Bacon Lettuce Photo

by Joe

Technically the shot is very simple; it’s taken with a Canon EOS 40d and a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro.
No flash was used: light enters from the door you can see reflected in the left side of the sphere.
These are specs:
shutter: 1/40s
aperture: f/5.0
ISO: 800
I used an high ISO setting in order to shot with a decent shutter speed to avoid motion blur.

There’s nothing that inspired me the shot, even if there is a famous Escher’s work with the same subject (a sphere in the hand). I think that every photographer, with a reflecting sphere in the hand, think about taking
a self portrait.
The particularity of my shot is the murder.
Well… I’m not new of this kind of “crazy” photos
It’s simple: sometimes I need to break with tradition
Ah: yes, I survived!

P.S. the sphere is a boading ball

Thank you Andrea for sharing your work with us. What caught my eye was the simple fact that your shot was not traditional. Check our some other shots Andrea took.

Some thing that was hard for me when taking photos was adjusting my ISO so that my shots weren’t blurred. I just didn’t want any grain in my images. I wanted them to be perfect, however, they would often times come out blurry because I didn’t have a fast enough shutter speed. So I traded blurry photos instead of clear photos with some grain. So learn from my mistake, capture the shot, even if it means that it is going to be a little grainy. Grainy photos are not the end of the world.

Phew, went on a little rant their didn’t I?

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by Joe

Technically the shot is very simple; it’s taken with a Canon EOS 40d and a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro.
No flash was used: light enters from the door you can see reflected in the left side of the sphere.
These are specs:
shutter: 1/40s
aperture: f/5.0
ISO: 800
I used an high ISO setting in order to shot with a decent shutter speed to avoid motion blur.

There’s nothing that inspired me the shot, even if there is a famous Escher’s work with the same subject (a sphere in the hand). I think that every photographer, with a reflecting sphere in the hand, think about taking
a self portrait.
The particularity of my shot is the murder.
Well… I’m not new of this kind of “crazy” photos
It’s simple: sometimes I need to break with tradition
Ah: yes, I survived!

P.S. the sphere is a boading ball

Thank you Andrea for sharing your work with us. What caught my eye was the simple fact that your shot was not traditional. Check our some other shots Andrea took.

Some thing that was hard for me when taking photos was adjusting my ISO so that my shots weren’t blurred. I just didn’t want any grain in my images. I wanted them to be perfect, however, they would often times come out blurry because I didn’t have a fast enough shutter speed. So I traded blurry photos instead of clear photos with some grain. So learn from my mistake, capture the shot, even if it means that it is going to be a little grainy. Grainy photos are not the end of the world.

Phew, went on a little rant their didn’t I?

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by Brian

A lizard on a lizard, love this juxtaposition and its really a lucky shot considering the narrow depth of field. I try my best to keep the eyes in focus and this time I got lucky! Taken at the Honolulu Zoo this past May. 1/250 sec at f/5.0 with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM on Canon 40D at ISO400. Cropped and post processed in Lightroom/Adobe Photoshop CS4.1

For other Honolulu Zoo photos, check out this gazing lizard, this beautiful pair of cranes, and this poky friend.

by Brian

This photo was taken on the road alongside Crystal Springs Reservoir in northern California using a Canon 17-40mm f/4L on a Canon 20D body. The rusty divider and the grit/dirt alongside the road along with the textures in the asphalt make this a favorite of mine. The composition worked out well, with the gentle curve of the road leading the eye into the shot. Some post-processing was done to enhance the mood using a tea-stain filter.

by Joe

About the portrait: To be honest, most of the credits go to the model. She has a very natural way of behaving. My intention was to catch her wonderful eyes. I asked her to move very close to the lightbox to soften the strobist light. On the other side of the face I placed a disk strobe for circular reflections in the eyes. Afterward I made the square crop and the selenium toning.

Make sure to check out Luc’s flickr and website.

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by Joe

Thursdaisy was one in a series of daisy photos I’d put up that week. The week before, serendipity (in the form of a few bokeh-filled days amidst banks of the flowers) had brought an informal Bluebell Week. Am a big fan of bluebells and I loved how the photos had turned out. So the next week, I found myself with a bunch of daisy photos. Et voila! Daisy Week was born. The theme weeks have been a fun way to direct the photography for a while.

This shot was heavily cropped from a larger raw file. I shoot exclusively with the 50mmf/1.4 on a 40D and usually shoot with it wide open, sometimes stopping down to f/2.2 if I want a bit less depth of field. This was shot wide open - a set of daisies, this in the bottom right hand corner. I was kneeling to get this from the right angle. With the f/1.4, the light was such and the background was such that the bokeh was guaranteed. I’d played with the shot and wasn’t happy one bit until I isolated this little fella and cropped tight on him. It went through a bit of post processing in Lightroom - took the shadows down a bit, upped the brighter colours, desaturated a tad. I then added a gradient top left to give the daisy a target of light for his streeeetttccchhhhing.

If someone was looking to replicate this shot, you’d want that low aperture and lots of light to help the bokeh behind. The f/1.4 wasn’t strictly necessary, it could have been the nifty fifty f/1.8 (the best value lens on either a Canon or Nikon) rather than the f/1.4 and there wouldn’t be any great difference. In fact, the petals would probably have been in slightly sharper focus… The f/1.4 does give that lovely smooth rounded bokeh though. That and the 40D were the best purchases I’ve ever made.

Wow, some awesome advice on depth of field and the differences between f/1.8 and f/1.4. Thanks for that Harold. Make sure to check out Harold’s photostream.

And just cause he has some great stuff, here is a slideshow of his most recent work:

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by Joe

With a craft mad 3 year old we often have pencils out. On this occasion we’d just sharpened them ready for another colouring session. Lining them up just reminded me of the way the teeth interlock on a zipper. It was shot with a Canon 400D with a 50mm f/1.8 lens with screw on macro filters. Colours were brightened post production.

Thanks Nicola and great idea. Next time I see colored pencils around I think I’ll take a shot just like this. Very creative.

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Hello Photo Lovers,

Here’s a submission from a colleague at iLovePhotos.  We always welcome your articles.

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by Katharine

A few months ago, I decided to bring my own parents into the digital photography age (I work for iLovePhotos afterall, so I’m in the biz of sharing digital photos). I wanted them to be able to take more photos and share them with me. In the past, any time they wanted to take photos they would buy a disposable camera (my mom does own a reusable film camera, but it’s so old, the format of film isn’t made any longer). They would take photos only for very special events, and then process the camera, get prints, scan the prints, and email them to me, or worse, send them in the mail. So much effort!

Buying a digital camera wasn’t an option for my parents — they considered it an unnecessary splurge even though it would cost them less than disposable cameras  and processing in the long run. So I set about researching a decent camera for them as a surprise Christmas gift.

The first challenge I had was deciding on quality. I wanted them to have a good, easy-to-use point-and-shoot, with a decent lens. I also needed it to be relatively inexpensive (I have my own photography habit to fund!) As a Canon aficionado, I was leaning towards that manufacturer, but considered a few others that made entry-level models. I settled on the Canon PowerShot A590IS 8 MP. It was Canon, had zoom, was highly rated on Amazon, and was also deeply discounted at the time (score!)

When the camera arrived, my parents were duly ecstatic, but there was one huge hitch — the camera was not compatible with their computer! I had forgotten that were still using Windows 98, and the Powershot required XP as a minimum (they’re buying an iMac later this year thank goodness). I didn’t want them to have to send it back, so we had to figure out a work around.

As it turns out, their local film processor has a media kiosk that will take the camera’s memory card (since my parents live in a town that only recently was colonized by Starbucks, I was worried their processor was strictly film-based). They will still have to pay to get their images off the camera, but only until the iMac arrives.

So far my parents have enjoyed the convenience of the new camera, but are still figuring out all the features. They’ve also been under the impression that they need to wait until the memory card is full before downloading images, as if it were a direct analogy to a roll of film! Now that they have the freedom to take digital photos and no longer have to worry about wasted shots, my next task is to show them how to take better photos.

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by Joe

As far as the photo goes, I’ve had the idea for a while - I was eating a bag of wotsits one day and out of nowhere thought about how they could replicate stonehenge - I’m sorry if that conceptual buildup is a bit vague, but I’m a graphic designer so my mind is built & trained to look at the world around me differently from normal I suppose it’s all about seeing things in a different context from normal - people really respond to their preconceptions being challenged - and this wotsits stonehenge does just that.

I sorted through four bags of wotsits to collect straight ones (the bent ones are no good) and, using a series of existing aerial shots of stonehenge as reference, started gluing them together to form the cheesyhenge. The image was shot using a tripod in my lounge with an overhead light plus lamplight positioned to the right, with a diffuser placed between it and the henge to diffuse shadows.

Great example of how one can be creative, this is something that even an amateur can pull of with a point and shoot. How about you give it a shot! Cathy shoots with a Canon EOS 400D, check out some of her other, more serious, photographs.
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by Joe

The shot is of a small Japanese maple we have in our front yard. We had just gotten back from the Griffith Observatory hoping to get some shots of the LA skyline but it was too hazy. I can always depend on some kind of plant in our yard in Long Beach to provide something I can shoot. I shot looking up toward the sun - hoping to get a nice sunburst, while getting the red of the maple leaves to light up nicely. I used at cross process on the blue sky to really make the color pop blue against red. I shot this with my Canon 40D and trusty 24-105. My wife and I are both going through some minor (but bothersome) health issues at the same time - and I had remembered this Rilke quote - a sunburst always reminds me that there is something deeper to be found in every situation; and that these situations often yield something we weren’t expecting.

What drew me to this photo was using the sun as a backlight which normally would make the subject dark but because the leaves were transparent you could see their beautiful colors against the blueness of the sky. The brightness of the sun also creates a vignette that directs your eyes to the subject. Very well done. See more of Simon’s work.

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