.7 mile hike on the way back from St. Mary Falls trail. The wind at the Sun Point must have been blowing at least 70-80 mph. It was hard to stay standing straight. Watching my wife's efforts to keep her hat from blowing away was priceless. :-)

Along the Sun Point Nature Trail

Sun Point

Wildlife at GNP

2013-05-14T01:47:00.002-04:00

Grizzly bear

Grizzly and black bears, Glacier NP has both and they are not that hard to find. Although, hiking through the woods for several days, we never came across any. This picture was taken in the Many Glaciers area from the side of the road. Having bear spray handy provided some peace of mind during the hikes, although honestly I don't know how we would have fared had we actually came across one along the trails.

Bighorn sheep

Mountain goat

Bighorn sheep and mountain goats seem to linger around the Logan Pass area pretty much all hours of the day. Not a single day went by when we didn't see some in the area.

Horey marmot

Came across a group of these Horey marmots during the Highline trail hike.

A brave little squirrel

This little guy had no fear! While we sat down to take some rest, it tired to chew through our backpack trying to get to an apple inside.

Hidden Lake at GNP

2013-04-18T01:27:00.001-04:00

Hidden Lake at GNP, Sept. 2012

Hands down, one of the prettiest lakes I have seen at Glacier NP. It was a cold morning, but this little unplanned trip was well worth the effort. Wildfires around the area forced us to alter our original plans, otherwise we probably would not have come here at all. The 1.5 mile trail begins from Logan Pass with nice panoramic views all along the way. Because of the relatively short distance and accessibility, this seemed to be a VERY popular trail.

Hidden lake overlook trail

St. Mary Fall at GNP

2013-04-12T20:34:00.002-04:00

St. Mary Fall, Sept. 2012

Undeserved. That was the first feeling I had after coming to the St. Mary fall. Places like this should require some effort to reach just so one would appreciate it more. Yet it was so easy to get here. The scenery on the opposite side of the fall doesn't disappoint either (below).

Across the St. Mary Fall

About two miles down the trail is the Virginia fall, and along the way there are several unnamed falls, each of which are quite beautiful as well. Photographing Virginia fall was an epic failure. Never really got into a good position and kept getting the lens wet from the mist. But if I had to pick one, I would say St. Mary is by far the more unique of the two.

One of the unnamed falls along the falls trail

Puzzles by the Window - Another Exposure Blend

2013-03-18T23:12:00.002-04:00

Swiftcurrent lake viewed from Many Glacier Hotel (Sept. 2012) [3-shot exposure blend]

With gusty wind blowing all day, there was nothing better to do than to sip on coffee, make puzzles, and take in the view. And what a view it is!

My every attempt of taking a picture of this failed miserably. Trying to make the outside look right underexposes the inside, and trying to make the the inside look right blows out the outside. It really called for some exposure bracketing and blending (another example here). Attempts at doing a HDR using both Photoshop and Photomatix didn't quite turn out the way I wanted. Doing it manually with layer masks was the best way to go on these. On a side note, all three shots were taken using a circular polarizing filter to cut the glare out of the front window. The visible glare on the right hand side is in fact reflections of the back window.

-2 eV

+2 eV

0 eV

Many Glacier Sunset

2013-03-13T23:26:00.000-04:00

Swiftcurrent Lake (Sept. 2012)

After a long day of hiking, this was the perfect ending to the day. A spectacular sunset at the shore of the Swiftcurrent Lake. In about ten minutes, the sky went from orange to red to violet. Sometimes you just get lucky! Both pictures are blend of two exposures (+/- 1 eV), each taken with a 3 stop ND filter to smooth out the water a bit (from the deck of the Many Glacier Hotel).

Swiftcurrent Lake

Many Glacier Hotel (5 shot stitch pano)

Sunrise next morning was decidedly less impressive, still the early morning light was better than midday harsh sun and the haze.

Sunrise

Highline Trail at GNP

2013-03-12T22:21:00.002-04:00

From the trail.. (Sept. 2012)

Highline trail is 12 miles of total epic-ness that is not to be missed! On paper, the distance seems long, but that thought disappears as soon as you step on the trail. The views are just simply spectacular all along the way. Besides the view, what I remember most is the silence. It's calm and peaceful. It puts you in a different state of mind; something that you just can't get from any roadside overlook.

The picture above is taken after hiking about 3 miles into the trail (I think..but could be off by a little here). It's a stitch panorama made with 8 shots (at 200 mm). The full size image is around 80 megapixels, but had to shrink it to post here. Trying to take this picture with a single shot using a wide angle lens didn't work very well. The perspective doesn't quite match the view in real life. The distance between everything is so large that it really deemphasizes the size of the mountains. Doing a stitch panorama at 200 mm gives a nice compressed perspective that's much closer to reality. My wife was kind enough to volunteer to walk down the trail as I waited for her to get in the right position before taking the picture. Even with her in the frame, the scale is deceptive. It's hard to get a sense of how large the landscape is without being there.

This trail is not really a true "loop". One end of the trailhead is at Logan Pass and the other one is on the GTTS road at the Loop. The best way to hike is to park at the Loop in the morning, take the shuttle to Logan Pass, and start the hike from there. That way, at the end of the day you can just come out of the trailhead at the Loop and get in the car. This plan didn't quite work for us. We parked at the loop in the morning and got in line with about 20 other people to wait for the shuttle to Logan pass only to find that the shuttle can only take 2 people at a time. In the morning the shuttles coming from the west side of the park are generally packed before even making it to the Loop, and the driver reserves only two empty seats for pickup from the Loop towards Logan Pass. We didn't feel like waiting couple of hours at the parking lot, so at the end decided to drive to Logan Pass instead. At the end of the day finding empty shuttle from the Loop back to Logan Pass is much easier since people are generally heading back the other way.

Trail description at the Logan Pass entrance

Standing by the trail marker at the entrance. Did not end up using the tripod even once. Should not have brought it along.

The first portion of the trail, approximately 7.6 miles, is from Logan pass to Granite Park Chalet. Mountain goats grazing the grasslands at the head of the trail near Logan pass are a common sight.

The early portion of the trail runs directly above the GTTS road. It can seem a bit narrow at times, specially with large drop offs on one side, but never too narrow to really feel dangerous, and there are hand rails for extra support.

The trail running along the edge of the mountain

The pictures from earlier in the morning were generally more crisp and clear compared to the ones from later in the day because of the haze. Some of the haze can be taken out in post and shooting in raw definitely helps.

Beginning from Logan Pass, the trail climbs gradually but steadily until the Granite Park Chalet, which is visible from the trail from a very long distance away. When we first saw it, it seemed deceptively close. Maybe because by this time we were getting tired and were really looking forward to taking a break. I was also getting tired of carrying around the tripod that I knew I shouldn't have brought with me. There is no running water at the chalet, but there are restrooms and bottled water, drinks, and snacks for sale. For being out in the middle of nowhere, that's not too bad at all.

Granite Park Chalet

From this point on, the distance to the end of trail at the Loop is about 4 miles. It's a fairly steep downhill and my knees definitely would have thanked me if I had a walking stick. In stark contrast to the earlier portion of the trail, almost this entire portion is through the woods, and having bear spray handy provided some peace of mind. I think horseback riding is permitted here because we saw a lot of horse poop along this portion. Towards the end, the trails opened up a bit more as we passed through an area where wildfire had swept through. The sparkly white trees provide a nice contrast with the newly growing vegetation at the bottom. Ignoring the knee pain at the end of the day, this was definitely a day hike well worth doing.

Wild Goose Island at Glacier National Park

2013-02-25T14:27:00.000-05:00

As far as photography in GNP goes, this is a fairly cliché location, but that doesn't make it any less beautiful. The overlook is one of the most easily accessible locations in the park. It's right off the main park road, and there is a small parking area across the street. Since I was staying couple of minutes away from this place, making an attempt during sunrise and sunset on most days wasn't that difficult. But from outside the park, it can be quite a long drive, specially from the west side (lake Mcdonald area). During sunrise and sunset, the parking area fills up rather fast on most days and there is usually a herd of photographers jockeying for a good position.

Wild Goose Island sunrise (Sept. 2012)

This shot was from the second morning. After seeing the heavy clouds and light rain, I hesitated to get out of bed, but I'm glad I finally did. I think of all the other attempts, the light was the best on this morning. But by the time I got there, the place was already full. Some photography tour company parked their van and the place filled up fast. Unable to find any good location, I walked along the road for a bit and found a little clear area not too far from the overlook. I had about ten minutes to set up the tripod and fire off a few shots before the rain really started to come down.

The crowd at sunrise

The results from the other days weren't that good; it was either too cloudy and too clear. On a clear morning, the rocks take on a warm color for a brief period of time, but the light gets harsh rather fast.

Cloudy sunset

Bright morning and clear skies

Seeing the full moon, I attempted to take a long exposure shot one of the nights. It was cold, really windy, and I was honestly scared that at any second a bear might come out of the bushes. Not being dressed properly for the weather, I hurried to set up the camera, triggered the shutter, and ran back in the car to get warm. Ten minutes later I retrieved the camera only to find that I left the aperture at f/13 for some idiotic reason. The picture was seriously underexposed, but I didn't have the patience to do it all over again. It took a lot of massaging in Lightroom later on to bring out some of the details. The full size image is extremely noisy and looking at the result, I really wish I took the time to take a second shot with the appropriate settings. No amount of digital trickery can really substitute for doing it right in the first place. The streak of light at the lower right side is from car headlights along the park road.

Under the full moon

Having made several attempts, I guess what would make this view look really dramatic is to get the reflection of the peaks in the water. But the water was not calm enough on any of the days that I was there.

Multi-exposure Composite Firworks

2013-01-28T14:31:00.000-05:00

Fireworks for the last home game of the year of the Pittsburgh Pirates

Fireworks are always a bit tricky to photograph, specially with a city in the background. Balancing the exposure is almost impossible. Generally whatever exposure works for the fireworks are always too low for the background, resulting in a silhouette of the city. Best way to get around this is to combine multiple exposures. The shot above is a combination of 5 individual photos. The first one is exposed just for the city, before any fireworks began. The rest are just four different fireworks shots. The stacking process is straight forward using photoshop. This is also a very good way of combining multiple burst of fireworks without using a physical black card.

Load all files into a stack using: File --> Scripts --> Load Files into Stack
Set the blend mode of each layer to "Lighten"..and that's it!

5 individual shots that made the final image

DIY Macro lens

2012-09-16T11:54:00.000-04:00

Macro lenses give a glimpse into a world that's not normally seen. Try to buy a good one, and it will set you back at least $500. How about something much better for much less?

Jumping spider; had to chase him around for 10 minutes before he decided to pose for me

The setup looks a little strange, but it's simply just a flash, diffuser and lens combination. The lens is really the DIY part of this whole thing.

The lens: 50mm f/2.8 El-Nikkor. This is basically a film enlarging lens. Since most film processing labs are closing down, these can be found for cheap on ebay. I think I picked mine up for $28.
Extension tubes: Extension tubes basically provide the magnification. In general, longer extension will result in more magnification, but in return you will sacrifice brightness. This is why flash becomes essential for this type of work. I bought the extension tubes from amazon for $12 (Amazon link).
Reversing ring: This has EOS lens mount (for Canon) on ones side and 52 mm thread on the other side. They run about $6-$8 (Amazon link). I needed this to mount the el-nikkor to the extension tubes.
40.5mm to 52mm step-up ring: The el-nikkor lens need to be mounted in reserve and the filter thread size of the lens is 40.5mm (not 52mm like the reversing ring). So I needed this step-up ring to make the 40.5 mm thread fit the 52mm thread on the reversing ring. I would have preferred to just buy a 40.5mm reversing ring, but nobody seems to make such things. $8 from Amazon ( Amazon link).
Diffuser: 6"x8" softbox ($12 from Amazon)

The setup

The actual magnification of this setup is about 1.9x. How did I get this? The picture of the ruler below taken with this setup shows a width of ~30/64 inches (0.46875 inches). Since my camera has an APS-C sensor, the width of the sensor is 22.3mm or 0.878 inches. So, dividing the sensor size by the measured width from the ruler gives about 1.9x.

1.9x Magnification

Flash, lens and softbox

Breakout of the lens parts

El-Nikkor 50mm f/2.8

Manual aperture ring!

Some issues to keep in mind:

There is no auto-focus or any focus ring. Which means only way of getting proper focus is physically moving closer or further away from the subject. This sounds limiting, but in reality this is what I end up doing anyway even when I'm using my Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, which has AF capabilities. It's much easier to move back and forth by a few millimeters than to play with the focus ring.
There is no infinity focus. But if you are concerned about macro photography only, this is a non-issue. Buy a high end macro lens like Canon MP-E 65mm (which will allow you to get 1-5x magnification for about $1000), and you'll see the same thing..no infinity focus.
Using flash is a must. You can try to shoot at f/2.8 to get more light in, but the depth of field will be almost nonexistent since the subject is so close to the lens. In most cases I ended up working at around f/8 or f/11. Using a ring flash would probably work better than a softbox mounted to a speedlight, but the results from the softbox is not bad either.
You have to get comfortable going manual on everything. Since there is no electronic control, the aperture needs to be adjusted manually, while moving back and forth to get the proper focus and also while adjusting the flash power to get the right exposure. It sounds complicated and definitely takes some practice but in the end, it's not that difficult to do. Although working with fast moving subjects might be an issue.
This setup is better than reversing a standard 50mm lens that if often done. Why? Because it's hard to find lenses with manual aperture ring these days. So if you take something like a Canon 50mm f/1.8 (which only has electronic aperture control and you lose all of that as soon as you reverse it) you will always be stuck shooting wide open at f/1.8 with very low depth of field.

More awesome macro shots from this setup coming soon!

Pittsburgh Sunsets #1

2012-08-12T00:20:00.000-04:00

Pittsburgh has its fair share of cloudy and stormy days. Some would say it has more than its fair share, but of course one benefit of this is what you see here...Every once in a while, the sky just lights up!

The reds were so saturated that it almost looks fake...but this is exactly how it came out of the camera. This is a three shot vertical panorama; one for the buildings and two for the clouds. Had to shoot the buildings with a +3eV bias to get it to expose properly compared to the sky. So in reality, it turned out to be an exposure blended pano...

More to come on this sunset series soon!

Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix 2012

2012-07-31T18:23:00.001-04:00

It was that time of the year again, PVGP! Vintage cars zipping through Schenley park streets and a car show on the golf course.. perfect combination! Awesome weather yet again for the race weekend. Here are some sights from around the race and the car show.
Unlike last several years, when I focused mostly on the car shows, this time I spent a lot more time enjoying the races..

Panning and shooting, must had taken at least 20 tries to get one good shot

Watching the race from the park in front of the Schenley Cafe

At one of several hairpin turns

Cool down lap..

Zipping by..

Strolling through the car show in between the races

Assortment of Ferraris were on hand as usual

could not resist taking a picture of the GT40

And there is me.. :-)

Ricketts Glen State Park

2012-07-13T23:08:00.000-04:00

The Falls Trail at Ricketts Glen state park was a fantastic little hike. The main attraction here are the waterfalls and there were plenty of them. 21 falls in about 3.2 miles! I ended up going there in the middle of summer on a bright sunny day, and photographically speaking, this was probably not the best time. Most of the falls are in the shade, but patchy spots of sun hit them all day. This makes for fairly tricky conditions with blown out areas all over the place. Out of the twenty one, I found only one fall in complete shade. After trying a few times to photography the rest, I decided to give up and focused instead on smaller things around the falls. If I had to do this again, I would probably go back in the fall (hopefully on a cloudy day) when the leaves are more colorful. The green leaves of summer tend to blend in with the darker rocks around the falls and does not provide much contrast. That all being said, it is still one of the best hiking trails in PA in my opinion.

Start/End of the hike

This was the first time I decided to use the new Hoya ND400 filter (9 stops!). It is fantastic, but it does have a slight greenish tint to it, which is specially apparent if you underexpose slightly; but the tint can be easily removed in post. Sometimes using the ND400 is an overkill because it can make things look too smooth, so I was switching back and forth between the ND400 and ND8 (3 stops) quite a bit. In the end, I ended up using the ND8 for majority of the shots, except for this one here...

Taken with Hoya ND400 filter

On the first day, we didn't get to the park till late afternoon. Since there wasn't enough daylight left to do any long hikes, we decided to check out the Evergreen Trail. It's a bit separated from the main park entrance. As far as I remember, there is a sign on Rt 118 that reads "Kitchen Creek" which leads to a parking area next to the trailhead. It's a short 1 mile loop trail with one waterfall at the very beginning. Rest of the trail is flat and a very easy walk. The picture below is the lower portion of the fall which basically turns into a water slide at the very bottom. Around the corner from here is the main fall, but I decided to skip taking picture there because it was crowded with a big group of people at the time.

Along the Evergreen Trail

Cheap DIY remote camera trigger

2012-06-27T00:49:00.001-04:00

Most of us are familiar with the 10 second routine. Set focus, press the shutter and RUN, and hope to get in position and look somewhat natural before the camera triggers..and repeat until you are happy with the result. I hate the 10 second self-timer mode on cameras. As I travel more and more with my family, this situation comes up over and over. After coming across a tutorial a while ago from Sawo over at enlightpaintment.com for a RF remote trigger, I decided to build my own using the same parts that he used (see parts list at the end of this post). As he describes in his video, it's basically a garage door opener. One advantage of this over regular IR remote that Canon or Nikon sells is that it works over much longer distance and does NOT require line of sight to trigger the camera.

The only tweak I made was to add an ON/OFF switch between the positive terminal of the battery and the power pin on the PCB, so that I don't have to remove the battery in and out all the time. Also, I didn't have a plastic box to put it in, so decided to make a little box with cardboard and then use a combination of super glue, hot glue and tape to hold everything together. The final box is surprising sturdy. One problem (which wasn't really a problem in the end) was that the PCB came with one broken relay, so there was only one working channel rather than two. But since I only needed one, it didn't really matter. But I requested a replacement from the ebay seller and they promised to ship me a new one (Three weeks later, still waiting..).

Toggle switch glued on top of one of the relays between the battery and the power pin

Cardboard box to house everything

Everything closed up with generous amount of tape and glue

This cheap little thing works like a dream! In all my tests, it never failed to trigger the camera (even from a different room behind closed doors).

Parts list:

9V battery
Super glue, tape, hot glue
2.5mm audio cable to interface with camera (which happens to be the connector type Canon uses for their remote release port)
2-Channel garage door opener with remote (From ebay; ~$10)

Have fun building your own!

Pittsburgh marathon 2012

2012-05-26T00:25:00.000-04:00

What could be better than waking up to the marathon. This year, I managed not to get my car towed! Here are some scenes from mile 21ish...

First one to pass by

First male runner..doesn't even look like he was sweating

Lead pack

Hot day to be doing 26.2!

How he managed not to pass out from the heat, i'll never know

Rebel's AF system leaves a lot to be desired, but AI-Servo mode helps a bit..

Star trails with motion blur

2012-05-08T09:03:00.000-04:00

I recently came across some spectacular startrail shots done by Bard Goldpaint, and it really pushed me to reprocess some of my older shots. The motion blur effect that he has on some of his shots is really nice, and lately I'v seen this done quite nicely in some timelapse videos around the web. After a bit of researching, I came up with a workflow that seems to work. It needs some tweaking, but I though it would be a good idea to share what I have for now.

Trails with 'motion blur'

Straight stack without 'blur' processing

The basic idea is to adjust the exposure of the shots so that they transition smoothly between 3-4 stops. This method will work best if the sequence consists of many shots of short exposures, as opposed to a few longer exposures. I personally shoot all of mine as a sequence of 30s exposures. So, here are the steps I followed:

1. First I imported all the images into Lightroom.

2. Then I hopped over to LRTimelapse and loaded the metadata of all the images except for the very last frame in the sequence (the reason for this will become clear soon). Then, I added three keyframes; one at the very beginning, one towards the middle and one at the very end. The idea is to adjust the exposure of the first frame to be -3eV, middle frame to be 0eV and the last one to be +1eV.

(Those of you unfamiliar with LRTimelapse can head over to lrtimelapse.com where you will be able to download it and find many useful tutorial videos on how to use this wonderful tool created by Gunther Wegner. In short, it allows you to achieve smooth transitions of many image parameters over a sequence of images. This becomes absolutely vital when shooting timelapse sequences, specially when adjusting exposure settings mid-sequence. I'm basically using this to get a smooth exposure gradient from -3eV to +1eV over my sequence).

Exposure adjustment with LRTimelapse

4. After applying the exposure gradient, I exported all the images as tif (originally shot as raw) including the last frame (which was not included in the exposure adjustment in LRTimelapse).

5. In order to get that glowing dot at the end of the trail, I needed to adjust the last frame. To do this, I used the Magic Wand tool in Photoshop to select all the stars in the shot. Clicking on the brightest star with the wand will generally auto-select about 90% of the stars in the image, which is usually good enough. Sometimes the wand also picks up unintended bright objects in the frame, but it's easy enough to subtract them from the selection. Once the stars are selected, I expanded the selection by about 50% (Selection --> Refine Edges --> Contract/Expand), applied a Gaussian blur to the expanded selection to make the stars appear slightly larger and then increased the brightness slightly.

5. After making the adjustments to the last frame, the only thing left to do was to stack them. For this, I used startrails.exe. Once the stacking was done, I imported the final stacked image into Photoshop and manually blended it with the shot of the benches with some layer masking. Since the benches in the foreground were lit with a LED flashlight (which had a pretty heavy bluish hue), I needed to adjust the color balance to make it fit in with the color temperature of the rest of the image.

Final thoughts...it's a lot of work! but, I definitely like the look of it better than just a straight stack. The exposure gradient can use a bit more tweaking, but I think I'll save that for next time when I shoot another one of these.

Spring

2012-05-06T13:42:00.000-04:00

It was a strange winter this year, hardly snowed, and definitely not as cold as the previous few years. And this spring has been no different either. We already made quite a few jumps between 75 and 35 degrees so far. But this didn't keep the flowers from coming out. It's nice to see the familiar scenes transform into something different even if it is for just a few days.

East Liberty Ave, Pittsburgh, PA

New Year's fireworks in Pittsburgh

2012-04-21T22:18:00.000-04:00

A VERY late post, but I stumbled across this pictures while going through my library yesterday. I remembered wanting to make a post about it while taking the shot, but then totally lost track. This was the very first year I decided to hang around downtown till midnight. The idea was to check out the festivities and then end the night with some fireworks shots over downtown. What didn't occur to me was that the midnight fireworks happen in front of the Highmark building and from the other side of the river, it's difficult to see anything at all. Lesson learned. Nevertheless, the lighting of the cloudy night sky was interesting enough to not delete the picture. Next year, different location.

Downtown Pittsburgh on January 1st, 2012

Star Trailing

2012-04-13T21:06:00.003-04:00

It's amazing how many stars you can see once you go a little further out from the city. Couple weeks ago, I had the chance to do some shooting in Moraine State Park, next to Lake Arthur. All went well, until about the very end when those bright trails showed up courtesy of a low flying plane. Didn't have the patience to remove it post.

For all these shots, I'v been sticking to the formula of shooting 30s continuous exposures for about an hour or so and then stacking them with startrails.exe; some minor brightness/contrast adjustments and color corrections on the final image before conversion to jpeg (they are all shot in raw and then stacked and saved as tiff before the final conversion).

For this one, after the star shots, I took one extra shot (changing the focus to be on the bench) and light painted them with my flashlight. Had to do a little bit of color temperature adjustment on the bench color in post since the flash light I was using was one of those while LED ones with very blue tone colors.

Lake Arthur

Walking to the sky, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, PA

High Res shots here.

Extreme Shaped Bokeh

2011-12-31T00:14:00.001-05:00

Shaped bokeh is cool, but try doing some complicated shapes and you will drive yourself crazy trying to perfect your exacto knife skills. Who has that much patience, really? It was time to figure out a better way. Something with more flexibility, more potential...more awesomeness!

After a bit of head scratching, the plan was to use a black and white mask printed on transparency sheets. Technically, this should do the same job as a normal cutout mask. But of course, nothing is as simple as it seems. Turns out, transparency sheets are rarely completely 'transparent' and on top of that, they usually have some sort of bumps on the surface which makes taking pictures through them almost impossible. Everything comes out fuzzy and light transmission is severely reduced. Bit of hunting around, and I finally found some really clear ones that seemed good enough for the job. So, after printing some black and white images on them using the highest the dpi setting on the printer (1200 in my case), it was time to see how it would work out.

Transparency mask cutouts...about 1"x1"

Mask holder

Homer!

Ready for action

Does it work?

Homer....bokehfied!

Hamerschlag Hall

Stewie...bokehfied!

The results are....not too bad I think. Let's just overlook the crappy foreground, bad subject matter and poor lighting for now, but this was a proof of concept and I didn't bother with choosing the perfect setup. But some important lessons learned along the way..

Intricate patterns doesn't really work very well. Any pattern that has lot of tiny openings causes unacceptable level of diffraction, and makes everything look fuzzy and dreamy...i'm afraid there is no way around this problem.
The key is to find super clear transparencies if possible
Shooting with fast lenses wide open helps (yay for 50mm/1.4). Bigger the aperture, bigger the shape that can be used.
After putting all that junk in front the lens, auto focus will most likely fail most of the time...but nothing wrong with using good old fashion manual focus.
Since the effective aperture is now smaller and most likely these types of shots will be taken at night, unless the foreground object is brightly lit, some sort of flash is needed most of the time. I wish I had used my external flash for the shots, but all I had available with me was the on camera popup flash.
Things work relatively well when the image being used is mostly transparent.

Top 10 of 2011

2011-12-19T23:11:00.000-05:00

In no particular order, here they are....Enjoy!

View from Cadillac mountain (more here)

Boothe Memorial Park, CT (more here)

Entrance to Acadia mountain trail (more here)

Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix (more here)

Horsebarn Hill, Storrs, CT

Yet another epic sunset in Pittsburgh

Heinz Chapel (more here)

Fun with fall colors (more here)

Almost Autumn in Acadia

2011-12-18T16:18:00.000-05:00

Note to self, first week of October is too early for fall colors in Acadia. There were some, but very little. Out of four days, we were stuck in heavy rain for about day and a half; and the remaining days were a hit and miss between heavy cloud/fog and some occasional sunshine. Needless to say, this was not an ideal trip. But we did get a chance to do some hiking around the area and take some photos along the way.

Cadillac Mountain, North Ridge Trail: View from top of Cadillac mountain is nice (if you drive up), but it's much nicer when you hike up. Well, for our trip up, it was covered with heavy fog. With visibility less than 10 feet, we had no idea what the view was like, but on the way down, things cleared up just at the right time for about 20 mins.

View from Cadillac Mountain, 5 shot panorama with exposure blend

Taking in the view

Endless fog, which blanketed the whole area most of the time

This was the view majority of the way up

Since there was nothing big to take pictures of, I decided to focus on the small. But 70-200mm is hardly the right tool for the job. This required many many attempts.

Spider web in early morning dew

Multicolored trail

More fog

Trail-makers

Acadia Mountain: Acadia mountain is a relatively short hike compared to Cadillac mountain, but gives a view of the opposite side of the island that you can't get from Cadillac. And it didn't hurt that the weather was nicer on this day..

View from the top, two shot exposure blend

Entrance/Exit of the trail

Hunters Cliff Overlook: This is a little known overlook which requires about 1/2 mile hike from the parking area, which is not listed anywhere in the park brochures. We found it in a book that we bought from the visitor center. The parking area is really not very well marked and we managed to get lost couple of time trying to get there, but the trail is quite well marked. And the view was well worth the trouble.

Hunters Cliff Overlook

Here are few other shots from various places on the park loop road. I really wish we had spent more time exploring the carriage roads, but the constant threat of rain killed those plans.

Sandy Beach

Signs of autumn

And finally, few shots from early morning walk along the shoreline path

Along the shoreline path

Early morning view from the shoreline path

Fall arrives with a bang

2011-11-06T00:03:00.000-04:00

Compared to last couple of years, fall colors this year have been quite nice. Here are some pictures from around Pittsburgh. Enjoy!

Highland Park, Pittsburgh, PA

In front of Phipps Conservatory

Schenley Cafe

Phipps Conservatory

Carnegie Mellon University

Cathedral of Learning walkway

Is there such a thing as fall color abstract? Maybe this comes close...

Schenley Park, quick flick of the wrist while keeping the shutter open

Full album with larger sizes: