Upde Designs

Good Day and happy Monday.  The character above is from the cartoon strip that I follow entitled “What The Duck” and this little guy is a struggling Professional Photographer trying to get along in a world where everyone has a digital camera with them at all times.  It’s a funny strip and I’ve followed it for a couple of years now so I bought this guy to keep in my office.

I know I said I wasn’t going to share any of my storm images with you but I’m kind of hurting for something to post today.  While these images do not show the incredible devastation and heartache that were the result of the flood you can get somewhat of an idea how large and fast the water level was and how quickly it came and went.

In this instance the images do not accurately reflect what I saw.  It’s hard to see the ferocity the water must have had that night.  How very frightening it must have been for those folks caught in the middle.

The Telegraph Herald had an agonizing story this morning about a lady living in a trailer park that was hit by the flood waters.  The image was from inside her home and showed the devastation she suffered.  She had no flood insurance so she basically lost all of her possessions.

It just doesn’t seem fair that those who have so little to begin with loose so much.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your week and be careful.

I’m kind of getting interested in Macro Photography.  One thing is you never have to look very far or hard to find something interesting to shoot.  After my water drop shoot Saturday morning I decided to take the macro lens out to the back yard and see what was cooking out there.

Well before I did that I shot this image of the gas stove in the kitchen.  I had seen an image like this on one of the training videos and I wanted to see if I could duplicate it.  The proper angle is critical to getting a great shot not only in Micro Photography but any type of photography.

I also learned two things from my afternoon shoot that was discussed in the training video but of course I didn’t bother to do either one of them.  One is if you’re going to shoot Micro Photography you must use a tripod.  I did take my tripod out to the back yard but I leaned it up against a tree and that is as far as it got.  You just cannot hold the camera still enough at this extreme closeness to have the image be tack sharp without a tripod.

The second lesson I learned the hard way was that f2.8 is not a good F-Stop to use.  At this focal length about the only thing in focus is the exact aiming point of the lens.  See the above paragraph. So at f2.8 you get the shallowest depth of field possible.  That’s not good when shooting Micro Images.

So this afternoon was a learning experience.  I will get better at it and hopefully be able to produce some WOW images.

Enjoy your Sunday, thanks for stopping by and as always be careful.

I know I told you on Thursday that I would post on Friday some of the flood images I made.  Obviously after seeing the wonderful job the Telegraph Herald did in covering the flood I was ashamed of the meager effort I had so nothing worthy showing compared to what you can see in the paper or on line with the TH-Online.

So today I decided to practice some more Macro Photography.  I took a lesson on shooting water drops and after spending close to an hour just setting up I was disappointed that my results were less than spectacular.

They always make it look so easy on the video and they get wonderful results.  But it’s like anything else it takes lots of practice and patience to get the kind of shots that make people say “WOW!”

Basically here is what was involved capturing these images.  First I had to get Jeanne’s broiler pan from the store room.  Fill it with water and for lack of a better place set it on some foam core over the sink.  Then put a sheet of foam core behind the pan of water to bounce the flash off of.   Set the Nikon SB900 flash with a Pocket Wizard II  on a light stand and set it on manual power 1/64^th.  Bounce the flash off the foam core into the water.

Next I shot with the Nikon D700 set on manual mode and manual focus.  I used a Tamron 90 mm 1:1 Macro Lens and shot with ISO 200 at 1/125 sec @f8.0 manual focus,   I put the camera in high burst mode.  Next I hung a sandwich bag of water over the pan of water and put a small pin hole in it so I could get a consistent water drop pattern.

Then I manually focused the lens where the water was dripping using a knife as a focal point.  Then I turned off the lights and fired away to the tune of 200 images to get the three you see here.

Enjoy your weekend.  Thanks for stopping by and be cool and careful.

What a storm we had in Dubuque.  15.5 inches in 12 hours and I’ve also read that we had 20 inches in 24 hours.  Lots of water very quickly.  I know I didn’t sleep well because of all the lightning and thunder.

I took a couple of days for vacation and I was suppose to play golf with friends today and Friday.  That got washed out so Jeanne and I took a drive around town this morning and out in the countryside to check out the damage from the “epic” flooding.  It was pretty amazing.

The image above is the debris from a building lightning strike  The building is at 1st and Main Streets and the entire area was blocked off by the police.

Angie and Ben had been downtown Thursday evening for dinner and as they came out of the restaurant they head the lightning strike.  They thought perhaps it struck a tree near by.

I suppose this building is at least a 150 years old and it is interesting how after all that time it finally got struck by a bolt of lightning.  Only on the top of the parapet and it traveled down to the roof.

Our little tour lasted about and hour and a half and we drove close to 50 miles.  I have some interesting images to show you later.  Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

Happy Hump Day.  I have had a Macro lens for a couple of years now.  It is a Tamron 90 mm f2.8 1:1.  It’s not a great lens but it does the job.  I haven’t used it much because I’ve been interested in other types of photography.

Last week I was taking an on-line course on Macro Photography and I was blown away by the creativity of the images allowed through macro photography.  Now admittedly Dilbert and his cronies are not the most creative use of macro photography, but since I hadn’t shot with the macro lens for over a year I decided to give it a quick test.

I’m a big fan of the Dilbert World and I happen to think Scott Adams is an absolute genius.  True, he paints a pathetic picture of corporate America and I don’t always agree with him, I am still impressed with the freshness of and often dead on accuracy of the scenarios he portrays with his strip.

Because I am a huge fan of Dilbert I have a lot of “Dilbert” stuff in my office at home and these three characters are about 3.5 – 4 inches tall and have been on my desktop for years.  So I decided to shoot them last night.  While the results are far from what I was looking for I am intrigued with the possibilities that can be created by macro photography.  So we shall see…

Thanks for stopping by.  Have a great Hump Day and be careful.

Yes as disgusting as this image is it just scratches the surface of what I saw.  The fish flies were back on Sunday and they were everywhere.  I knew they were back when I found one on the patio door.  It is rare when they make it all the way out here but this one did.

I never gave it much thought but then later Jeanne called me while on her way downtown and suggested I should look at the car dealership at the corner of JFK and Pennsylvania.  (By the way that is the front page story in today’s TH.)

the above image is representative of every car in their lot.  They were all covered with the insects.  Their entire building was covered.  I mean you can only take so many pictures of dying fish flies.

The first image in this post is a natural pile of the dying flies.  For some reason a huge number of them decided this would be the place of their last hooray and there was a pile about 2 -3 inches deep and 4-5 feet wide.

There were a lot of puffy white clouds in the sky Sunday morning and the sky was a deep rich blue so I snapped a couple of images of the sky as there is always a need for a nice sky.  When I got home and was processing these images I noticed some spots on the sky pictures.  “Oh great I have dust on my sensor”, I though, but as I enlarged the image those spots were fish flies still flying high.

Thanks for stopping by.  Check out the TH-Online today as they have several more fish fly pictures.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Oh one more thing.  Remember a few days ago I posted a look back to a year ago and some images of war birds flying at the airport?  Well my friend and fellow photo enthusiast Andreas Exner was out at the airport Sunday and caught some nice formation flying images.  You can check them out here.

Happy Monday to you.  Angie, Ben and Joshua stopped by last evening for dinner.  It was time for Fincel corn, one of Angie’s favorites so we grilled burgers, brats, and hot dogs with the corn.  It was a great evening with the kids.

I hadn’t seen Josh since the 4^th so I was anxious to see him.  I asked Jeanne if he had any new tricks (as she sits with him from time to time) and she said that he can now set up and he has two new teeth.  The top two teeth are not all the way through yet but he demonstrated their effectiveness on my arm last night. 🙂

Our surprise visitor was Mark.  He called earlier in the day and said that he was coming home for a couple of days to catch up with some friends.  He’s working three jobs this summer so it is rare when he has any time off.  So we were blessed to have the whole family for dinner and it was wonderful.

Thank you as always for taking the time to check this blog.  I have some interesting images for you tomorrow.  Enjoy your week and be careful.

Good Day and thank you for stopping by.  A little Photoshop talk on the blog today as I wanted to show you what I’ve been doing the last few days.  Last December 2010, actually it was the first day of December one of our banks sponsored a “Ladies Night Gala.”  Many of the most prominent women of the community attended and it was a wonderful evening.

I volunteered to set up a portrait studio in a corner of the bank and take portraits of anyone who wanted to have an image made.  Then we would send them a 5 x 7 or 8 x 10 as a gift from the bank.  The image above shows the set up I had.  It was a fun evening but as always it was also a learning experience.  I was still suffering from migraines at this time and I discovered that my green screen while good for single portraits was not so good with large groups.  I also was trying tethered shooting for the first time so I learned a lot and made a fair amount of mistakes but in the end had a lot of fun.

Additionally like all things it was a great learning experience for me because portrait photography is one of the areas of photography I really enjoy a lot but don’t get the opportunity to do it as often as I would like too.  There is a fair amount of work involved in making someone look their very best.  For a lot of different reasons I never got around to finishing the images.  Friday I promised my friend Laura that I would do that this weekend so that is what I’ve been up to.  I thought it would be fun to show you some of the process that is involved in the final image.

This is Michelle, an employee at the bank.  She graciously sat through about 15 shots while I got the lights adjusted.  The image above is a RAW image (digital negative) converted to a JPEG file without any white balance, sharpening, color balance, or anything done.  Essentially this is how it came out of the camera.  The main reason for using a green screen is so that you can replace it (the green screen) with any type of background you choose.  It’s called Chroma Key or Chroma Color and you see it a lot in movies, the weather maps, etc.  It is widely used because it is relatively easy to separate the subject from the background and replace the background.   That is unless your subject happens to be wearing a green outfit.

Here is the image after I have adjusted the white balance, color balanced the image, sharpened it, corrected for lens distortion, removed any noise, added some vibrancy and color enhancements.  This is also the part of the process where I remove any skin blemishes, wayward hairs, red eye, veins in the eyes, wardrobe imperfections, and generally make the best possible image I can.

Now I replace the green screen with a more pleasing background.  I have a number of digital backgrounds that I have built over the years.  (Most of them were lost when my hard drive failed.)  This is one of the few I have left.  I created them all in Photoshop so sometime this Winter I will rebuild them.  Other than replacing the background in this stage of the process I also rebalance the color to go with the new background.  To make sure the lighting is still correct.

This is the part of the process that often times create the most controversy.  It is correcting any imperfections, applying digital make up, thinning the facial features, removing age lines, etc.  Making the person look their very best.

I look at it this way.  When you are face to face with someone and talking with them or even just looking at them they are in constant motion and you are taking in the whole spectrum of their presence.  When you stop time and freeze all motion by taking their image any little imperfection that is not noticeable to the normal eye becomes a beacon that screams “look at me.”  I believe those should be repaired, or diminished to give the person their best appearance.

Here is an example.  I took a picture of a great landscape of a barn and some other buildings with a great windmill right in the middle.  When I saw it in person I knew I had to take a picture of it.  When I got it home in my computer it looked awful because of all the power lines running through the buildings (which I didn’t even notice while taking the images.)  No one wanted to see those power lines so I took them out and it made a wonderful image.  Basically that is all one does when you touch up a photograph of an individual.  Anyway that’s my point of view.  I welcome your thoughts.

Sorry for the long post.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy the rest of your weekend and be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 VR Ii Lens | ISO 200 1/320 sec @f10

“Hotter than the Hubs Of Hell” yesterday.  I wanted to get out and shoot something so I waited until 12:30 pm then went out to Mickey Ds (I gotta stop doing that) got a burger and fries, pumped up the AC and set out to see what I could find.

I took off on one of the County back roads looking for something interesting to shoot.  The sun was bright and the light was harsh.  When I would step out of the car for a moment my glasses and lens would fog up.  It was like stepping into the exhaust of a jet engine.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 VR Ii Lens | ISO 200 1/320 sec @f10

I drove around for 40 minutes and didn’t find anything really worth shooting.  I had seen these two barns on the outward bound part of my journey and had decided if all else failed I would stop and shoot them on the way back to work.

All else failed so here are the barns.    I need to find some inspiration.  I’ve just about finished my 52 week project and now I have to decide if I want to do it again or try something else.

There are 20 different mile markers on the way to and from Maquoketa on highway 61.  I’ve been thinking of shooting the salient part of each mile, which would be a neat project.  I don’t know how interesting it would be but I’ve been thinking about it.

Thanks for stopping by.  Stay cool and be careful.

Nikon D90 | Nikon 18 - 200 mm VR | ISO 200 1/1600 @f5.6

Good Day.  I didn’t have anything for the blog this morning that was taken within the last week or so but I was looking through my images taken a year ago and came across this P51 Mustang.

Jeanne and I had been to Maquoketa on this particular Saturday to look at the flooding and on the way back stopped by the airport.  This time of year some of the old War Birds fly into Dubuque to practice their formation flying for the Oshkosh Air Show.

Nikon D90 | Nikon 18 - 200 mm VR | ISO 200 1/1600 @f5.6

There were also some t-28 trainers there and they took off right after the Mustang.  This Mustang was a beautifully restored aircraft.  I wish I could have gotten a closer look at it but we arrived too late.

Nikon D90 | Nikon 18 - 200 mm VR lens | ISO 200 1/1200 sec @ f5.6

Now I don’t know if they did this because they saw us sitting at the observation area with a camera or if they were just practicing.  But these three T-28 Trainers took off together and did a big wide turn over the airport and flew over our heads.  Just as they got to us the trailing two turned on their smoke.

The roar of those big radial engines vibrated against my chest and hurt my ears.  It was a magnificent sight to see.  I guess I’d like to think they did that for my photo opportunity.

Enjoy another HOT day.  Looks like this pattern is with us for a while.  Stay cool and thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.