Tag Archives: display

Photographs: Night, Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Store Window Display

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Store Window Display
Motion blurred photograph of a Chinatown store window display

Store Window Display. San Francisco, California. July 25, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Motion blurred photograph of a Chinatown store window display

Part of what I enjoy about night photography is the way that the environment is transformed and how I often have to resort to “seeing as the camera sees” more than seeing as I see in the dim light. The camera sees better in low light, it can pick up colors that fade almost to monochrome in nighttime human vision, and it can “see” things like blur motion with longer exposures.

For a few minutes on this evening I decided to play around with long exposure blur. Instead of keeping the ISO high so that I could use short shutter speeds in the low light and stop motion, I lowered the ISO and intentionally selected smaller apertures and very long shutter speeds. Then I used the combination of subject motion and intentionally moving the camera myself to create abstractions. It may hardly matter, but the subject here was a store window full of colorful lanterns.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Deals and Sales

Deal Alert — X-Rite i1 Display One Pro

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This isn’t the typical post here, but today only there is a great deal on the X-Rite i1 Display One Pro calibration system at site-affiliate B&H Photo. The device calibrates computer and other monitors and projectors and has a bunch of other useful features that I won’t list here. If you need such device, this sounds like a great time to get it. Here are the details:

  • Big savings on X-Rite i1 Display One Pro calibration system at B&H — Regular price $249. $95 off right now makes the cost $154. An additional $25 mail-in rebate brings your final cost to only $129! VERY LIMITED TIME OFFER – ENDS AT MIDNIGHT EST TODAY or when supplies run out. This unit calibrates a wide range of monitors and projection systems.

Note the VERY LIMITED DURATION of this offer. It ends tonight at midnight EST or sooner if supplies run out. Now, off to see about ordering… ;-)

X-Rite I1 Display Pro
X-Rite I1 Display Pro
Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Thinking Aloud

Fallen Begonia Blossom

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Fallen Begonia Blossom - A fallen begonia blossom on a bench at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens
A fallen begonia blossom on a bench at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens

Fallen Begonia Blossom. Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden, Fort Bragg, California. August 27, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A fallen begonia blossom on a bench at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens.

On a recent trip to the northern California coast around Mendocino, we spent the better part of a day wandering around at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in Fort Bragg. If you ever visit this part of California, you will quickly discover that there are lots of flowers there, both wildflowers and cultivated varieties – they seem to like the cooler, moister, foggier climate. The Botanical Gardens is surprisingly large and comprehensive for a private facility in a somewhat out-of-the-way location. It covers many acres, stretching from the coast highway all the way to the edge of bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and it includes a wide range of plant types, not all of which are what you would expect here.

This was our first visit to the Gardens, so we sort of explored rather than trying to necessarily see everything. Not far from the entrance is the structure of the Mauer Display Garden, where begonias were blooming. The flowers and the intensity of their colors were quite amazing. At one point I believe I remarked that I had never seen anything quite as intensely orange as some of the flowers. At one point I looked away from the main displays of living plants and happened to notice this very colorful blossom that had fallen onto the corner of a bench. While the color probably seems unbelievable, it really was this intense. (Photographing these flowers proved to be a great reminder of the exposure challenges we face when using DSLRs to shoot subjects that are intense in one of the three color channels. In some photographs, the red channel was perhaps three to four stops brighter than the other channels!)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Equipment, Technique

Yet Another Reason to Like Live View – Shooting in the Wind

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I have posted in the past about some of the advantages of having a live view feature on your camera, especially for the types of photography that I do using my Canon 5DII. This past week I discovered another use, and an unexpected one at that – shooting in conditions of gusty winds.

I most often work from the tripod, and I usually use a pretty large and stable tripod in the context of shooting a full frame DSLR camera. But in some very windy conditions putting the camera on a tripod is not sufficient to stop camera motion and the consequent blur. This is especially a problem when you are shooting in low light or otherwise need to use very long exposure times, and it becomes worse when using long lenses which will catch more wind and magnify vibrations. There are a bunch of tricks that you can try in order to keep the camera steady, but in really strong winds the camera is just going to move, especially if you have a very large lens attached.

One way I try to deal with this is to time my exposures for moments when the wind may momentarily decrease. This can require a lot of patience – sometimes I’ve had to wait several minutes for a very brief halt to the gale, during which I try to make my exposure. But even in this case, you have to make sure that the camera vibration stops completely if you are using a long lens. Ultimately, you have to simply trust that the camera really has stabilized since there is no way to tell directly. Last week, as I was using live view to focus a 400mm lens on a distant subject and again noting that 400mm plus 10x software zoom in live view makes the camera very sensitive to vibration. In the past I have noted this mainly in the context of how darn hard it is to manually focus a big lens this way! But this time it occurred to me that I could use this in my favor.

With the 10x live view magnification enabled, the display is very sensitive to camera motion from the wind. I realized that by leaving the camera in the 10x magnification setup after composing the shot that I could simply watch this display, with its magnification of motion, and wait until the image stabilized during lulls in the wind to take my shots. If the display isn’t bouncing at 10x, motion blur is not going to be an issue. Problem solved. More or less.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.