Chicago River from the Wrigley Building, Chicago, Ill. | Canon 5D Mark II and 24-105mm f/4L IS lens @ 24mm | Exposed 2 seconds @ f/8, ISO 400.
While making a long walk back to Union Station from Navy Pier, with a detour to Water Tower Place (some detour, I know…my legs are still burning a bit) I happened upon the Wrigley Building right after twilight. The image about would have been better if I had taken my 24mm TS-E with me, but I had borrowed my dad’s 24-105 f/4L IS because it’s lighter and smaller than my 24-70. and I only wish that the couple in the image below hadn’t been standing right by those beverage containers. You can’t have it all.
Making out by the river, Chicago, Ill. | Canon 5D Mark II and 24-105mm f/4L IS lens @ 105mm | Exposed 1/25 sec. @ f/4, ISO 3200.
Meadow Lake Wind Farm, Wolcott, Ind. | Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens with circular polarizer | Exposed 1/13 sec. @ f/20, ISO 50 (+2/3 EV)
This past Sunday, as I was driving up I-65 North through Indiana on my way up to Racine, Wisconsin, I came upon the Meadow Lake Wind Farm. I exited off the interstate and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and Dairy Queen in one (where else can you can get dip cones with a faint aroma of gasoline?) and was impressed by the imposing structure of the wind turbine directly in front of me. It was about 4:00 in the afternoon (Indiana is on Eastern time) so to help the color I screwed on my circular polarizer. The sun was coming from about 90 degrees, so I knew I could get optimum polarization if I wanted it, but I really only wanted a touch. It’s easy to make the sky turn blue-black if you’re not careful! The tricky part was conveying a sense of movement.
My tripod was packed away in the trunk of my car, so I braced myself against a car door and switched to shutter speed priority. I knew this would mean that a slow shutter speed, in broad daylight, could only be achieved with a low ISO and a tiny aperture. The polarizing filter was already helping by knocking the light back two stops, so a small aperture would finish the job.
Thing is, while the 5D Mark II has built-in sensor cleaning, it’s also the camera that I use the most, and I knew that it had some dust spots that needed to be cleaned off. So, to get a slightly less dust-revealing aperture (originally f/32), I knocked the ISO down to 50. Now, if only the wind turbines in the background had been slowed down enough to show that they were moving, too!
"The impeded stream is the one that sings" (Wendell Berry), Eno River State Park, Durham, N.C. | Canon 5D Mark II and 135mm f/2L lens | Exposed 1.3 seconds @ f/32, ISO 100 (-2/3 EV)
For the past week I’ve been working with a Canon 135mm f/2L lens from Canon Professional Services. I’ll be publishing my thoughts on this lens soon, but until then, a bit of a “teaser” from last evening.
Strong wind led to poor fishing conditions at Salmon-a-Rama as heavy waves crashed against the pier on Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at the Reefpoint Marina in Racine, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm f/2.8L lens @ 64mm | Exposed 1/2000 sec. @ f/4, ISO 200 (0 EV).
Boats anchored near Pugh Marina, Racine, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens @ 135mm; exposed 1/400 sec. @ f/7.1, ISO 400.
Both Thursday and Friday night I went out to the lakefront in my hometown of Racine, Wis. to reacquaint myself with my old stomping grounds. The light was a mixed bag both evenings, but the temperatures were mild and it was nice to see the lake that I grew up with. It’s funny how much I grew to expect to have a significant body of water nearby, even though I didn’t grow up with boats.
When I was in school at Grinnell College, and when I moved to Columbia, Mo. for graduate school, the thing that drove me crazy was how landlocked those places were. I don’t care if I get out onto the water–I’m not even that fond of swimming–but the Great Lakes (an ocean would do in a pinch, too) are to me what mountains are to some, and rivers are to others: the physical features that make us feel that we belong.
Funny that all of these examples are actually quite lethal environments. The water wants us in it no more than the mountains want us atop them, and many people die every year in these beautiful places! In any event, it’s good to be back for a little while as work on my master’s project.
Abandoned barn in late-afternoon light on Hwy. 146, Gilman, Iowa, in November 2004. | Canon 10D and Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX HSM lens @ 12mm; exposed 1/100 sec. @ f/20, ISO 200.
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine from my days as a student at Grinnell College asked me if I had any landscapes of Iowa that she might frame up for her apartment. For one reason or another it took me a while to get back to her–sometimes, my e-mail inbox gets a bit clogged.
Original capture of the barn
While going through my landscapes from Iowa, which were less abundant than I expected, truth me told, I found this image of a barn near Gilman, Iowa, which was just a stone’s throw from Grinnell on state Highway 146. I remembered this image when I saw it: I remembered that I never had the right tools to process it, even though it had a perfect exposure (the histogram went “to the right”). It’s sharp, too–that Sigma 12-24mm was a strange but surprisingly sharp piece of glass. At least, my copy of the lens was. As with anything from Sigma, your mileage may vary. I purchased it early in 2004, back when it was first introduced for about $500, and there were not many options for getting a truly wide perspective on the APS-C cropped cameras. Interestingly, the Sigma 12-24mm is now sells for $800. Crazy little world!
At the time I made this image, I was using Capture ONE from Phase ONE as my primary RAW converter, and found this image to be far too difficult to tone properly. But here it was, sitting in my Lightroom database, long-since converted to a DNG file (the universal RAW format that all manufacturers should be using, but that’s a topic for another day).
I set a custom white balance, and then established a black point and white point. Then I adjusted the curves to make the black a little richer–I don’t find going beyond about 9 on the black slider in either Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW is very effective. Three brush strokes and a gradient later, the image was ready to go into Photoshop for some final tweaks–normally unnecessary, as I find the global adjustments with the brush and gradient tools for localized toning to be sufficient for my images.
Amazing what you can do with your images now that you couldn’t–or, at least, didn’t know how to–do a few years ago.
Entrance to the Devil's Ice Box, Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 16-35mm f/2.8L II lens @ 20mm; exposed 87 seconds @ f/11, ISO 400.
When I first looked into the opening of the Devil’s Ice Box, I wasn’t sure what would happen with a time exposure. There was barely enough light to focus on the rocks–I was lucky that all of the mist above caused by the hot, humid air hitting the cool air from the cave was creating a giant diffuser. Essentially, localized cloudy conditions on a sunny evening. I was surprised at the colors that were revealed in the first time exposure–I started at 30 seconds at ISO 800. I re-adjusted for a bulb exposure at ISO 400 for less noise. You can see this same sliver of stream passing underground through the cave system in the photo below:
Looking down into the Devil's Ice Box, Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 16-35mm f/2.8L II lens @ 16mm; exposed 13 seconds @ f/16, ISO 400.
Lightning over Discovery Lake, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm f/2.8L lens @ 30mm; exposed 6 seconds @ f/8, ISO 800.
Last week, my friends Jakob, Calin, and Jamie called me up to join them on a small lake near Discovery Parkway in Columbia, Mo. to fish. Well, they fished. I fished for lightning photographs.
Unfortunately, while the picture above is tack sharp, it’s not quite satisfying. Later in the evening, I made another image that is far more pleasing–great color, great lightning strikes, including one on a cell phone tower–but is way, way out of focus when viewed at 100%. Interestingly, when sized for this blog, it’s hard to tell that it’s soft, so I’ll share it here:
Lightning strike on the cell tower, Discovery Lake, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm f/2.8L lens @ 43mm; exposed 2 minutes, 36 seconds @ f/8, ISO 100.
Storm over the water tower, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens @ 135mm; exposed 10 seconds @ f/7.1, ISO 800.
Last night a line of thunderstorms tracked through Columbia, Mo., changing the hot and humid air for the better, leaving much cooler temperatures in their wake. Before the rain came, I set up my tripod on the balcony of my apartment to try to get some lightning strikes.
Lightning was plentiful, if far away–I counted out the seconds between the light and the sound, lest I be caught outside with my own personal lightning rod–but I had little to no success at capturing a bolt across the frame.
However, I did get one image that was almost surreal: the city’s water tower encircled by the light from the lightning strikes and the clouds as they sped past overhead.
I’ve added some contrast to the image, but the colors are how the camera saw them. A fun, if a bit surreal landscape.
Next time I’ll get lightning bolts.
That said, if anyone has a suggestion for how to capture them, I’m all ears!
