Archives 2011

What is better than the weekend?  How about a holiday weekend!  It is September already and Labor Day weekend is upon us.  I had the opportunity to head out to the Kincaid Labor Day weekend fair.  Kincaid is a small town (population is less than 2,000), but it seems the small towns know how to have the most fun.  That was definitely the case with their Labor Day fair.  While they have many events going on over the whole weekend, including bands and a car show, I decided to go to their tug-of-war competition today (and might go out to the car show tomorrow).  My Uncle-in-law was in it, so that was a good enough excuse for me to head out and shoot some photos.  I shot over 300 photos over the course of about three hours.  With so many shots to go through it was tough to narrow it down to just one.  I ended up going with this one because of the action it captured.  From the dirt kicking up on the ground to the struggle in their faces.  I also spent some time manually selecting out the team and adjusting the background’s levels a bit to make them pop out of their surroundings.  I like how it turned out a lot!

“War”

This is a shot I have been wanting to do since the beginning, and Friday night finally provided me with the right weather conditions and opportunity to go out and try and get this shot.  This one was definitely a learning experience as much as it was a shooting experience.  First important thing I learned when attempting a very long exposure like this one: check your focus with a quick 5 minute exposure before going in for the long haul!!!  I didn’t do this (I thought I had it right) and a 45 minute exposure was completely worthless as the focus was way off.  It is very hard to focus through a tiny view finder in to pitch black nothingness.  The stars are all but impossible to see through it.  After my failure I tested a 5 minute exposure on the brightest thing in the sky, which actually turned out to be Jupiter!  It was kind of cool and I didn’t expect that at all, but when I held my Google Sky Maps app up to what was the brightest thing in the sky, it was definitely Jupiter.  So, after getting my focus right I made another attempt.  I like the image but it could have been better.  First off, my camera’s sensor was getting pretty hot due to the multiple long exposures I had tried before this one.  Plus it’s August.  This heat caused a lot of digital noise in the image, despite my 100 ISO setting.  Second thing was the 25 minute exposure.  I would have liked have gone for an hour, but because of my first missed opportunity it ended up being close to 1a.m. for this exposure.  This meant the night’s dew was setting in and my lens was starting to fog up.  I had to call it quits.

Like I said, despite the problems, I still like this image a lot.  And hey, the point of this project is to force me to learn new things, and I definitely learned a lot this go around.

“Star Trek”

This weekend my wife’s cousin was married.  I decided to rent a lens for the wedding and reception just to play around and see what one of Canon’s L-Series lenses was like.  I went with the 24-70 f/2.8 lens.  While I wasn’t overly thrilled with the lens in general I did get some beautiful shots out of it.  This was my favorite of the evening, the wedding topper on their cake.  Congratulations Lindsay and Leroy!

“L&L”

I can’t believe it is the middle of August already, and only 20 pictures left after this week’s.  This year is just flying by.  August’s main attraction around these parts is the Illinois State Fair.  An annual carnival of music, gluttony, and rides.  What else could make America so great?  I had a pretty good idea of the shot I wanted to get this week, and it worked out pretty well.  I tried several different times through out the evening until I hit the sweet spot for what I wanted.

“Ascend”

This was was a real blast to shoot.  Not only figuratively, but literally!  The set up was pretty low tech.  I had my Canon and my 70-300 lens set up on my tripod.  I went for the longer lens so I could keep the camera back from the action a bit.  Then I stacked up a couple of cardboard boxes 10 feet or so away.  I cut a whole in the center of the box and stuck my brand new light bulb in it.  Sure, I felt a little bad for blasting apart a brand new bulb, but it was for a good cause.  To shatter the bulb I used my trusty old BB pistol I’ve had since I was a kid.  I haven’t shot a BB through it in probably 15 years, but after picking up a fresh tube of ammo from the store, the thing fired as perfect as it always did.  Then it was a combination of sports mode, my remote trigger, and shooting the bulb at the same time.  One of the things that surprised me was that it took multiple shots before the bulb fully shattered.  The first couple BB’s through the bulb just took a chunk out of the glass, leaving the rest of the bulb intact.  But usually the 3rd round through, the glass shattered.  This was my second bulb as the first one was slightly out of focus when I looked at it on the computer.  This one ended up with a way cooler action shot any way though, so it worked out.

“Fracture”

I ran out to a local car show on Friday night to snap some photos.  After fighting my camera’s focus (which was stuck in manual, I think some photobooth software I was using caused this weird condition), and a flash that refused to fire (apparently the batteries were good enough to power on the LCD panel but not do anything else), I was finally able to start shooting.  The main car show was actually Saturday but I couldn’t make it Saturday, so I had to shoot the few cars that were out there on Friday night.  It ended up working out though as one of the cars there was a timelessly cool 1958 Ford Fairlane 500.  It was a beautiful car and looked like it had just rolled off the show room floor.  They don’t make them like this any more.

“Fairlane”

What made me think standing in a the middle of a field for an hour on the hottest day of the year a good idea?  This shot, which is another HDR merged shot, to give both the sun-setting sky and the fields the correct exposure.  I didn’t think I was going to get the shot at first because when I left my air conditioned car, all of my camera gear fogged up!  After a lot of blowing and wiping I finally got the lens cleared and started shooting, luckily not too late.  I absolutely love all of the soft natural colors in the final merged image produced by the hot July sun.   Three separate images were combined in to make this one photo.

“Maize”

I love summer.  Have I mentioned that yet?  This was a busy weekend with a lot of things going on.  Family having parties, the Christian County Fair, as well as the Chatham Sweet Corn Festival.  We some how made it to everything we wanted to and had a great day.  Our last stop was in Chatham for Sweet Corn.  Sweet Corn is an annual gathering hosted by the Chatham Jaycees at the Chatham Community Park.  The main attraction is, of course, sweet corn (and beer).  You can get other food as well, but most people come for the corn.  There are also other vendors selling things like kettle corn and other fried snacks.  Once the sun starts setting, the music starts rocking.  This year’s saturday night band was Area 51 from Lawrenceville Illinois.  They are a cover band, and while I’m usually not a fan of cover bands (having been subjected to the now defunct F5 might have ruined cover bands for me, I could not stand them), I actually liked Area 51.  They played some really great songs and their vocals were really well done.  I enjoyed them a lot and would definitely go see them again and hope they play future Sweet Corns.

“Festival”