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DailyPhotos > Jeremy  > Photo Diary > My Daily Photo Diary
One photo a day to continue the study of subject, composition, and light. Critiques are always welcome. Although I endeavor to create a photo to match the day shown in the caption, my "day" is the waking period between major sleep cycles.

This is my second year of the project. Click here to see the year 1 gallery. You may contact me at jeremy@winnick.net.
Gallery pages:  <  1  2  3  4  5  6  
< 46 of 53 >
Jeremy > May 10, 2009; Day 8. Play Day at Al’s. Today I joined Peter and our friend Steve in a trip to Deerfield in search of photographic bliss at his 186-acre estate. The moment I stepped out of the car, I knew it was going to be a frustrating day…the black flies are peaking right now. We donned hoods and eschewed deet: we were all holding DSLR cameras. Luckily there were occasional strong gusts of wind that blew all the flies away; those were sweet solitary moments. Peter and I found this grove of birch trees and I taught him how to do a vertical pan. I wasn’t expecting to get one I liked, since the leaves are all green. Luckily, the shades of green are different in the spring, and having the color of Earth in the shot helps too. I may end up with more than 50 keepers from this 6-hour trip. We love going to Al’s because if we call him before we come over, he’ll put a rhubarb pie into the oven. If excess happiness is unhealthy, I would have been hospitalized today. Raw: Color Temperature: 4450K; Tint: 0 Raw: Exposure: +0.4 Raw: Blacks: 60 Raw: Brightness: +13; Contrast: +50 Raw: Saturation: +10 PS: Healing Brush to remove sensor dust PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 9, 2009; Day 7. Uneasy Ascent. I took a walk through the cemetery today, finding all kinds of spring subjects under a pleasant canopy of overcast skies. I liked this shot the most; I can’t say why. I darkened its mood with the channel mixer. Click here to see the SOOC JPEG, with just the sharpening step applied. You can see why the very slight crop was needed. Raw: Crop: 11.3MP Raw: Color Temperature: 4450K; Tint: 0 Raw: Exposure: +0.35 Raw: Fill Light: +15 Raw: Blacks: 7 Raw: Brightness: +29; Contrast: +50 Raw: Saturation: +10 PS: Curves: Medium Contrast preset PS: Channel Mixer: Custom preset, Gray output, Red: 10%; Green: 10%; Blue: 80%; Monochrome PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 8, 2009; Day 6. Ugly Flower. I haven’t yet mowed my lawn for the season, which means a lot of weeds are sprouting flowers, to the delight of the bumblebees. I thought I’d practice trying to catch one. But rather than chase the bees, I picked a flower and waited for a bee to come to it. The bees seem to select their flowers somewhat randomly. Naturally, the nearby bees were selecting the adjacent flowers. Someone once wrote that macro work is slow and tedious. I’m beginning to agree! The tripod at its lowest possible setting, just above the ground. While watching the bees, I noticed that they are rather rotund bugs that would need a lot of DOF to show fully in focus. Their girth also causes the flowers to sway under their weight each time they land. By the time the flower has stabilized, the bee is off to the next one. I computed that I’d need no fewer than 8 seconds of perfect stillness on the part of the bee to capture it clearly. (Ring flash to the rescue? I may try that.) I realized that a 1:1 shot of a bumblebee was not in the cards today. Thus, I just photographed the ugly flowers instead. I wish I had noticed the flower in the lower left of the main stem; it is the only attractive one in the bunch. I’d need extension tubes on the macro lens, though, to bring it closer and push the unfortunate dead flower adjacent to it out of the frame. I wonder if flowers are aware of their fallen, rotting brethren next door. I hope not. I could have just pruned it out too. This shot got a lot of post-processing. Click here to see the original JPEG from the camera with just sharpening applied. Feel free to tell me if you think that I’m going overboard with the processing. The lab "a" adjustment did most of the blue-to-purple conversion. I personally like the final result. Kashaaf asked me yesterday if I also tried the rain shot with the focus on the house, or somewhere in between. I didn't try in-between, but I did try a shot of my house with focus on the house. I didn't like it nearly as much. Raw: Color Temperature: 9100K; Tint: 0 Raw: Exposure: +0.25 Raw: Blacks: 19 Raw: Brightness: +18; Contrast: +50 Raw: Saturation: +8 PS: Curves: Linear Contrast preset PS: Lab a channel adjustment: “Soft light” at 50% opacity PS: Curves adjustment to give the effect of developing E4 slide film in C41 chemicals PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 7, 2009; Day 5. Art House. This is my next-door neighbor’s house, which has never called out to me as a photo subject until today. I’m in my car, still in my driveway, in a steady rain. Too bad I had already used the wipers before noticing this. When I got to work I had thought of some more items to shoot like this, but unfortunately, the rain was nothing more than a mist by then. Tonight was the 4th photography class at the Concord High School. We covered aperture. Not much new information for me, but I did enjoy the time we spent critiquing the photos of the other students. Peter produced one of his shots from Sunday, which was great. Raw: Crop: 9.6MP Raw: Color Temperature: 6350K; Tint: +30 Raw: Saturation: +8 PS: Curves: Medium Contrast preset PS: Lab a channel adjustment: “Soft light” at 50% opacity PS: Lab b channel adjustment: “Soft light” at 50% opacity PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 6, 2009; Day 4. Where Calories Go to Die. This is the façade for one of two Planet Fitness gyms in Manchester. It’s much better looking than the one in Concord, because this one was built as a gym; the Concord store is a converted True Value Hardware, which was a converted FunSpot. I was drawn by the stormy sky. It’s a quick and dirty shot. If I had more time, I’d have put the camera on the tripod, set the timer, and walked into the scene with my bag slung over my shoulder. Raw: Color Temperature: 8000K; Tint: 0 Raw: Exposure: -0.3 Raw: Recovery: 100 Raw: Fill Light: 20 Raw: Saturation: +8 PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 5, 2009; Day 3. Strawberries and Cream. Actually, it’s cream falling into Grenadine. I already did separate cream-into-cream shots as a daily and for my closeup photography class. The current Joy of Photography class has a macro lesson too (week 4), so I was practicing tonight with liquids of different colors. I like the effect of liquids that don’t immediately dissolve into each other. Thus, a shot like this may be better suited as a submission for the abstract art lesson (week 5). In any case, I cannot submit this particular shot or any of the other 264 shots I took tonight, because they were all shot at ISO 1600. Oops! Good thing I’m still practicing. Whereas the D700 does handle noise at ISO 1600 very well, a high ISO is totally unnecessary here since all of the light in this shot is coming from the flash. In my experience so far, when the flash is the key light in the shot, a high ISO setting almost always leads to blown out highlights. This one is spared because the inner crown is in the shadow of the outer crown, which has expanded beyond the frame. This shot also suffers from a couple of drops of splatter on the lens. I'll have to watch for that too when I re-shoot this. Raw: Color Temperature: 6100K; Tint: -8 Raw: Recovery: 38 Raw: Blacks: 9 Raw: Brightness: +10 Raw: Contrast: +37 Raw: Saturation: +8 PS: Curves: Linear Contrast preset PS: Healing Brush to remove sensor dust, very visible at f/57! PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 4, 2009; Day 2. Dusk Launderette. It’s Monday and I’m in Portsmouth enjoying the late evening dusk. I was compelled to return to this location with the ultra-wide lens and find a better angle than the one I captured before. I think I got the amount of evening ambient light just right. Now all I need is a little action. Someone in that chair with a book, and/or someone standing over one of these machines. And a little steam on the windows would help too. Remarkably, I never noticed that pair of underwear sitting there. Raw: Color Temperature: 3900K; Tint: +2 Raw: Recovery: 100 Raw: Fill Light: 8 Raw: Saturation: +8 PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Jeremy > May 3, 2009; Day 1. In Motion. Peter and I joined a few friends for a bike ride along the Franconia Notch Parkway. It was our first ride of the season, and proved to be a perfect season starter ride. There are a few hills and the trail is paved and kept clear. This far north in New Hampshire, there remains trace amounts of snow and no bugs. Thus, it was a very pleasant ride. Peter and I used the opportunity to practice our photography along the way. Today I taught him how to adjust the camera for better motion capture of spring rapids. I haven’t yet seen the photos he took today, but I bet he gets some keepers. Lunch was at the Woodstock Inn, one of our favorite restaurants near the Parkway. My friends notified the staff that it was my birthday so there was cake and singing. Up here, the folks are so friendly that several nearby tables joined in the song. Luckily they didn’t expect any cake. :~) Verbeast, you asked about my raw processing. I use a photoshop plug-in called Adobe Camera Raw, which knows how to open Nikon’s proprietary NEF format. The plugin has a nice interface and gives you easy control over exposure, white balance, and saturation (among many other things). These things I prefer to do at this stage because the results are much better. If you only shoot in JPEG and you experience bad white balance, it’s really hard to fix. In raw, it’s a snap. After I make these adjustments, I save as a tiff. Then I perform all other processing on the tiff from within Photoshop itself, and do the final save as a JPEG. Raw: Color Temperature: 5050K; Tint: +6 Raw: Fill Light: 15 Raw: Saturation: +10 PS: Curves: Linear Contrast preset PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
May 10, 2009; Day 8.

Play Day at Al’s.

Today I joined Peter and our friend Steve in a trip to Deerfield in search of photographic bliss at his 186-acre estate. The moment I stepped out of the car, I knew it was going to be a frustrating day…the black flies are peaking right now. We donned hoods and eschewed deet: we were all holding DSLR cameras. Luckily there were occasional strong gusts of wind that blew all the flies away; those were sweet solitary moments.

Peter and I found this grove of birch trees and I taught him how to do a vertical pan. I wasn’t expecting to get one I liked, since the leaves are all green. Luckily, the shades of green are different in the spring, and having the color of Earth in the shot helps too. I may end up with more than 50 keepers from this 6-hour trip.

We love going to Al’s because if we call him before we come over, he’ll put a rhubarb pie into the oven. If excess happiness is unhealthy, I would have been hospitalized today.

Raw: Color Temperature: 4450K; Tint: 0
Raw: Exposure: 0.4
Raw: Blacks: 60
Raw: Brightness: 13; Contrast: 50
Raw: Saturation: 10
PS: Healing Brush to remove sensor dust
PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
> May 10, 2009; Day 8. Play Day at Al’s. Today I joined Peter and our friend Steve in a trip to Deerfield in search of photographic bliss at his 186-acre estate. The moment I stepped out of the car, I knew it was going to be a frustrating day…the black flies are peaking right now. We donned hoods and eschewed deet: we were all holding DSLR cameras. Luckily there were occasional strong gusts of wind that blew all the flies away; those were sweet solitary moments. Peter and I found this grove of birch trees and I taught him how to do a vertical pan. I wasn’t expecting to get one I liked, since the leaves are all green. Luckily, the shades of green are different in the spring, and having the color of Earth in the shot helps too. I may end up with more than 50 keepers from this 6-hour trip. We love going to Al’s because if we call him before we come over, he’ll put a rhubarb pie into the oven. If excess happiness is unhealthy, I would have been hospitalized today. Raw: Color Temperature: 4450K; Tint: 0 Raw: Exposure: +0.4 Raw: Blacks: 60 Raw: Brightness: +13; Contrast: +50 Raw: Saturation: +10 PS: Healing Brush to remove sensor dust PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
May 10, 2009; Day 8.

Play Day at Al’s.

Today I joined Peter and our friend Steve in a trip to Deerfield in search of photographic bliss at his 186-acre estate. The moment I stepped out of the car, I knew it was going to be a frustrating day…the black flies are peaking right now. We donned hoods and eschewed deet: we were all holding DSLR cameras. Luckily there were occasional strong gusts of wind that blew all the flies away; those were sweet solitary moments.

Peter and I found this grove of birch trees and I taught him how to do a vertical pan. I wasn’t expecting to get one I liked, since the leaves are all green. Luckily, the shades of green are different in the spring, and having the color of Earth in the shot helps too. I may end up with more than 50 keepers from this 6-hour trip.

We love going to Al’s because if we call him before we come over, he’ll put a rhubarb pie into the oven. If excess happiness is unhealthy, I would have been hospitalized today.

Raw: Color Temperature: 4450K; Tint: 0
Raw: Exposure: 0.4
Raw: Blacks: 60
Raw: Brightness: 13; Contrast: 50
Raw: Saturation: 10
PS: Healing Brush to remove sensor dust
PS: Smart Sharpening: 180-1-Lens Blur
Camera: Nikon Corporation (Nikon D700) |
More details: exif |
Original size: 2832px x 4256px |
Current: 200px x 300px |
Other sizes: Small • M • L • O |
Share photo: links, forums, blogs |
Keywords: deerfield flora ambient birch handheld al jaeger d700 24 to 70mm
Gallery pages:  <  1  2  3  4  5  6  
< 46 of 53 >

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