It’s hard to beat the Lumix FZ1000 as a travel camera. At two and a half pounds there’s no problem having the camera on your shoulder all day long. The 25-400mm f2.8-4 lens is pretty sweet. With the Macro Mode on you can focus down to less than an inch. what more do your need?*
Here’s a few images from 34,000 feet from the window seat of an American Airlines plane wending it’s way from Detroit, where I was speaking and judging at a photography convention, to Phoenix on my way home.
Love the movement of the water through the scene. Gives the story about how some of the landscapes are formed over the years.
It’s fascinating watching the country unfold from way up high! Toto I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore…
Lots of different views from above…
I find myself inspired to take these images after reading Julianne Kost’s Window Seat – The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking. Great images and story of how she created her book.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
* Well you may not need it but the camera also has 4K video and Photo Mode so you can pull 8MP stills from your video and a whole bunch more features that come in quite handy.
Pulled into the driveway the other night and saw the full moon starting it’s ascent from the eastern horizon and I immediately ran for my camera. Now we’ve all had the wonderful (I say sarcastically) experience of photographing the moon and being disappointed by the amount of volume it took up in the entire image surface. You know, way too small for what we had in mind when we made the photograph.
The FZ1000 is 400mm at the long end of the zoom at f4. While solid even that is pretty short for something that is 238,900 miles (give or take a centimeter or two) away from the camera. The camera has a setting called Digital Zoom and shows and captures the image at a larger size. 1600mm in this case. This does degrade the image vs having optics do the job. But have you priced a 1600mm lens lately? In spite of a bit of degradation of image quality I like the Digital Zoom because I can see exactly how the image will fill the frame.
Even after cropping in there’s 2300 pixels of moon that when made smaller and placed in an art piece will have plenty of detail
Now are these images good for study of the craters on the moon’s surface? Heck no! But will they be good for art projects where a moon is needed? You betcha!
One way to add interest to a moon shot is to silhouette an object. I wish I had thought about this a bit more but didn’t have much time to scout out a more appropriate subject but you’ll get the idea with these mesquite branches starting to bud out with our warm weather.
Moon with mesquite branches
One thing to be aware of when attempting this when you have the foreground element in focus there will be a blob of light behind your subject. To help this along I took one of my plain moon images and placed it under the mesquite layer and put it into Multiply Blend Mode. This allowed the image of the moon with detail to show through.
Many photographers ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?”
And because I believe this artist says it ever so much better than I do I think I’ll turn most today’s Photo/Art Quote over to Chuck Close from a Facebook Post in Patron of the Arts.
“Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Chuck Close
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” – Chuck Close
If you haven’t heard of Chuck before make sure you read up on his story and take a look at his work(remember these pieces can be HUGE) and his web site and you will be even more inspired to follow his advice and thoughts.
Here’s a different time lapse from the same location as a few days ago at Sound Bites Grill. Was able to set the tripod up on the deck that overlooks this wonderful scenery in Sedona.
This time I set the camera behind a red rock stone column in order to stay out of the gusts of wind that caused some extra work on my last time lapse at this location. I also unclasped the camera strap and tied down the camera for even more stability. I was able to do this quickly because I have the Peak Design Camera Strap. I really enjoy the ability to quickly be able to remove the camera strap when shooting video or time lapse images. This cuts down on the wind profile of the gear leading to to steadier capture. It also make it easy to change the type of strap if I’d rather use a wrist strap instead of over the shoulder. This is a pretty cool system with lots of options.
But I digress… How about the video Bob? Here you go…
Sunset time lapse in Sedona
I used similar settings as the last time lapse on the Lumix GX8 capturing a frame every three seconds processing out to a 4K video .MP4 in camera at 24 frames per second. Then taking that video into Adobe premiere Pro to add some Ken Burns movement through the scene.
I was hoping that the clouds your view scudding across the scene were going to be there as the sun snuck beneath the horizon and giving spectacular color, but alas, it did not. Such are the vagaries of predicting the weather.
Of note, as you study this time lapse be aware of the look of the red rocks after the sun has gone down and the sky begins to move toward cobalt blue and the density range begins to tighten up. This is an ideal time to capture the red rocks as the light is being reflected off of clouds and there’s lots of depth and dimension and beautiful color. I can’t tell you the number of times I will be at a scene with other photographers and they pack it up and leave moments after the sun sets. I wait that extra fifteen to twenty minutes AFTER the sun goes down to get much more intense images. Does it always work? Nope. but way more often than you might think and the rewards are worth it. I’ll address this in more detail in a future post.
Lately I’ve been capturing time lapse sequences of sunsets here in Sedona, Arizona. And by photographing them I seem to have reprogrammed my brain for the way it sees light change. Almost as if by capturing and working with images that compress time into a shorter period I am extending my vision of light and time.
Let me explain.
Because of this new awareness I am now seeing the shadows slowly crawl across a scene as if I am becoming hyper-aware of the changes. Capturing a time lapse makes you take time to slow down because it takes a fair number of images created over a relatively long time period to have enough material. In a sense it becomes a meditation.
Now in this particular case it was a bonus to set the camera up then retire to the bar to observe the changes taking place which was a fun way to work/play on a personal project. My wife and I got to enjoy a glass of happy hour wine and one of their stellar appetizers. (it was the calamari, cooked perfectly and served with a sweet/spicy sauce over a bed of carrots and light greens)
Images captured with the Lumix GX8 & 12-35mm f2.8 Vario lens. Time lapse was processed in camera then imported to Adobe Premeire CC 2015 for processing slight movement. I was hoping that the clouds you saw in the beginning of the video would have hung around and colored up to spectacular… and they did as they moved out of the frame. Color was bright salmon to the south… Oh well, still nice movement of light on the red rocks.
Last night I had the honor & pleasure of sharing some thoughts & ideas with the students of Gene Devine’s Business Operations and Management for Photographers class at the Art Institute of Phoenix. It was a great group who asked the right questions about being in business.
I’m very glad that this kind of a course is available for those working to become professional photographers. The business of running a photography business is often neglected in classroom environments. Sure we all want to create fabulous photographs & art! But if we don’t understand how to market, price our work, run the business and know if we are making a profit or not we won’t be around very long as professionals.
Instructor Gene Devine ‘awarding’ me the Art Institute Cup! (so proud!)
If you are newer to photography as a business make sure you learn as much as you can about marketing, pricing, negotiation skills, bookkeeping and staying profitable. If you’ve been around the block a few times & are making it as a pro get out and share your business acumen with high school, college and other groups learning how it should be done to stay successful.
Paraphrasing here but you’ll get the idea. The lyrics go something like this,
“I want it all, I want it all, AND I WANT IT NOW!!’
We live in a very now society. Information is almost instantaneous. Look at the web. I just typed the search term photography into my browser and had access to About 1,020,000,000 results (0.66 seconds) from Google. Holy Crap! The reason I bring this up is that technology has spoiled us in many ways. This quick access to information has spread to the ability of cameras to give us a quick result that’s good enough. AKA in focus and a decent exposure.
This leads to two things I’ve noticed. The lament that a photographer isn’t creating ‘enough’. Enough new or exciting or different images. Or worse. A photographer thinking that they are creating wonderful images and not receiving the just kudos.
Let us now move on to today’s quote.
“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.” Edward Weston
Granted that when Weston shared this quote the processes for attaining images was more difficult than we have at our disposal today. But the abiltiy to see, and bring that vision, to our final images still takes knowledge and time.
Practice. Experimentation. Study. Making mistakes. Education. And, more practice. Push the limits of the new tech.
Rinse and repeat.
Don’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results. That’s someone’s definition of insanity often attributed to Einstein.
That is what ultimately leads to creating compelling imagery.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
PS – What are you doing daily, or weekly, to take your image creation skills to the next level?
PPS – Esoterica – Weston was pushing the material he had at hand. For example, in his iconic studio photographs of the peppers and nautilus shells did you know that the low rated ISO of the sheet film used made it necessary for very long exposures? Some as long as 4½ hours!!
Time lapse Photography – Sound Bites Grill & Snoopy Rock
aka – Snoopy Goes to Sleep
I get to spend quite a bit of time at Sound Bites Grill, being the house photographer. So I am very familiar with the view. And as many times as I see the sun set on the red rocks I am always amazed at how each sunset differs from the one before. On this day with no clouds to help I decided to concentrate on the comic feature built into the red rocks a Charles Schultz character called Snoopy.
Snoopy Rock Time Lapse Video
The initial images were captured with the Lumix GX8 with a 35-100mm f2.8 Vario lens. The settings were for an image captured every 3 seconds. The video was processed in-camera in the GX8 to 4K video with playback speed at 12 frames per second. I had previously processed the 916 images into a 4K 24 fps video and felt it was too fast.
One problem that I wasn’t aware of during capture (cause I was having dinner at the bar) was there were some very severe wind gusts shaking the camera. That’s not a good way to view video. Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 to the rescue. Opened the file in Premiere Pro then added the graphics and music. Even more important used the Warp feature to examine and fix the shaky wind buffeted footage to rock steady. Also added a slight Ken Burns effect zooming slowly into the image featuring Snoopy that is possible because of the 4K size files that still leaves you plenty of quality on an HD timeline.
As an added benefit to shooting time lapses there are individual images to choose from to create stills from the same scene. Here’s one with just a bit more color correction in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.
Snoopy Rock still photo at sunset.
I’m really enjoying the ease with which time lapse videos can be made with the Lumix cameras. You don’t need to take the subsequent video into and additional processing program but that enables the addition of information and flourishes depending on your final output.
“The… event occurred around the first serious choice I made as a photographer to concentrate on a limited subject. The subject was always light, but I wanted to explore a single form, which turned out to be the flow of water in creeks and rivers near my home. I photographed in every season, when the water was high in February and March, when it was low in August, when it was transparent in July, when it was an opaque jade in December. In 1980 I began to photograph moving water in moonlight, exposures of twenty-five or thirty minutes. These images suffered from reciprocity failure – the color balance in them collapsed – but they also recorded something extraordinary, a pattern of flow we cannot actually see. They revealed the organizing principle logicians would one day call a strange attractor.
The streaming of water around a rock is one of the most complex motions of which human beings are aware. The change from a laminar, more or less uniform flow to turbulent flow around a single rock is so abstruse a transition mathematically that even the most sophisticated Cray computer cannot make it through to a satisfactory description.
Aesthetically, of course, no such difficulty exists. The eye dotes on the shift, delights in the scintillating sheeting, the roll-off of light around a rock, like hair responding to the stroke of a brush. Sometimes I photographed the flow of water in sunshine at 1/2000 of a second and then later I’d photograph the same rock in moonlight. Putting the photos side by side, I could see something hidden beneath the dazzle of the high-speed image that compared with our renderings of the Milky Way from space: the random pin-dot infernos of our own and every other sun form a spiraling, geometrical shape motionless to our eyes. In the moonlit photographs, the stray streaks from errant water splashes were eliminated (in light that weak, they occur too quickly to be recorded); what was etched on the film instead were orderly, fundamental lines of flow, created by particle after illuminated particle of gleaming water, as if each were a tracer bullet.
(Years later, reading Chaos, James Gleick’s lucid report on chaos theory, I would sit bolt upright in my chair. What I’d photographed was the deep pattern in turbulence, the clothing, as it were, of the strange attractor.) “
– Barry Lopez, “Learning to See,” chapter 13 in About This Life
In a post a couple days ago I talked about an art installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Arts and how it moved me and made me sad…
Well, there was another installation there that saved me from spiraling too far down into the depths. It was Bruce Munro’s Ferryman’s Crossing.
When I first walked in to the Crossing I thought, “WTH??? It’s a bunch of CD’s on the floor…
First look at Ferryman’s Crossing
And despite my initial reaction I decided to spend some time checking it out. Glad I did.
The CD’s are tilted in two directions with lights flashing down from the ceiling from different angles, timings and places. This is not an environment you want to be in if you are epileptic but strangely enough it is a very calming place to be. There are large expanses of concrete receiving the reflections bounced off of the cleverly placed CD’s.
Sounds of a stream with birdsong and wildlife are piped in while the reflected lights play as a dance upon the walls. The longer you stay in the art the more you see. Yes I said in the art. You can walk as though on the banks of the stream. As in Joseph’s Coat from the bible many colors appear among the CD’s while the soft reflections play upon the walls.
Here’s a short video to give you a feel for the movement within the art.
Maybe it’s because I consider myself a ‘child of the water’ and enjoy all kinds of water I felt more at home here the longer I inhabited the space.
I did think to try and push the envelope of my creativity to see what I might capture with my camera. So in addition to the ‘straight’ images I photographed here are a few from my experimental foray. I looked for slightly different images to tell the story of this art piece.
Zooming the lens slightly during capture led to the electric colors and patterns
Rotating the lens and moving during capture…
Images were captured with the Lumix LX100 camera. To make the colors appear richer I set an underexposure of approximately 2 stops. Slight processing and enhancing with Adobe Camera Raw using the highlight and shadow sliders…
Sometimes we need to spend time in a place before it begins to share it’s innermost secrets with us.
For infrared conversion of my cameras I use LifePixel. Infrared allows you to put an older camera to use and opens up a new time time of day for productive image creation.
Learn Photoshop in a fun environment. Aaron Nace applies the right amount of fun with easy to understand and follow tutorials. Actions and brushes are included with lessons!
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Platypod has become a great resource for being creative in getting your camera gear easily into unusual places. As an Platypod Pro I get to work/play with the gear even before it comes out. Head over to Platypod, subscribe to the newsletter and you will get special discounts reserved only for subscribers.
Love the movement of the water through the scene. Gives the story about how some of the landscapes are formed over the years.
It’s fascinating watching the country unfold from way up high! Toto I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore…
Lots of different views from above…
