A few months ago, during the mating season, I came across a ten point buck and a doe in my backyard. The two hung around for about two full days before moving on. I live in “Bucks County”, so it is quite common, but I’ve never had this big of a Buck in my yard.
Decided to dust off the GoPro Hero 6 Black and take it on my drive to the office. Set it up on the dash and did a time-lapse with two second intervals.
Shot this in the flat color profile because I haven’t spent much time color grading and wanted to give it a try. Since I wanted to have something to color grade of course it would snow that morning and have completely white skies void of almost all color.
In the end, this became more of an opportunity to composite two different time-lapse videos with hand painted masks. It was color graded although not sure it mattered that much.
The sky was painted out quickly by hand using a mask and I added a bluer sky I had from a previous time-lapse. Normally, I would do all this in Premier Pro, but decided to play around with the timeline options in Photoshop for this one.
Results aren’t bad for maybe 20 minutes of work.
One of the benefits of having soccer practice next to a Gothic Cathedral is that it gives you something to shoot while you wait for practice to finish. I spent a few minutes the other night taking advantage of the earlier sunset and grabbing some blue hour / night shots around Bryn Athen Cathedral.
Spent a week in North Wildwood New Jersey at the end of August. This was the first time I left the big expensive full frame Canon and “L” lenses at home and instead only brought the Lumix GX9. Granted, it is newer and therefore more fun to play with, but it really has impressed me. So much so, that I’m starting to take a more serious look at Micro Four Thirds in general.
I didn’t bring a tripod with me and with the exception of trying to take some shots of the bay bridge with stars in the background, I didn’t need one. Every shot taken (except for that bridge shot) which was rested on a wall, was handheld. Most people will not be impressed with this (or the shots, probably), but it’s a pretty big deal for the way I shoot.
The weather wasn’t the best, but we managed to spend some time at the beach near first avenue. Walking along the sea wall was quite difficult in the wind and we were constantly pelted with sand.
No trip to the Jersey Shore is complete without a stop in Cape May. This isn’t the place you think of when you think of Street Photography, but I found myself waiting around after dinner while the others shopped and really started to fall in love with the “L monochrome D”, black and white setting, on the GX9.
One of my favorite shots of the trip was a Wes Anderson inspired shot of condo units. There was just something about the back-lighting combined with the pastel colors of the units and the symmetry that I couldn’t resist. In posting of the this image to Flickr, I found a group for Wes Anderson Style Photos.
And of course, one the better shots to be had during the whole trip, would occur when I didn’t have my camera; while fishing. The expression, “the best camera is the one you have with you”, comes to mind. Fortunately, the Samsung S8 isn’t too bad at taking photos.
When I bought the GX9, I did so with the intention of using it in situations when I wasn’t going somewhere specifically to take photos. This would be mainly work trips and family outings, where lugging the full frame Canon and Canon glass would be an expensive pain in the ass.
The first work trip that I had a chance to bring the GX9 with me was to Chicago back in June. I didn’t have a lot of time to shoot, and the times of the day that I was able to get out, were not the ideal times of day you would want.
Most of the time, I found myself walking around in the afternoon well before golden hour, but late enough where the big buildings cast a shadow on pretty much everything. Thankfully, Chicago is much more open than Philly or New York. Yes, there are a ton of skyscrapers, but the setbacks allow for a much more pedestrian friendly space on the ground which creates a harmony that you don’t experience in many other cities. You don’t have to look straight up in Chicago like you do in New York, not only is this easier on the neck, it makes it easier to see and appreciate how the building rises up from the ground, as well as how it touches the sky. There was a famous quote about skyscrapers similar to this that I remember reading in school. Louis Kahn may have said it, but I’m too lazy to look it up. I always liked the concept of the quote, but it didn’t really make sense until I experienced Chicago.
Since I was shooting at a time of day where the light is not very good, I ended up making mostly black and white photos of the cityscapes. This a good way to save shots that otherwise would not be as striking. Bumping the contrast a little allows for the lights and darks to play off of each other and allows the textures to be more visible.
The GX9 has a new shooting style called L Monochrome D. It’s a style that creates a more dynamic contrast between the highs and lows and is capable of adding a grain that can be adjusted by the user. The end result is quite nice and I haven’t seen black and white JPEGs this good, straight out of the camera, since the Ricoh GRD III from 2010. I’ve been a RAW shooter since it was possible to shoot and develop raw files and I’ve set the GX9 to shoot RAW+JPEG. Lightroom has the profiles from the camera to apply the styles in post. This is how I edited all the black and white images here. They were RAW files edited for the basics and then I applied the L Monochrome D style. However, when compared to the JPEG with the style applied in camera, the end results were very similar.
I’m so used to shooting RAW that I would never consider working with a JPEG SOOC, but the results (both in color and B&W) are so good with this camera, I’m starting to think we may not need to shoot RAW for much longer. Sure, there will always be those tricky shots with complex lighting that only a RAW file can recover, but for most other situations, the in-camera applications are quite impressive.
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