Is this a mechanical dragonfly? A musical instrument?

Actually, the photo is looking up from the street level to one of the domes in the Marin Center that Frank Lloyd Wright designed.

Related image: Wright Stairs.

[Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 1/8 of a second at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

I like to work with my photography setups, equipment, and Photoshop in a what-if state of mind.

When I’m in a what-if state of mind, I don’t care what the documentation says, or what some Photoshop guru says to do. I want to see what happens if…I try this, or that, or something totally new. Wild and crazy is, of course, my hope.

Some of my best images have come when I’m in a what-if state of mind.

A fringe benefit: experimenting with “what if” develops the muscles I need to problem-solve when a client asks me to make specific images, often based on something I’ve already created, but a bit different. It’s important if you hope to use “what if” experimentation for this purpose to keep good records of what you’ve done so you can reproduce it.

This image started with a “what if”: What if I put a bunch of Iris flowers in a totally dark room, open the shutter long enough to get full depth of field at ISO 100, and “paint” the buds of the flowers in with a flash light?

I ran into all kinds of problems with this scheme. It was hard to accurately track the duration of the light painting, so therefore hard to be consistent with exposures. I ended up shooting 15 minute exposures, painting for about a minute, in some of them climbing up Nicky’s bunk bed and clamping the camera on to get a nice bird’s eye view down on the flowers.

The kicker is that I could tell even from the LCD that these photos just didn’t work. So I opened the room-darkening blinds. With the camera still on the tripod, and the flowers sitting on a black background, I zoomed and panned for some mid-length exposures to see what effects I could get.

This technique was partly inspired by some lovely panned images of trees by Robert Eckhardt, who attended my recent night photography workshop. I’ve also been looking at Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Shutter Speed, which is a great idea book for images along these lines (but please don’t rely on the Peterson book for accurate general information about digital photography concepts such as noise and ISO).

A technical note: If you look at the exposure information for this photo, you’ll see I used a circular polarizer. The point of the polarizer was primarily to make my exposure longer (so I had more time to play with the pan and zoom), and also to help saturate the colors.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at focal lengths ranging from 200mm to 70mm (300mm to 105mm in 35mm terms), circular polarizer, 10 seconds at f/32 (comprised of 2 seconds at 200mm, 5 seconds zooming from 200mm to 70mm, and 3 seconds panning up and down on tripod at 70mm) and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

On a bright, but overcast, spring morning I saw this pink Papaver rhoeas in the morning dew. I photographed it head-on at f/16 for depth of field on the center, but a little less sharpness in the petals. Then I processed the photo to enhance the diaphanous feeling of the petals.

Sometimes simple works.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 1/6 of a second at f/16 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

This is an Iris ensata ‘Azuma-kagami’, from the same planting as my photo of last spring. I used the same technique as Falling in Love and Gaillardia x grandiflora, combining three exposures and painting them together using layers and masks.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures with shutter speeds from 1/4 of a second to 2 seconds, all exposures at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

For our second night of shooting in my night photography workshop we left the dark hills and went down to Port Oakland. Oakland is one of the busiest industrial ports on the West coast, and even in the darkness a giant container ship (the Wan Hai 505 shown in this photo) was loading. Moist air and varied light sources combined to create eerie effects, and everyone came back with great photos and a different take on this photographically interesting area.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm (300mm in 35mm terms), circular polarizer, 15 seconds at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

If you weren’t at the digital night photography workshop I gave over the weekend here in Berkeley and on location in nearby Port Oakland, then you’re like most of the world. This was a workshop attended by a small, select group of hardcore photographers dedicated to the pursuit of extreme darkness, heedless of wind, cold, and danger!

Proof of the talent, fun, and general wackiness of this event: on Friday night, socked in with fog on the top of Wildcat Peak, David, a gifted High School student, turned to painting with light using our flash lights, with the twenty second exposure above one of his results.

This flower is a Gaillardia x grandiflora ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Gaillardias are native to North America, and are sometimes called Blanket Flowers because of their coloration.

I’m using an eight foot long raised bed in my protected side yard to grow flowers for photography, and this Gaillardia is the first subject. As models go, I think my flowers will prove to be very pretty and cooperative. Another benefit: they don’t seek modeling fees.

I photographed this flower on a black velvet background using diffuse natural sunlight. A previous experiment had convinced me that a single point of focus wouldn’t create an image that was sharp all over the flower. So I made twelve varying exposures at three focus points, and hand layered them together for an HDR and HFR image.

Some related stores: Falling in Love, Red Flowering Dogwood Blossom, Gaillardia, Digital Photograms.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 12 captures at shutter speeds from 1/2 of a second to 8 seconds, all at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

This is my second forty minute exposure of stars circling over the Point Reyes the other night. The original version was horizontal. As this exposure progressed, low-flying clouds were sweeping across the sky, softening and darkening the scene. At the extreme left of the photo, a working boat on Tomales Bay flooded the scene with light. Time passed.

On a technical note, it’s pretty tough to accurately gauge exposures from the LCD at night because the display compensates. It might look decent on the screen, and still be four stops underexposed. So the exposure histogram is a better way to tell if your exposure is in the ball park. It’s unrealistic at night to expect nice, bell-shaped histograms in the middle of the range. But if your histogram is totally clumped on the left, you have a problem.

I glanced at the histogram for the previous exposure, and lightened things up a bit, moving from f/13 to f/10. Had I known the scene would darken as much as it did (because of the clouds), I would have opened it up at least another full f-stop.

[Nikon D300, 12-24mm zoom lens at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms), 2,407 seconds (about 40 minutes) at f/10 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

There was a strong wind blowing at my Angel Island campsite, and my tent puffed in and out like a bellows. But a little after midnight, the wind totally cut out and the surface of San Francisco Bay turned as flat and reflective as a sheet of glass. I grabbed my camera and tripod, put on a polarizer, and got a bunch of exposures before the wind picked up again and the glorious reflections vanished.

Some hours later, emerging from my sleeping bag, I saw the rising sun kissing the top of San Francisco’s towers.

[Above: Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 95mm (142.5mm in 35mm terms), circular polarizer, 30 seconds at f/5.3 and ISO 100, tripod mounted. Below: Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at 26mm (39.5mm in 35mm terms), 2/5 of a second at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

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My wonderful Pilates teacher Jennifer Durning told me about the Great Horned Owls in Claremont Canyon, Oakland.

Three Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) chicks sit in a nest about twenty-five feet above a wide path. While I was there, Mom and Dad hovered higher up in nearby trees.

The nest has been there for about a month, and is pretty well-known locally. I climbed up the hillside and spent the afternoon looking straight across at the chicks. In the hours I spent before it got too dark to photograph, there was a real social scene with bird lovers and photographers checking in. Some of these people visited the owls daily.

These “babies” are surprisingly large, perhaps a cat is a good comparison size-wise. As you can see, there’s quite a range of size in the siblings, with the one in front much smaller than the other two. They seemed to interact well with each other, engaging in mutual grooming, and nuzzling each other. They slept for much of the afternoon.

Looking at the antics of the clutch, I could help thinking of my three kids. Owls, humans, what’s the difference?

[Nikon D300, 80-200mm VR zoom lens with 2X telexender at 400mm (600mm in 35mm terms), 1/250 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 320, tripod mounted.]