Walden Pond - the look of summer

My project to photograph Walden Pond is spread out over a year so I can capture it in each of the four seasons that Thoreau would have seen. On this trip I wanted to capture the look of a typical, sunny summer day. The sun accommodated me with temperatures in the 90's. Normally, this is not my favorite time to photograph nature, but I wanted to show the pond in all its myriad aspects and a mid-summers day is one of them.

Not my favorite light by which to photograph, but this is what the pond really looks like on a summer day. This is a panoramic composite of two images taken with a 24mm focal length lens. 

For this photograph I switched to an extreme wide angle of 12mm of the Sigma 12-24mm zoom on the Nikon D800. This focal length is currently the widest rectilinear available for a full frame camera and the Sigma does a nice job of handling it.

The star burst from the sun is particularly sharp with many shooting rays. Taken with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom set to 24mm and aperture of f/8, an ideal setting to produce this type of star effect.

The green vegetation around the pond is still lush and colorful due to the many rains we had in the late spring.

I carry an early edition of Thoreau's "Walden" on most of my trips to the pond so I can photograph it within the forest environment as the seasons change. 

Walden Pond - The Meadow

At the far end of Walden Pond, near where Thoreau had his cabin, is a swampy, mosquito infested area called the Meadow. The day before, when I went there I was eaten alive by mosquitoes, so it makes me wonder why I would go back again the next day to photograph it in the morning light. Since my goal for this project is to do a book and prints that reflect the pond and forest life as Thoreau might have experienced it, I guess that means mosquitoes and all.

The photo below is a composite of three photos assembled as a panorama in Photoshop. The resulting image is approximately 150mb in size. Considering that each of the photos were taken with a 36mp Nikon D800 and 24mm focal length lens, I calculated that the resulting panorama is equivalent to having taken the shot with a 50mb camera.

The composite was made from the three images below.

I find it amazing that Photoshop was able to effortlessly combine the three photos above, including the complexity of the fallen tree, into one panorama.

Summer on Walden Pond

I am back at Walden Pond to capture it in its summer look. It is very hot and humid with plenty of insects to let me know what summer is like on the pond. Here are a few images from today.

This is Wyman Meadow at Thoreau Cove near the upper end of the pond where Thoreau built his cabin.

All of these images were taken with a very small aperture of f/16 to maximize depth of field.

Quiet skies

Over the past few weeks New York City has been permeated with heat and occasional thunderstorms, which has given it a soft, misty sky in pastel colors with strong cloud formations to add variety. I decided to record these hazy summer skies using a quiet, minimal look. Here are a few samples I did with the Nikon D800.

Nikon D4X - myth or reality?

There is quite a bit of chatter going around the internet on if and when Nikon will announce a D4X camera model. Most indications are pointing to a fall 2013 announcement with a year end delivery, but the bigger question of sensor resolution is all over the place -- everything from 36mp to a high of 74mp.  Suggestions of 54-56mp are probably closer to the mark.

If you really think about it, Nikon will need to score the same shock it did when it announced the D3X with its 24mp sensor, and the  D800 with a 36mp sensor. Simply incorporating the 36mp D800 sensor into a D4x body isn't going to do it, even if Nikon can add some processing speed so the drive can travel faster than the slow 4fps of the D800. To justify the huge price difference between a D800 and D4X model something bigger is going to have to be offered.

I'm speculating it will be in the 54-56mp range. My reasoning is that, first of all, this will be a shocker size, something that Nikon will need to accomplish for its PR value. After all, there is already a 41mp smart phone camera out there making a 36mp full frame camera yesterday's news.

Second, 54-56mp isn't so large that the camera will be bogged down transferring information from the sensor to the card. A larger memory buffer, similar to what Nikon added to the later D3s and current D4 will be necessary to improve the processing speed and consequently the fps of the camera, and ,although expensive, will be justified in a high end, high priced camera. Even so, I'd look for 4-6fps as a maximum drive speed.

My third reason for choosing the 54-56mp size is that Nikon is not ready to make its own D4 obsolete. A smaller 36mp sensor combined with beefed up processing speed is going diminish the differences between a D4 and D4X. There was never a question of D3 or D3X because the gap between them clearly defined their particular uses. For a similar gap between a D4 and D4X the megapixels will need to jump to where the speed of use is different enough not to compete, thereby turning an "either-or" decision between the two bodies into a "both-and". That feeds better into the strategic nature of marketing.

Where do babies come from?

From Photoshop, of course. This composite image is made up of three different photographs. First came the baby. This is my newest grandchild, Vivian, born only a few weeks ago. In this image she is only two days old. Someone gave her a bouquet of balloons in the hospital and we tied them to her to make a funny photo. That gave me the idea for this image of a baby floating in a sky with balloons..

First thing I had to do was replace the real balloons with a generic variety. In the studio I photographed some helium filled balloons tied around a doll. I did this against white so it would be easy to silhouette later.

I wanted to have the baby and balloons floating against a cloudy sky. I keep a file of sky photos but I found them all too dark so I photographed a new sky that was light and airy to use for the composite. Silhouetting the baby in a swaddling blanket was easy. Next came the part where I had to silhouette the balloons. This is was very time consuming because of the thin ribbons. Once that was done, it was simply a matter of combining the three images and tweaking the assembly a bit. Because this is intended as a stock shot I left some large neutral areas top left and bottom as copy space.

Fly on the wall perspective

My 12 year old grand daughter, Kayla, was visiting my studio yesterday and brought her camera along to take some photos. We were photographing some simple still life subjects when I decided to teach her what I call the fly-on-the-wall perspective trick.

Most photographers starting out always select a camera angle from the comfort of their position, rather than adapt the angle to suit the subject. Usually this means taking the photo while standing up and tilting the camera up or down to take the picture. To break this habit, I tell them to think of themselves as a fly when approaching a subject. A fly can go anywhere and land anywhere. A fly could land on the ceiling, on the wall, right next to the subject; could land on the subject itself, under the subject, in some cases, like that of a glass jar, a fly could even land inside the subject. These different perspectives give completely different interpretations of the subject and usually result in a more interesting photograph.

Here are some samples from a simple still life scene Kayla and I did together:

We began with this simple scene photographed from the standing perspective of my 12 year old grand daughter as she looked at the subject. 

The photo became more interesting as we moved the camera down to the where a fly would see it if he landed next to it on the table.

Here the fly  moves in for a much closer view giving the shot more impact.

Then our fly take off and views the subject while hovering overhead.

Photographed from a distance our fly can use the normal perspective of an 85mm portrait lens...

...but moving in really close in front of the subject, our fly had to switch to a wider angle focal length that gives the photo a completely different perspective with more impact.

The examples above are of a very simple still life setup. The fly-on-the-wall perspective can add much more interest when applied to the larger subjects of travel and landscape photography.

The perspective of this simple scene  is a mundane view showing the entrance to an ancient Mayan city in Mexico.

The meaning of the location changes completely when seen from inside the entrance looking out. In this view we have a much better understanding of what if felt like to be a Mayan walking into the enclosed city with the bright sunlight glaring in at us from the other side of the tunnel.

This view of Stonehenge is typical of what you would expect, taken from a distance while standing up.

Here our fly moved in close to a foreground stone and used it to frame the scene by using a 14mm lens from a very low angle.

Where a photographer places the camera in relation to the subject can add a personal uniqueness to the photograph, and make all the difference in how the scene is interpreted. The viewing perspective and interpretation in turn will then dictate the choice of lens focal length.

In this photo of the Library at Ephesus, Turkey the camera with super-wide 16mm lens is placed very low to the ground and relates a foreground object to the distant background of the library.

For this view of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul the camera was placed on the ground looking up with a 21mm lens.