Week 5 hit while we were on vacation in Hawaii.  The theme for this week was “Lights”.  One of the fun parts about this weekly photo shoot is that it’s all about interpretation – I’m allowed to do anything I like that say’s “Lights” to me.  (My game my rules :-).

When I travel I do tend to take quite a lot of gear with me but I don’t normally take any lights.  This time however I had a single speedlight with an umbrella.  While talking to Abi one afternoon we thought it would be fun to take a picture of her flicking her wet hair back.  I figured to do this I’d need a light to freeze the motion and get that perfect picture.  So just after the sun set we walked down to the hotel pools to see if there were any empty ones that would allow us to make a picture.

Unbelievably the infinity pool was empty so we ran to that and Abi jumped in.

I put the Umbrella and speedlight on the end of a mono pod and asked Lisa to hold the light pointing at Abi.

Before Abi started to flick the hair I needed to get the lighting right, so we took 5 pictures getting the right exposure and light power.  Once done, she started to “perform”.  Amazingly it took less than 10 attempts to get this shot.  So from start to finish it was 14 photographs.

I have to say I knew what we were trying to do but didn’t think the image would come out like this, both Abi and I were delighted and celebrated the shot by swimming in the pool together for the next half hour.

Hope you like the shot too.

Earlier this year the family had a long weekend break in Cannon Beach Oregon.  If you haven’t been there or know the name, this is a really pretty town on the Oregon coast that is perhaps best known for the landmark, Haystack Rock.  Haystack Rock is this huge (235 feet high) natural rock that’s right on the shore line.  During low tide you can get to the rock and a number of small rock pools around it’s base.  The area is actually protected as a marine sanctuary and there’s always someone there to make sure people aren’t “doing naughty stuff” (not sure what that is but if you look at the rock funny they tell you off – in my experience anyway :))

The beach itself is just huge, it’s this beautify sandy wide area and it’s great for kids and dogs to run wild.  The water on the Oregon coast is pretty cold so you don’t often see people swimming, but you do encounter lots of vacationers taking walks, making sand castles, flying kites and having picnics.

Something that’s pretty unusually about the town (and beach) is that they are amazingly dog friendly.  Most hotels let you take your dog and some shops and even restaurants allow pets on their premises.  It’s also ok to let the dob off the leach on the beach (which too these days is a little unusual).

If the coastline looks kind’a familiar, you should also know that The Goonies (1985), Twilight (2008), and Point Break were all filmed in this area too.

Anyway we drove down there (takes about four and a half hours from home), took Roxie (our dog) and had a great time.  We stayed at the Hallmark Resort which is a very large hotel right on the beach that overlooks Haystack Rock.  In fact the first image below was taken from my hotel room balcony.

I think we stayed for four days, took lots of walks on the beach, ate fish and chips and generally relaxed.  Lisa and Abi rented beach bikes and cycled up and down the beach for an hour (James played on his computer while I read a book).

I took lots of pics while there, some of the town, some of the family and am uploading a sample here.

If you want to relax, I can really recommend the town, the people are very welcoming and the scenery is beautiful.  We will definitely go back again.

This week I brought a new lens and after trying it out thought I’d post a “lens review”.  I’ve never really done this before as most of my readers are really here to see family pictures or the odd landscape shot.  Most aren’t really interested in the gear I own or how I use it.  But I thought what the heck, how hard can it be to write a review!

Well it appears the answer is VERY HARD.

As I started to type I figured there were somethings I needed to explain first and before I realized it I’d written a huge posting and hadn’t even got to the bit about the lens!  So I figured I’m not ready just yet for a full lens review, I should probable start with a few postings about general photography then I can refer to those when I tell you how wonderful my new lens is – and why.

So this means (I guess) I’m going to write up an “Intro to Photography” section in my blog.  For some I’m sure this will not be of interest, but I’m often asked how to do stuff and what to buy etc., so this new section (when I get round to it) will be more to answer those kind of questions.

So dropping the review here, let me tell you about this picture.

The new lens is a portrait lens and enables me to take pictures with a very narrow depth of field.  This means that I can photography a subject (Abi in this case) and only Abi is in focus.  Everything behind her (or in front) is softly out of focus.  In the image below you can see the garden behind Abi is all blurry this is called bokeh and a good lens can make this look natural and pleasing to the eye.

So why do this?  Well the idea is the viewer isn’t distracted by background objects and can enjoy the subject you wanted them to look at.  You’d think this was pretty simple, but the depth of field (amount of the subject in focus) can be tricky to manage.  It’s easy to make the depth too small or too big.

This was my first attempt with this lens and if you are super observant, you will note that Abi’s left eye (the one nearest the camera) is nicely sharp and in focus, but her right eye is slightly out of focus and a little blurry.  That said the image is sharp enough to post and with more practice I should get better at controlling the lens.

Abi kindly let me shoot her in the garden and went through numerous funny poses (most with goofy faces) until we got this one.

Needless to say I’m very happy with the lens and can’t wait to shoot some more portrait’s to really put it though it’s paces.

Hope you like the pic – thanks Abi for playing along.

Very interesting day yesterday. Abi had a Gym Meet in Bellevue so we all went to that (I say all, I obviously mean Abi, Lisa and I – James stayed at home on his computer). Anyway Abi walked on at 4:30 in the afternoon and the competition finished at 8:30pm.

She did amazingly well and came first in Beam, Bar and Vault and second in Floor, and first overall with a total score of 37.1 a whole point above her nearest competitor. I suspect she was slightly disadvantaged on floor as she was the first person to compete, so the judges base other scores off her! Bottom line it’s always really better to go somewhere in the middle of the pack – that said she was amazing. (Very proud Dad)

What made the day especially interesting was the weather. I should call out that when I left home to go to the meet (around 4pm) it was dry outside. The day had been cold but clear, even with some lovely blue skies. Anyway while at the meet it started to snow.

When we left the gym the snow was sticking and the roads were just terrible. People where sliding all over the place, hitting curbs and cars and it was pretty dangerous.

Lisa and I were in different cars and I got out of their first and headed home. I got on the 520 freeway and the traffic came to a halt around 2 miles from the end of the road. We just weren’t moving at all so in frustration I followed some other cars who exited the freeway by traveling the wrong way off the 520 by driving up the on ramp.

I then cut through back streets (witnessing multiple accidents) and got to the bottom of Novelty hill (we live up a big hill separating Redmond from Duvall.)

Needless to say I was keeping Lisa up to date on my progress over the phone, telling her the state of the roads, so she got to the bottom of Novelty around the same time as me. We tried to get up the hill but it just wasn’t happening, cars that were further up the hill from us had given up, turned round and came down. People told us the road was un-passable and there were too many abandoned cars from failed attempts.

Eventually (after not going anywhere for a while) we gave up too and turned round and tried another hill to get home. This also proved to be impossible and once again we had to turn around and head back to Redmond.

By now it was 10pm and we were hungry and tired. Lisa called the Redmond Marriott and got us a room and we headed there for the night. When she called they were at 40% capacity, when we got there they were nearly full. I called James and told him what was going on and he was fine, said he’d see us in the morning.

At 9am I got Lisa and Abi up, we grabbed some breakfast and headed home (again). We made it up Novelty Hill this time but had to pass around 60 abandoned cars that had been left on the hill. In some places the road was down to a single lane there were just so many cars!

Eventually I made it home and pulled up outside our house that was covered in snow and looked great, so I grabbed a picture of that!

I walked in the house and found James still on his computer in the same clothes.  Apparently with neither Lisa or I there he decided to stay up all night and play games – oh to be 16 again 🙁

So today I’m posting two pictures. Abi on the 1st position podium and our house in the snow.

Like I said, an interesting day. 🙂

Those that check out my pictures know that I like HDR images.  I know that this isn’t to everyone’s taste but I just love the way they look.  Anyway much to my frustration Lisa doesn’t like HDR photography at all and tells me the images look fake.

I definitely agree that HDR doesn’t work in all situations and you can easily overdo the processing (something I’m guilty of too sometimes).  When I got home I shot the house and bracketed 6 exposures – all one stop apart.

I then threw them all into Photomatix to see what it would produce.  The result was just horrible.  Sure the image had better dynamic range but just looked terrible.

When processing HDR the tone mapping tool (I like Photomatix) is just the beginning, you then need to stack the original images with the tone mapped version in layers in photoshop.  Then the work begins.  You manually blend layers together to produce the desired end result.

Then you denoise the image, add any filter effects (Topaz, NIK or OnOne provide great tools for this) and finally sharpen.

The image above took a while as snow and HDR don’t like each other 🙂  This image was a combination of the six original pictures, the Photomatix tone mapped image, an HDR Topaz Adjust image and several NIK color effects filters.

I tried to keep the end result as subtle as possible – hopefully Lisa will like this one.

This picture however, I know she will like 🙂  Abi once again in fist place – like I said above, very proud Dad.

Since I got rid of my Nikon gear (and all my studio strobes) I’ve been looking for a good portrait replacement lighting system.  I’d already brought three Lumopro 180 speed lights to go with my fuji kit and they are excellent, but good lighting has more to do with excellent modifiers that soften the light, rather than a powerful flash of light (which is after all what you get from a speed light).

Now I have a few speed light soft boxes, including some Westcott Apollo’s and Lastolite EzyBox’s but neither really delivered on what I was looking for.  I really wanted something that was small and portable, easy to set up, delivered soft wrapping light, and was easy to control.  Then I found a review of the Westcott Rapidbox.

The Rapidbox comes in three flavors, there’s a 20″ mini-octor, a 26″ bigger octor and a small 24″ strip box.  The strip box being nice and thin is great for hair or back rim lighting and I sold my elinchrom strip with all my Nikon gear, so I liked the idea of getting a replacement.  I also liked the size of the 26″ octa, which would be great for single person head shots.  So I ordered both from Amazon.

Yesterday they both arrived so today I get them out to try out a quick portrait.  The challenge being, could I set up both lights and grab a nice portrait headshot in say 10 minutes.

So that’s what I tried to do.  Firstly I should call out that it took longer than 10 minutes – try 20, but that was more to do with learning how to set the lights up.  Now I know how to do it, I’m confident I can do this in the target 10.  I also asked Abi to pose for me and she kindly agreed – she doesn’t do that very often these days, and I grabbed a couple of shots.

Here’s my favorite:

I have to say I was really impressed with these modifiers, they delivered on the easy to set up and gave me the control I wanted to capture a nice portrait, they also come in tiny portable boxes.  So all in all I’m really pleased with my purchase.  These two boxes will definitely be part of my traveling lighting kit from now on.