Tamron Blog: Angle of View

Shooting Motion with Panning

By Jeff Allen

 

A great way to photograph “night light” subjects is to follow, or pan, with the subject as it moves past you. The best results are achieved when using the continuous shooting mode on the camera, so there are more frames to choose from. Experiment with shutter speeds, but the results are generally created with shutter speeds ranging from 1/10 sec. to 1/60 sec., depending on how fast the subject is moving and the amount of available light. When panning, leave a bit of room in the frame for the subject to “move into”. This shot of a carousel horse was the third frame of a of five-shot burst shooting as the horse approached and passed by. Good results can be achieved with this technique whether hand-held or panning on a tripod.

Gardens by the Bay: Supertree Grove

By André Costantini

If you ever make it to Singapore, you might want to check out the Gardens by the Bay. It is a park that recently opened (2011) and is designed to be sustainable, meaning among other things, the "Supertrees" collect solar energy during the day and use it to illuminate them at night.  And the skin of the trees are made up of over 200 varieties of ferns and flowers.  The tallest of the Supertrees is over 15 stories tall.  There are 12 in total and there is even a suspended walk that connects some of them.  

Actually, the Supertree Grove is only one of many sections of the Gardens which also features lakes, indoor gardens, and the world's largest indoor waterfall.  My brief trip to the Gardens only allowed me time to see the Supertrees, which is what attracted me to the gardens in the first place.  I thought their forms and colors would make an intersting subject to photograph.  I made sure to get there just before sunset so I would get the chance to see the trees at twilight, when the light would be ideal to photograph.

I had my Tamron SP 24-70 F2.8 which gave me a nice wide angle perspective and also having the VC function in this lighting situation was ideal to help stabilize the image when the light was the perfect ratio between the sky and the illuminated Supertrees, but the amount of light made the shutter speed a little slow to hand hold without a little help. 

It amazes me how much of a difference a couple of hours can make.  Below are a series of images from when the sun was about to set until the slightest bit of the afterglow was still barely illluminating the sky.  There are alway images you can take in all of these condtions.  While watching the changing light, it is always a great opportunity to experiment with form and color.

ISO 160 24mm f 4.0 1/3200

ISO 160 24mm f 4.0 1/400

ISO 640 24mm f4.0 1/8

ISO 640 24mm f2.8 1/8

ISO 640 24mm f2.8 1/8

My Visit To The Eastern State Penitentiary

by Mike Moats

Recently I visited the historic Eastern State Penitentiary located in Philadelphia, Penn.

Eastern State Penitentiary broke sharply with the prisons of its day, abandoning corporal punishment and ill treatment. This massive new structure, opened in 1829, became one of the most expensive American buildings of its day and soon the most famous prison in the world. The Penitentiary would not simply punish, but move the criminal toward spiritual reflection and change. The method was a Quaker-inspired system of isolation from other prisoners, with labor. The early system was strict. To prevent distraction, knowledge of the building, and even mild interaction with guards, inmates were hooded whenever they were outside their cells. But the proponents of the system believed strongly that the criminals, exposed, in silence, to thoughts of their behavior and the ugliness of their crimes, would become genuinely penitent. Thus the new word, penitentiary. Its vaulted, sky-lit cells once held many of America’s most notorious criminals, including bank robber “Slick Willie” Sutton, and gangster Al Capone.

It's very interesting to see this unique setting, and for a photographer it's all about the textures of the crumbling walls and paint.

All images shot with the Tamron 18-270 lens on a Nikon 5200.

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Creating Panoramic Images

By Ken Hubbard

 

Recently I started to collect some images for a Tamron Enewsletter on Letchworth State Park in Upstate New York, one of eight state parks Tamron USA will be holding photo workshops in this year. I came across one image that was completely different than the others, and I had forgotten I created on my last trip to the park. What made it different from the rest is that it was a panoramic image created from 5 separate vertical images, when viewing this image I realized this is a technique that I do not use often enough.

The definition of Panorama is “an unobstructed and wide view of an extensive area in all directions” and in photography it is capturing elongated fields of view using either specialized equipment or software. The simplest way to create a panoramic “style” image is to use an ultra wide lens like the Tamron’s 10-24mm at 10mm’s to capture your scene, then in Photoshop software crop the image so it appears elongated either horizontally or vertically. The issue I have with this technique is that when using an ultra wide-angle lens is that you get the expansion effect between foreground and background subjects, which usually makes your foreground subjects look larger than they should and your background subjects look smaller.

Since I did not want the look of an ultra wide lens, I needed to capture this scene in a different way. So to create this horizontal panoramic, I turned my camera to the vertical position and with a Tamron 28-300mm VC lens set at the 40mm focal length I took 5 separate images from left to right, each a small part of the entire scene I wanted to create a final panorama of. When capturing the images I overlapped parts of the scene in each image by 15 – 20%. You will need to do this so that the Photoshop software can create a seamless merge of all the images. Once I had the images captured I opened Photoshop and imported them into the program through the Photomerge section which is under the FILE dropdown, then under Automate. Once the images are imported you have a few options to create the Panorama, in the case of this image the settings were: auto layout, I checked the box for “blend images together”. Once that was done, I clicked OK and Photoshop did the rest by processing files and creating the panorama. Today there are a number of very sophisticated software options besides Photoshop, and depending on the level you want to take your panorama images you have many options.

Misty Mornings

By André Costantini

Every morning for a week, this was the view from my room. And after seeing this the first morning, I felt compelled to be up to watch this daily. Of course every day was different. The clouds moved quickly and would burn off within a few hours and sometimes less. The wonderful thing is that I was in the same location every day and so my challenge was to find where the best images were in a scene that was constantly changing, but from a singular perspective.

It is the combination of pollution and temperature which creates the fog and mist in the Kathmandu Valley. The nights get into the 40's while the days can reach the mid 70's. These extreme changes and the fact that all of this is trapped in a valley make for a moody morning of photography.

Using the Tamron SP 70-300 VC lens I was able to frame up specific subjects in the image. The effect of using a telephoto lens creates the effect known as compression. What this does is effectively flatten the elements in the image making objects that are far away and those that are closer to appear almost in the same plane. In the first image you see a smoke stack next to trees as the dominant form with the faintest hints of factories in the background. Shot at 210mm f5.6 1/320 the second image is broken up into three planes divided horizontally by the clouds. In the top third you see electrical tower and factories. In the middle you see a smoke stack that is emitting smoke (actually a brick factory) on one plane. And in the final third, just trees. It was shot at 220mm at F10 (to increase the depth of field) at 1/320. The third image is just clouds and trees, but it is the light playing off of the clouds which makes the image enticing. Shot at 300mm f5.6 1/800 Because there is fog and the sun is backlighting the subjects, these images are very low contrast, but this adds to the flavor and the mood and is much closer to how it appeared in person.

Whether it is Maine or Nepal, usually the haze is most prominent in morning or evening when temperatures are rapidly changing. It is worth getting up a little early to witness these changes and you might even get a good shot or three!

Long Exposures and Seaside Piers

By Ken Hubbard

One of my last blogs that I posted a few months ago, I was talking about the not so winter I was having on Long Island and having to travel to Montreal to see snow.  Well, that turned out to be a real bad idea, because mother nature decided to finally hit us with some bad winter weather and then follow me around for a while on my travels.  One of the places I was looking forward to was Myrtle Beach. The Carolina Nature Photographers Assoc. was having its annual convention there at a hotel right on the beach.  I thought to myself "boy, this is going to be nice... Beach, sand and warm weather".   The beach was there, and my room on the 12th floor looked over the beach nicely, but as far as the warm weather goes, I don't think it ever went past 55 degrees. A bummer for South Carolina!

No matter what the weather is, and after this past winter I can't believe I'm complaining about 55 degree weather, I still try to find some time to shoot where ever I am. In this case the Apache Pier was within a few hundred yards of my hotel and seemed like a good place to capture some long exposure night images.  I really liked the patterns in the support planks and noticed that I got a mirrored look to them when I put one of the posts directly in the center of the frame.  The image below is a 30 second exposure shot at F/22 and an ISO setting at 800.  I used an LED flashlight to light up the entire inner structure, since there was so much light coming from the pier itself my first few images without it came out very dark.  Since LED lights can sometimes come out a little on the cool side I used one of Rouge Light Modifiers warming gel filters, that normally go onto a speedlight, over my flashlight to warm up the color a bit.  Another thing to remember when using a flashlight on long exposures, always keep the flashlight moving and don't leave it pointing at one spot too long,  this will cause a hot spot on your image that will not look good.

Himalayas in Black and White

By André Costantini

About 125 miles west of Kathmandu you will find Pokhara, the second largest city in Nepal. It is located at the base of the Annapurna mountain range, which is part of the Himalayas. Now although you will not be anywhere near the famed Mt. Everest, you will be near only three of the top ten highest peaks in the world and be privy to quite a view from town and the surrounding hills.

Pokhara is a famous destination as a launch point for travelers to spend weeks trekking the Himalayas. With only several days to stop by, we didn't have time for a proper trek, but had plenty of time to hike about and take in some of the spectacular scenery.

The deceptive thing about this landscape is that without anything for scale you really have no sense of how massive these mountains really are. The peaks in the image are over 23,500 feet tall. The altitude I am making these images is probably only 3,500 feet. The peaks are roughly 30 miles away and there is a tiny paraglider in the bottom center of the image, probably at about 5,500 feet and probably only 2 miles from us.

The conversion to black and white was done using Nik Silver Efx Pro 2.0 which is a really great black and white plug in for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. The density of the sky was so blue even without the use of a polarizer, that the black and white conversion came pretty easily with a dark sky without much manipulation. In this case the key was to use the software equivalent of a red filter on the camera, which makes the blue tones, blacker.

Certain images tend to lend themselves really well to black and white. This image was one because there was nice contrast from the snow and the clouds against the sky. In the original image the intense blue color hues overpower the form of the clouds and mountains. But when the color is removed now our focus shifts to the contrast of the clouds and mountains against the sky for something a little more striking. I have included the original image below for comparative purposes.

This image was taken with the Tamron SP 70-200 f2.8 VC. The focal length was 70mm and the aperture was set at f7.1 at 1/640th of a second.

Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

By Ken Hubbard

 

When you head to Montreal, Canada the week in between Christmas and New Year's you expect a few things like, the streets and shops decorated for the holiday season, tourists who came to see this historic city, cold weather and snow! I know the reason I wanted to go up to Canada in the middle of winter, were the great photo ops in this beautiful old city regardless of challenging weather conditions. Well, with a major snow storm hitting the city the night I arrived and lasting throughout the entire next day, I was put to the test early. For at least the first full day I was there, it was going to be an indoor shooting experience. Which was fine, since I was staying in Old Montreal and there are a number of Cathedrals and other historical buildings to shoot, they just needed to be open!

Luckily, Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal was open despite the whipping winds and heavy snowfall. One good thing about such a bad weather day is that less people are out sight seeing and what would usually be a very busy day inside the Basilica was now a much easier photographic experience. There was only one potentially bad mistake I made, I didn't want to carry my tripod around in the snow storm, so I left it back at the hotel. I usually depend heavily on a tripod in such low lit places as this, especially when I'm dealing with exposures of anywhere between 1/2 sec & 1/8 sec. even with my ISO set to 1600. Luckily for me the three lenses that I brought were all well suited for low light shooting because of either a fast F/2.8 aperture, Vibration Compensation, extreme wide angle of view or the combination of all three. The three lenses I used were Tamron's SP 10-24mm, 18-270mm VC & SP 17-50mm F/2.8 VC.

Since the Tamron 10-24mm is an extreme wide angle lens, it was a bit easier for me to hand hold my camera at slower shutter speeds like 1/4 sec and still get sharp images. The wider the angle of view your lens is the easier it is to hand hold. For example, if you look through your viewfinder when you have a lens set to 300mm, you can actually see your camera moving all over the place. Now, when you put another lens that is 10mm on your camera, you don't see the camera shake at all. The second Lens that I used was the Tamron 18-270mm, because I used some longer focal lengths it was harder to hand hold. This is where the Vibration Compensation system really helped, I was able to slow down my shutter speed about 4 stops than I normally could and was capturing images down to about 1/3 sec. The last lens I used was the 17-50mm F/2.8 VC. With the added feature of a fast F/2.8 aperture in this lens along with the wide angle of 17mm and the Vibration compensation, all allowed me to capture some images down to 1/2 sec. The images attached to this blog were all hand held using either one of these three lenses and were shot with various apertures, ISO 1600 and shutter speeds between 1/2 - 1/8 second.

My Top Ten Favorite Images Of 2012

By Mike Moats

Even though 2012 has not come to a close yet, I couldn't wait any longer to post my top ten favorites of 2012. Well actually I lied about the number I'm posting, I just couldn't narrow it down to ten, so I came up with twelve images. There is a nice variety of images, many that I shot when I was out on the road doing my Macro Boot Camps. Images were shot using either the, Tamron SP 90mm macro, Tamron SP 70-300mm VC, or the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD.

I will start with this image shot in the winter of 2012, and work through the spring into the fall. This was shot in a small frozen puddle in a park near my home. I liked the design of the leaf on the right and the bubbles. The thousands of tiny bubbles add a nice texture to the black background.

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In March I was in Raleigh, North Carolina for a workshop, and one of the local photographers and friend Susan Bailey asked if I would like to visit the Duke Universities Arboretum as the flowers were starting to bloom. I like the flow of the petals in this flower, and the soft pastel color.

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While I was at the Duke Gardens the tulips were just starting to bloom, I like how this budding tulip was being cradled in this leaf.

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Now moving into April, I was presenting at the Bird and Photo Festival in St Augustine, Florida, and I visited a small park. It was early morning and I found this pair of Bird of Paradise leaves that were backlit by the sun. Nice abstract pattern.

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While still in St Augustine, I strolled down to the beaches in search of feathers or shells. I found lots of nice shells composed in the sand and this was one of my favorites.

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Back in the spring I started playing with different subjects outside of nature photography. Its been lots of fun and I've produced some very cool stuff with all kinds of subjects. I had a blast photographing water and oil. This was my fav of the oil and water shots.

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Now we're heading into the fall, and I'm in the Boston area doing a workshop and had a day off to shoot, so headed up to Rockport, MA. Stopped by a small harbor of boats and saw this nice reflection in the water of the boat and ropes.

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I heard about this very cool place called Old Car City. As I was on my way from Savannah, GA to Cincinnati, OH, I stopped in at Old Car City, which is 50 miles north of Atlanta, and 2 miles off I-75. There are over 4,000 classic cars scattered over 6 miles of trails through out woods and fields. Had a blast and got tons of great images. I scheduled a 2013 spring workshop there that sold out within days. People love shooting rusty junk cars.

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When I made it to Cincinnati after Old Car City, I stopped at a small Arboretum and found this unusual looking succulent. I used the Solorization filter in Nik Software to get this really cool look.

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I had two weekends of workshops in the twin city area in Minnesota. Jillian Bell who is a Tamron Tech Rep lives in that area and went with me to the Minnesota Arboretum, which is run by the University of Minnesota. The indoor area was just a small building with some tropical plants, but I found this nice succulent that turned out very nice.

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While at home and in between traveling to workshops, I started visiting some of the local Detroit area museums. This one was shot at the Henry Ford Museum.

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We have another nice car museum called the Walter P Chrysler Museum. Too bad attendance over the years wasn't strong enough, so the museum is closing as of January 1st. This is a cool abstract of reflection in the fender of one of the cars.

That's my 12 favorite images of 2012, thank you for stopping by and viewing them.

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Just Go Shoot Yourself!

By Rob Moody

I had an experience working at the Great American Scrap Booking Festival this year that caused me to think. I viewed literally hundreds of scrapping pages and a theme started to present itself. The theme was that the photographer/scrapper was in very few, if any, of the images in their own scrapbook. It was as if just the camera went on all these trips with a family that didn’t have a mother! I was shocked, but then thought about my photography and realized, I was guilty of the same thing.

After this experience, I started to look at the entire body of work that I’ve created as a photographer. As I spent time looking at various images from adventures past, I realized that when it comes to my passion, nature photography in the mountains, I have many great images, but unfortunately not very many that include me in the adventure.

I’m making a conscious effort to change this.

On every trip since then, I have made sure to either take images of myself or hand the camera to others to snap off a couple. I think often times we think of ourselves as the photographer, so naturally don’t think of ourselves as being in a potential part of the photograph. This is crazy because of the extensive selection of tripods, cable releases and remote controls available for every camera today. Alternatively, you can use your cameras self-timer and a tripod to get yourself in the image if you want to go lightweight and inexpensive.

Shooting yourself presents a couple of challenges:

One is how do you compose the image intending to include yourself?

Another is how do you focus the camera when you are not in the picture yet?

The answer to the composition question is to pre-visualize yourself in the image as if you were shooting another person doing the same thing. Realize that a great many things you do while adventuring might add interest to the body of work. Plan to record like a journalist to add more flavor and tell more of a full story about your adventures.

Another tip is to compose the image as if no one would be in it, and then include you as part of it. A self environmental portrait of you doing the things you love. Be your own model, it’s a great photographic learning exercise. Think about the magazines you read and the images included of people doing things you normally wouldn’t think to photograph, the behind the scenes stuff.

The answer to the focus part is method. If another person is going to be in the image with you, you can simply focus on them and then run over and place yourself next to them in the image. If you are the only one in the picture, focus on something in the area where you will stand for the image. To do this, place your AF point selector to single point AF and move it to the item in the picture where you will be standing, for example a rock or a patch of grass. Then use your self-timer or remote/ release to trigger the shutter with you in the picture on that spot.

Another method you can use is to set a specific distance on the lens. Most lenses still show distance identification markers in both meters and feet. For this, set the focus to manual and turn the focus ring to your preferred distance. For example, set the focus to 6ft and then stand approximately 6 feet away from the camera.

The key to both methods is to take several images so you have something to choose from. Also, this will improve your chances of getting a focused image with you in the right place in the composition. Greater depth of field with an f/stop like f/8 – f/16 will make it more likely everything will be in focus. The less depth of field the less chances of getting exactly what you want in focus. This is somewhat trial and error at first, but with a little practice in the backyard you’ll get the hang of it. Have a little fun and shoot yourself. I hope to see you out there.