I agree, I made it my new wallpaper.

some cliche bay area shots. i went to see some old friends and only brought a 17-40 and 50mm. i could probably get by with those two lenses alone.

Good first post!

I have one more with incense for you:




@mikekelley: First of all, I really dig your pics. The one with the bird on the pier is outstanding. It's quite funny that you triggered all your snowboard shots yourself and let your buddy be the "living tripod" I consider it quite an accomplishment to go over a kicker full speed and being able to visualize your position and the one of the camera to push the trigger in the exact moment. The fisheye certainly helped there...
Anyways great shots on the board and also your courage to grind boxes while holding your cam in hand is quite respectable

Here's a shot from the winter:

The kiwi pic picked up too much noise in the green when you boosted the saturation. You should scale it back a bit. Maybe increase yellow as well and shift the hue.

Love all the other shots, especially the B&W on the chair.

The skiing shot you just posted is sick. That looks insane.

For the recent incense shot was that just smoke flow or did you wave the stick through the air before bringing it down?

@Freakin:

I had the incense in its holder the whole time. I held a scoop over the incense to gather some smoke and then pulled it away to the upper left. That created that nice spiral. Had over a hundred tries with different kind of metal things, which cool the smoke down and make it thicker. The strobe was positioned to the upper left with a snoot on it.

Just finished another shot:



The lens flare at top left could certainly be removed, didn't bother for now

Thanks Mess!



This time it's not me! I love myself (heh) but sometimes I have to shoot other people to make some money here and there. All done with 15mm fish and 5d. Who said you need a 1d to do sports?









Aaand just noticed some sensor dust on the last one. Time for a clean..

this has probably already been debated but what is the best dslr for ~$500?

i was kinda looking at the nikon d3000. i could spend a little more if it's really worth it.

@mikekelly - I <3 your stuff. As cheesey as it is, it's very nice.

@Messy - the second incent one is amazing.

lol thanks wrane! but cheesy!?

Oh, I was talking about your San Fran pics. Snowboard pics are LDO badass.

hahaha yeah after i posted i was like oooooohhh yeah i think he was talking aboutt he SF stuff.

Thanks again! And I agree

lake tahoe long exposure.

Wow incredible shot, Scratchy! Any chance you can post a high res to use as a wallpaper?

Mind telling us how you did it? HDR? Filters? What kind of postprocessing?

Just got the Mark ii trying it out. Probably more than I need but once I sold my old stuff it wasn't much and I think the solid ISO performance will definitely come in handy. No filters. Polarizer i ordered is still out of stock which is another story.

Yeah HDR as always. A few minor adjustments in camera raw but it mostly came out of photomatix looking like that. I had just learned how to get the sunburst effect so I was shooting for that. Wait until the sun is party blocked but still shining through and move the aperture over to as small as it will go and roll the dice.

I'll probably try a few more from time to time if the clouds look interesting to see if i can do better. I never really paid much attention before but its been almost 2 weeks of either not a could in the sky or total overcast.

Not really sure how to post bigger without messing up peoples thread display so here is an imageshack with a larger jpeg.
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/6513/69009316.jpg

@scratchy - flippin' amazing.

@dan - #3.

Alright. To be brief here, I want to become a better photographer. I have minimal knowledge of cameras (took a photography class in HS - I understand iso/aperture/etc.) but that's pretty much it. Despite that, I've received a Canon EOS 450D from my camera-enthusias uncle.

What can this bad boy do? Any newbie tips out there? Good starter websites? Is HDR too advance?

I should probably pull the manual out. A-DEP/M/Av/Tv/P confuse me.

Clearly i need to get photomatrix. You might want to look into the problem of disappearing boat though.

I love happy accidents. I shot this figuring I'd just get some kind of nice night detail of the courthouse in the foreground, EMC (the Absolut Des Moines building) to the left, and 801 Grand (the Principal building) to the right. I didn't expect the sky to turn out like it did.



Link to large size

Digital goes some interesting things to skies. When it gets warmer try setting up someplace and take a picture every couple of minutes from before sunset till there aren't any differences between shots. You can try the same thing for sunrise too. Here is a site that calculates sunrise/sunset times: http://www.sunrisesunset.com/usa/Colorado.asp

Yeah blue and golden hours are prime shooting hours. Golden hour is roughly an hour before sunset, blue hour roughly one hour after.


Here are some more shots from the last 2 weeks:

The church+fountain pics are HDRs, I might come around to clone out the lens flares in the fountain pic, didn't bother for now.

Some really nice pictures in this thread. Especially some by Messy Mess.

Hey guys..what setting do you use the most? Tv, AV, or Full Manual? I am struggling to get good at using the manual mode. Might as well add a picture to my post...hope your not haters of post processing, my niece has bright blue eyes so I though it was a good picture to do this with..wish I had a better background, also for example this is with the "portrait" setting.

What are Tv and Av???

P is a decent start but i have to adjust sometimes -1 or -2 but of course i use Aperture and Shutter as well.