Archive for the ‘Moments of Light’ Category
Night Moth Pictures
A few nights ago we got back to our house after nightfall. On the way into our house, my wife noticed a leaf that was hanging “funny” off of one of our trees. It turned out to be a really interesting moth. Of course I wanted to get a picture of it.
I brought out my Nikon D-700 with my 70-300 lens mounted. This lens offers VR capabilities, but that still didn’t change the fact that I needed a light source. I was going to use flash for the photograph, but I could not see the moth to focus! I thought my camera had a focus-assist light, but at the time it was not coming on and I did not have time to figure out what was wrong, or even if my memory was incorrect. As a quick solution, I simply asked my wife to hold a flashlight on the moth so I could focus, and then the flash would illuminate the moth for the photograph.
I was quite pleased with the results. I ended up using manual focus. The combination of camera flash and flashlight illumination came out better than I expected. Here’s a picture cropped to show the moth hanging from the tree branch.
Here is a version that I have cropped all the way into the moth detail. The amount of texture and color is amazing. The focus point was on the head of the moth, so the eye shows up quite clearly. The antenna are great too, but what really amused me was how clearly the moth’s “toes” show up.
One of the tips to share here is I had two different angles to consider shooting from. One angle put the moth in front of a bunch of lights from the skyline. The other angle had me shooting towards my neighbor’s back yard, which had no lights. That was obviously the better choice because I don’t have any light pollution showing up behind the image. So in this case, I guess I was shooting a “moment of darkness” instead of light. 
XKCD Rules…
That is all. 
Please Recycle
Plastics. It’s not just a quote from “The Graduate” it’s become a way of life in the United States. And apparently, it has become a new floating island in the Pacific Ocean as well.
Old Habits Die Hard
A recent headline on AOL read as follows:
How to Take Better Pictures at the Game
5 Tips for Catching That Perfect Play on Film
Yes, they said “film” in their headline. And the best part is that the article talked about using a couple of new digital cameras at the US Open to capture shots of the tennis players.
I bet the person who wrote the headline is over 30 years old. 
How Long Can You Store Film?
Some years ago I bought a brick (20 rolls) of Fuji Velvia slide film. I needed some for a trip that I took right away, but there was no way I was going to use all of it at once. I stored the remaining rolls in the freezer.
Life intervened, and it was several years before I was able to schedule another trip dedicated to photography. I was a little concerned that the film had been stored for so long that it would have become stale, but I didn’t have time to shoot a roll and get it developed before leaving for the trip, so I pulled the film out of the freezer and decided to use it anyway.
I just got my pictures back yesterday, and it seems that the faith was justified. On initial inspection I don’t see any sort of color shift or other sign that the film was in less than optimal condition. This weekend I plan to go through and scan some of the more promising images to I can see how they look. But all of the initial indications are good.
Shake Your Film Canister
Here is another drawback of going all digital. You don’t have any film canisters sitting around, and therefore you can’t use this:
If you don’t want to click the image, the product in question is a set of salt / pepper shaker tops that you can use on film canisters. So if you don’t mind that your salt and/or pepper ends up smelling like film, then go for it. They can be yours for the low, low, price of just $1.99. As for me, I’ll keep my regular salt and pepper shaker that I got from REI.
Got My Own BL-3… Without Paying Too Much
A few posts ago I wrote about the horrible overpayments being made on eBay for the Nikon BL-3 battery caps. Yet, here we are today, and none of my favorite online vendors have this item in stock yet. I have a camera sitting around doing nothing because I don’t have a way to use my batteries.
That is, until today. Continue…
Preserve Your Rights
I first got into photography a long time ago… in junior high school, to be exact. I was the photographer for our junior high school yearbook. Seriously. I used a Graflex 35mm camera with black and white film. It was fun. The camera broke not too long after (I still have it, I’m sure it’s worth a fortune on eBay 
) so it wasn’t until the late 1990’s that I started up again.
Once I did get back into the swing of things I started looking for ways to make money or gain recognition as a photographer. One day I was reading the Parade section of our Sunday newspaper and saw a photo contest. They paid $500 or something like that for first place, and $100 for each of the runner-up selections. That looked like a possible way to make a bit of money.
Then I read the fine print and realized that the $500 prize was a drop in the bucket compared to what the contest folks could get for my photograph. By entering the contest I was allowing them to do whatever they wanted with my photograph… essentially I was transferring ownership of the picture to the contest company. It wasn’t worth $500 then, and it isn’t now either.
I flashed back to this memory when I read this blog post about how various web sites are using the same technique (or something similar) today. Same scam, new audience.
Just be careful where you post your images. Read the fine print. Make sure you retain the rights you want to retain, because once they’re gone there probably isn’t a way to get them back.
I’ve Got Something to Say
This site was one of the very first sites that I ever set up. It started out hosted on the free member pages that America Online offered. Eventually I decided that I wanted to get a domain name and set up a site where I had more control over how things were done. I still have the original code that I used on AOL though.
