I did two different photo shoots this weekend. First, Maty and I went to Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden on an invitation Saturday evening. Then I did a separate shoot of an orchid. Read the rest of this entry »
As I have previously mentioned, I am learning to put a little more thought into the photos I take. I have managed to take quite few pretty darned good photos over the years, but I see some of my shots might have turned out better, or at least a little differently, if I had put more thought into the composition. After a bit of reading on photography techniques I played a bit with the aperture and shutter speed today. The results? I just knew you would ask that! Let’s take a look.
I have added nearly 60 photos to the Cusco album. These include archeological sites just outside of Cusco. You can read the story of our visit to Cusco, if you like.
Plaza de Armas - Cusco
You can see the photos from our Memorial Day weekend trip to King’s Mountain in the gallery. Maty and I spent the afternoon there, and grilled steaks in the picnic area. We visited the historical farm, complete with people dressed in 1800′s attire and doing the things that one would normally do in the 1800′s: cooking, sewing, weaving, making wood crafts and tools, and such. Then we went to the picnic area, cooked and ate, and then headed down to the lake. We sat by the lake watching people on the paddle boats, and then headed toward the dam.
You can walk around the lake by the foot of the dam, and we took some photos from below the dam, and Maty decided to take her shoes off and soak her feet for a bit in the cool water. What a great day!
That’s right. I didn’t kill this mocking bird. I just shot him… with my Nikon D70. You can see the results in the photo gallery, in the Birds album. While we have one or two that visit our bird feeder, this one I shot at Freedom Park. I think he decided to put on a show for me when he realized I was taking his photo.
I’ve changed the commenting on my articles. If you really want to comment, you can just drop me a line – I’ll setup an account for you to log into. Sorry, but I get at least 20-something spam posts in my holding queue. Ughhh…
Maty and I went to Badin Lake & Morrow Mountain Saturday. You should take a look at some of the photos (opens in new tab/window). I took 99, but only the better ones are posted. One of the highlights was a Great Blue Heron we saw at Badin Lake. Absolutely phenomenal to be able to get a few shots of him. In retrospect, I should have gotten a few photos of the gulls hanging around, if only for identification purposes.
There did not appear to be much to do at Badin Lake without a boat or a fishing pole. We had thought about having a picnic, but decided it probably wasn’t quite warm enough. That, and we had planned to bring a grill and meat, which wouldn’t have been allowed at the lakeside area. We tried to hit the Badin Museum, but it appeared to be closed. So we opted to head up to Morrow Mountain and see we could see. Morrow Mountain struck me as a great place to visit. I didn’t see any trail guides at the information booth at the entrance, but you can either go toward the river and campground or go up the mountain. Ironically, you can have a fire at Morrow Mountain (away from the river), but not down on Badin Lake (right on the water).
It was a bit of a challenge taking photos, as the wind was gusting strongly at points. I never thought a leaf could hurt until one dinged me in the ear. Before Maty could finish laughing at me, a gust lifted up her hair, just in time for a leaf to ding her ear, too. We made it to the car without getting blown off the mountain, and headed back to Charlotte.
The roughly 160-km (100 miles) trip from Charlotte to just East of Albemarle took us about 1.5 hours (+/-). It was mostly easy travel, across Hwy 24/27. I’d love to return to the lake one of those little kyak thingies and my camera. Overall, it’s a great day excursion from Charlotte – I suggest leaving @ 10-ish in the morning, and plan to retun by about 6-7 PM. Well, glad you stopped by! See you on the next adventure!
I bought some roses for my sweetheart this past weekend, and then took photos of them, which you will find… here. I played around with the aperture priority and a tri-pod. I still have a lot to learn, but these came out pretty decent.
I’ve finally gotten around to uploading the photos I took last year, both during the 2009 Presbyterium Invitational Criterium (bicycle race), and from my trip to the UK. I still didn’t have my Nikon when I saw the Criterium, so those photos are taken with the Canon Powershot 540. And no spare battery. I’ve added photos in the Dunstable Downs and the Saint Albans albums as well. Those photos are, of course, taken with the Nikon D70s.
Dunstable Downs is, effectively, a chalk hill with a phenomenal view over the area below. It just so happens that there is a glider club situated just at the foot of the Downs. Thus, you will see I’ve caught a few shots of the gliders in their brief flights. Additionally, you can see a bit of Saint Albans, particularly the Six Bells pub, where my Mom’s husband and I ate lunch. Then the park, leading to the abby, and the abby itself. Of course, we had to come back, so a few more shots coming through the park. Here is a sample of what you’ll find in the 2009 Criterium album:
Did I mention I’m no expert at photography? The Criterium was my first experiment in sports photography – not at all easy. Enjoy your browsing!
One would think you could simply take a bunch of photos, connect your camera to your computer and upload the images to your website. Alas, it just isn’t that simple. My digital images are large, the filenames overly simple and the format tag is always capitalized as JPG, instead of the normal jpg. However, I tend to use two libre-licensed applications to prepare my digital images for uploading.
A magnolia flower
Let me say up front – this is not so much a howto as a ‘whatto’, as in ‘what to use’ to process your images for posting on the web. These are not the only two, of course, but definitely two great applications anyone can use. I asked about this on one of the Linux4Christians mailing list I subscribe to, and the folks there were pretty helpful. So I’m really just passing on what others have passed down to me. I may come back with a proper howto article later.
The focus here is also on working with multiple files – batch processing, if you will. If you’re a big GIMP fan, or you have some specialized task that you need to perform before uploading a particular photo, that’s one thing. But when you need to rename and shrink a bunch of files at once, it’s time to pull out a different toolset.
Once I am ready to transfer all my cool photos, and maybe some that aren’t so cool, to my computer, I usually place them in a ‘holding tank’ of sorts. I have a folder named for whatever the current set of photos is all about where I copy the original images to. Having done that, I normally like to run pyRenamer, a program that renames whole sets of files at once. I use the Images tab, which has a preset renaming pattern that works for me. I then re-run it to change all the UPPERCASE letters to lowercase.
Once I’ve done this, I import the originals into F-Spot (my desktop photo album), thus creating a duplicate set of images. Now I can have the full-size originals and play with the ones in the holding tank. I then run an ImageMagick command to resize the photos from their original 3000×2000 (or something like that) resolution to 102×768. ImageMagick is a command-line tool, but even a novice computer user can run the simple command to resize images.
The resizing process takes a few minutes, and once it’s done, you should be able to see the difference when looking at the file sizes of your images in a file browser. KDE users may prefer KRename (I believe that is the correct name) for renaming files. At any rate, ImageMagick and pyRenamer both work very well at getting my images ready to upload to my blog.
I’ve added some 235 photos to my albums of England, namely the London and Leicester albums. I will continue uploading photos over the course of this week and next. The photos of England were taken during my trip there last October. There are 6 different albums for London – just to keep things from getting unwieldy. And don’t stop there – check out a few of the other albums, such as my Little Sugar Creek Greenway album. All were taken with my Nikon D70s camera. Anyway, enjoy!
Big Ben from the London Eye