The Manipulation of Light

The manipulation of light from my strobes is definitely a challenging and fun endeavor. Utilizing a snoot made from a 8.5x11" paper I narrowed the light projected on this flower. All the lights were turned off in my room except for my Dell 24" monitor (so i can see what is going on in my make shift basement studio) and I fired the strobe at 1/4 power. Of course my SB-800 was the commander and my SB-800 the snooted slave.

In retrospect I should invest in a better snoot. Light from the flash easily penetrates the paper and thus lighting is not 100% focused.

After much tampering with CS2 I have figured out how to replace colour, the black background was initially not 100% black. It is a bit reddish. A sample of this can be seen on my flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/drfung/


105mm VR, F/7.1, 1.3 seconds, ISO-200

In the Heat of Battle

It has indeed been hard to keep this Photoblog alive. Alot of work lately... I haven't placed my photography interest in Hiatus or anything but rather I have neglected this website a bit. As of late I have purchased a used F100 film camera. Steve McCurry used this camera for some of his most famous shots. Google his name I am sure you will recognize his work. Other than that I am looking to buy a 1.7x teleconverter for my 105mm VR and my 70-200mmVR, just waiting a bit to see if I can drive the price down on something I found online (ahhh the bargaining techniques I have learned from my father).

This is a picture of a horseshoe making competition I took from the Calgary stampede. The end result was that this guy did lose, however I found his expression to be quite interesting.

It was really dark inside this tent as a consequence I had to boost the ISO up to 500 and utilize a f stop of 2.8, hense you can see some lens blur if you look at it in its full size on flickr.

And at last I managed to get the HTML on flickr to work from this site.

www.flickr.com/photos/drfung/ here is my flickr website

70-200mm @ 200mm, 1/80, F/2.8, ISO 500

Happy Birthday Canada, 140 Years Old

Canada Day 2007, Canada is 140 YEARS OLD. And Calgary is home of the Prime Minister so naturally the fireworks should be nicer than the rest of the country? WRONG. Well I was far away in hopes to capture the skyline as well. However, I realized to do that, I have to be close to the source where there is more ambient light to utilize high Shutter Speeds.

70-200mm VR @ 200mm, F/2.8, 1/320, ISO 640, Tripod

To the Core

I took this image over the pedestrian overpass on Memorial Drive, Calgary. It was around 9-o'clock when the sun began to dip under the horizon leaving me some warm light to work with.

I don't believe that this image is suitable for larger prints because it is one of the few images I use a very small f stop to compose. So resolution is a bit poor, but the effects were to my liking. The only fault I find with this image is that there was a soccer game to my left and this really distracts my composition.

18-70mm @ 56mm, 15 seconds, F/29, ISO 200

Old Montreal

For the past week I have been preoccupied with work so I found it really difficult to update this blog. Well Flickr was a big reason behind my lack of postings as well, this website is really done well. However their blogging system is lagging being this system.

I took this image a while back. Back then I could not see any interest in this because it was very dull to start off with. I always take pictures in RAW format and from the thumbnails this picture was just awful. As a consequence I did not open it at all. Well on flickr I discovered a way to save dull images.. this is of course messing with saturation and exposure (all the functions you can play with on Photoshop's Raw plug-in). In any case I was able to save this image from cold storage.

18-70mm @27mm, F/13, 1 sec, Tri-pod