Saturday, December 31, 2011
A series of moments that hold magic for me:
My oft-mentioned Christmas Eve bubble bath.
My oft-mentioned Christmas Eve bubble bath.
The moments as the sun is setting on the night before Christmas, as my dad was outside chopping extra branches off of our tree before bringing it inside, while my mom is showering and we are all anticipating the arrival of the family. For us (and many other families as well), Christmas begins on Christmas Eve.
The few minutes prior to being allowed downstairs to open presents on Christmas morning. As a newly married couple without children, we still get the chance to be 'the kids' when we go to our parents' homes for Christmas. This includes sitting on the steps and waiting to be called down to see the tree that Santa decorated overnight. This may not be a visually interesting or good picture, but the feeling is special to me.
It's New Year's Eve and I'm back to posting! As much as I enjoyed the Picture the Holidays project and had been keeping up with it steadily, when Christmas rolled around I focused entirely on spending as much time with loved ones as possible. I paid attention to my prompts via my iPhone and tried my best to take pictures for them, but otherwise spent my time home savoring the moments.
Christmas Eve. One week ago tonight the magic was about to begin. I see Christmas through child's eyes without any prompting because I believe in the magic and wonder the holiday brings. I still wake up before the sunrise, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Christmas morning waiting for the rest of my family to rise. I still take my annual Christmas Eve bubble bath before the rest of the family arrives at my parents' house. I still fall asleep Christmas Eve while watching A Christmas Story; it's the one night a year I can fall asleep with a TV on (I don't even have a TV in my bedroom here in our house!).
This year, I photographically chose to view Christmas through my cousin's eyes. She's at that age where she is still hanging on to the magic of Christmas and the rest of our family knows that it won't be long before she no longer asks me to track Santa for her as she's done for years now.
Looking like a mature little lady when she first got to my parents' house, she soon changed into her pajamas and wondered where Santa was flying to next. A reminder that she's growing older, but is still a child.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Truthfully, the way I usually recharge around Christmas (and really any time of the year) is a hot bubble bath.
But unfortunately, the bathtubs in our house are small, and since I'm pushing six feet tall, it's just not going to happen. It's something I'll save for Christmas Eve at my parents' house, but I digress.
I try to keep this blog mainly photos, but some of these prompts for Picture the Holidays deserve some narration. When Jon and I worked at our old job, we were shiftworkers. Overnights, weekends, holidays, evenings, et cetera. Two or three days off together per month, max. Such is the life of a meteorologist (or two).
It was always a little dream of ours to move on to jobs which gave us more time to spend together. We used to talk about eating breakfast together during the week and reading the paper on Sundays. (I know, seriously, we got old fast. That's what happens when you get married, I suppose.)
So after we moved to Virginia and we both started working from home, that little tiny dream of ours was realized. I usually roll out of bed around 7 on Sundays. I wrap myself in my fuzzy throw blanket, slip on Jon's work shoes sitting by the door, and waddle outside in my pajamas to retrieve the Post from our driveway. When Jon wakes up, we settle down on the couch and grab our favorite sections: the front page, business, and metro for him; travel, arts, and the comics for me (I guess I'm not that old... :).
So all of that was really my way of saying that reading the paper with my husband and a cup of tea on a Sunday morning is my way of recharging for the upcoming week.
But unfortunately, the bathtubs in our house are small, and since I'm pushing six feet tall, it's just not going to happen. It's something I'll save for Christmas Eve at my parents' house, but I digress.
I try to keep this blog mainly photos, but some of these prompts for Picture the Holidays deserve some narration. When Jon and I worked at our old job, we were shiftworkers. Overnights, weekends, holidays, evenings, et cetera. Two or three days off together per month, max. Such is the life of a meteorologist (or two).
It was always a little dream of ours to move on to jobs which gave us more time to spend together. We used to talk about eating breakfast together during the week and reading the paper on Sundays. (I know, seriously, we got old fast. That's what happens when you get married, I suppose.)
So after we moved to Virginia and we both started working from home, that little tiny dream of ours was realized. I usually roll out of bed around 7 on Sundays. I wrap myself in my fuzzy throw blanket, slip on Jon's work shoes sitting by the door, and waddle outside in my pajamas to retrieve the Post from our driveway. When Jon wakes up, we settle down on the couch and grab our favorite sections: the front page, business, and metro for him; travel, arts, and the comics for me (I guess I'm not that old... :).
So all of that was really my way of saying that reading the paper with my husband and a cup of tea on a Sunday morning is my way of recharging for the upcoming week.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
There's something special about today's image:
It moves! What you're looking at is called a cinemagraph: a photograph that isolates and shows one area of movement. There are plenty of how-to tutorials available, but make sure you have a pretty solid knowledge base of photoshop.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
I saw one with my eye while I was setting up, and even captured it in a test shot, but just barely.
Can't see it? Yeah, it's hardly visible. Here, have another look.
Because I never had a good way of taking such time lapse images (and also lived relatively close to Boston for four years), I've still not nailed down the best method for capturing shooting stars. I bumped my ISO up tonight, but only to 800. I know. I had the aperture as wide as it could go (4.0 on my wide angle camera), and the shutter was open for 30 seconds. The culprit definitely had to be the ISO. Unfortunately, clouds moved in and now I don't have a good view of the heavens. Looks like I'll have to hold out for the Perseids in August.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
This prompt actually caused me more stress than relief from the stress, actually.
I went for a walk today and was spending too much time scanning the ground in front of me looking for something that fit the prompt.
I did spot a pothole in the street that resembled a Christmas tree, though:
Maybe something like this.
Or this:
I went for a walk today and was spending too much time scanning the ground in front of me looking for something that fit the prompt.
I did spot a pothole in the street that resembled a Christmas tree, though:
But since I'm not too crazy about the image, I'll probably use a prettier picture featuring a shape in my actual book.
Maybe something like this.
Or this:
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Tonight, I tried my hand at star trails for the first time. I figured I'd make a quick post with the steps I took to get this shot.
Tools:
a camera capable of shooting in manual. I used a Canon 7D.
tripod
remote shutter OR the ability to craft something to hold your shutter down, like I did, using a pencil eraser, tape, and a hair elastic
a dark, clear sky
this photoshop action for star trails
Steps:
First I took a few test shots to set the right exposures. I played around with settings and eventually came up with 25 seconds at f/10. I kept the ISO relatively low at 320, though in hindsight I could have increased it to get the stars to be more apparent. The lens I used was my sigma 10-20mm wide angle at 10mm. And last but not least, I set my camera to burst mode.
Once I got the settings I wanted, I rigged up my eraser/tape/hair tie shutter-holder-thingy and let the camera go. Or you could do the easy thing and use a remote shutter release, but I don't have one.
Meanwhile, I made dinner and made sure to check on my camera to be sure it was still snapping away.
About an hour and a half later, I decided to be done, mainly because I was excited to see the results! I loaded about 250 pictures into photoshop and then ran the aforementioned star trail action on them (read the directions on that website before running the action). I was happy with the star trails in the resulting image, but the tree was way too blurry.
So I loaded all of the pictures into the application Preview on my iMac and one by one, scrolled through to find the outliers; the ones that blurred or had a movement in the tree. Then I started over with the action and came out with this:
Much better than the first! But you can notice gaps in the star trails where the blurry tree images were deleted before (yes, the Earth moves enough within 30 seconds to make a gap in the star trail). But the trails in the first image (the one with the blurry tree) were perfect and had no gaps, so I just simply pasted that image as a layer over this one and masked over the gaps.
But I was still not 100% happy with the tree. In a still image, the tree looked sharper and wasn't as bright. So I took a good still image and masked in some of the branches and the bright lights.
Finally, I did some basic editing: sharpen, curves, and adjusted the contrast a wee little bit. I used the patch tool to get rid of those little red flares in the center of the image. I also cropped out the moon because I found it a little distracting. All of this took me about 3 minutes.
And here we have the final image again:
You might wonder why I didn't just set my camera to bulb and leave it open for an hour and a half. That may work in locations where it's truly dark, but in most towns light pollution will be a problem. Even light that your eyes can't see, your camera will. Leaving the shutter open that long will also introduce a lot of noise. Also, rumor has it that there's the possibility of the camera's sensor being permanently damaged during exposures that long, but I don't know how true that is. Either way, the stacking option worked just fine and it seems to be what many photographers do as well.
Hopefully this helps you give star trails a whirl - even without a remote shutter release!
With a subject like 'twinkle twinkle', I could have taken another picture of my tree and called it a day. But I've already taken plenty of pictures of my tree, so I wanted to do something different.
And then I had an ah-ha moment:
star trails.
My first attempt at shooting star trails, and I think it turned out pretty well. 215 25-second exposures stacked (but more on that later).
I had an extra string of lights that I played around with for awhile and then strung up on this tree off of our back porch. I wanted to keep them in the frame to add to the Christmas-y theme of twinkle twinkle.
If you're interested in the how-to, check out my post here.
And then I had an ah-ha moment:
star trails.
My first attempt at shooting star trails, and I think it turned out pretty well. 215 25-second exposures stacked (but more on that later).
I had an extra string of lights that I played around with for awhile and then strung up on this tree off of our back porch. I wanted to keep them in the frame to add to the Christmas-y theme of twinkle twinkle.
If you're interested in the how-to, check out my post here.
Friday, December 9, 2011
The good thing about living in a small town is the ability to go for a walk and run errands at the same time.
I stopped by the market for a few things and then made my way into old town.
When I spotted this mailbox across the street, I thought it was my sign.
Until I looked up.
Merry Christmas.
Edit: I went back later that night to get a better shot of the sign lit up:
Edit: I went back later that night to get a better shot of the sign lit up:
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