Week 35: Meteor Shower

This weekend was the Orionid meteor shower. I was pretty excited for it and thought it would be a great opportunity to try and get some star photos with meteors streaking through. Back in August I was out in Colorado for another meteor shower and was pretty disappointed by the lack of meteors. I had high hopes for this one. It was supposed to peak between 4am and dawn on Sunday morning with meteors once every minute.

Bound and determined I got myself up and out of the house around 2:30. The shower was supposed to originate from Orion's belt, so I picked some places that would have a good view of Orion and some interesting scenery. I was out until about 4am and didn't see a single meteor, boo. But there were an incredible amount of stars out, so I figured I would take advantage. Here's what I came away with. Only four shots this week, but better than nothing and I'm pretty happy with the four shots.

 I started out at the prairie thinking that scenery would make a nice backdrop with the stars. I was wrong. The shots just weren't working. I got some good stars, but there was really no subject, just boring trees and land. Undeterred, I had an idea. I've taken some shots out at a random cemetery out in the country and thought I could get some good shots there. So I packed up and tried to find an unmarked cemetery, in the dark, at 3:30am. After driving past it 4 times, I finally found it.

This first photo is more for the creepiness factor. Nothing like hanging out in the middle of a cemetery, in the middle of the night, with a bloody Jesus. I liked the composition of this one, but would have preferred if that tree wasn't there on the right.

I was quite happy with how this turned out. The hard thing about night photography is trying to frame things when you can't really see anything through the viewfinder. Luckily I had my headlamp with me, so I was able to use that to light of the sign, get it all framed, then turn it off and take the photo. 

This is easily my favorite of the bunch. I love the framing and composition and the fact that I was able to get a hint of the disk of the Milky Way. Plus the church looks kind of castley, which gives the whole shot a very old European look. If I have the patience I might re-visit this location and use it for some time-lapse shots. Could be very cool.

 

This one has nothing to do with the previous shots, but it's one I took the weekend before and really liked. I really like HDR when it captures what you see in real life. This was an instance where I just couldn't get the depth and range of color in a single shot, the way I saw it with my eye. Taking three shots and combining them really allowed me to capture things the way I saw it. And it doesn't hurt that the colors were beautiful out at the prairie to begin with. 

Week 34: Twin Cities

This past weekend I was in Minneapolis to run the Twin Cities Marathon. Unfortunately the one time I wish I had had my camera I didn't bring it with. That's always the way it goes. I would have liked to get more photos on Sunday after the race, but I was a bit tired and kind of ran out of time to do anything. So not many pictures this week, but better than nothing.

This first photo is from my friend Becky's apartment. Cheeky monkey.

Post-race beers chilling on the window-sill in the hotel.  Didn't work so well.

Nighttime view outside of the hotel window. 

Long-exposure shot from a bridge over the highway. I'm pretty sure we ran past that cathedral during the race. 

HDR shot outside of the hotel window. 

Week 33: Reflections

I was excited about this theme this week. It was my first time in a while really taking a theme and working with it, instead of working my photos into a theme I determined after taking the shots. It was nice, in a way. Having a specific them forces you to look at things differently. You're not just looking for anything that could be a good photo, you're looking for specific things. It's somewhat limiting, but forces you to grow creatively. Unfortunately I found this week kind of a bust. I'm not really happy with any of the photos and I had a hard time finding things that I found interesting. Not sure if it was the theme, or if it was me. I also had a few ideas that I thought were going to be interesting that totally failed. I really wanted to try to take some photos of reflections in a camera lens, but they all just turned out bad. I don't think my problem was finding good sources of reflection, I think it was finding interesting subjects within those reflections. Finding subjects seems to be a continuous struggle for me.

This was a shot that at least forced me to move around a bit to get what I wanted. I took some other shots of a tree reflected in this water and it wasn't working. Then I decided to move around until I got the sun to nicely reflect. I do enjoy when I have an idea that I can actually execute.

Not thrilled with this photo. It's the center of a sign light. There was a lot of reflective chrome, but it didn't really reflect anything. I tried moving around to get something, but it was just kind of muddy.

I can't decide if I like this shot or not. I like the contrast and the texture caused by the wet pavement, but I don't find anything about it particularly interesting.

Not much to say about this one, kind of boring. Just a reflection of my legs in a glass door.

This one I kind of enjoy. It was another one that I knew exactly what I wanted and worked until I got it. This was shot through a window and I managed to get equal focus with what was reflecting in the window and what was inside the building. I really love the composition and how it's really hard to tell exactly what you're looking at. The inside and the outside images blend really nicely together.

There was just something about the texture of this light, with some condensation under it, that I liked. 

This was one of the few water reflection shots that I liked. It sort of looks like the tree has been partially erased.

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. Again, I think it would be better if I could find something more interesting reflected in the mirror. 

Week 32: Time-lapse

I decided to do something a little different this week. I have always loved doing time-lapse photography. It's like long exposure photography to the extreme. You really don't know what you're going to get until you've edited all of the photos together and created a video. It's funny, I'm usually not a patient person. I barely have the patience to take a 30 second exposure and see what I get. And yet, I'm somehow able to have the patience for time-lapse. Don't get me wrong, it's difficult. I often have to sit out with my camera for over an hour to get a shot. And then you get back to editing and find out the shot just didn't work. But the payoff makes it worth it. Being able to see motion that's usually imperceptible to the human eye.

I've done some time-lapse in the past, but it was usually just single shorter events. I never really had the drive or the patience to get enough shots that I could piece together into a full-length clip. This week was my attempt to finally do that. I've mixed some old shots with a fair amount of new shots to get a video that was long enough, and overall I'm quite happy with it. It could certainly be better, but that's for future videos :-)



The Universe Within from David Hilgendorf on Vimeo.

Week 31: Utility

I've been lazy with this blog lately and have kind of abandoned themes and stuck with them for a week. This week is my attempt to at least half get back into that. I didn't exactly have a theme for this week, but I definitely knew what I wanted to take pictures of and I knew the general feel I wanted most of the photos to have.

There are some pretty interesting things in the basement of the place that I work. I've always been a little tentative to go into those places since I probably shouldn't be there, and there was always the potential that I could run into someone. Well, I had to go into work this weekend and figured it would be a good time to explore the bowels of my office. What follows is what I found.

This shot was taken in the air conditioning and furnace control room. I knew I wanted to do an HDR of this as soon as I saw it. Machinery and grease always make for good HDR subjects.

This is the motor that controls the ancient elevator in our office. I swear I'm going to die in that thing one of these days. I tried a lot of different shots of this before I got what I liked. I originally tried using just the available light with a long shutter speed, but the windows kept getting really washed out. So I picked a shutter speed that exposed the windows the way I liked them and then used my flash to fill in the motor. 

Just a couple of random electrical components sitting on a window sill. I really liked the light coming in through the glass block window. 

I couldn't really get a good shot that I liked of this. I think because the subject just isn't all that interesting. All of that said, I think I finally found a lighting technique that worked for what I was going for. I tried putting my flash in about 8 different configurations before wedging it between some pipes in the ceiling and firing it straight down. 

 

This one didn't work out quite how I would have liked. With the available light there, was a really nice tiny amount of light illuminating the railing and part of this boiler. Unfortunately I couldn't really get it exposed the way I wanted, so I decided to try and HDR shot. In general I like it, but it's not what I was hoping for. 

Week 30: Misc

I'm fairly disappointed with the photos this week. I don't think they're particularly bad, but they're just uninspired. Oh well, it's always good to get out and practice. The good thing is that I knew they weren't going to be great as I was taking them. So, I guess recognizing is something...

This one made the cut solely because it's a peacock out in the wild. I've never seen one out in the wild before. To be fair, I think it came from a farm nearby and might have escaped, since I saw four other peacocks fenced in on that farm. Ah well, I can hope and pretend that it's a wild peacock in Kansas.

I feel bad posting photos of flowers, just seems like kind of an easy out. Flowers are almost always beautiful and it doesn't take much skill to take a decent photo of one.

I really quite like this one. I'm realizing that I love the effect of shooting right into the setting sun. I have to make sure I don't do it too much, otherwise all of my photos will start looking the same.

Something about this one is just off. I feel like it should be decent, and the colors on the boat are great, but something about it just didn't turn out. I blame it on the HDR and the bad processing that makes the sky different colors. Or maybe just too much clutter in the background.

This was a shot I took of an old tractor. I really like it, but feel like it's missing just a tiny bit of color.

For this shot I was able to capture what I had in my head, but it seems a little out of place with the rest of the collection. I have lots of warm light photos, and then this black and white. I think it would be better standing on its own.

This one is just kind of...meh. I wanted to capture the sun reflecting off the water and needed a subject in there.

Week 29: Hot

It's been hot this week, it was hot last week, it's going to be hot next week, and probably the rest of the summer. What better theme to have for this week. I decided to fully embrace the heat and go out on a photo walk in the middle of the afternoon, when it's hottest. Last week I used the nice setting light to create a series of really nice soft warm photos. This week I wanted to do the opposite and use the harsh afternoon light to try and aid in the oppressive feeling of the heat.

There's something about cracked pavement and weeds growing through that just scream heat to me. Maybe it's because back in Madison you knew it was hot when the pavement started buckling.

A little bit of the sun peeking into the corner...a streetlight in the middle of a parking lot..there's nothing quite hotter than an asphalt parking lot in summer.

Proof that it was just a little bit hot when I was out walking. Not the worst temperatures we've ever seen, by far, but not exactly pleasant. 

This is going away from theme a bit, but this valve does bring gas into an apartment complex, which heats water...

For some reason construction barrels always signal heat to me. 

As a kid, I remember the thigh-searing pain of trying to use these types of swings in summer. 

Literal heat.