Traveling the Journey of Light | Photoblog Thoughts, feelings, and techniques behind the photography of Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston

Nebraska - From One Extreme to Another - Day 3 - Another WorldPosted by drfl on June 30th, 2010

For thousands of years Nebraska was located under a great inland sea. When the water drained many different mammals, reptiles, and birds migrated into the regain and roamed over the terrain. This great diversity of animals have been studied extensively via the many scientifically interesting fossil deposits throughout the park. Evidence of these fossils can be readily seen as “tracks” in the rocks and deposits that were formed by wind and water over millions of years.

Technical Details:
Canon 50D, 70-200 f/4l @ 73mm, f/7.1, 1/25 sec.
Toadstool Geologic Park, Nebraska

Opening The Shutter to New PerspectivesPosted by drfl on May 11th, 2010

It seems to be human nature that we must become entrenched into a specific set of ideals.  These ideals divide us, polarize us, surround us, and engulf us.  Look at the debate surrounding the health care bill in the United States in the past few months or what is happening with the Arizona immigration law or the political debates in the U.K.

Religion.  Politics.  Culture. 

Just mentioning any of those topics engenders intense, never-ending debate.  So what does this have to do with photography?  Just as we often find ourselves bound to views we have developed, over time many find themselves bound to particular techniques, subjects, and equipment.  This bind is often unconscious and just as our views on other topics, we my find ourselves unwavering on these items and our artistic vision as well. 

From personal experience, I spent a few years only photographing landscapes and wildlife.  I would focus on the wide-angle with landscapes and the portraits with the critters.  Great sunset?  Wide-angle.  Bear on the side of the road?  Portrait.  Mountain scene?  Wide-angle.  Canada Goose?  Portrait.  For my landscapes, my widest wide angle wasn’t wide enough and for my animal portraits, my longest telephoto wasn’t close enough.

Although it took some time, I realized I needed to change my singular focus and open my shutter to new subjects and new possibilities.  It’s now been a couple of years since I consciously began this journey.  I’ve started my OLOH - One Lens, One Hour personal assignment project, I’ve engaged in quite a bit of portraiture, and I’ve captured the little guys.

So now I ask all of us to open up to fresh vistas, literally and figuratively.

Today’s post is an example of my changing my vista.  This image was captured in Arkansas, a location that I initially had little desire to visit.  When the opportunity arose to go to St. Louis I researched the surrounding area and I planned a side trip to the Ozarks.  It’s quite a beautiful and diverse area and one that I have passed up visiting many times.  As for the image, this particular landscape was captured using a telephoto lens, a diversion from my wide-angle philosophy from years ago.

Technical Details:
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 f/4l @ 200mm, f/8, 1/100 sec.
Ozark National Forest, Arkansas

OLOH - The Self-Assignment of One Lens, One HourPosted by drfl on April 21st, 2010

I often participate in giving myself self-assignments and one of my most frequent assignments is what I call “One Lens, One Hour”. In this assignment, I give myself 2 constraints, I can only choose one lens to use and I only have one hour in which to utilize said lens. While I do not usually limit myself to filters or other accessories, I usually go forth with only the camera in hand, lens mounted, and nothing else.

Ever since purchasing the 135 f/2l, I’ve been in a shallow Depth of Field mood and since I only have one other lens that can open wide, I choose to go out with my trusty 50 Compact-Macro. I visited our local Arboretum and shot the beautiful trees that were blooming. Now, I don’t usually photograph flowers, and my last two posts have contained images of flowers, but I think that variety helps breed creativity. Besides, they were colorful and pretty and the weather was perfect during my hour! All images were captured with a Canon 5D Mark II (Extra Crispy) and a 50 CM Lens.

 
Shot at f/3.2

Shot at f/2.8

Shot at f/2.5
 

135mm of Pure JoyPosted by drfl on April 12th, 2010

After over a year of waiting and much debate, I decided to order a Canon 135 f/2l lens.  Being primarily a landscape/wildlife photographer, this lens wasn’t on anywhere close to my future purchase shortlist (I was holding out for a 17 or 24 tilt/shift) for quite a while.  Reviews of this lens are nothing short of rave.  On every merchant website I visited this lens never scored below a 4 out of 5 and the vast majority of those reviews were 5s.  I have never seen any product that didn’t have at least 1 bad review since usually, there’s one or two people out there ready to throw out a bad review for any little thing.  This lens had none of that and there were literally hundreds of reviews. 

So what were the main motivating factors that pushed me towards this lens?

• As my portraiture kept picking up, I needed a lens with a fast autofocus (lots of fast kids). 
• Compatibility with Canon teleconverters, both the 1.4x and 2x support autofocus on all Canon cameras (making it a 189 f/2.8 and a 270 f/4 lens).
• I needed a lens that allowed me to capture a greater rate of in-focus photographs in lower light.

The 135 arrived on Friday so I spent the weekend field testing it.  As I am not into photographing brick walls, looking at charts, or studying diagrams I am going to include my subjective thoughts and observations into today’s posts.  If you need charts and graphs, feel free to look at the hundreds of sites dedicated to that.  Frankly, it gives me a headache and keeps me from shooting.

I’ll begin by what I expected.  Since this lens is at the top of every portrait photographer’s list and is recognized for its sharpness, I expected to receive a lens that was sharp, provides a good working distance between my subject and I, and gave excellent bokeh, color, and contrast.  When I finally had it in my hand and attached to a camera I found that I was wrong on 4 counts.  The lens is extremely sharp, has incredible bokeh, fabulous color, and phenomenal contrast.  In short, the lens exceeded my every expectation (well, except my working distance one, I guess, but how do you improve on that?).

Next, I’ll mention how it compares to what I already own.  In the normal and short to long telephoto arena I currently own a 70-200 f/4l (Non-IS), 300 f/4l (IS), and a 50mm compact macro lens.  The “fastest” lens I had owned previously was the 50 which opened up to 2.5.  This lens gives me some great depth-of-field, and it has some good bokeh associated, but the autofocus is horrendous and the working distance was a tad close.  The lens is primarily meant to be a macro lens with the primary mode of focus being manual so it often hunts to obtain focus.  This makes this “fast” lens not so fast when it comes to snapping portraits, especially of constantly moving children. 

My  300 f/4l focuses quickly and was my sharpest lens.  Not great as a general-purpose human portrait lens (as opposed to animal portrait), but it has great bokeh.  This was the sharpness benchmark that I expected the 135 to exceed.

The 70-200 f/4l covers the 135 focal range and was the primary reason I held off on purchasing this lens for so long.  I have owned this lens longer than any other and I use it frequently for portraits.  The focus is fairly snappy, however, this lens lacked when it came to focusing inside and was not as fast as I needed more often than I was willing to admit. 

Finally, I’m going to post some photos.  These exemplify the beauty of this lens.  My focus rate was extremely high and I used various focus points.  Really, I felt like I was holding a whole new camera, the autofocus was that fast!  The sharpness of the lens and the way that the rest of the image melts away from the area in focus is simply superb. All photos below were taken with a Canon 5d (Original flavor) and 135 f/2l.

Taken at f/2.5

Taken at f/2.5

Taken at f/2.8

Taken at f/2.5

Taken at f/2.5

Frankly, this lens begs to be used at wide-open apertures. I never saw myself stopping down beyond about f/3.2, except for a test. If you have any reservations about this lens, cancel them now and order.

As a side note, when I was researching this lens, many forums discussed the benefits of placing the 1.4x extender on this lens, but there were no examples, so I will be discussing that aspect of this lens in tomorrow’s post.

Omaha Holiday Lights Festival - 2009Posted by drfl on December 28th, 2009

I don’t usually get a lot of time to photograph the city, but every year I make it a point to go to downtown Omaha and photograph the holiday lights that the city places on the trees throughout the mall. On each visit I attempt to make a photograph from a new location or a new perspective. This year was particularly spectacular as we got over a foot of snow dumped on us. I headed down right after the snow and before many people had walked through so that I could get a shot without any footprints. I was the first to make the prints, but of course, when I was done my feet were very cold, but my car was close.

Below are links to previous year’s images. It’s always fascinating to see how the city has changed.

• Holiday Lights Festival - 2005
• Holiday Lights Festival - 2006 - I
• Holiday Lights Festival - 2006 - II
• Holiday Lights Festival - 2007 - I
• Holiday Lights Festival - 2007 - II
• Holiday Lights Festival - 2008

Technical Details:
Canon 5d Mark II, 17-40 f/4l @ 17mm, f/9, 2.5 sec
Omaha, Nebraska

This photograph can be viewed on my website at: Holiday Lights Festival - 2009

What is “Acceptable Sharpness”?Posted by drfl on December 23rd, 2009

A few weeks ago I wrote an article entitled “How to get Sharp Enlargements: Breaking the Megapixel Myth”that gave some tips on creating images that could be greatly enlarged. Now, I am going to address the issue of “Acceptable Sharpness”. In a perfect world of capturing sharp photographs we would all have a remote similar to the movie “Click” in which we could simply hit the “pause” button and everything would simply stop. At that point we could setup our gear, put our tripod in place, connect our cable release, set the mirror lockup, choose the sharpest aperture, put on the best lens, fix the lowest ISO, and then finally capture the image. Unfortunately, no such device exists and so we are left to deal with breezes that blow, animals that run, and hands that shake and As a result, not all nature images are studio perfect. When zoomed in and analyzed imperfections may be noted, perhaps a little motion blur, perhaps a bit of depth of field issues and of course, hand held photographs will almost always be less sharp than an image from a tripod mounted camera. Does this mean that these images should be tossed out due to technical imperfections? At what enlargement point would these images degrade? These are the questions that led me on my path to finding my “Acceptable Sharpness”.

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