Long Exposure Landscapes

Even more purpose for my blog! Amazing!

      Today's post is about landscapes. Specifically, it is about landscapes that I took for my "Intro to Digital Photography" class.  We were supposed to emulate a specific photographers style, and initially I was going to go with Ansel Adams, the famous mountain landscape photographer, but there aren't any mountains around here, so that one is out.

      So I was sort of out of luck on a style to be inspired by, but after talking to Guy Rhodes last week, and seeing some of his cityscape and landscape pictures on his blog (http://guyrhodes.com/blog/), I decided to at least try to get some sort of a feel similar to his.

      Now these first few are in color, but I honestly prefer them in black and white, as I usually do with landscapes of any sort. I am supposed to present 4 landscape images for my class, but I am going to count the color and black and white renditions of these images as just 1, as I would like a comparison of the two.

       Last Saturday night I couldn't sleep, so I went out and drove up to Lake Michigan at 2:30 in the morning. It really was pretty amazing to be on the beach in 20 degree weather, with the lake completely frozen and covered in snow. It was very surreal.

     This one here I actually prefer the color version, as you get some of the nuances in the sky caused by the many different colored lights in the refinery there. This one, however, I had to shoot at f/2 with my 35mm DX lens, so it doesn't have the sharpness that the other pictures have, as I can't go past about f/4 without super heavy vignetting.
    This one is a slightly farther back version of the first one, without the darker band of sky at the top.

I am quite impressed by the dynamic range on this image. This was with my 80-200mm lens, at ISO 1600, f/8.0, with a 6 second exposure. I was surprised at how much light there was for the camera to gather at 2:30 in the morning, and the sky cleared out enough to even see a couple stars. Lovely.

This last one I got the idea for actually as I was driving back, and I had just passed a pull-off, so I pretty much hit the brakes hard, then reversed back there, set up my tripod in the middle of the road, and hit my remote. Now just imagine, I am out all by myself at 3:30 in the morning, and it just so happens that the one car that I see just happens to be right there, in the middle of my shot, driving on the road, and would have run into my camera if I hadn't stopped the exposure and moved.

Afterwards I realized that it would be pretty awesome to have some headlight or taillight trails going all the way down that road, so I stood there waiting for a car for about 10 minutes, but alas, none came. I probably could have realized how daft it was to wait for a second car at 3:30 in the morning, but oh well.





Now last night my girlfriend suddenly realized that she needed some pictures for this assignment too, so we went out to try to get something with her idea, which was a black and white image of the Theater here in town. Now this was very difficult, as it was ridiculously foggy (like can't see out of my apartment window foggy), but we went out anyways, and I am glad of it. I took my camera too, and I got this shot below, and I think it is one of my favorites:

I love the composition of it, with the repeating patterns and the leading lines and the dynamic contrast, so I am fairly proud of it, and it is the last picture that I am choosing for this assignment.

Now for the assignment, we were supposed to try to emulate a landscape photographer, so I chose Ansel Adams, but obviously in Indiana there aren't any mountains or hills. This is unfortunate, but I do have one image that I took over Christmas Break that I feel gets fairly close. However, we aren't allowed to use previous images for any of the assignments, so this picture is here for the sake of the Blog.

 Ansel Adams strove to achieve dark skies and bright snow on his peaks, and I think that this got fairly close. I'm not good enough with Photoshop or Lightroom to get the sky completely black, but I'm not sure if I would want that, as it would kill the snow plumes that I really like.

Bonus image! This is what happens when you stop a DX lens down anywhere past around f/2 on a Full Frame body (As I was saying something about when talking about my assignment images.) Also, it shows off the absolutely appalling amount of oil spots there are on my sensor. I really need to send it in to Nikon for a cleaning...

Anyways

Thanks for reading,

Kevin

Photojournalism through Blogging

Yesterday the IMC photo/video team got to go to a presentation by Guy Rhodes, an amazing photojournalist and videographer based in the Chicago area. He has a fairly inspiring story about how anything can lead to you being a photojournalist. He said that he started out by charging his middle school $20 per event to tape it on a little VHS tape camcorder. Pretty basic.

And from that humble start, he is now getting gigs in Florida, New York City, Las Vegas, etc. I find that very encouraging, and you should all check out his Blog sometime (guyrhodes.com/blog/).

I took a couple pictures, one of him, and one of his gear. A really nice guy with some really killer gear:

< This guy right here is Guy Rhodes








Shown here are his 2 Canon 1D Mark4s, one with a 17-40mm f/4, and one with his 400mm f/2.8 (wow). As well he uses a Panasonic Video camera for some of his videography work. That sort of tech makes me realize even more that I should really switch to Canon if I want to get into Video more.

Anyways, more on Photoblogging and such. As you may have read, there was a fairly substantial MLK day celebration here at Valpo, so I went to cover a couple events.

The first event, though there were very few people there out in the cold, was a simple Tree Blessing. Now the simple fact that there is a new tree on campus isn't really anything to get too excited about, but it is the meaning behind the tree that is significant.

Each year, a person or group of people are awarded the "MLK" award, and as a result the campus plants a new tree in their honor. This was the blessing of the tree for this years recipients.

 The Pastor said a fairly poetic blessing, mostly taken from the Bible, pictured here. Then afterwards the award recipients posed for me for an IMC picture.

All in all, a fairly intimate event.

I also went to the Hip-Hop in Politics in Senegal presentation, and from a photojournalistic standpoint, it was ridiculously boring. Literally it was just a power-point presentation in  a windowless square room in the student union. But the idea behind it was much more powerful than the simple space suggested.

The professor who was actually in Senegal while the events were taking place.

I might come back and edit this post, and go into more detail about the actual things that happened in Senegal, but the gist of it is that a group of Rappers radically altered the outcome of an election by protesting and writing songs about it.

So the rappers and hip-hop artists helped to basically out a corrupt leader in Senegal. Their "slogan" as it were, was "Yen a Marre" which is french for "We're Fed Up." Fed up with the established order and corruption. However, this "overthrow" was done mostly peacefully through demonstrations and music videos and such things, as opposed to violent opposition such as what happened in Libya and Egypt.

All in all, this was a fairly interesting assignment for my photo class, and one that I will probably use the knowledge gained in the future.

   I found it really interesting that in one of their songs they made allusions to Hitler and De Gaulle. These are figures from quite a ways back in history, so it was strange to me that they would use these people to try to further their cause against a corrupt president who wasn't really killing anyone. I think it is sort of in "bad taste" to make this comparison.


on that note:

Preow

Kevin

TV: Top Gear
Movie: Kiki's Delivery Service
Game: Mirrors Edge (madness)
Music: Thirteen Senses
Food: Not enough

Guest Blog. MLK Day: Peace Circle vs. Hip-Hop

At Valparaiso University we make a really big deal of celebrating Martin Luther King Jr Day.  Everyone gets the day off school, most upperclassmen sleep in and freshmen are required to go to one of the many focus sessions offered to stimulate conversation.

This year the theme of MLK Day was "Building Bridges: Dream. Dialogue. Service."  Now while I, as a civil engineering senior, would have preferred a session called "Building Bridges: Out of Steel and Concrete", I was not so lucky.  I had to pick a focus session to go to which focused on some more abstract concept of bridges.

After spending a fair amount of time looking at the brochure for the event I decided to go to an event called, "Creating Safe Spaces for Hard Conversations: An Introduction to Peace Circles".  This event promised to discuss the merits of peace circles and how they can be used to promote change and create a safe environment to share stories.  All this while actually sitting in a circle.


When I got to the event, I found the peace circle:

Unfortunately, five minutes before the session was scheduled to start, this was literally all that was there.

Since I did not want to be the only person at a focus session, I decided to bail on this one and go to my second choice.

The second session that I decided to go to (and this one I actually stayed for) was called "Hip-Hop and Political Change in West Africa".  Hip-Hop.  Nice.  The only reason that this was choice number two and not choice number one was that I thought sitting in a peace circle would be pretty cool, while sitting in a dark ballroom watching slides might not have been.

When I got to the ballroom for this session the room was packed.  I was there probably three minutes before the session was scheduled to start and this is what it looked like:

Sure, there are a few empty chairs, but overall this is a pretty packed room.  The empty peace circle had nothing on Hip-Hop.

Based on the attendance at these two events, I began to consider the usefulness of both Hip-Hop and peace circles in promoting societal change.

The speaker at Hip-Hop discussed how a group of Hip-Hop artist and rappers who call themselves "Yen a Marre" (which in french means "I'm fed up") got more people to get out and vote in the last election in Senegal.  Their goal was to remove from power a president who was not governing by their constitution.  These artists were able to get hundreds of voters educated and out to the polls on election day.

I wonder, if those artists had decided to sit in peace circles around the city instead of organizing rallies and informing people about how to vote, if the results would have been different.  I speculate that it would have been quite different.  I don't believe that their campaign would have been as effective with peace circles as it was with main stream music.

Thanks for reading,
Justine

The New Year

So, happy new year everyone. The only thing different, in my mind, is that now I have to start labeling my pictures starting with "2013" instead of "2012."
Picture!

Yesterday I bought myself a GoPro Hero3 Black edition with my Christmas money (plus some of my own money.) Thus far it is pretty cool, and I plan on using it to take some timelapses while in the car/plane in the next week or so. It is amazing what this little camera can pack into such a small body. 4K cinema video at 15fps, 2.7K at 24fps, 1080p at 60fps. The possibilities for this little system are near endless. I plan on using it when I make the TED skit this year for ASME. Hopefully I can stick it on the side of a car or something during the video, since I got the suction cup mount for it.

Here are a few test shots I took today while out and about:

 My neighborhood isn't super exciting, we just have this little bridge area with some irrigation hardware in it, so that's where I went for these shots.

The detail in this one, especially in the ice, is very good for such a modest little camera. I should have gotten it a bit closer, as I'm sure it would be able to see it. The sensor is so small that everything is basically in focus, and for something like this that is perfect.

This one above is probably one of my favorites, since it means that this tiny camera can fit easily inside of a mailbox, yet still pull great detail out of the highlights. The sky and trees at the end of this were completely blown out, but I was able to pull a ton of detail out of them, which seriously impressed me. Well done GoPro. Yes, it isn't as much detail as I would have gotten out of my D600, but that wouldn't have fit inside of a mailbox, now would it?

All in all, I am very excited about the possibilities of this tiny, rugged camera, and am very glad that I bough it, even if the battery life is fairly sad at this point. I might go get a new battery at some point here before too long.

I'll have some more pictures up later,

Preow

Kevin

TV: Rose Bowl and such
Movie: Home Videos from 1994
Game: Minecraft
Music: Macklemore
Food: Chicken Strips and Kool-Ade