The past week, I worked on doing some fish tank shots. I tried some ink, coins, and other random things that looked like they would be cool to drop in there. I positioned the fish tank on my counter, and placed two strobes (1 behind, 1 to the side). I proceeded to take some sweet ink shots.

The real reason I did the ink shots, was simply because they look pretty awesome. I really don’t think they are my most amazing photographs, but they look pretty cool. My brother and I purchased the fish tank from some dude on Craigslist for $10. Pretty good deal for a 10 gallon glass tank.

After my brother did his shots, I figured I might as well do them also, so really the inspiration for this project is his post.

Ghoti is a constructed word used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling. It is a respelling of the word fish, and like fish is pronounced /ˈfɪʃ/. It has,

• gh, pronounced /f/ as in tough /tʌf/;
• o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/; and
• ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/.

Wikipedia – Ghoti

What is it?!?!

Well, I was looking at some of the amazingly great photoshop compositions at Worth1000.com, and saw an image of a cat jumping from the water, attacking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I loved the idea, so I decided that I will try to do the same for the landmark bridge of North Idaho… the Longbridge of Sandpoint. At 1.3 miles, the bridge should create the adequate effect I am looking for. Unfortunately, after searching for quite some time on Worth1000′s website, I was unable to find the original… so you will just have to accept my drawing as a substitute for the amazingness of the original and for my work.

EDIT: I found the link to the image…. I like it, it’s nice.

http://fx.worth1000.com/entries/506056/kitty-attack

Darkness – the absence of light. Our eyes trick us during the night. According to our eyes, there is no light – no color – nothing. Photography opened up a view of the dark world, known more frequently as Night.

The above image was shot on the dock at the Honeysuckle Marina on Hayden Lake in Idaho. It was nearly black, but with the help of a slow shutter speed, I was able to capture the colors of the bay adjacent to the docks. As you can see, the lake has started freezing over due to the incredibly cold weather recently.

Exposure:

• Shutter Speed: 30 sec.
• Aperture: f/9
• ISO: 100

This week, I was feeling incredibly uninspired so I had some difficulty coming up with ideas for this week. So I did the logical thing… I did a motion blur of the US-95 and Prairie Ave. intersection. I drove down to the bank next to the intersection, and busted out my tripod and 50D, set the exposure, and out popped this masterpiece (you can bow to me later, I know, you’re just in shock right now).

Exposure:

• Shutter: 20 sec.
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100

I was experimenting with some new filters this week, so after converting from RAW, I threw some Topaz on this pic and then changed the blending mode to soft light to reduce the effects so it wouldn’t be way too fake. Then I ran some high pass (desatted, on softlight) over the image to give it that nice over-edited look.

Finally, I made a fancy animation, because thats the cool thing to do.

Exposure same as above.

While I was out, I shot a panorama of Hayden Lake. This is below.
[RAW]

View Panorama Larger[/RAW]

This panorama consists of 6 images, taken at 30 seconds each, meshed together with photoshop. Because I was out on the dock at Honeysuckle Marina, there was some slight camera movement in the photo, this isn’t too noticeable at smaller sizes, but if you view it full size it becomes more prominent.

Finally, here is the contact sheet.

[RAW]

Stop Light Before and After[/RAW]

Over Thanksgiving break, while at Fairmont Hot Springs, BC, CAN, I decided to try – once again – some High Dynamic Range. I have tried it in the past, and I really want to improve my ability, and work on not over editing them.

This photo to the right was shot looking up a stream/river (what ever it is called) handheld at 1/2 sec. to get the effect of moving water (the blurred ness of it).

I cheated and simply created three jpegs with different exposures of the RAW image instead of using three RAW images. This was simply because my tripod wasn’t handy and the motion would ultimately cause some trouble. These images were put through Photomatix, then into Photoshop for some tone correcting due to weirdness of Photomatix.

This image is also on flickr… Where it has received an average of 8.1/10 from the Score Me! group.

The image was shot with the following:

• Shutter: 1/2 sec.
• Aperture: f/22
• ISO: 100
• Camera: Canon 50D
• Lens: Canon 28-135mm

This second photo was actually bracketed, with separate images for each exposure (not cheating this time). I feel that this one turned out a little bit better on the editing side. I feel that this one has been edited less, so it looks more natural. I really is amazing how HDR really brings out the colors in an image, as you can see below in the originals, there was virtually no color in the original image, but it was brought out when combined.

This image had separate values for each exposure:

• Shutter: 1/40, 1/160, 1/10
• Aperture: f/8
• ISO: 100

Out of all of the photos that I took, there really weren’t too many that would work well with HDR, so I just left them out. Below are the originals, contact sheet, and a epic-failed-edit of another photo. I invested a lot of time editing these, from shooting them, going through the fails, and editing them, trying to make them not fake.

Oh and my Adobe Camera RAW really has been acting up recently, so I am unable to convert from RAW using anything except Photomatix.