I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a photography thread for a little while now, so I’m finally pulling the trigger. I think I’ve shared on here that I’ve really gotten into photography over the past few years. I found that it was a very positive creative outlet when I was going through some serious depression. I’ve posted some of my photos in the “post a photo of where you are” thread, but it seems a little more appropriate to have a thread dedicated to photography. Since this is something that I really enjoy and is an ever growing part of my life, I figure a photography thread might be a meaningful way I can contribute to this little online community we have here.
My intent with this thread is for it to be a place for people to discuss all things related to photography, to share and ask questions, and hopefully learn a bit. I’m going to try my best to keep up with the thread and answer questions, but I can be real bad about forgetting to check things sometimes, so don’t be afraid to nudge me with an@ or a pm if I haven’t responded. I’ll be back later on to post a few things about my setup and some stories about how photography has affected my life.
Anyway, to kick things off, here are a few recent photos I took at Blowing Rocks Preserve on Jupiter Island. I woke up early to try and catch the Loenid Meteor shower, but as you can probably see from the photos, it was too cloudy to see any meteors. Regardless, there was a lot of wave action and some cool clouds, so I figured I’d play around with the new 6-stop neutral density filter I recently purchased. Between the wind, the spray on my lens, and the waves washing around my tripod, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get any photos that were sharp, but lo-and-behold, I got several that I was pleased with. All these exposures are around 20-25 seconds:
So here’s a photo of my current camera setup. I shoot with a Sony A7Rii mirrorless, full-frame camera. I upgraded my camera this summer after my last camera drowned while I was out in Big Cypress Preserve photographing ghost orchids. I have two lenses (lenses are the most expensive aspect of photography when you get into it). My favorite is the one that’s pictured on the camera, it’s a 20mm F1.8 Sony G series prime lens. It takes beautifully crisp photos, which is important now that I’m on a full-frame camera. The second is a recent purchase, it’s a 24-105mm F4 Sony G series zoom lens. I got this because it was a lot more versatile than the 20mm and it allows me to play around with focal lengths that are more appropriate for street photography and portraiture.
I have a Peak Design strap that I love. It makes it real easy to attach/detach from the camera and it’s comfortable.
To the right is my new neutral density filter. It’s a six-stop X-4 model by Breakthrough Photography. I have a couple variable-stop ND filters, but I do not like them, because they do not filter light evenly and create weird shadows across the image that are a pain to remove in post.
I just connected with the local photography society where I live. I’m hoping to meet some more people and learn more. So far the folks I’ve met that are into photography have been pretty supportive.
Do you have any favorite photos you can post, or photographers that you enjoy?
I love minimalist photography, but most of the photos I take probably wouldn’t qualify as minimalist (although there doesn’t appear to be any official definition). Here is one of the exceptions from my photography, an early morning cityscape of West Palm Beach. It’s rare that the intracoastal is this still, especially in the daylight, so this was a pretty lucky morning for me to be out and taking photos:
All my negs and prints are in storage and I didn’t get them digitised as I stopped photography a long time ago when I started a normal job, unfortunately. The Rollei is with them, collecting dust. :(
My favourites back then were Bill Brandt (I have Shadow Of Light which is an inspiring body of work), Edward Weston and Irving Penn, but also some quirkier ones like Diane Arbus.
Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill, London is just magnificent, and typical of one period of Brandt’s work:
I was really interested in textures and the contrast between them. I experimented with a lot of different techniques but never really found what I wanted.
I pushed fast (400ASA) film to 1600 or 3200 for an intense, grainy effect, and tried rare recording film (12ASA) to see what it looked like (impossible to expose correctly!) but mostly settled on Tri-X at 400ASA because I loved the look of its grain.
Digital is like a separate medium really, with all the post-processing effects available - those used to be done (as much as they could) in the darkroom but with film you really had to visualise the end image before taking the photo, and choose how to expose and print to get there.
I guess the same is always true with photography, but it was more of a necessity then because film and paper were too expensive to be firing off dozens for a single shot.
Here’s some photos I took over Thanksgiving weekend in St. Augustine. I was shooting the pier because they put Christmas lights on it that were blueish and I thought they might look cool early in the morning. Both mornings I went there ended up being pretty spectacular sunrises, which stole the show.
It’s been a bit since I posted any photos, so here are a couple that I shot a while ago and edited, but forgot I had. I really like minimalism and abstraction, and I seem really attracted to small details, so I guess that would be macro photography, even though I don’t own a macro lens. This is me playing around with all three concepts.
It’s been a bit since I’ve shared any photos, so here are some of my favorites from the first day of my trip to Alaska I. January. We took a helicopter flight around the Chugach Mountain range and the conditions were phenomenal. It was late afternoon and there was some low cloud over that was moving out as we were flying around, which made for some incredible, dramatic photos. I hope y’all enjoy.
Haven’t posted in a while, but wanted to drop this photo in here. It’s a composite of the Milky Way that I took earlier this year out in Big Cypress National Preserve. BCNP is the place with the darkest skies in Florida, so it presents the best opportunity to get decent night sky photos. This is a composite of 15 11s exposures taken on my Sony A7riii with a 20mm Sony g lens at F1.8 and, I believe 1600iso. I spent a ton of time editing and reeditjng this photo, basically teaching myself how to do a decent job of creating layer masks for the sky and removing light pollution while preserving the star colors. (As an aside, @suzzer99 thanks for the effort you put in to explaining photoshop techniques, but in the end I went with Capture One for the edits). Anyway, I’m super pleased with how this photo evolved and ended up. I’m not sure if it will come through on this small version, but I was able to capture the reddish hues of the Lagoon Nebula and orange of Antares, among others.
So I’d been wanting to learn how to take star trail photos, and I finally got a opportunity with som good conditions a few weeks back. A cold front came through and on the back side of it we had a night with zero clouds and basically no wind in Big Cypress, so I drove out with my equipment and took 220 30-second exposures. I spent the next couple weeks learning how to process and compile them. Here’s the result:
Nice shot! The angle confuses me though. Shouldn’t the stars all be rotating around the North Star?
You can also put the camera on bulb for 30 minutes. Or you can with DLSRs. Maybe mirrorless doesn’t have that.
Just don’t wander off and then lose your way back to your camera like I did in Joshua Tree. When I finally found it but my bulb was on for 45 minutes and I think might have damaged the sensor a little. The shot came back all green and purple.
