Studio711 - Ben Martens : Photography

Pregnancy Photos

bwmartens — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:30:00 GMT

Tyla and I have attempted a few home photo sessions to capture her big beautiful belly. You might have seen some of them on Facebook, but I thought I’d post them here too. The due date is less than 3 weeks away!

Fun With Photo Editing

bwmartens — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:30:00 GMT

I took a couple series of photos at the corn maze when we were back in Indiana and edited them all together. I was going to use Photoshop and do it all by hand, but the Photo Fuze tool in Windows Live Photo Gallery (free download!) worked perfectly. The key to a trick photo like this is setting your camera to manual so that all of the exposures are exactly the same and then holding the camera as still as possible between photos.

Photographing Propeller Aircraft

bwmartens — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 07:30:00 GMT

For years I’ve seen big beautiful images of propeller aircraft and never realized how difficult they are to photograph. The photo below is the best example that I captured at Seafair this year.

What’s so difficult? When taking a picture of a jet, you crank up the shutter speed until you’re shooting so fast (1/500th to 1/1000th of a second) that you have a much easier time dealing with the speed of the moving plane and avoiding blur. If you try that with a propeller, you’re also going to freeze the propeller in place and it looks very unnatural. To let the prop spin all the way around and get nice prop blur, you need to slow down to something around 1/60th of a second. But as soon as you do that, the whole plane is now going to be out of focus because it’s moving so quickly. That means that you need to VERY carefully attempt to move your camera along with the path of the plane while you depress the shutter and hope that the prop is blurred but everything else stays clear. This same technique applies to photographing a cyclist and blurring the background to show speed but still keeping the cyclist in focus.

Luckily for me, the Blue Angels were the highlight of the airshow so I didn’t have to worry about propellers for most of the day!

Seafair 2012

bwmartens — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 07:30:00 GMT

Every year Seattle hosts a multi-week event called Seafair. Navy ships come into port, there’s a large airshow including the Blue Angels, and the hydroplane boats race. This year I got the pleasure of watching the Blue Angels twice.

On Friday, my division at work rented out two of the Argosy boats. I was on the Royal Argosy (the one that hosted our wedding reception) with camera in hand. The Blue Angels fly up and down Lake Washington, so being out in a boat is a very unique way to watch the show. They seem to pass within arms reach.

On Saturday as part of Tyla’s birthday weekend extravaganza, I surprised her with tickets to Seafair. We usually just watch from a park or somewhere free, but this year we had reserved parking and two reserved seats in the grandstands. It was well worth the price as we got to enjoy the whole airshow (not just the Blue Angels) and it was all taking place right in front of us with commentary over the loudspeakers. In between flying acts, we got to watch the incredible hydroplane races up close and personal.

I almost didn’t get any pictures on Saturday though. We walked the mile from our car to our seats and I pulled out my camera for the first shot. I depressed the shutter button, but nothing happened. It immediately dawned on me that I had left the battery in the car. AUGH! I decided it was worth the effort to go get it so I handed Tyla the camera and most of the stuff in my pockets and ran to the car and back. It was 90 degrees that day and I don’t run, so by the time I got back, I was a ball of sweat.

I’m so happy that I ran back though because I got some good pictures. A few of my favorites from both days are posted below but you can see more in the photo gallery. I know that photo gallery isn’t awesome, so I’ve also posted some of the better ones on Flickr. If you want full resolution copies of any of these, please let me know.

Kerry Park Sunset

bwmartens — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 07:30:00 GMT

There’s a park up on Queen Anne Hill (where Frasier’s apartment would have been if it really existed!) called Kerry Park and it has a great view of Seattle and Mt. Rainier. If you’ve seen a skyline postcard of Seattle, this is probably where it was taken. I’ve never been there, but the other night it was pretty clear so Tyla and I hopped in the car and checked it out.

I thought I’d be the dork with the camera on the tripod, but boy was I wrong. There were at least five or six other photographers there with way more expensive gear than me. I went from thinking I’d be a dork to feeling like a n00b.

The sunset was beautiful (though you can’t actually see the sun setting from this point) and I had fun taking photos. Mt. Rainier was a bit hazy due to the fire smog coming in from Asia. (You can read more about the smog on Cliff Mass’s weather blog.) But now that I think about it, maybe it was the haze from the guy behind us on the park bench smoking weed.

Once we moved to get out of his cloud, I got a couple good photos. Here are my favorites:

You can see a bigger version of the bottom picture on PhotoSynth, but it’s nothing spectacular. I only used four or five photos to make it.

Fireworks

bwmartens — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 07:30:00 GMT

Tyla and I had a great Independence Day. We spent the afternoon at her family’s house enjoying delicious food and a new game called Dominion. (Any fans out there?) Then later in the evening we headed up to Monroe where fireworks are legal. Tyla and I bought a few and Tim and Chelsea bought a lot. Andy and Stephane brought some awesome pulled pork.

As we waited for it to get dark, we decided to mess around with the sparklers and our camera. I had been reading about light painting and I was pretty happy with the very first attempts. These were taken with the camera set to manual focus, BULB shutter, and about f/9. The camera was on a tripod hooked up to a remote shutter release. I’d hold the shutter open while everyone else drew things with the sparklers. Here are some of our better attempts. The very first one cracks me up every time I see it. The plan was to have every person write one letter of “JULY 4”, but Andy wrote “POOP” instead of “Y” and Tim made a backwards 4. And the last one is of course from Chelsea who works at Brooks headquarters.

I also tried to take photos of the fireworks, but that didn’t turn out quite so well. I think my focus was a bit off for all of them and then we got lots of smoke in the air. And on top of all that, I think my lens was fogging a bit. But even with all that, I still got some that were interesting.

We ended up leaving Monroe at the perfect time. As we got off of 2 onto 522, we stopped on the overpass and had a terrific view of the show from the Evergreen State Fairgrounds!

Pan Tilt Mount for Canon T2i

bwmartens — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:30:00 GMT

We take a lot of incredible hikes and if you’ve been following along, you know that I love making big panorama photos on these hikes. After my foray into the world of Arduino electronics, I got the idea to build my own computer controlled pan tilt mount for the camera. The idea would be that I’d mount the camera on this contraption, plug in the details about the zoom level of the lens, the horizontal and veritical sweep to cover and then the electronics would move the mount around and snap all the required photos.

There are some very expensive products you can buy to do this. GigaPan is one of the most popular and it’s easy to get lost in the samples on their website. I don’t have a thousand bucks to blow on this hobby though.

Once I get to the point where I have a mount that can pan and tilt with some kind of motors and support about 3 pounds, I know I can do the rest. Getting that first bit done is proving tricky though. The best thing I’ve found so far is a combination of parts from ServoCity, but just the mount and the servos are over $140. If you have any ideas about how I could build the motors and the mount more cheaply, please let me know! Otherwise I think this project idea will be shelved for a while.

Two Camera Shoot

bwmartens — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:30:00 GMT

Tim and I brought our cameras to church for our mid-week Lenten service with the plan to record Pastor’s sermons and the songs from the visiting Evergreen Lutheran High School choir. It was our first time attempting to do a two camera shoot. Here’s what we had set up:

Tim’s filmed from the back left corner of the church. He held the wide shot for the choir and did a closer shot during Pastor’s sermon.
Mine was positioned about 4 pews up the right side with close up shots of the choir and a wider shot of Pastor’s sermon.
I set my little Sony recorder on the front pew.
In front of the choir we had a mic hooked in to the sound system being recorded on to a DVD.

Unfortunately the last one failed and wasn’t usable. There were plenty of other mistakes as we worked out the kinks. We had plenty of shots that were a little out of focus and a couple of times when Tim and I readjusted our cameras at the same time. It still came out decent though and when we try this again at Easter I think we’ll be a lot smoother. The video is posted on the church’s YouTube page and on their Facebook page.

Canvas Print

bwmartens — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:30:00 GMT

Groupon had a deal a few months ago for a canvas print from Picture It On Canvas. We bought the deal since we have a lot of bare walls to cover in the house and it sounded like fun. After the hustle and bustle of Christmas, we finally got around to ordering. Picking a photo wasn’t easy but we went with a shot from our engagement photo session. We also sprung for a frame, and I’m glad we did! The end result looks very impressive! Be careful if you order something similar because it takes a little work to make sure that when they wrap the canvas around the frame to make sure you end up with the right part of the picture on the front of the canvas. If you see this hanging in our house and decide you want something similar, we got the “Gallery Wrapped Thick Bars, 16 x 20 with hanging hardware.” The photo below shows it leaning up against the wall before I hung it.

Photo Memories

bwmartens — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:30:00 GMT

This summer I posted about a website called Dear Photograph. It contains a bunch of photos of people holding up old photographs in the same spot they were taken. I decided to give it a shot while I was home for Christmas. Many of the photos didn’t end up looking very interesting. To do this well I found that you need a small aperture (large f-stop to get everything in focus), lots of light, and a scene with some identifying features to get everything lined up.

The two photos below are the best ones from my attempts. Unfortunately they’re both taken in almost the same spot, but it was still fun to try.

Those photos were fun, but the photo below is still the best example of the idea that I’ve ever seen.

Photo Quality Comparison

bwmartens — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:30:00 GMT

I like to design my own Christmas card (2006, 2007, 2010) and this year was no different. While we were figuring out the design, I printed a couple test cards at Bartells because it was more convenient, but then our final batch was done at Costco because it was cheaper ($0.39 vs $0.99 for each 5x7 print.)

You might think that everyone uses a similar online photo ordering system, but that’s apparently not the case. The image on the left is from the Costco card. Notice that the circles are pretty clean (the texture of the circles is intentional.) On right right is the print from Bartells. Notice how dirty the white area looks. It seems like Bartells compresses their images quite a bit more when you submit them. It might not look terrible here, but that’s probably due to some lack of scanner quality. If you see them side by side it’s pretty bad.

If you’re printing a normal photo, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference, but given that it’s significantly cheaper to get better quality from Costco, why wouldn’t you?

Photo Editing

bwmartens — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:30:00 GMT

Now that we have a decent camera and a copy of Lightroom, I find myself wondering how much editing is too much. I can change and edit almost anything in terms of lighting and color. When I show some people the change, they think it’s awesome and want to know more about it. Others have the opposite reaction and think I’m cheating. What do you think?

Let’s look at an example. This photo of Mt. Rainier is one of my favorite shots from the summer:

If you saw me taking the photo, you might not have expected this result. The backstory is that I was walking around a dirty parking lot in Eatonville, WA. It was the Fourth of July weekend and we were waiting for the fireworks to start. The surroundings were pretty ugly, but that one strip looked amazing. Here’s the original photo before editing:

I cropped out the ugly bits, dropped the foreground to solid black, and then brought out more pink and purple in the sunset.

Is that cheating? I don’t think so. I think it’s just part of the art of modern digital photography. It’s a pretty big change from older film photography though. I do think that digital editing can go too far, but crop, lighting, color, removing lens distortion, and removing noise are all tools that I use on a very regular basis with no qualms. I’ve even been known to edit people out of a photo a time or two.

I guess everyone will have their own opinions, but now you know where I stand.

Long Lake Timelapse

bwmartens — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:30:00 GMT

This is shaping up to be photography week. I have quite a few posts about photos I took on vacation. This one is a short timelapse video that I took from the dock in Maine. It looked like a storm was rolling in during sunset so I was hoping for some great cloud formations. No such luck, but I thought it was still worth sharing. If you watch closely you’ll see a flock of loons come strolling into the picture around the boat near the end. I recommend watching it in full screen at 1080p.

Camp Ticawa PhotoSynth

bwmartens — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:30:00 GMT

It’s hard to explain what the main lodge at camp looks like on the inside. While we were there last time, I walked all over the inside snapping a bunch of pictures. I then shoved them all up to PhotoSynth and let their app piece them all together into a little world that you can explore. Seeing how well it works, I wish I had taken even more, but this is still fairly interesting. Head to the link below to check it out for yourself:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=ea96d320-230d-4848-934b-dd9ec47596e6

So Many Photos

bwmartens — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:30:00 GMT

On Wednesday I mentioned that we have 313GB of photos. That got me to thinking about how my photo taking has increased over the years. I got my first digital camera in October of 2002 and took 117 photos that year. I’ll start the chart with the first full year, 2003. I do have all of my print photos scanned in from years prior, but I didn’t take very many photos so I’ll just those out of the mix. And for 2011, I’ve extrapolated out to the full year so it’s just an estimate.

The red line shows pretty clearly what year I met Tyla (2008) and the green line shows how much better my cameras have gotten over the years. 2010 gets an artificial bump because of our engagement and wedding photo sessions which total about 3500 photos.

I expect the number of photos taken per year to continue to increase linearly for a while, but I wonder if the size of the photos taken will continue to grow exponentially? I have an 18 megapixel camera now. How much is enough? Maybe we’ll all start shooting in 3D and that will cause another bump in image sizes. Or maybe photos will be a thing of the past and we’ll always shoot video?