Spent some time on Saturday afternoon in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park which is situated between Cleveland and Akron in eastern Ohio. Its a beautiful expanse of park land that stretches for about 30-40 miles, and threading through it are the railroad tracks of the scenic railroad.
Before Winter looses its clutches on NW Ohio, I will be leading a photo walk around Bowling Green, Ohio on Saturday March 13th, starting at 10AM. If you are interested in coming, leave me a comment, or email me for more info!
Went to Florida last week for a few days to visit my parents. They have been spending winters near Ocala for the last five years, so its always a good excuse to escape the snow in NW Ohio and take in a little sunshine. On the way, flew into Tampa and visited the Lowry Park Zoo, where I saw this giraffe, acting a little shy. 
From last weekend. A swan checking me out as I take a picture of it. Probably thinking I’m an idiot for being out taking pictures when its so cold!
Hi folks! Just a quick note, because I haven’t posted much lately. I’ve been pretty busy with work, school (my last semester!) and designing a new website for myself! Woo-hoo! Its almost ready to go live, I just need to put together a gallery selection, and finish coding the contact page.
If you’re interested, you can check it out here: www.worldthruacameralens.com. Once its finished, this site will be merged with that one, and this blog will have the same theme. Hopefully that will be in the next few weeks.
This is my second review of a Scott Kelby product. Back in November I reviewed the Digital Photography Book, Volume 3 and gave a little background on Scott. In that review I said:
For me the highlight of this book is the chapter on photo recipes for “getting the shot”. A staple of the series, this chapter presents a number of different photos and information on how to get a similar shot. Photos run the gamut from products to sports to people to landscapes, all with different lighting and background effects, and the basics of “getting the shot” are laid out for you.
Interestingly enough, Scott must have heard similar comments from a lot of people, because he’s back with a DVD/book combo that is nothing but the recipes. But Photo Recipes Live: Behind the Scenes is more than just a repeat of the sections from the Digital Photography Books Volumes 1, 2, and 3. It builds on them with a series of 16 digital files, some complete setups for common situations (recipes) and some quick tips. And interestingly, the only reference to Photoshop are small asides about how to shoot subjects to minimize your time in Photoshop.
This combo is a reverse of most book/DVD packages, where the bulk of the information is printed out and the DVD supplies supplemental material. Here the DVD is front and center and has the lion’s share of the information on it, and the booklet (about 75 pages) is a complement. Think of the booklet as an index or a quick reference with pictures from the video and time signatures so you can quickly jump to a specific spot in a video. But it also includes some added information that Scott doesn’t cover in the videos. That makes the booklet an integral part of the whole.
So what’s covered? Well, this is not just portrait lighting. The videos take pictures and recipes from the book and fleshes them out, providing things like distances between lights, natural light versus studio light, camera F stops and modes, and even model placement. Different lessons cover doing portraits with masculine and feminine touches, couples shots, on location tips, product shots (plexiglass is your friend), even flower arrangements and landscapes. And this being a Scott Kelby product, there are references to various products and how to save money on what you are getting. Nice touch!
One additional positive about this package is that the DVD comes with MP4 files to install on iPod/iPhone. along with the directions on how to do it for the iPod challenged. And to be fair, I do have a couple of small quibbles: the video player interface that comes on the DVD is a little slow. It may be my Macbook, but I just copied the iPod videos to my laptop and watched them through iTunes. And a webpage that is referenced in several videos with all the gear and links to the various manufacturers is currently 404-not found. (NOTE: Brad Moore, Scott Kelby’s assistant posted a response in the comments below that the 404 error should be fixed in the next day or so. Thanks for the update Brad!)
So is it worth it for the average photographer? If you liked the recipes section of the Digital Photography books, then this is a definite must to add to your bookshelf. If you haven’t seen the Digital Photography books, pick them up. They are worth it, and make sure to add this one to the pile. And, if you didn’t like the Digital Photography books or the recipes in them, I’m not sure why you have read this far. 
Another picture from my Saturday morning trek through the south Toledo suburbs. This juxtaposition of monuments I thought was funny. The one in the background is at Fort Meigs, a real fort dating back a couple of centuries that is still open for visitors. President Bush gave a speech there back in 2004 when he ran for reelection. The one in the foreground is one of several supports for the old bridge that is no longer there spanning the river.
Interesting that we remember our contemporaries in different ways, huh?
Ventured out on Saturday morning in the subzero wind chill to try and scout locations for a possible winter photowalk, and this was the first picture I snapped. This statue overlooks the Maumee River and occupies a prominent spot in downtown Perrysburg, Ohio. I liked the way the shadows on the side kind of echoed the ominous clouds overhead.
We are having a blue moon over the next few nights (a second full moon in a month) and last night the sky here in NW Ohio was very clear. So I decided to brave the cold temperatures and try out some of the techniques from the book I reviewed a few days ago, Creative Night.
At first I tried taking shots using a cable release to get a longer exposure, but even with the lens stopped down to its lowest aperture, I was getting a lot of lens flare because of the brightest of the moon and the ambient light in the city. So I went in the opposite direction and set the camera to a very fast shutter speed, and captured the image above. This was shot at f/25 ISO 200 at 1/125 of a second. Pretty cool!
Here is a second shot taken at 1/320 of a second a few seconds prior to the above one.
I’ve always had a desire to learn to photograph at night, and I’ve experimented a bit with it, but not with much success. I’ve managed to capture some interesting cityscape shots, but I’ve never really gotten a good handle on the intricacies. I think with Harold Davis’ new book, Creative Night: Digital Photography Tips and Techniques released by Wiley in November 2009 is the primer I needed to really get better results. In this slim 240 page volume he explains the finer points of nighttime shooting and guides readers towards “[becoming] a creature of the night”.
The book is divided into several sections, and falls into three broad areas. First there is some introductory material about night photography: the type of equipment to use, camera settings, and most importantly – being safe. (Ironically in several captions of the accompanying pictures, the author talks about getting lost in the dark) The information is brief and to the point, providing rules of thumb for choosing aperture and ISO and some useful advice like making sure people know where you are going and having someone you can call when you get back safe.
Davis warns aspiring nighttime shooters that this is not an easy area to master. Early on in the book, he addresses the difficulty of getting an accurate focus manually, and the prevalence of noise in night photography due to high ISO settings, longer exposures, and under exposing pictures when shooting in the dark. Some of the included pictures by the author illustrate this. Many are very eye-catching, but others are plagued with an abundance of noise and lack of focus.
Locales and subjects form the middle part of the book, starting with urban compositions such as cityscapes, industrial areas, traffic and bridges. These provide a way for aspiring night time photographers to begin trying out this new type of photography. Following this Davis covers deciding on interesting composition, and photographing motion. Then the book delves into shooting in more remote locales, and shooting the night time sky including the moon and stars.
Finally, the last third of the book looks at some of the technical aspects of nighttime photography, including ways to keep noise out of your pictures during shooting and how to remove the noise that does manage to sneak in. This includes instruction on how to take night time images in a “stack” that generates star trails, and processing those stacked images in Photoshop.
All in all, Harold Davis’ Creative Night brings together a lot of very useful information for the shooter who wants to delve into this subject matter. 4 out of 5.
