Bacon Lettuce Photo

by Joe

The New Jersey shore is one of my favorite subjects. Intending to shoot something a little different last week, I’d headed to Island Beach State Park, armed only with my Lensbaby Composer mounted on my Nikon D200, hoping to get some dreamily blurry seascapes. The first thing I saw when kicked off my shoes was this sign, posted at the entrance to the public beach and pointing directly at the sea. My first shot of the day is usually a throw-away — a sort of warm-up to the rest of the shoot — but I knew this one would be a keeper. The urge to shoot it was undeniable. It was bizarre, ironic, and cinematically irresistible.

I shot this in color and cropped and converted it to black and white in PS CS3. I cropped the image because the f/5.6 aperture ring I was using on my Lensbaby blurred the seagrass on the right side of the frame so dramatically that it detracted from the sign. And I converted to black and white because the “happy” mood evoked by the deep blue sky and vivid green grass made the sign seem more cute than odd. As an added bonus, when I pumped up the blue filter in the bw conversion process, the sky grew more dramatic and “smoky.”

If you ever go this beach, be sure to check out the sign on the other side of this dune: “NO BARE FEET.”

No kidding.

I love this photo for a couple reasons.

The first being its just a great black and white, the contrast is perfect. I think that is what makes a black and white so dramatic is the amount of contrast. If you simply just take a digital image and drop the saturation it’s still not the same. If you look at black and white photos from a roll of film the contrast tends to be deeper. However, that is my opinion and is subjective.

The second being the tilt shift effect. It adds this mystical feel to the photo along with the black and white and dark clouds that give it this ominous feel.

I don’t know if I would have stopped to look at this photo if it were in color. Not everything is better in color.

Check out more of Pam’s work on her website.

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by Joe

I took this photo with a Nikon D200 DSLR and Micro Nikkor 105/2.8 lens combo on a tripod with the lens stopped down to f/5.6 - just enough to blur the background so as to highlight the front camera, but not enough to completely blur the shape of the cameras at the back and spoil the effect of the five cameras lined up. I used a light box so as to avoid having to use the harsh light of a flash, and cropped the top and bottom slightly so the final image fitted a 4:3 format, then tweaked colour and sharpness slightly using Nikon View.

I was about to pack one of the cameras (3rd from the front in the photo) to send to the US, and my wife suggested I take a “group portrait” of it with my other Nikon rangefinders before doing so. The black Nikon SP cameras in the photo are actually quite rare (only 2,500 made) so having three in the one place at the one time was special for a Nikon rangefinder fan like myself! I think most people think of Nikon as an SLR and compact camera manufacturer, and haven’t really heard about the rangefinders, so its fun to take photos of (and with) these cool cameras to share with others.

I love film and I love the look of old film cameras. Immediately upon seeing this photo I started to drool.

Exposure: 1/4
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 105mm
ISO: 100

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by Joe

It’s not exactly a rare occurrence for a Lego Stormtrooper to appear in my macro photos, and the fellow in this shot is my go-to guy when I want to try out a new technique. I’m not sure how I came up with the idea of him tending to his Lego flowers, but it fitted with the lighting style I wanted.

The effect I was going for is one I’ve seen used in some of Joe McNally’s photos recently, the faked sunset. It’s a great technique for when the light quality is poor (in this case, the direct sun was way too bright and contrasty). You move into the shade, and make your own sun! The photo is lit with a mixture of ambient daylight and flash. It was a bright enough day that the 1/250th exposure allowed the background to come through, but the key light is an off-camera Nikon SB-800 flash fitted with a 1/2 CTO gel to mimic the colour of the late afternoon sun.

Easy stuff really, the hardest bit was getting the Lego Stormtrooper to stand up in the grass. He ended up impaled on a cocktail stick hammered into the ground.

This is a bit like yesterday’s Danbo characters. I have some Naruto action figures I’m starting to think maybe I’ll take them out for a shoot later tonight. Like I said in yesterday’s post sometimes a photo isn’t just capturing something that is happening but making something happen. On a point and shoot camera you can do this by setting it to macro mode, that is usually represented by a flower icon. Point and shoots take some remarkable close up photos

Mike has an amazing collection of Star Wars photos. I encourage you to check them out.
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by Joe

The pic was taken with a Nikon D200 using a 18-200VR lens. Due to the rather unpleasant climate (warm, wind blown dust and flies) I did not want to mess about with any settings so programmed auto was used. The only post processing was tweaking the saturation in Office Picture Manager and a little cropping to get rid of an unwanted clump of grass.

This pic was taken in the Desert in the North Eastern corner of South Australia where I work on a fly in fly out roster. There is not a hell of a lot to do after work in a mining camp so I like to wander around the desert and take snaps of sand and other random things.. on the day I took this pic I was trying to recreate a scene from Star Wars using figurines, for a while I also had an obsession with wild plastic chairs… anyway spending a lot of time in the sand makes a guy appreciate the shapes, patterns and shadows that sand can throw, and when I saw what you see in the photo I was pretty impressed.

You can see more of Raf’s photos here.
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