Wide angle experiments

Since I had a wide angle lens at my disposal (Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L mark II) that I had rented for another project, I thought I'd make good use of it and try some experimental shots. These were shot next to the "New Orleans" building in Rotterdam. I like how the lines on one side of the building, if framed right, give the illusion that the perspective is somehow warped in an Inception-like fashion (see top photo).

The second shot was originally framed vertically, but I thought it looked better with a horizontal crop, to reduce distracting elements in the background. Still, I think the background is way too busy and distracting. Tried to clean it up in post, but that just got too contrived, so I'm going for the "raw" look.

When you're not looking

After my "Alien Skyline" shot it occurred to me that the same location would be great for a time lapse shot, with clouds rushing by in the sky, casting patterns of light and shadow on the buildings. So one morning, when the weather was cooperating, with lots of cumulus clouds in the sky (the big fluffy ones) and a fair amount of wind, I set out for a short hike with my camera and tripod.

Part of what makes this location so interesting is the domes in the foreground. It's a pavilion that floats on the water, housing some exhibition about sustainability. Once arrived, I discovered to my dismay that a couple of big banners had been put up in front of the pavilion, right in my ideal line of sight. Fortunately it turned out that, unlike last time, the walkways that connect the pavilion to land were now open, and I could position myself on one of them to get a pretty good view.

After spending about half an hour timelapsing I packed up and went home. When looking at the images afterwards it struck me how much the light changed during that time frame. Among the hundreds of shots,  the camera had captured many different "atmospheres", varying from utterly boring to very interesting. The above one turned out particularly cool, with the sunlight hitting just the top half of one of the buildings, and the rest being in shadow. This made me realize the opportunities you miss when you just pause for a moment to take a photo and walk on. The same shot might look totally different if you just wait five minutes (or hours, days, weeks for that matter). Just think about all the potential opportunities for cool shots that happen when you're not looking...

Tower of darkness, the sequel

Last week I decided to do a new take on my "Tower of Darkness" shot of the Maastoren office building in Rotterdam, this time from the other side. This is the side where the front entrance is located, and it features a huge glass and metal structure, which creates interesting patterns of light and shadow. Gave it a similar treatment as the earlier shot. Because of the busy lines it's less of a clean architecture shot, but more something out of a Batman movie.

Snapshot

Two weeks ago we did a photoshoot at the Maasvlakte in the harbour of Rotterdam (see previous pics). I wasn't too impressed with the images I posted earlier. But often, after I don't look at the images for a while, other, less obvious shots start growing on me, as was the case with this one, which is just a casual snapshot while I was testing the camera settings.

First I did a high-contrast black & white version, which made our car look sleek and menacing, but made the left side of the image (where Brit is standing) look very dull and uninteresting. Then I made a second version with subtle, desaturated colors, using Magic Bullet Looks. This time, the car looked less interesting. So I decided to blend the two together with a gradient mask. So the right side is now completely monochrome while the left still has some color in it.

Moody sky

This morning the sky over Rotterdam was quite moody. Caught the below shot of the Maastoren from underneath the Erasmus bridge, which conveniently provided some shelter from the occasional rain shower. The exposure was a bit tricky. I was trying to get just enough detail from the underside of the bridge, but not so much that it would be distracting. The second one is looking the other way from more or less the same location (equally moody).

Aperture tip - this one goes to eleven!

Sometimes you find out new things about software you've been using for years. I use Aperture for post processing my RAW images. It allows me to do almost anything I want to do to an image without having to use dedicated image editing software like Photoshop (or my personal software of choice, Pixelmator) by moving around its nifty sliders and using the brush tools.

Whenever I felt I couldn't achieve a certain look in Aperture, it was often because I wanted to do something more extreme than Aperture's sliders would allow. Let's say in the image below I want to make the sky darker for dramatic effect. In the color controls, I select the darker blue color (the one that's closest to the actual color of the sky) and drag the luminance slider all the way to the left.

The luminance value is now at -70. But what if I want to make the effect even more pronounced. As it turns out, many of the controls in Aperture go beyond the limits of their sliders. By placing the mouse on the number to the right of the slider and dragging left or right (up or down works as well) you can adjust the value over a wider range. In this case, the luminance value actually goes all the way to -100.

By the way, you can also use the little arrow key's next to the value to adjust it up or down, or just type in a number. The first option is useful for small adjustments, the latter one if you already know what the value needs to be. For a lot of the sliders in Aperture - though not all of them - the actual range is greater than what you can achieve by using the sliders alone.

Hope this was useful and inspires you to take Aperture to new extremes :-)

Red hot

These are a couple of shots from a little photoshoot I did in South Africa. The bright red color of the car seemed to contrast nicely with the azure sea. Also, in this particular location there happens to be a ship wreck situated picturesquely close to the shore (you might recognize it from some videos I've posted previously), which made for an interesting contrast.

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Michael Fletcher - Capturing the moving landscape

Instead of just rambling on about my own work on this blog I thought it might be interesting for a change to feature other people’s work that I find interesting or inspiring, and have a little chat about their background, motivation and way of working. This time I would like to introduce the work of Michael Fletcher.

I've been following Michael on Vimeo for quite some time. Based in Western Australia, he's involved in the photographic business of his equally talented brother Christian, and has managed to produce an impressive number of awe-inspiring short films focussing mainly on the Australian landscape. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, landscapes and video can be a challenging combination. It’s often difficult to make them look interesting because there’s not much movement going on.

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Running on the rocks

This shot was taken in De Kelders, near Gansbaai, South Africa. This particular area is great for photography with its variety of rocks, sea and the local fynbos vegetation, that only occurs in this part of the world. Used a single flash without any light modifiers: an Nikon SB900 camera left, mounted on a gorillapod and positioned on the rocks.

A moment in time(lapse)

The above shot is one frame from a timelapse I shot last week. The idea was to test out shooting timelapse in RAW and aplying some color grading in Aperture. Normally I would shoot a timelapse in JPEG because of the excessive amount of storage required for large numbers of RAW images, but that severely limits my options in post production.

This location struck me as interesting because of the grungy old warehouse (soon to be renovated into shops and appartments) and the construction cranes behind it, working on what will become a large new highrise.

This is a typical example where a tilt-shift lens would have come in handy, to eliminate the distortion in the warehouse, and give the whole thing a more flat, geometric feel.