Tag Archives: photography tips

July 17, 2015 · 5:35 am

Fun Photo Friday — David Williams at White Sands

The Face

Photographing the dazzling white gypsum crystals of White Sands is not simply a case of point-and-shoot. That intense white will confuse your camera’s light sensor. Unless you make adjustments for that, your “white” dunes will come out looking dingy gray from underexposure. Approach photography at White Sands as you would approach bright daylight photography of snow — think “Exposure Compensation.”

Lonely Dune Climber

The vast majority of the photographs I’ve posted this week were taken with exposure compensation between +.7 and +2.0, with most falling in at around +1.3. And even then the JPEGs appeared washed, lacked contrast and detail, and lacked luster and punch on nearly every level. Fortunately, I was also saving images in Raw.

The Yucca

Indeed, I wound up tossing nearly every original JPEG and converting the Raw files into JPEG format after working a little digital post-processing magic. The results were vastly superior, and I was able to compensate for the Panasonic FZ1000’s inclination to internally over-process JPEGs and to remove the corner vignetting evident many of the shots. The FZ1000 is a very good camera, but that 16x zoom lens does have its limitations. I’m also not very impressed with the aforementioned internal JPEG processing. Large swathes of monochromatic areas, such as sky, often come out looking blotchy rather than smooth and uniform. My Canon G1 X is vastly superior in this regard.

The Garden

For a rather lengthy, perhaps boring, but nicely detailed look at exposure compensation I refer you to my previous blog post on the subject: Honey, Why is the Snow so Gray . . . and Your Face so Dark?” Another post on the subject would be: The Photo Clinic is Open.

Next week we take David Williams on a grand tour of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and the picturesque and historic Mexican Canyon Train Trestle. Until then I leave you with three last Fun Photo Friday images of White Sands:

Wooden Fence

Blowing in the Wind

Hiker in the Distance

By the way, if you’re reading this and other material authored by me on The Destinary website, this post was not “Posted on (fill in the date) | By destinary” as they’ve been erroneously claiming; this material was in fact reposted. The Destinary have also been claiming the right to do so, without links back to the original and without full attribution (“by RDoug” and a nonworking link is not proper attribution) with a rather bizarre interpretation of U.S. copyright law in which they claim I’m responsible for changing my RSS feed settings so that they cannot skim my material for commercial purposes. That would make reading my blog less convenient for you, which I’m not willing to do. As such, I’ll be running this little diatribe on all travel related posts until they cease and desist, along with this:

Final note: Considering The Destinary is a site listed as owned by Sonia Bosquez-Platt of Indianapolis Tour & Travel, you may want to rethink doing business with her or her company.

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Filed under Fun Photo Friday, Photography, R. Doug Wicker, travel

Tagged as exposure compensation, Fun Photo Friday, photography tips, R. Doug Wicker, travel photography, White Sands, White Sands National Monument

July 3, 2015 · 5:35 am

Fun Photo Friday — Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Daytime photograph is easy, but . . .

There are some tricks to capturing a sporting event, and it gets really iffy in nighttime, artificial lighting situations.

. . . nighttime? Not so much.

You have to balance your camera’s sensor limitations against the need to freeze the action. Remember, the smaller the sensor the noisier the image at higher ISO settings. This night I was using a Panasonic FZ1000 with a 1″ sensor because I needed the longer telephoto reach over my 1.5″ Canon G1 X, but that meant I was going to be limited to around ISO 800. That in turn meant I was not going to be able to freeze the action. Most of the shots you see here were taken at 1/80th of a second. You have to make choices, and I chose image sharpness over freezing the action.

Stiii—RIKE ! ! ! And the bat disappears in a blur

My location also placed a severe limitation on me. I was behind the safety netting, and auto-focus tends to focus on the nearest object. So this night I found the players and field were softened at telephoto distances, but that the netting was distractingly sharp. This is the time you simply must switch to manual focus if your camera has that capability. Fortunately, the FZ1000 does.

Manual focus through the safety netting

In action photography it’s easy to guess when to press the shutter release if you’re panned back to see the entire scene.

This type shot can easily be timed completely through the viewfinder — the foul ball is the blurred white streak midway between the pitcher and batter

But what if you’re zoomed in on the batter and can’t see when the pitcher is releasing the ball? In this case you have get creative using both eyes. Glue one eye to the viewfinder or LCD screen (viewfinder is better when manually focusing, obviously) while keeping the other eye open and watching the pitcher. This is also a skill you want to acquire in firearms shooting, so it has other applications. Do the both-eyes-open thing and you can get this kind of perfectly timed shot (the ball is the white streak to the upper left and the bat is mildly blurred at the start of the swing):

Keep one eye in the viewfinder and the other on the pitcher

Here’s another example from Wednesday’s post using this technique:

Incoming!

And another:

Foul ball

Now for some favorite shots from this enchanting evening courtesy of our wonderful neighbors Randi and Jim Brewer:

Off his leash

A happy fellow

El Paso skyline

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Tagged as AAA baseball, Chihuahua AAA baseball, El Paso Chihuahuas, Fun Photo Friday, Panasonic FZ1000, photography, photography tips, R. Doug Wicker, Southwest University Park, sports, sports photography

September 20, 2013 · 5:35 am

Fun Photo Friday — Doors and Windows Edition 2

Today’s Fun Photo Friday concludes our two-week look at creative composition during travel photography. I hope you got something out of this, and that you’ll actively start looking at new and creative ways to preserve images of your travels.

This week’s selected half-dozen: