 phoenix |  August 19th, 2010 Last night the sky was clear with no cloud coverages. My friend and I drove to a farm near Pickering and did some star gazing. I brought my camera gears along to do some simple astrophotography.
First easy target for the camera is the moon. I’ve posted my photo of the first full moon of year2010 before. Beautiful as the full moon is, it is actually too bright and does not have enough contrast on the moon surface to see some of the craters. A new moon will actually offer much better details than a full moon because of the contrast provided by the shadows on the moon’s surface. Last night is 2 day past moon’s first quarter, the moon is actually about 57% full. However it still offered enough shadows on the moon’s surface so that some more details can be seen.
The same gear as the last moon shot was used. Canon EOS 7D was coupled with Sigma 100-300 F4 & Sigma 1.4x teleconverter all sitting on the Manfrotto 055 Pro tripod. This gives me a relative stable platform for the camera and an equivalent focal length of 672mm. The following photo was shot at ISO 100, F11 @ 1/100th second.
Continue reading ‘Star gazing with Canon EOS 7D’ »
phoenix | February 27th, 2010 This is another figure/doll photography 121 post. I’ve heard from many people as well as seen from many forum posters that they can’t seem to get sharp images for their figure/doll. Some of these people simply didn’t know to use the macro focus mode on their point and shoot camera. However, a lot of them are new users of D-SLRs or have switched from point and shoot digital camera to D-SLRs. In this post, I’d like to explore some of the difference between a point and shoot digital camera and a D-SLR that may cause new and unfamiliar user to get blurry photos. I will also explore a few things on the D-SLR and are specific to D-SLR that may cause blurry photos. I will be using nendoroid, standard PVC figure, as well as doll as my subject. As usual all photos in the post have higher resolution images linked so click on the thumbnail to see better details.
Be aware, this post is image heavy and may take a bit longer to load.
Continue reading ‘Figure/doll photography 121 – Blurry photos – How to tame the focus’ »
phoenix | February 25th, 2010 I’m going to call this a figure/doll photography 121. It’s not a 101 because even though what’s presented here is what I know of, it may or may not be correct. It’s not a 123 since I’m not really providing a step by step instruction. So some where between 101 and 123, I hope this becomes helpful to someone. And through that, the knowledge is transferred from one to another, and hence the name 121.
Black background, there are a lot of myths about it. There are talks about how to use black seamless paper, black cloth, or even black velvet behind the subject to create it. Then there are talks about using post production editing tools such as Photoshop to achieve it. However, neither of these approaches produces what I would call a true black background. Black background material is always visible due to light reflection, even black velvet shows up under some lighting conditions. And then there are many cases where the use of background material is just not practical or not possible. Photoshop on the other hand, will product a true black background, but typical masking technique to mask out your suject will produce an unnatural edge around it, this is on top of the amount of work needed to mask the fine details. In this post, I will try to walk through my technique in creating what I would call a true black background, just like what I have done below for Dollfie Dream Kanu Unchou. I’ve used this technique for many years now, mostly for floral photography but used sparsely for figure photography as well. however it can easily be applied to much bigger subjects such as dolls, real people and even other bigger subjects that you might want to photograph. And it’s all done straight out of camera with no background material and no Photoshop work.
Continue reading ‘Figure/doll photography 121 – How to produce black background’ »
phoenix | January 30th, 2010 Today is the first full moon of 2010. That large beautiful moon up on sky is calling out to me to try out my Canon 7D DSLR on it. So despite the -15°C (with wind chill -20°C) weather, I geared up and went to my backyard for a bit of backyard astronomy. Okay so it is not the ideal place to do any astrophotographing since I live right in the city. The large amount of light pollution from city lights and the air distortion in the city are all enemies of astronomy. But in such cold weather, I really don’t want to drive up north just for a few photo of the moon. Not to mention, just as the title suggests, I don’t actually own a telescope. I was merely trying to see how much my Canon EOS 7D can capture when combined with my long lenses. I have a Sigma 100-300 F4 and a Sigma 1.4x teleconverter. The Sigma 100-300 F4 @ 300mm coupled with the Sigma 1.4x teleconverter gives me a focal length of 420mm. On the 1.6x Canon EOS 7D it gives me an effective 672mm focal length.
I started with my daily tripod / head combo, the Gitzo GT1541 Mountaineer carbon fiber tripod and Markins Q-Ball Q3 Emille. Now that’s one big mistake. The little 4 section light Gitzo tripod is obviously not stable enough to photograph something that’s some 380,000 kilometers away, which is how far the moon is away from the earth. And the Markins Q-Ball even though stable enough to shoot earthly things but definitely slips a bit when having the big lens aimed upwards. So even with mirror locked up, and remote release cable, the image is still very blurry. Here’s the result, click on the image to see in full resolution.
Canon 7D, Sigma 100-300 F4 @ 300mm, Sigam 1.4x teleconverter, manual exposure @ ISO 100, F8, 1/100 sec, manual focus using live view.
Continue reading ‘No telescope, no problem! Canon 7D doing astronomy’ »
phoenix | November 12th, 2009 Metro Toronto Zoo opened the 10 acre Tundra Trek show casing a lot of arctic animals. So what “white” arctic animals are there? Well, there’s Polar Bear, Arctic Wolf, Arctic Fox, Snow Goose, and Snowy Owl. However only three of them are on display when I visited.
This is the third and last post in the “white” animal series. And the star of this post is the Arctic Wolf. I’ve had posted my photos of the Arctic Wolfs at the Toronto Zoo before in this post. But the new exhibit is much bigger and the wolfs looked much happier in there.
Looks like a big white dog, but this is actually the Arctic Wolf.
Continue reading ‘“White” animal in the zoo – Arctic Wolf’ »
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