Well winter is here finally, and with the onslaught of bad weather the oppourtunity for taking photos has taken a dive. Thats not to say I haven’t gotten anything, but most of them came from the start of the month when it was warmer and I had more of a reason to go outside :D

Now that winter has arrived I’m finding the motivation to get out and do things much harder to come by. We’ll see how it goes as the cold winds continue to blow

#1 - Redwoods

This is shot of a tepid pool of water in the middle of the Redwoods in Rotorua. I like how this looks like a little window into a different world, something prehistoric, like there could be dinosaur lurking just out of the frame.

I am also starting to experiment more with different aspect ratios, as you can see by the square image here. Using something different to the default 4:3 that comes out of the camera has been helpful for getting me to think more in terms of what frames the subject best and how to set the scene. By cropping the edges off the frame, it draws more focus to the tree and pond in the center, and removes the extra noise from the frame that doesn’t contribute to the overall look.

This is another experiment with aspect ratio. This one is modeled after pictures from the XPan, which was a film camera that shot at a ratio of roughly 2.7:1, so very similar to a widescreen movie. I really like the look that you can get with it, as it tends to give photos a ‘cinematic’ feel when compared to the standard almost square frame. I definitely didn’t get the exposure right for this one. There’s too much on the extreme end of light and dark, and the composition isn’t the best. But you can see what I was going for. I think moving backwards and giving more space in the foreground probably would have made for a more interesting shot.

As you can see, another xpan xperiment (sorry). I really like the feeling of bleakness from this photo, you can almost feel the cold and dampness radiating out of it. Thinking about it, maybe the colour balance could be improved, make it a little darker. But i’m fairly happy with this overall.

#2 - Ti Point

These photos were from the North Shore, at Ti Point.

Nothing fancy about this one, but I included it because I discovered photoshop’s content aware brush on this image and I think its amazing. Even knowing where to look, you can’t see where the branch was blocking half the screen. Technology is amazing. To improve this shot, I think taking a step back and framing it with the bushes a little more evenly would have helped balance it a bit better.

I’m… unhappy with this one. Its not terribly interesting, but I don’t know how i could improve it. Maybe having a person in the frame? Something better in the foreground? I’m not sure.

I really like these ones. I saw these guys hiding in a crack in the rock so of course I spent the next 30m squatting above them trying to get some good photos of them. I really learned the value of auto ISO on these photos, as the camera is pretty good at figuring out what is the best setting to put it on. The shutter speed is higher because I was jerking around a bit trying to stay still without a decent rest. But they came out really nicely in my opinion. A little brightening and colour adjustment and bam, a few not bad crab photos. You can see the noise from the higher ISO, but it doesn’t detract too much from the photo overall. And for f/5.6 its not terrible

#3 - Bloodmoon

I like this one. I can’t really explain what about it I like, but I like it. I took this before the blood moon, and I thought it would be neat to include. This is may favourites after all

Moving right along…

Last week we had a ‘Super Blood Moon’, which is a super moon combined with a lunar eclipse. This meant the moon was both larger than normal, and turned red due to the light from the sun passing through the earths shadow before striking the moon. This was a great oppourtunity to get some photos, so I tried my hand. Above you can see the first part of the transition as the moon moved into the earths shadow. This happened over the course of about an hour.

Then…

These were difficult to get with my gear. With the limited focal length of the 135mm lens and the limited aperture at that zoom, getting a decently exposed image of the dark section the moon was challenging, since the moon actually moves across the sky pretty quick, so you can’t expose for too long without it starting to blur. The moon was also very unevenly lit, with the left side being bright and the right side almost completely dark. These photos are both HDR shots combined from 3 exposure bracketed photos to get both the light and dark sides together in the same shot without having the blacks crushed or the whites blown out. I’m pretty happy with the result overall, even though the 300mm lens resolution isn’t that great.

Astrophotography

These are my very first stacked milky way shots. They are objectively bad, but they’re a good start. I learned a lot about how to take these kinds of photos, and next time I head out to take some more, i’ll have a much better idea of what i’m doing. I think these were both around 15m of total exposure time, stacked from 15s photos. I didn’t take any flat frames which I think is what is causing the bad distortion in the second photo. Something to try remember for next time. Next time i’ll also try for a longer total exposure, but I think its going to be tricky to do well without getting a tracker and probably a faster lens. But we’ll try :D The post processing is also quite lacking, thats something i’m going to have to sink a lot of time into to get better at, since so much of astro photos depends on the processing.

Final thoughts

I think I’m starting to get more at home with taking my camera around and using it effectively. I still have a lot to learn with composition though, so I just need to keep shooting!