***Official Ants Photography Thread***

[Benny003]

Originally Posted by HoldemHart

Ben, I know this has been said before but jesus you take some unreal photos.

Thanks, I try anyway. I still feel like I have a long ways to go in a lot of ways though. I guess that's part of the fun though. I always try to see ways I can improve.

[mattyande]

Here's a fun shot from a camping trip near Yosemite last month...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthew...ream/lightbox/

This next link is to a larger collection of similar images if you're interested in looking...

http://www.matthewandersonphotograph...ta/web/toyota/

[Benny003]

Very cool, what kind of camera settings were you using in terms of ISO and shutter speed?

[mattyande]

Originally Posted by Benny003

Very cool, what kind of camera settings were you using in terms of ISO and shutter speed?

Thanks Ben

ISO 3200
f 2.8
30 second exposure
Multiple iterations and adjustments required on the light on the truck... we only had a LED lantern to use...

[SYDM6]

Spent a week in San Francisco earlier this month (July 3-10) and decided to put a selection of photos from the trip into a slideshow for a variety night my friends and I do every month. Thought I would share with everyone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ2pESJpm4w

Obviously it's best to view it in full 1080 HD.

[Benny003]

That was fun, you had some good photos in there. Thanks for sharing.

[daveshookme]

Just read this on B&H's blog, pretty interesting read from one photographer about the evolution of his bag and why he's a photography.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/insights...-peterson.html

[Benny003]

Originally Posted by daveshookme

Just read this on B&H's blog, pretty interesting read from one photographer about the evolution of his bag and why he's a photography.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/insights...-peterson.html

That was pretty good. I went to his site after reading that and he had a lot of interesting information on it. For a second he almost had me convinced to start doing my own printing at home just because he was so enthusiastic about it, haha. It would be fun to make "gallery quality" prints right at home, but I wouldn't be able to make enough use of it. I'm pretty sure MLB doesn't allow prints to be sold by anyone other than themselves, so that rules out 90% of what I shoot.

[Benny003]

I'm heading to Boston tomorrow for 4 days to see the city and go to Fenway. I plan on posting occasional photos during the trip through Instagram, so follow me on there if you're interested: ben_c_krause

[Benny003]

This should blow your mind:

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/07/31/...ndon-olympics/

[daveshookme]

God dammit, now there's brain matter on the wall behind me. But it's still drooling.

[smartyarty420]

Originally Posted by Benny003

This should blow your mind:

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/07/31/...ndon-olympics/

holy crap, that's crazy. that's a ton of gear.

[STLDAVE41]

i love browsing through this thread. you guys and gals are very talented in your photographic skills. i myself cannot even draw a stick figure, the artistic part of my brain never developed. but I love looking through these photos, you all do great work. just wanted to stop by and say thanks for all the great photos you upload in here. carry on

[sweet_4_certain]

Any tips on shooting 70-200 with a 1.7 tele (at 340mm)? Was shooting f4.8 at 1/1250 (as an example), but still not getting the sharpness. Maybe I just need more practice. Should I just increase aperture?

[Benny003]

Originally Posted by sweet_4_certain

Any tips on shooting 70-200 with a 1.7 tele (at 340mm)? Was shooting f4.8 at 1/1250 (as an example), but still not getting the sharpness. Maybe I just need more practice. Should I just increase aperture?

Yes, increase the aperture. Use like f/5.6 at least. How far away was your subject and is the teleconverter the same brand as the lens? Have you tried doing any autofocus fine tuning for your camera? That can make a big difference. Teleconverters can be frustrating sometimes for sure though.

[sweet_4_certain]

Thanks Ben, will give it a try. Subject was fairly far away. Both lens & tele were Nikkor. Tell me more about the autofocus fine tuning? I have a D700.

[mattyande]

Originally Posted by SYDM6

Spent a week in San Francisco earlier this month (July 3-10) and decided to put a selection of photos from the trip into a slideshow for a variety night my friends and I do every month. Thought I would share with everyone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ2pESJpm4w

Obviously it's best to view it in full 1080 HD.

Finally got around to watching this... nice work... a fun way to show a collection of images...

[Benny003]

Originally Posted by sweet_4_certain

Thanks Ben, will give it a try. Subject was fairly far away. Both lens & tele were Nikkor. Tell me more about the autofocus fine tuning? I have a D700.

http://digital-cameras.wonderhowto.c...n-dslr-334478/

*Warning* Watch that video in the tutorial on mute.

There are lots of tutorials online though, so I just picked one at random. The fastest way to do it is with the product in the link below because you can make the adjustments easily through the LCD playback instead of downloading the images to your computer to check the sharpness:

http://michaeltapesdesign.com/lensalign.html

But the cost only makes sense if you have a lot of lenses to calibrate.

Use the Distance Tool in that link above to determine how far away to setup your camera from the target when doing the AF Fine Tuning. Longer focal lengths need to be setup farther away from the target.

[daveshookme]

I'm getting up in a few hours to take some pics of the sunrise, does anybody have any tips? I'm taking my T3i with the 18-55mm kit lens. I also have a 50mm prime & 28(?)mm prime but both have FD mounts so I need the adapter which has is also a 1.4x, so it's not worth as much as I'd like, and I have a 2.0x teleconverter. Any advice/things a relative newb should try/keep an eye on would be awesome.

[Benny003]

So a couple weeks ago I took a fishing trip up to the Canadian border and in addition to using my DSLR I also used my iPhone a fair amount to take pictures. Here's a link to see some of my iPhone photos from the trip:

http://benckphotos.com/gallery/lakeo...ds2012-iphone/

All of the photos were shot and edited on my phone.

Originally Posted by daveshookme

I'm getting up in a few hours to take some pics of the sunrise, does anybody have any tips? I'm taking my T3i with the 18-55mm kit lens. I also have a 50mm prime & 28(?)mm prime but both have FD mounts so I need the adapter which has is also a 1.4x, so it's not worth as much as I'd like, and I have a 2.0x teleconverter. Any advice/things a relative newb should try/keep an eye on would be awesome.

How did it go? I didn't really have any advice for sunrise pictures. I just look for good light and try to put it in a good context.

[daveshookme]

Originally Posted by Benny003

How did it go? I didn't really have any advice for sunrise pictures. I just look for good light and try to put it in a good context.

I'm just dumping them to my computer now, I have a paper to write for 6pm tonight, but if I get a chance I'll take a quick browse through and post a couple of the keepers.

This was the first time I shot in RAW, I figured what with the beautiful sky and water we had I'd give the full thing a try (also helped I found my 32gb card, I wouldn't have even considered it with my 2 or 4gb helpers ). I also have to track down the disk with the EOS utility on it and then see what I do next. Any tips on that process? I've never shot RAW, I've only ever shot JPEG's. I don't really plan on doing too much with them, but only because I don't really know what I can/should do if that makes sense. I've really only ever shot what I saw and was happy with that, but now I'm starting to get interested in more detailed photography, more artistic shots and experiences.

[SYDM6]

If anyone would be so kind as to vote and help me out:

http://bit.ly/R2h1ST

[Benny003]

Originally Posted by daveshookme

I'm just dumping them to my computer now, I have a paper to write for 6pm tonight, but if I get a chance I'll take a quick browse through and post a couple of the keepers.

This was the first time I shot in RAW, I figured what with the beautiful sky and water we had I'd give the full thing a try (also helped I found my 32gb card, I wouldn't have even considered it with my 2 or 4gb helpers ). I also have to track down the disk with the EOS utility on it and then see what I do next. Any tips on that process? I've never shot RAW, I've only ever shot JPEG's. I don't really plan on doing too much with them, but only because I don't really know what I can/should do if that makes sense. I've really only ever shot what I saw and was happy with that, but now I'm starting to get interested in more detailed photography, more artistic shots and experiences.

Try the free Lightroom demo and never look back. It will all make sense after you try that. Basically you can think of raw as an unprocessed jpeg file. When your camera makes a jpeg, it's applying sharpening, noise reduction, saturation, and whatever else you told it to apply in the camera settings. The raw file is exactly that, it's just the raw picture data with no processing applied. So you use a raw processor (Lightroom or the camera manufacturer's software) to manually apply the needed sharpening, saturation, noise reduction, etc. The thing with Lightroom is that 1) it makes the process very intuitive because it lays out settings you need to adjust in a very logical order and 2) you can apply batch preset settings on import or apply them to a number of images all at once if they have already been imported. So when I import my raw files into Lightroom I have presets setup for each of my cameras that are automatically applied to every photo. The presets I use are just a good starting point for sharpening and saturation, but they also include color calibration settings that I performed for each camera. Then I go through and pick my selects and do the full edits on those fine tuning the exposure, contrast, sharpening, and noise reduction. The raw files just give you a lot more to work with and if you setup a good workflow, like Lightroom, you can edit raw files just as fast as jpeg files, but you get much more control and much higher quality data to manipulate before getting to the finished product. With jpegs the camera is blindly applying the processing equally to every image. With raw you can fine tune the processing for each image individually to get the best quality possible. Of course you also have the option to freely adjust the white balance when editing raw files too, which is something you can't really do with jpegs.

So just try the Lightroom demo for a few days and it should all make sense.

[smartyarty420]

Originally Posted by Benny003

So a couple weeks ago I took a fishing trip up to the Canadian border and in addition to using my DSLR I also used my iPhone a fair amount to take pictures. Here's a link to see some of my iPhone photos from the trip:

http://benckphotos.com/gallery/lakeo...ds2012-iphone/

All of the photos were shot and edited on my phone.



How did it go? I didn't really have any advice for sunrise pictures. I just look for good light and try to put it in a good context.

I like the shots you did w/ your iphone. what app were you using?

[daveshookme]

Originally Posted by Benny003

So a couple weeks ago I took a fishing trip up to the Canadian border and in addition to using my DSLR I also used my iPhone a fair amount to take pictures. Here's a link to see some of my iPhone photos from the trip:

http://benckphotos.com/gallery/lakeo...ds2012-iphone/

All of the photos were shot and edited on my phone.

These are some interested photos, too. I've never been a huge advocate for phone pics, but with the iPhone boasting 8 MP there are certainly some great shots coming from them.

[smartyarty420]

Originally Posted by daveshookme

I'm just dumping them to my computer now, I have a paper to write for 6pm tonight, but if I get a chance I'll take a quick browse through and post a couple of the keepers.

This was the first time I shot in RAW, I figured what with the beautiful sky and water we had I'd give the full thing a try (also helped I found my 32gb card, I wouldn't have even considered it with my 2 or 4gb helpers ). I also have to track down the disk with the EOS utility on it and then see what I do next. Any tips on that process? I've never shot RAW, I've only ever shot JPEG's. I don't really plan on doing too much with them, but only because I don't really know what I can/should do if that makes sense. I've really only ever shot what I saw and was happy with that, but now I'm starting to get interested in more detailed photography, more artistic shots and experiences.

From what you said, you had a paper to write so i'm assuming you're a student so if you go w/ ben's advice (ben knows his shit and i use lr4 as well) and get lightroom 4, you can purchase the student/teacher edition and it's about 1/2 the price of the regular version. all you need is a school email address to register it. lr4 is excellent and should be all you need. if you ever get in to more advanced stuff and decide to get photoshop (cs6), adobe offers a student/teacher edition to that as well.

[Benny003]

Originally Posted by smartyarty420

I like the shots you did w/ your iphone. what app were you using?

I was using a combination of Snapseed, Dynamic Light, and Instagram. I usually edit in Snapseed first and then finish it off in Instagram. Sometimes I'll even go Snapseed->Instagram->back to Snapseed->back to Instagram if I wasn't happy with the filter applied the first time in Instagram.

If you're on the fence about phone photos, Snapseed will put you over the edge. Yes, the file sizes kind of suck and the noise is horrible on the phone pictures, but once I was able to finally tweak contrast, dynamic range, and saturation I finally started enjoying the pictures coming out of my phone simply because it became fun to be able to shoot and edit a photo right then and there. Being able to edit the photos in the phone finally allowed some creativity to be fine tuned without having to go back to a computer to do it. Plus you can upload them right on the spot. So that's why I started to like it. I just stopped caring about the image quality in terms of noise and sharpness and started having fun sharing little moments while out and about.

Originally Posted by daveshookme

These are some interested photos, too. I've never been a huge advocate for phone pics, but with the iPhone boasting 8 MP there are certainly some great shots coming from them.

I still just have the iPhone 4, which is just 5MP. I wish I had the 4s because that camera is supposed to be a lot better and not just because of resolution.

[daveshookme]

Originally Posted by smartyarty420

From what you said, you had a paper to write so i'm assuming you're a student so if you go w/ ben's advice (ben knows his shit and i use lr4 as well) and get lightroom 4, you can purchase the student/teacher edition and it's about 1/2 the price of the regular version. all you need is a school email address to register it. lr4 is excellent and should be all you need. if you ever get in to more advanced stuff and decide to get photoshop (cs6), adobe offers a student/teacher edition to that as well.

I do have the entire CS5 master collection for the "less than student" discount but if I end up liking/getting LR4 I'll probably buy it. $80 is a lot easier to swallow than $800

Originally Posted by Benny003

I still just have the iPhone 4, which is just 5MP. I wish I had the 4s because that camera is supposed to be a lot better and not just because of resolution.

well, I stand corrected then. I guess I'm just more of a photo purist. Not that that should surprise you at this point

[Benny003]

How the iPhone and Instagram changed the creative outlook of one of the Chicago Tribune's staff photographers:

http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2...n-chicago?lite

Very interesting read. I find it fascinating to read how the iPhone has been changing the creativity of professional photographers.

[daveshookme]

Initial reaction RE Lightroom: I like it.