Morning light thru the trees, originally uploaded by JamMastrJ.

I was backing out of our driveway to bring the kids to school and I actually stopped, got out, grabbed my camera and took this shot… it was too cool to miss…

I’m really digging this lens!  It took me a LOONG time to make the decision to pull the trigger on one of these, mainly because of the cost.  It IS expensive, but the quality of picture over my Nikon 70-210 f4-5.6 is night and day.

Here are a few pictures for you to enjoy!

Hard to believe that in less than a year, I’ve taken over 15,000 pictures with that camera.  Actually, on 10/28/09, I will have had the camera for one year.

D90 Image Count

Not bad, eh?

By comparison, my D70, which I bought just over four years ago (almost to the day) has a mere 8832 actuations…

D70 Image Count

I used a nifty command-line utility called “ExifTool”, which you run in Terminal on your Mac.  You can download it here.

In the Nikon, you’re looking for the line item that says: Image Number.

Okay, so here’s #15,651:

Pete's Shed

Had some fun at my friend Peter’s house, his back yard is beautiful, so I took a bunch of pictures with my new lens!

My newly purchased copy of Photoshop CS4 Extended is way cool, so much more powerful and easy to use than previous versions!

Here’s a little something I did – I’ll write more about my weekend, but here are a couple of pictures… did you know I was into miniatures??

I’ve been reading Shutterbug magazine, it has some pretty cool articles, and I’m learning lots.  In reading one article about Astrophotography – I got my idea for this month’s theme:

Star trails!! It’s the ultimate motion shot.

What’s really neat is that this is a composite shot – made up of nine, four-minute shots at f7.1 ISO 200.

In researching how to do star trails, I found out that I can’t leave my shutter open long enough to capture star trails (most tell you to leave your shutter open for an hour or more).  I tested out my new Nikon D90 and it seems that the maximum shutter time is 20 minutes.

That being said, I read several articles and they ranged from four to six minute exposures.   I settled on four minutes, just because it was COLD out and I was impatient!

The post was done in Photoshop CS3 using Stacks, Smart Objects, and so forth.

I’m pretty happy with the result!  Let’s see if I make it into the top 50.

More to come!

One thing I immediately realized was that I:

1) forgot a flashlight, even though it was very bright from the moon, it wasn’t quite bright enough to see all the controls on my camera

2)  wasn’t able to focus the camera (thus a flashlight would have helped), because it was so dark

To compensate for the fact that I couldn’t focus on anything per se, what I decided to try was focusing on infinity (the farthest point) and see what comes out.  Here are a few shots:

you can clearly make out Orion’s belt in this shot

I brightened this up a bit, bumped the exposure and brightness a little

there was considerable lens flare from the moon on this shot, but I cropped it out

Some of the shots, when looked at 100% were a bit blurry.  That might have been because of the wind blowing the camera strap or even the shutter opening and closing.  The other reason was because I couldn’t see the subject to manually focus the shot.  In any case, the pictures came out pretty good.

One thing I didn’t realize was how much stars move even with a relatively “short” long exposure.  All of these shots were at a 30 second shutter speed.  The one shot of the “Seven sisters” (Pleiades) constellation shows just how much they move, even in just 30 seconds.

The only bummer was that I saw TWO shooting stars and I didn’t get to capture them on the pictures.  The last shot above, I was going to shoot one more of the same shot and decided not to… If I had, a shooting star would have been streaking across the top of the house!

All in all, it was an interesting experiment.

I really liked this picture and was actually a much wider shot of a bunch of these flowers.  I found that when I got “close” to the picture, it was a lot more interesting and the colors really popped.

To vote for my picture, click here:

Vote for the best “Get Close” October contest entry

> Scroll down to find my picture
> Cursor over each photo to get a medium version; click on it for a large image.
> Click the X in the upper right corner to reduce it again.
> To vote, click and drag a photo into a box at the top.
> If you change your mind, click the X in the corner and it will disappear, or just drag another photo on top of it.
> Click the “Cast vote” button under the photos
They will close voting in 7 days: Midnight Tuesday the 18th, and announce the winners by Thursday the 20th.

Since this is the first time I entered a contest, I don’t expect to win, but it sure would be cool!  This month’s entry is “Motion” and I don’t even know where to start.  I tried to get some long exposure shots Monday night down the beach, which I’ll post soon, but I didn’t quite get the motion I was hoping to get (waves on the shore from the long exposure).

Would I recommend this to anyone who wants to kick it up a notch?  Yes, for sure.  It wasn’t necessarily the nitty gritty of the taking pictures, although there was plenty of information given and learned, but in this case, it was like taking a mini-Photoshop class within the photography class.  I learned a few tricks, mainly the illusive MASKS and how to use them to perk up your photographs.

I’ve been using Photoshop for a good ten years now, mainly to create composites that I make websites out of.  So, I’m familiar with a lot of techniques to get knockouts, silhouettes, etc.  What I didn’t know was some of the more advanced techniques.  For example, this is one of my candidates for our Christmas card this year (click for full-screen mode):

This is a neat looking picture – the one reassurance that I needed was that the pictures I’m taking are actually GOOD pictures… that much the instructor was able to reassure me.  Some of my problems though, are not using the right focal length, aperture, etc.  Also, he noted that I “rush” my shots, which now that I think of it, I DO!  So, I have a lot of work to do training my eye and SLOWING DOWN.  So, that picture was pretty good, but I changed it a bit, cleaned it up and made it more cooler (is that a word?):

Now, we’re getting closer to what you’d see from those fancy-schmancy photographers.  Let me tell you what I did:

1. I made a copy of the original layer (Command-J one of those things I learned), then proceeded to De-Saturate that level.  Then, I added a Layer Mask to that level and made the level color BLACK (which “turns off” whatever effect applied to that layer.  Then, change to a paint brush, change the foreground color to WHITE and then paint the effect back on.  Actually, in this case, the opposite was true, since BLACK removes the effect and WHITE reveals the effect (or was it the opposite?, I’m still on the curve on this one).
2. Once I made everything black and white except James’ sweater, I moved on to the background.  I created another Layer using the previous layer (perhaps the wrong way to do that, but it worked).  I applied a Gaussian Blur to the photo, created a layer mask, blacked out the mask then painted on the white to reveal the Blur.  I put the blur all around the outside of the kids.
3. Now, I made a sharpen layer (same steps as the previous effect) and used that to sharpen the kids eyes.
4. Finally, I created a layer to take away some of the black rings around their eyes.  All three kids have them, my sister-in-law tells me it might be from allergies, but I’ve yet to figure out WHAT they are allergic to (perhaps it’s me ).
5. One last thing, there was an annoying glare in James’ eye that I cleaned out.

I think that’ll be the final, until I print it out and see if it’s too dark, light, etc.

I took 200+ pictures, I’ve whittled them down a bit and you can view them by visiting my gallery and clicking on Digital Photography Class Shoot.  They aren’t all of my subjects, some were of Peter’s and Cassy’s families (and they came out pretty cool too).  Frank Siteman (the photographer) let me use his f2.8 300mm lens at the beginning of the shoot – WHOA! I need one of those!!!  What a cool lens and the shots were unbelievable.  My problem was that I’ve completely forgotten how to use a manual focus lens, so many shots were blurry , but I did manage to get a few really good ones.  Anybody have a spare $5000 they can give me??

Sooo, next time, Cuz, you gotta come with us – I’m not sure you would have benefitted from the Photoshop stuff (but perhaps you would have), but you would have had tons of fun and learned alot about taking pictures.

I’ve submitted a few pictures, one for Fall Foliage, and another for Sports Action Shots… Michelle just shot me an email and told me that my picture was on the front page of Boston.com (which I thought she meant the RAW section) and I went crazy, but couldn’t find the shot.

After I couldn’t find it, I sent her a note and she clarified for me: it’s on the FRONT PAGE of Boston.com!

Well, that’s kind of cool, no, that WAY cool!  It’s one of my favorite action shots and it’s nice that it’s being used to feature that section.

Just in case, I’ve included the image here, I know how fluid these websites are and I just wanted my 15 seconds of fame .

I also entered last month’s contest for “Close Ups”, I’ll let you know if mine gets picked as the top 50 so you can vote for me!

I like the way it works, and I need to eventually pick whether I’m giong to continue keeping pictures in my iPhoto library or convert them over to Aperture.  There are 16,803 pictures in my iPhoto library and I’m not convinced that ALL of them need to come over.  For the time being, I’m importing the pictures into iPhoto and if they are in need of touching up or other photo editing, I’m importing them into Aperture.  I know it’s a two-step process, but like I said, I haven’t decided to make the jump just yet.

Here’s something that was pretty cool – a before and after type shot.  A few weeks ago, Lizzy had a soccer game up at Hampshire United’s home field (in the middle of nowhere).  It was late in the day and the shadows were pretty intense.  Obviously, you can’t use a flash in these situations, especially all the way across the field, such as the shot below.

You can see how much I was able to adjust the picture using Apeture.  I know you can do this in Photoshop as well, but it was really simple doing this in Apeture – I might have done some tweaking in Photoshop as well, but I just wanted to show how a few minutes of tweaking can really make a difference:

Before

After

Huge difference, huh?  The one thing I noticed was that there were three soccer players in the picture!  When looking quickly at the thumbnails, you kind of make out one player, but the other two were obscured by shadows.

To make this shot come to life, I tweaked the levels a bit, tweaked the Shadows and finally adjusted the color of the sky adding a bit of Hue, Saturation and dropping the Luminance a taste.

There you have it, a quick and dirty before and after.  It actually took me longer to type this post than it did for me to clean up the image!