Category Archives: Photography around SoCal

Image of the week #5

February 6, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

Here is a shot from inside the San Gabriel Mission, this is a small alcove off of the main church interior. The green color comes from the sun shining through green tinted windows up on on the walls of the main chapel. Why green I do not know but it made the whole inside of the church cast in a green light. The San Gabriel Mission was the 4th mission in California to be built, although it was not known as California then. It was founded on 8 September 1771, it is filled with all kinds of interesting historical pieces. The photo was taken handheld with a Canon 1Dm4, Samyang 14mm f2.8 at f.28 and ISO 3200.

Image of the week #4

January 29, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

Here is this week’s image, a sunset shot, looking at Catalina Island with the sun setting behind it. I rushed home because the sunset was so colorful, this was near the end, did not have time to setup a tripod so I rested the camera on the railing and turned on the IS to help stabilize the shot. This is a 1 second exposure at f4.0 taken with a 24-105mm lens at 73mm on a Canon 5dMII. All I did was adjust the contrast I did not add any saturation or change the color this is how it came out of the camera with just a little contrast adjustment. Amazing colors, I really need to make sure I carry my camera around with me, but at least I did not miss all of it, it was nice to watch the colors while driving too and just enjoy it visually. Thanks for looking.

Image of the week #3

January 22, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

This week I had a harder time getting some shots, really did not shoot a lot, got caught up in the day to day of life. This shot was an experiment, (aren’t they all! ). Taken hand held inside a dimly lit church, All Saints Episcopal, in Pasadena. Shot with a Samyang 14mm f2.8 using a Canon 1DM4, ISO 3200, f2.8 and a 3 shot bracket at +/- 2 stops. Starting exposure was around 1/60. This is also a vertically stacked panorama, some call a vertorama, as it shows all the way back behind me as well. So the top part of the image is actually above and behind me, I was bent over backwards while shooting this sequence. Field of view is around 75 x 176 degrees. The panorama is made from 4 frames, each 3 exposures, Ptgui did a great job of stitching although there are still some stitching errors. I am pretty pleased with it, especially getting the panorama to stitch without using a tripod or pano head.

Image of the week #1

January 8, 2012 by admin | 1 Comment

This year I have decided that I need to get out and shoot more. So I decided to do a photo of the week. My goal is to post a decent picture every week that I am able. So here is my first weeks picture. This is a Cooper’s Hawk and was taken from my back yard, near my bird feeder. They prey on small birds, he was perched in an elm tree about 20 feet or so from my bird feeder. Taken with a 500mm f4 lens handheld on a Canon 1D IV. This was taken from the back deck so there was not a lot of room to find a good shot but I managed to find without any trees or limbs in the way. He is resting on one foot and the other is being held up. The bird is looking towards the feeder. My feeder is generally very active, I have large flocks of house finches, goldfinches, and nutmeg mannikins that come by on a regular basis. During the winter I will also get lot of white crowned sparrows pecking around the feeder and I do get a California towhee on a regular basis. So plenty to interest the hawk.

Lunar Eclipse

December 11, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

Early Saturday morning, December 10, 2011 there was a full lunar eclipse. Here on the west coast we only got to see a portion of the lunar eclipse, it started just before 5AM and the moon was going to set at 6:30AM, but we lost sight of it before then due to a layer of clouds low on the horizon. This was tricky to photograph, as the exposures kept changing due to the moon going into the Earth’s shadow, so it got dimmer and dimmer, complicating matters was the sun was also rising, so the background got brighter and brighter. This first shot is a composite of 23 shots with a 50mm lens. Exposures ranged from 1/200 to 2 seconds at f5.6 at 100ISO. It was also a challenge to composite as the images ranged from a black sky to a much brighter blue sky as the sun got higher. (Click on the images to see larger versions.)

This next shot is a composite of 3 shots taken with a 500mm lens, this shows the shadow moving across the face of the moon. The orange color is when the shadow is covering the moon, almost completely here, since the moon was full it was also very bright, so you need to choose what to expose for, the shadows or the brightly lit areas. The problem with bracketing and making a composite exposure is that there is huge dynamic range, so you would need a lot of exposures. Also the moon is moving constantly so you will get some shifting in the frame, but that can be dealt with, however the real problem is the length of exposure to show the details in the dim areas is so long that the moon is blurred unless you track the movement of the moon.

These were shot from Laguna Beach, it was an interesting experience and I would probably shoot things a little different next time, but overall I did ok. I would shoot at a higher ISO for the composite sequence and check exposures more often to equalize the relative exposure of the moon. I would also use a slighter longer focal length. For the longer focal length shots, a higher ISO would give me a faster shutter speed and less chance for showing movement blurs and I would also make sure the image stabilization was off for this type of photography. Thanks for looking, feel free to comment.

Sunset Panos

October 1, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

There was some nice clouds on Friday, some remnants of a tropical storm, so I setup on the roof and shot a few panos of the setting sun. These are 5 sets of image in portrait orientation with 3 exposures per frame to capture all the details and the available light. Processed in PTGUI and Photoshop. Shot in Laguna Beach and within about 5 minutes of each other. Shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens. Click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.

Huntington Library and gardens

July 24, 2011 by admin | Comments Off

I used to go fairly often to the Huntington Library, located in San Marino California, just below Pasadena. However lately I have only been able to go every so often, and in fact I had not been there for about a year or more, until now. I had a chance to go with my friend Greg, who got us in early in the morning, before the general public. Being able to get in early is really nice, first the earlier the better for me, and with the summer “June Gloom” going on made for some nice diffuse overcast light, which is great for flowers. The gardens always have a lot of flowers and they are very well maintained, so a target rich environment! I was hoping that the ponds would have some nice lotus blooming. I really miss the large lotus blooms at Echo Park lake, it really is too bad that people saw fit to steal the roots and not let others enjoy them, and I know they also had a disease issue, but it really was a combination of the two factors. The bloom there was really spectacular and now there is nothing, I sure hope that it can be restored at some point. Anyways back to the Huntington, there was some pink lotus flowers at the lower pond and some yellow lotus at the Chinese Garden, so that was really great. Also I can’t miss a chance to visit the large cactus garden there, always a treat to get some abstracts of the different cacti. So here are some shot from around the Huntington Library gardens. Hope you enjoy them.