November 26, 2018: Final Blog Post

All images taken in manual mode.

Sunrise in Yellowstone National Park

 24-70mm f2.8 @32mm ISO 250 f/16 1/125s

Dust spots cleaned, added more contrast, darkened more shadows, and applied the sky-pop filter.

Mossy woods in Mount Rainier National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 1000 f/7.1 1/20s

I went to Washington without a tripod. I squatted down for this picture. I used a high ISO because I did not have a tripod with me, and I used 1/20s. We talked about the slowed handheld shutter is the inverse of the focal length used. For this shot, that would have been 1/24s, so I used 1/20s, which is slower, and it worked. f/7.1 was not ideal but for the cloudy day in the woods and high ISO, it captured enough in focus.

 Yellowstone National Park

70-200mm f2.8 lens @200mm ISO 320 f/14 1/125s

Mount Rainier National Park

 24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 1250 f/8 1/50s.

Mount Rainier National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @48mm ISO 640 f/11 1/400s. 

 24-70mm f2.8 @32mm ISO 640 f/10 1/320s.

Taken from a moving car, hence the fast shutter speed.

 70-200 f2.8 @112mm ISO 250 f/8 1/1600s

After the share & critique, I converted the image to black-and-white, increased the contrast, and blackened out the background.

 24-70mm f2.8 @70mm ISO 250 f/13 1/1000s.

After share & critique, I added the sky pop filter and further sharpened the image.

Bainbridge Island, WA

120-400mm f4.5-5.6 @400mm ISO 400 f/11 1/200s

I am aware red-orange attracts attention, and there is a fair amount of human influence in this image, but I was trying to photograph cormorants being able to coexist with humans.

Yellowstone National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @29mm ISO 2250 f/10 1/160s

 Yellowstone National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 250 f/10 1/1000s

This is one of my proudest images from this semester. From the share and critique, I cropped into the image a bit more to eliminate any discomfort by lines of coincidence. I also removed dust spots.

 Olympic National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 500 f/11 1/100s

This shot was tricky to get with diminishing sunlight. Lake Crescent was all in shadows from cloud coverage and time of day. I tried getting the lens as close to the surface of the water as I could get. I used the sky-pop filter. Without a tripod, it was difficult to get this shot. In order to get this shot handheld without jacking the ISO too high, I could only get f/11 to get the focus in the image. The foreground is not in focus, but the subject of the image is the lake beyond this pool.

 Yellowstone National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @70mm ISO 320 f/22 1/2000s

I cranked the aperture to get the sunburst effect. Unfortunately, because of the assembly and quality of my lens, I could not avoid the green lens flare, and I wanted to keep the blue sky, so I did not convert to B&W.

 Olympic National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 500 f/11 1/160s.

This shot was handheld in fairly low light. Because of the shape of the mountains, I did not want to go crazy with the sky pop filter, so I only brought the gradient down a small way. I used f/11 to avoid cranking ISO to get a faster shutter speed. I did not want to set my camera down in the wet sand and gravel and I had nothing to prop against my camera. No tripod.

 Old Faithful Geyser.

24-70mm f2.8 @40mm ISO 320 f/14 1/250s

Attempted to edit in Ansel Adams style. I could have used a narrower aperture, but because I was at a fairly wide focal length with nothing too close to me, I was not worried about using an f/16 aperture. I was also using a polarizer filter, so I did not want to go too dark.

 Olympic National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 100 f/18 1"

I was able to prop this on a rock and with the sun nearly set, I used a longer shutter speed to allow the waves in the lake to smoothen out.

 Olympic National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 100 f/22 3"

I propped the camera on a couple small stones. The sun was past set, so I used a long shutter speed and very narrow aperture to get most everything in focus. I used a wide aspect ratio because there were some awkward leaves, which were out of focus, below the crop frame.

Yellowstone National Park

 @600mm ISO 400 f/9 1/1000s.

I wanted to frame the shot such that the coyote was the subject and surveying the carcass scene and judging its competition with (pictured, one of) the bears. I am glad I did not use a tighter aperture because both the bear and the coyote would be in focus, and the opposite-direction-facing bear in focus would take away from the subject (the coyote). Unfortunately, I could not cleanly heal out the branch behind the coyote.

 Beartooth Pass

24-70mm f2.8 @60mm f/16 1/160s

Originally, this was a demonstration of the advantages of having a polarizer filter. I went back and cleaned up the dust spots and made some minor edits. I used the sky-pop filter and increased the contrast and clarity.

 Overlooking Mt. Stuart and Cascade Range

24-70mm f2.8 @70mm ISO 320 f/9 1/4000s

If I went as fast as 1/4000, I might as well have reduced the ISO to the lowest it could go. This was a tough edit because of the large amounts of blue in the image. White balance and contrast were difficult. I struggled with making whites white. I chose a shallow aperture because there were scratches on the airplane window, even though the distortion through them are visible in the image. I took the photo because of the rule of dominance that jagged lines are more attractive than curved lines.

Yellowstone National Park

@600mm ISO 400 f/9 1/1000s.

This was originally oriented as a landscape but changed it to a portrait. The high shutter speed was due to the lens being handheld. The large 600m I was using may have been too heavy if I used a shutter speed like 1/500s.

 Custer National Forest

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 320 f/14 1/80s

Since the share and critique, I lightened up the blue sky. I previously got carried away with it and the polarizer filter. Instead, I made the image black and white, and applied Ansel Adams' style of making blue sky nearly black.

 Custer National Forest

24-70mm f2.8 @70mm ISO 320 f/14 1/160s

Since the share and critique, I cleaned the dust spots and applied the sky-pop filter. I increased overall dehaze. I still like the picture despite speculation that I accidentally grabbed the gravel pit behind the trees.

South of Billings

Stack of 32 images, all of which had the same settings:

24-70mm f2.8 @46mm ISO 100 f/6.3 30"

Since the share and critique, I adjusted the aspect ratio to 6x17 (like the Linhof Technorama), which eliminated the phone pole and lines. I took out the reds from the red lights in the city because they were distracting. I used f/6.3 because I read somewhere that if too narrow an aperture is used for lightning, you would not capture enough light from the lightning. This is dependent on the intensity of the lightning. I could have narrowed the aperture to f/11, but I did not want to use too high an ISO.

Olympic National Park

24-70mm f2.8 @24mm ISO 640 f/11 1/60s

I used a brush with zero saturation to eliminate the red-orange colored reflectors on the post to the left. Since red attracts attention, it would have been distracting from the overall image.