Photography

Watering a Water Melon

water melon, originally uploaded by Art By Steve Johnson.

Here is something a bit different – cubes of water melon being squirted with water – not as technically difficult as it looks. There was a reasonable level of ambient light so I just set the shutter speed to maximum flash sync, manually focused to a point just in front of where I intended to squirt, set the self timer and started squirting.

There are, in effect three light sources at work, flash on the left as you look at the picture, a lot of ambient from behind and a little from the right.

If you look at the feint trails with the  on the left of the image as you look at you can see that the water drops appear a little in from the right. The trails are the highlights on the drops and the brightness of the trail shows when the flash went off in relation to the entire release time. The rest of the trail is the non flash shutter open time and more interestingly, gives an idea of the ambient light level.

Having a plastic working surface is really handy (this is a gray plastic fold out decorating table. The amount of water is deceptive – there is actually very little, about a teaspoonful in the whole shot and about a tablespoonful including what is out of frame so no studio flood to mop up.

Weather

The sky darkened dramatically this morning and a storm was obviously in the offing so I stuck the camera on a tripod and snapped a few shots through the studio windows.

The image is part of a weather vane  (the part out of shot consisting of a metal rabbit and an arrow).

Dragonfly

One good thing about dragon flies is that they will stay at the same flower and more or less the same position for minutes on end.

This makes them arguably the most cooperative models anywhere in the animal kingdom.

This was shot at around noon in bright sunshine with a little fill flash. The background is actually an out of focus road and the flower is a daylilly.

More about dragonflies:

Honey Bee and Lavender

One of a set of photos taken at around 6 PM . The sun was out but a bit of flash was needed. The camera was hand held but the flash was enough to keep the image reasonably sharp.

I use a Nikon d40x dSLR camera with a Nikon SB-600 Speedlight Flash. On this occasion I left the flash on camera.

I love the camera – wonderful piece of kit but have a love/hate relationship with the SB600. when it works well it produces great images but it lacks consistency and predictability. Sometimes it will work great for a whole shoot, other times I’ll have to shoot 3 frames to get a useable one. I’ve tried it in auto and manual mode and with every possible camera setting and still no predictability. Don’t get me wrong it is very useable and Adobe Lightroom does great work on less than ideally exposed shots but it is a bit of a pain.

If anyoner is reading this and thinking of picking up a second hand SB600 don’t – pop for an SB800 it is a much more consistant strobe, more powerful and has much more functionality regarding remote strobing.

Garden in the Rain

This is one of a set of photographs shot from the cover of our porch into the garden during a thunderstorm. lots of flowers and foliage with rain drops.

Flash was used, with a diffusing dome which not only illuminated the shot but also allowed for any movement to be frozen giving a sharpness to the water droplets that is hard to achieve without flash – at least at shutter speeds of under 1/500 of a second.

These were photographed using a Nikon D40x with an equivalent focal length of 300mm and an Nikon SB600 flash with diffuser dome, camera mounted.

post processing was done in Adobe Lightroom.