Fall 2010

So, it's been a while since I've posted anything new. That's because it's been a while since I've gotten time to take any photographs. School's been pretty busy, but last weekend I got a chance to walk around campus and take a few shots. In central Illinois, we've been really lucky to have had cloudless skies a majority of the time. Without further ado:

20mm, f/13.0 (-0.33 exposure bias), 1/60 sec., ISO 100

This is the Beckman Institute. Named after Arnold Beckman, an alum of the University who invented the pH meter and founded Beckman Instruments, the Beckman Institute is an inter-disciplinary research center that focuses on how the life sciences and engineering merge. Okay, that's enough tour guide stuff. In short, the Beckman Institute is really cool.

20mm, f/8.0 (-0.33 exposure bias), 1/60 sec., ISO 100

I found that no exposure bias was overexposing the sky, and the blue was getting washed out.

13 mm, f/5.0 (-0.33 exposure bias), 1/320 sec., ISO 100

10 mm, f/7.1 (exposure bias -0.33), 1/250 sec., ISO 100

Maine

So after a summer in Central Illinois, I went back home for 3 days before coming back to school. I bought a wide angle recently, so I played around with that quite a bit.

20mm, f/5.6, 1/250 sec., ISO 140

11mm, f/4.2, 1/125 sec, ISO 100

10mm, f/22, 5/8 sec., ISO 100

I held my camera at the base of the tree. It's mind-blowing how many versions of this exact picture have the top of my head in the shot. I guess I'm still getting used to the very wide angle of view

11mm, f/4.2, 1/60 sec., ISO 200

50mm, f/11, 6 sec., ISO 100

University of Illinois Arboretum and Allerton Park

I haven't made a post recently, mostly due to the fact that I've been busy with work, lazy, and a bit under the weather.

A few weekends ago, I went back to Champaign and walked around the University's Arboretum for a few hours on Sunday. On the way to Champaign, I stopped at Allerton Park, a giant University-owned park in Monticello, Illinois.

I like how the dew droplets act as a magnifying glass. I could have used something to fill in the shadows, and the blurry foreground is a bit distracting, but I'm still pretty happy with this one.

This little guy sat around for a good 2 or 3 minutes while I happily clicked away

One day I'll have the patience to photograph water droplets.

The soft focus was entirely an accident caused by a very slight breeze bringing the seeds closer to the lens.

This was the setup I used to take the previous two photographs

The fruits of boredom

Being that I live in Jacksonville, Illinois, I get bored pretty frequently:

This started with me seeing what the longest shutter speed I could get was. After finding the right values (25 sec, f/22, ISO 100), I took another picture, only this time I took the photo, then went to get something from the table that is in the frame. I noticed that I could see through the blur that was my body. So I took the photo again, this time standing very still. I was actually falling forward very slowly, luckily I didn't lose my balance or fall out of focus. I did blink a few times, but apparently quickly enough so that my eyelids weren't picked up in the exposure.

For those of you who are wondering, that's Rocky on my t-shirt, running through the streets of Philadelphia. And yes, there is significant water damage to the wall behind me. That's why it's all wrinkly. Hopefully it won't cave in until after I move out.

Children

Guanajuato, Mexico:

The best way to distract a kid is to have someone else take a picture. That's the only way she wouldn't stand 4 inches from the camera.

While at first shy, the girl later became more comfortable and tried to take the kid's tip cup. What was most interesting about the whole thing is that the accordion playing kid saw the girl pick up his cup, and had absolutely not reaction, apparently totally confident that her dad would put the cup back.

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico:

This kid had the funniest expressions just before I could get a picture of him. He peeled his entire banana, then seemed disgusted that he had to hold the mushy fruit in his hands. Nevertheless, he finished his banana and ran back inside.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia:

After spending a few days in the city of Addis Ababa, me and my family went on a day trip to a mountain just outside of the city limits. There was an old Ethiopian Orthodox Church built in a cave built around 700 CE (I think). We think this girl was trying to sell the branches she's holding that she plucked from a nearby tree.

This is one of my favorite photos that I've taken. After telling the girl with the branches that we couldn't buy them (in really terrible Amharic), we started heading back to the car. My sister and I lagged behind the rest of the family and I spotted this kid through a crack in the fence. Luckily for me and my sister, he spotted us and was just as curious as we were.

Macro

I really, really like macro (close-up) photos. Not only do they look really cool (at least good one's are), but they're also technically challenging. I've only just started taking macro photos, so they're a little rough around the edges, but I hope to keep taking these sorts of pictures.

George Washington's face on the front side of a dollar bill.

Reversed 50mm on a 36mm extension, 1/125 sec (whoops), ISO 1600 (I forgot to write down the aperture. It was probably around f/16, but I really don't have a clue. The metadata doesn't include aperture settings when the lens is reversed.). Had I remembered to decrease the shutter speed, the camera wouldn't have auto-selected ISO 1600 and this might have come out better.

As you might be able to tell, this is the back side of a (dinged-up) penny. I like how you can see Abe sitting in his chair. The plane of the lens isn't exactly parallel to the penny, so the part with the UNUM is in better focus than the bottom right corner.

Reversed 50mm on a 68mm extension, 1/4 sec. ISO 100. Again, I forgot to record the aperture.

When I was walking from my car to the steps of my apartment after work one day, I noticed that there was a pretty neat birch tree (a River Birch, I think), so I stopped and pulled off a small leaf (no more than an inch in length) so I could take some pictures of it. When I got back to my apartment, I set the leaf down and forgot about it for a few hours, so it started to dry out and curl up. I decided to roll with the tiny punches my tiny leaf was throwing my way and I decided not to abuse the birch tree any more.
The last two weren't really lit properly and aren't in focus, so they don't look so good when you blow them up, but they're not absolutely terrible in thumbnail format. The second one is a good example of how small your depth of field (DOF) becomes for macro photos.

Jacksonville

This summer (2010) I'm living in Jacksonville, Illinois. It's a small town in Central Illinois about 30 miles West of Springfield. It's an ..... interesting town. One weekend I decided to wander around town with my camera and take some photos. It was also the first time I took my new camera out, so I was playing around with settings and such. Here are just some of the photos I took: (click for full-size)

This is the Morgan County Courthouse. It's a pretty historic building and I've heard that Abe Lincoln argued cases in this building before becoming President.

50mm, 1/250 sec. f/8 ISO 100

After walking around town for a bit, I decided to wander along the railroad tracks for a few blocks. After coming across a bunch of abandoned railroad tracks, I found a group of (presumably) abandoned pieces of railroad-related equipment. This is the motor's end of the sheave/belt assembly on a very large auger. I'm not sure what exactly it was used for, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was used for mixing something. In retrospect, I should have taken this photo in portrait orientation, but oh well. I'll get it next time.

50mm, 1/125 sec. f/5.6 ISO 160

I believe that this is the adjusting mechanism for a large (30,000 lbs capacity) scale. It's similar to the ones you'll find on balances in labs, just on a much larger scale.

50mm, 1/200 sec. f/8, ISO 100

Lastly, here's a picture of the landscape outside of Jacksonville. This was taken just a few minutes outside of the center of town and is across the street from the Jacksonville Correctional Facility.

50mm, 1/250 sec. f/8, ISO 100

Welcome

Hi All,

So I've created a blog where I can post some of the photos (good and bad) that I've taken as well as some commentary about the settings, circumstances and stories surrounding the photos.

The name of the blog, while pretty corny, has a photographic significance. An "f-stop" is a photographic term that refers to the aperture of the camera. If you want to know more about it, the Wikipedia link is here.