Adventures down Rt. 36

To celebrate the beginning of my vacation from the "day job", my wife and I headed down to Newcomerstown at the southern end of Tuscarawas County to visit the Cy Young Days Festival.  Cy Young was a baseball player born in the late 1800's in southern Tuscarawas County and spent his later years in Newcomerstown.  While we were there, we took in an oldtime baseball game.  If you have never seen an oldtime game, they are a lot of fun to watch.  There are similarities to modern baseball, but the players don't wear a glove.  Also, there is a higher level of sportsmanship among the players which is something you don't see a whole lot of in today's sport.

After we were done watching the game, we decided to continue our day out by heading west to Coshocton County and the canal boat rides on the Monticello III.  Having lived on this side of Ohio for 30 years now, I've always heard about the Ohio-Erie canal and it's importance to the area, but never really was able to associate with it until we took a ride on the boat today.  Riding on a canal boat is a very tranquil experience.  Well, now it is.  Back then living and working on the canal was a miserable experience and was no where near the pleasant one we had today.  Our guide, Fred, gave a good history of the canal system in Ohio and it's importance to the economy of the state before the rail system took over.

40mm of Cedar Point

Yesterday was spent at Cedar Point enjoying the company picnic for "the day job".  I'm not much of a ride person, with the exception of the train, so there wasn't much else to do except wander about with my camera.  And bugging my son at his job as he is employed and living there for the summer.  

With the exception of the night shots, I stuck with my 40mm pancake.  Another 40mm challenge day! 
I wanted to use just that because I wanted some examples to share with my nephew as he just bought a new body and was looking for a good lens to go with it.  I've always loved using this lens for landscape mainly but haven't been using it much since when I'm out on an assignment I never know what environment I'm going to have to shoot in, so the 28m-135mm comes into play the most.
Was a gorgeous day at the park and we couldn't have asked for better.

After the sun went down, I switched out the 40mm for my 10mm-20mm and played with some time exposures just for fun

The curious case of wavey lines in creating star trail images

For the past couple of weeks I have been, as my wife puts it, obsessed with trying to learn and utilize the technique of creating star trail images using Photoshop CC, Bridge and lots and lots of images.  I've been spending about two hours at a time taking series of 30 second exposures and merging them in Photoshop.  But was I started to notice was effects like this showing up in the images:

  It was really bugging me because after spending a couple hours outside at night, I was hoping to have something that looked good and not like someone threw a pebble in a pond.  So I started working it our what it could be and I found that when I don't make ANY corrections to the images in Bridge using Camera Raw, it works just the way I want it to!

So there you have it!  If you are doing star shots and you use Bridge to edit the images before importing to Layers in Photoshop and you get that odd results, the editing before hand is what's causing it.

Creating star trails

One of the cool techniques with photography that I've seen over the years but have never tried was creating images where the stars appear to be streaking through the sky.  It's called star trails and it's a technique that takes a lot of time.  When I set out to attempt this technique on Friday night, I followed the instructions that were listed on this site.  I have Photoshop CC and I downloaded the trial of Adobe Bridge which are two of the required tools to use.  For my subject, what other then something like the grand old Zoar Hotel.  Here's a rundown of what I did.

My first bit of advice for anyone attempting this is that if you're going to do this, be prepared to invest a lot of time doing it.  I spent about 30 minutes trying different compositions of what I was going to try and capture.  I also spent time trying to figure out what aperture and ISO setting that my Canon T3i with Canon 28-135 lens would work best.  I decided upon  f/5.6 at ISO 800 with a 30 second exposure.  I also switched from shooting RAW to JPG.  As I knew I was going to be shooting for 2 hours, I was going to end up with a lot of images and having 240+ images to process, the 25MB file size of each would chew up a lot of hard drive space.  Shooting JPG gave me 4MB files that are easier to manage.  I would also advise that when doing this, have a really good shutter release cord that locks and most importantly, a good, sturdy tripod.  If you get vibrations during your exposures, it will show up.  Also, make sure you put your camera into multiple exposure mode so when your shutter release cable is locked in shooting mode after each 30 second shot, it instantly takes another.  So with everything locked in, I started my capturing at 11:13 PM.  The next two hours seemed like an eternity.  When I was done, I came home, loaded the images into Adobe Bridge, (following the steps from the website link above), and came up with this result.

While it looks cool, I'm wasn't happy with the focus.  While it appears that the hotel is lit up, it's actually very dark.  So dark that my auto-focus on my camera couldn't lock on to anything, so I had to guess.  So that fueled me to give it another shot on Sunday.  But, I did a few things different.

First, I used a different lens, my Sigma 10-20 mm.  Secondly, I locked in my tripod even more by adding weight to it to stabilize it further.  Third, I made sure I was far enough away from the hotel to manually focus my lens to infinity and adjusted the aperture to f/6.7.  With those changes made, I started my new round of 2 hour, 30 seconds exposures. I was much happier with the results.

Using the wide angle lens gave it a much mode dramatic effect.  But, if you are familiar with the hotel, you will be able to tell that the color is off.  The only thing I can attribute to that is the green given off by the street lights and the multitude of colors given off by the passing cars.  This time however instead of using Adobe Bridge to edit the file, I edited the files in Adobe Lightroom and then used Bridge to migrate the files to layers in Photoshop and go from there.

So there you have it!  I probably will attempt more of these, but am looking for subjects that won't be as effected by other lights as much as this was.  Still, it was a fun exercise even if it did leave me a bit sleep deprived this holiday weekend.

History by candlelight

On Saturday night, my wife and I headed down to Schoenbrunn Village in New Philadelphia, Ohio and attended their spring lantern tour.  It's one thing to see the structures during the day, but at night with only the light of candles, the village takes on a whole different appeal. Last night I made sure to only use what light was available to me from either the twilight of the day or the light of the candles. Really was easy to take you back in time and have a better appreciation on how these settlers lived at night.