Meteors and satellites
Looking east under Leo in an attempt to capture a few Leonids. This is 77 minutes compressed to 15 seconds (300x speedup). I'm surprised my battery lasted that long in the sub-freezing weather! By my count, there are 5 meteors, 6 satellites (including a very bright Iridium flare right at the end), and 1 UFO in the movie (seriously, what is that thing moving slowly up and to the left near the beginning?)
Also watch for the zodiacal light shortly before twilight.
Each frame: Canon XTi, 30 s, 18mm, f/3.5, ISO 1600
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Uploaded on Nov 18, 2009
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Draft Horses drawing
ABRITTON2009 emailed me this photo of a charcoal and graphite drawing she created, inspired by this photo I took at the Freedom Festival Parade in Provo a few years ago.
Pretty neat that my photo inspired this intricate drawing!
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Uploaded on Nov 11, 2009
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Notes from my first engagement photoshoot
A few days ago I did my first "photoshoot", taking engagement photos for my wife's sister. Totally amateur, of course; if they were going to pay someone, they should pay someone who knows what he's doing. :) I know the principles of camera operation just fine, but my portrait experience is pretty much limited to taking pictures of my kids.
The photo above was mostly well-liked but not chosen for the wedding announcement because of the awkward shadow of his chin on her eye. I may put up additional photos after the wedding announcements circulate, but the groom-to-be doesn't want the novelty of the announcement to be ruined if somebody happened to have already seen one or more of the photos on it.
So, lessons learned from this excursion:
Try to put the couple at ease. The groom-to-be seemed a bit uptight and presented an unnatural smile. (I actually didn't think it was that bad, but when I reviewed the shots with the couple, he cringed a lot.) During the shoot, his fiancee encouraged him to relax and act natural, but I think he was trying too hard. (I can understand; have this problem myself.) It would have been more effective if I had got them talking about themselves, how they met, good times spent together, etc. His best shots are those where he's gazing at his beautiful bride-to-be instead of worrying about whether he looks okay.
Spend a little time framing the shot. I guess in photographing small children I've learned to "spray and pray" and just get as many shots as I can before the kids lose interest or patience, with the hopes that at least a few are good. On this trip, I should have slowed down a bit and paid attention to the details.
Allow plenty of unstructured time. The couple's favorite photo is not a posed shot; they were just walking together and I sprinted ahead a few steps, turned around, and snapped a couple of candids.
Bring an extra memory card. I took many more shots than I expected to, and I had to stop and frantically delete a few obviously bad ones to make room for more.
Don't use aperture priority mode and fill flash on a sunny day. I've had my XTi for three years and I'm surprised I haven't encountered this quirk earlier: The fastest shutter speed it will use when the flash is enabled in 1/200 s. I was shooting away in Av mode at wide apertures to separate the couple from the background. I checked that the camera didn't overexpose in these conditions, and it didn't; they were being properly exposed at about 1/2000 s. Then I popped up the flash to try and fill in shadows. Big mistake. Now the camera was slowing the shutter to 1/200 and overexposing by 3 stops. Heroic processing was able to recover some of these (dcraw -H 2 does a decent job recovering highlights), but a few otherwise good shots were ruined.
So I learned a few things, and I have to say that, despite the stresses, it was a good experience, especially where I captured not just two people but the chemistry between them.
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Uploaded on Nov 8, 2009
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Slowly twisting, in the wind
A crop from the previous video in my stream, hoping the stars will be easier to see.
That's the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor) on the right side.
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Uploaded on Nov 5, 2009
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