Galen and Jagoda Got Married (FINALLY)!

After five years together, Galen and Jagoda got married on September 26. I, for one, have to say, "it's about damn time".  Prior to the wedding, Galen told me that he was going to give me his flash and let me play with it.  He claims that it is a really nice flash, but to be honest, I have no idea as I have NEVER used a flash before and wasn't sure what to expect.  Well, actually, that's a lie. I thought that a flash would let me take pictures in low light, holding the camera, and with shutter speeds fast enough to actually capture things without constant blurring.  I was only sort-of right.

I didn't get my hands on the flash until a few hours before the wedding and I didn't even know what type of flash it was.  Add to this that Kyra and I have a newborn and I didn't even get the chance to do some quick Googling (er, Binging) on how to take flash photography. Really, I just didn't think it would be too hard.  Point camera, turn flash on, and BOOM flash lights up subjects and you get a pretty picture.

Boy, I was doing something wrong, and after hours of playing, I'm still not sure what. I felt that I had very long exposure times and I had to crank the ISO pretty high to avoid constant motion blur in most of my pictures (indoor at least. Outside we had pretty decent light for most of the wedding so those were nice).

I would like to provide some context behind each of the shots, but the whole thing was a constant experiment, trying to take the same photo with 5-6 different settings, and then looking through them to see which one worked best and why.  Adding to this, several pictures were taken by other people wile I was tending to baby Andrew, or Kyra, or the bride, or the groom.

Oh yes, lessons.
1) Do some reading/research on how to turn the flash on and get it to work. This is a lot easier when you have the flash at home with you and you have some time to play. Some of them, well, this one at least, had about 10 buttons, dials, and knobs.
2) General rule, your subjects need to be pretty close. I tried "sniping" some photos and it didn't work at all.
3) I got better results when I used the exposure meter/lock. Basically, I told the camera to read/lock the exposure, this caused the flash to go off very briefly providing the camera with the approximate lighting conditions for when you actually take the picture.
4) Use some method to defuse the light.  Flashes are pretty bright/harsh and if you point them directly at the subject you get really odd contrast so you need some way to defuse the light. Most flashes come with a chintzy piece of plastic that works decently well, but you don't have to stop there. In a few of these photos I tried bouncing the flash off the wall behind me which works pretty well when you have a white wall and your subject is really close. I can tell from personal experience that it doesn't work so well when you have glass windows behind you.
5) Low light (well, at least THIS low light) creates a really warm look. A little too warm in my opinion. In most RAW files, the subject's skin was orange/red so I ended up reducing the temp a fair amount on the indoor shots to make people look like people, rather than Oompa-Loompas.
6) If you have a newborn, take lots of photos of the baby, and try to get at least one incredibly embarrassing photo of your wife to post on a blog she will probably never read :)
7) Don't hire me to do your wedding photos. Hire a professional who knows what he/she is doing.

So, without further ado, I will post some of my favorite photos below and maybe give a sentence or two about why I chose to put them here.  There are more pictures on my Facebook page, you know, cause it's Facebook and I need to tag people.

I like the color. I feel that the green provides a great contrast with Amy's dress. I also prefer candid photos over posed.

I know I know. I complained about not liking low light because it makes things look too warm. However, I like this photo BECAUSE it looks nice and warm.  But trust me, I had to cool it off quite  bit to get here.

Of course I like this photo, it's my wife and my kid damnit! 

Awwwww

Look! It's me! I'm not sure who took this, but I like it because I'm selfish.

This was taken outside, under a canopy so the light was really well defused and the grey brick background made for a fantastic exposure.

Again, I'm a fan of green. The other thing I like about this is the composition. I like the space between the subjects and how they each fill the outer third of the frame. Interesting note, Kyra doesn't like this shot specifically for the reason I like it.  She says that her eye is drawn to the center and that having the subjects on the edges is a little distracting.

THE BRIDE!  I told Jagoda that I was going for an ass shot. Instead I got the "you can do it" girl WITH the ass shot.  You go girl!

Awww, how cute. The fun thing about this shot is that it was taken during the maid-of-honor's toast and it was of all three of them.  However, when I put it on the bigger screen I realized that including the MoH was distracting, so, I cropped her out.

Obligatory "terrible" photo of Kyra. Why is this here? Because I think it is funny and she will probably never see it.

Let There Be (northern) Light!

I had the opportunity to do something really cool a few weeks ago.  My friend, Jack invited me to head up to Artist Point near Mt. Baker and take star pictures.  I was quite excited as the only other real chance I had to take star pictures was for the Manshower (a.k.a. Shitty Backpack -- story coming soon) in the Three Sisters Wilderness near Bend, Oregon. That was my first real attempt at astrophotography, and while Jack is a pretty good teacher, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

So, after a lovely dinner with Jack and his wife Lauren the two of us hopped in the car to head on up for some star shots.  For those of you who have been under a rock for the past two months, you should know that there have been massive wildfires in eastern Washington, and on this particular weekend there was an easterly wind that was blowing all of the smoke from the fires to the west.  This made for a rather smoky evening.

Regardless, when we arrived at Artist Point we hiked up a little hill to get a clear view to the south of the Milky Way directly over Mt. Baker.  We tried taking a few photos and while I managed to get one nice shot, it was just too smoky to get any real nice star shots.

Since I'm pretty new at all of this, I'm not going to spend too much time introducing the photos or talking about "the ambiance."  Rather, I am going to upload several photos and talk through them.  How I took them and what I did for post processing.  The idea is to pass along what I learned while at the same time looking for advice from people who know what they are doing.

Some info.  I have a Panasonic Lumix FZ 1000.  This is actually a pretty nice little point and shoot, but a point and shoot nonetheless.  I learned pretty quickly that this is a VERY noisy camera, as the sensor is only 1". For now, this is all I have and I don't have the money to buy a nice new camera with a bunch of lenses so getting a new camera is not an option. At least for now.  My wife says that if I stick with photography for another year or so that she will let me buy a new camera.

The Smoky Way (RAWish)

Smoky Way (stacked)
The Milky Way rises behind Mt. Baker.
The "clouds" in the front are actually smoke
from several fires in the area.

These two photo's are exactly the same, but they are processed differently.  The photo's are a stack of 10 exposures.  Each shot was a 20 second exposure at ISO 6400.  The difference was in the processing.














For the photo on the left I stacked the 10 exposures using Photoshop and then tried to remove the noise by converting to a Smart Object and then using the "median" stacking (for more information check out this great video).  I have heard (and read) that this is one of the best ways to remove noise from photos, and it works really well if you look at the Milky Way shot later on.  The issue in this case is the smoke moves.  So, to get the stack to work I either had to mask the the bottom third of the photo, including the smoke, or let Photoshop auto-align the layers with the smoke unmasked, in which case it auto-aligned based on the smoke rather than the stars.  So, while the noise is greatly reduced, I loose all of the stars in the horizon and the smoke gets a "flowing water" look rather than the sharp, cloud.

For the photo on the right, I used the noise reduction technique for the foreground only, and then picked my favorite star/cloud shot and used a layer mask.  I really don't think I achieved much by doing the noise reduction on the foreground, so I probably would have been just as well off by using the RAW file.  Personally, I prefer the picture on the right. . .noise be damned, I like the stars.

Galactic Bump (Stacked)
After the show died down (again) we flipped
around to try to get more star shots.
As you can tell, there was still a fair amount
of smoke and light pollution, but hey,
the primary reason we went up here was to
get star shots so we at least had to try.

The photo directly left was taken on the same night, but from behind a ridge so the smoke wasn't as prevalent. This is a stack of 9 total exposures, all taken at ISO 6400.  Eight of them were 20 seconds, and one was only 13 seconds (I cut the exposure short because the northern lights were acting up again).  I used the same median stacking technique to reduce noise and it came out pretty well.  I maintain a lot of the sharpness and drastically reduced the noise.  When I took these, I wasn't planning on doing the stacking, mainly due to ignorance, so I didn't take enough exposures.  Next time I go out I will do 20-25 exposures and stack those.

One other thing I noticed was that it appears that the stars are moving in my shots.  I'm not sure what is causing this.  All of these shots were taken with a 25mm lens (well 25mm equivalent) with a 20 second exposure, which according to all available materials, should minimize/eliminate star movement. I thought it was a side effect of stacking, but when I zoom in on the RAW files I still notice the movement, although not quite as much.  This suggests stacking is not perfect and does add some movement, but that perhaps my exposures are too long to begin with.   Next time I go out I am also going to try slightly shorter exposures (15-18 seconds).




And now the show begins.  This was my first time ever seeing Norther Lights, let alone photographing them so I was quite excited.  I think I should let everyone know that the sky did NOT look like this to the naked eye.  Yes, it was brighter than a typical night sky, and yes, we did see pillars shooting way up there, but for the most part we didn't really see the rich colors you see in the photographs.  Cameras see more than the naked eye, especially when they are absorbing light from 10-20 seconds.

Curiosity

We noticed that the sky to the north was rather bright.  It was the beginning of a Northern Lights show.
ISO 3200
F2.8
20 Second exposure
Temp: 3786, Tint +75







The Aurora Borealis shots are a mixture between 20 second exposures at ISO 3200 and 10 second exposures at ISO 6400.  I noticed significantly less noise with the ISO 3200 shots, but feel that I didn't get quite as much sharpness/definition as the 6400 shots due to the longer exposure.  Next time I get the opportunity to do this I will play around a bit more and try shorter exposures with ISO 3200. It is a fine balance between minimizing noise and not under-exposing the shots. I'm not going to bore you with all of the details regarding how each picture was processed, but I will give a bit of information for each one such as camera settings, and some quick stats about post processing.  Again, I'm not really sure what I'm doing, so it was all pretty experimental.

Lying in the storm

This is me lying on the cold , cold rocks. Jack found a tarn near by which made for a  perfect foreground.  I brought a tent which we set up on some rocks. Jack had some light pucks that we tossed in the tent as well.
ISO 6400
F2.8
13 Second exposure
Temp: 3905, Tint +75

Northern . . .head lights

A behind the scenes shot of Jack and I getting into position for a pose.
ISO 3200
F2.8
20 Second exposure
Temp: 3905, Tint +34

I had some fun ideas while out there.  The first of which was to take a few frames specifically exposed for the tent.  You can imagine that a 20 second exposure would completely over-expose the tent and make it appear totally white, and you would be correct.

The second idea was to try light painting the rocks.  The light painting consisted of me running my headlamp across the rocks during the exposures.  I tried both red and white light. . .the red looked really cool at night, but didn't really work out once I got the pictures back to the PC.

On the back end, I imported the Aurora exposure, tent exposure, then one of the rock painting exposures and worked with layer masks to blend the three together.  This resulted in a photo where the Northern Lights look good, the tent is not blown out, and there is a lot more detail in the rocks.  I didn't do this on all of the photos below, but I actually like it.

Beam Me Up

Jack and I figured that this would make an interesting pose.  The smoke in the air made our headlamp beams quite visible which I like.

ISO 3200
F2.8
20 Second exposure
Temp: 3781, Tint +61

Organ of Light

Captivated

Touchdown!

Lo and Behold

Glory

Silhouette

The light show waxed and waned, but slowly built intensity with each peak.  During this peak the pillars were incredibly bright and reminded me of a pipe organ.
ISO 6400
F2.8
13 Second exposure
Temp: 3960, Tint +89

Curtain Call

Grand Finale

After a while we forgot ended up caught up just watching the light show.
ISO 6400
F2.8
13 Second exposure
Temp: 4050, Tint +84








In hindsight, this pose makes no sense, but we thought it would be kind of cool to do the "touchdown" type pose.
FYI, this is Jack's favorite photo from a technical standpoint. . .I can see that now, so may go back and redo some of the others with these settings.
ISO 6400
F2.8
13 Second exposure
Temp: 3905, Tint +96




Jack got caught up and decided to just sit and watch for a while.  In the mean-time I was still trying to figure out how to take pictures.
ISO 3200
F2.8
20 Second exposure
Temp: 3850, Tint +41








Ok, ok, I know I said I wasn't a fan of the "touchdown" pose, but in this case I think it works. Also, Jack has a much better version of this picture. Partly because he has an awesome 18mm lense, but mainly because he is much better at this.
ISO 3200
F2.8
20 Second exposure
Temp: 3850, Tint +41




The lights died down again for a while and we decided to take down the tent during the lull to give a different mood.  Personally, I like not having the tent as it is less distracting and allows for more color.  One of the things that I really like about this shot is the ability to really see the path the green lights took through the atmosphere.  You can sort of see it in other photos, but I think that it is more prevalent in this one.
ISO 6400
F2.8
13 Second exposure
Temp: 3850, Tint +64

I really like how the pillars make it look like a curtain is being pulled in front of the stage.  It was a bit ironic given that the show ended again about 5 minutes after this shot.

ISO 6400
F2.8
213 Second exposure
Temp: 3850 Tint +64

Yet again, we were interrupted by bright skies to the north.  This time it truly was the last show of the evening.  Additionally, smoke was moving in again creating haze.
ISO 6400
F2.8
13 Second exposure
Temp: 3960, Tint +64







If you made it this far. . wow, thanks.  Please feel free to leave comments below.  Any suggestions?  What is your favorite picture and why?

I'm going to start posting more regularly.  It will be a mixture of current adventures (we are about a week away from having our first baby) and summer trips, including the aforementioned Shitty Backpack.

Oh, and if you are interested, check out Jack's blog (http://www.jmongol.com/).  His photos are amazing (much better than mine), is a great teacher, and as inspired me to get out, take more pictures, and restart my blog. Everyone say "hi jack!" and try to crash his server:)