Well, it’s Friday again, and that means it is time for some more photos. Like last week (which was about shooting and studying waterfalls), I want to bring a little technique into the picture of the week (POTW). Last week, it was long exposure. This week it is action shots (fast exposure). One of the fun things about shooting D-SLR is the “burst mode” where you can simply hold the shutter button down and let the pictures fly. With my 20D, I can shoot five pictures per second, so I thought I’d give it a try and see if I could come up with some cool sequence shots.
These pictures are from our family beach vacation in Destin. There were two guys surfing, and I ask permission to take some action shots of them. I bumped the ISO up to 400 so that I could get a fast shutter speed. I ended up settling with 1/2500 sec figuring that it would be fast enough. I didn’t want to go up to ISO 800, and I didn’t think shooting any faster was necessary. I did forget to factor that it does matter the direction in which you shoot–that is, if you shoot into the sun, your subject in the foreground will be silhouetted because the backlight (sun) is brighter than the available light exposing the subject. Two options can correct this: (1) either use a strong fill flash (with high speed flash turned on), or (2) you can blow out the background (sky and sun) and have a better exposed subject. In this case, I didn’t have a flash, and I wanted the background detail to fill out the composition. So I had to deal with the conditions and hopefully end up with something decent.
Without further ado, here are two sequences–one shooting into the sun, and the other shooting with the sun behind me.
Sequence AA-DD
Sequence X,Y,Z
* I have three other sequences (Sequence 1-3, Sequence A-B, and Sequence 11-13) you might want to check out.
** To view these photos are more, visit my Flickr page. To view more Friday Photos, go here.
YES!!! I’m the first to comment on a Mr. Brister blog entry. Oh glorious day this is!!!
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I have a photo question. I used the Powershot G5 for my latest trek on the AT. The camera did a good job with close ups and bright shots (you can see them on my facebook). However, there was a lot of “noise” in photos of dark landscapes (i.e. thunderstorms, clouds, mountains, etc.). Besides purchasing an SLR, is there anything I can do to eliminate noise. Now that I have these photos is there a way to edit the noise.
My trip was wonderful. This year I took Thomas Watson as my hiking partner. He and I had great conversation on the chief end of man.
John,
Glad to hear you had a great time on the AT! Man, having Watson as your travel companion must have made for great conversation. He regularly travels with me, especially on mission trips. Of late, he has been talking alot about This Godly Man’s Picture, and I have been loving it. I think the next thing he wants to talk about is All Things for Good. I told him that the title reminded me of an old M.C. Hammer song from when I was in middle school. I don’t think he got it. 😉
Now regarding your photography question, when you are shooting in low light in “auto” mode, the camera will determine the settings for you. In that case, it usually bumps up the ISO and slows down the shutter speed (that’s why you will see a lot of out of focus night shots with point-and-shoot cameras). The noise part comes when the ISO is raised to 1600 or higher (say 3200). Initially, to keep the noise from being in your picture, you have to make sure the settings remain below an ISO of 800; however, low lighting conditions rarely give you that option (unless you have very nice and expensive lenses that can keep you from shooting at ISO of 1600).
Photoshop (PS) has a filter that you can use to remove noise, but I have not been pleased with it at all. In fact, I can’t really tell the difference when using it. There are, however, some good plug-ins to PS that you might want to check out, but they are not free (you might find a free trial version). While I plan on writing on this more in the future, let me direct you to two websites and their software:
1. Noise Ninja
http://www.picturecode.com/
To download, go here:
http://www.picturecode.com/download.htm
2. Neat Image
http://www.neatimage.com/
To download go here:
http://www.neatimage.com/download.html
Now back to our plans to talk about church planting . . .