thechrisproject photography

This picture seems like a culmination of my last two Monona pictures. I take a lot of pictures of the lake, but I think that’s only natural. I live a few blocks away from it and I travel around it almost every day. TingLi Lin’s recent series of misty Madison pictures has inspired me to take advantage of this ugly weather and try to make something pretty out of it.

I also put up this picture I took of San Francisco from a friend’s roof. I’ve been sitting on this picture for a while. I was looking for a picture to try the new CS3 Black and White adjustment on when I found this. It seemed like a great test subject so I gave it a shot. I’m pleased with the way it turned out.

I’ve been having trouble posting lately. I think it’s due to the firewall I’m behind at work? I’ve never had a problem with any other website due to that, though, so it seems like it’d be a little odd. Details in my post at Google groups.

The name servers for my website were all messed up for the past day or so, too. Nothing is safe on the internet! At least nothing cheap is.

UPDATE 1: Apparently ZoneEdit was the victim of a large attack.

UPDATE 2: I seem to be able to edit and create posts on blogger today. Weird.

A few weeks ago I went to see DeVotchKa with some friends. I saw them open for the Dresden Dolls sometime last year and I liked them then, but I somehow didn’t really get into them after the show. This time I brought my camera and we stood really close to the stage. I got some decent pics out of the hundreds that I took. There was someone in front of me and off to the side (much better angle that way, the mic isn’t right in front of their face all the time) that was also taking pictures. We got to chatting and one of her first questions was, “Do you put your pictures up on flickr?” Heck yeah I do!

I’ve become quite the flickr addict lately. I joined a while ago for some reason not related to posting a lot of pictures. I think it was to comment on a friend’s pics. I didn’t see the big deal at the time. I have a webpage and hosting space, I can put pictures up whenever I want. I can make the galleries look however I want them to. The social aspect didn’t particularly appeal to me either. I thought, “Great, a bunch of yahoos posting crappy pictures and talking about it a lot. Pass.” Then I noticed the groups. People posting pictures of similar things. Groups with upload limits. Groups concerned with rating pictures. Top 10 groups. Then I started looking at the pictures more. There are A LOT of really great photographers on flickr. I bet that Madison could even put together a gallery show of nothing but flickr users. Seriously. I’ve even added flickr to my short list of compulsive internet actions. Check email, check bloglines, check to see if anyone’s commented on my pictures.

It’s a great service. As a programmer and web enthusiast, the design is great. The stuff they do with html and javascript is amazing. I’m always finding new things out about the interface. I even paid to upgrade my account, and it was definitely worth it. I started this out meaning to write about concert photography, but it mutated into this flickr post, and I’m okay with that. I’ll get to concert photography soon.

I can’t connect to blogger again. Argh! This keeps happening to me. I’ll write a whole post and then I can’t connect to blogger again. I can ping them, but can’t even connect to blogger.com. I wish blogger could be as slick as flickr.

I’m not much of a shopper. If I have to go into a mall, I tend to move at a mild sprint. My girlfriend needed to get an outfit for her choir performance and asked me to go with her. I figured it would be a good opportunity to take pictures that I don’t normally seek out. Plus, I just got my new Rebel XTi that day and was dying to use it. So we headed downtown to explore.

The cups picture was taken at Urban Outfitters on State Street. The color was pretty striking and I think it translated well. The 10.3 megapixel sensor is pretty amazing. Check out the super high resolution version of this picture. Damn!

XTi First Impressions
There are a few things I love about this camera. One is the number of pictures I can shoot in burst mode. 11 pictures without pause! That’s great. We were eating at Himal Chuli when the UW Girls Rowing team jogged by, adorned with Santa gear. I took four or five pictures then went outside the restaurant to shoot four or five more. I wouldn’t have been able to do that before.
The amount of time between turning the camera on and being able to take a picture is amazingly small. With my 1st gen Rebel, there was about a 2 second wait. With the XTi, it’s less than half a second. If I half press the shutter button when the camera is at my waist, by the time it’s at my eye it is on and ready to shoot. I had my old Rebel set to turn off after 4 minutes of inactivity. I was worried that this one would eat batteries since the back screen is on a lot. But I’ve set the auto-off time to be 30 seconds because turning it back on again is nearly instantaneous.
Big sensors make a difference. I’ve heard the arguments before, but if you ever crop your photos (I do), having those extra pixels around really helps. It also makes shooting in low light easier.
All in all, I’m very happy with it and I’m glad that I bought it. Here’s one more shopping shot for you:

This is a picture I winter or two ago. I wasn’t out to be shooting at all, I was just riding my bike to my dad’s house on a weekend. I brought my point and shoot along with me almost as an afterthought. The snow was coming down pretty furiously and the going was a little rough on most of the bike path. As I was traveling under a bridge, I was just suddenly struck by how pretty it was. It was kinda like “holy shit, I’m taking a picture right now because this would be stupid to miss.” My only regret is that I didn’t have my SLR then. This is a good picture for the web, but I can’t seem to print them very well; they always look like overblown low-res digital files.

I took this next picture a few minutes later and a mile or so down the creek. To this date, it is my most popular flickr picture.

I entered both of these in this weeks dane101 MadThemes contest. The theme was “snow”. I had a lot of pictures with snow in them that I considered entering, but I wanted something where the snow was one of the main characters in the shot. I think these two capture that well. I also entered this shot, taken on the bike path on the way to work one morning.

The funny thing about this image is that I still squint sometimes when I look at it. I know my computer monitor can’t harm my eyes like the sun can, but I still instinctively squint, especially when it’s large.

Now I really need to work on the pictures from last week’s My Brightest Diamond/Devotchka show. My new camera should arrive today!

Phantom Kitty made this comment on the above picture.

i have almost this exact shot. i’ll have to dig it out.

have you found you’ve taken a million photos over the years, and now wonder how you’ll find time to post to them all? …or is that just me?

I was going to answer there, but it’d be a little involved for a Flickr comment. It’s been something that’s been on my mind lately. The more times I go out and take 500+ pictures in one night, the more I realize that my current workflow just isn’t handling this very well. I told Kirstie Kat this morning in an email, “Gleaning 600 raw files for the few dozen that I want to show off to the world is not a skill that I’m particularly adept at yet.”

I got my digital SLR in May 2004. Since then I’ve taken roughly 13,000 pictures. Right now, I see two major problems with the way I deal with my pictures:

1) Things get lost by the wayside. I think this is what Phantom Kitty was getting at. When I take snapshots I’ll do really minor tweaking in Picasa (brightness, white balance, contrast, cropping) and post up galleries. These are not pictures that I do a lot of post processing on. I don’t think I’ve used Photoshop for any of them. Good pictures take a lot of time and work, and I’m still in a learning stage as far as post work goes. My appetite for picture taking far exceeds the amount of time I have to pour through the pictures, find the good ones, and work on them. Good pictures tend to go up on Flickr. One fact I find solace in is this: a lot of my old pictures suck. As I look through pictures that I took even a year ago, I realize that I’m getting a lot better. But I’d still like to post some pics of that show I saw in a basement a year ago, and some pictures from Thanksgiving last year and…

2) Old Pictures are hard to find. I’ve been submitting pictures to the dane101 MadThemes contest. This week’s contest is Snow. I’ve lived in Wisconsin (this time) for 3 and a half years. I have pictures of snow. Finding them took a little work. I found a few, then looked, found a few more, then remembered some others that I had, and found those. This is not very efficient. I organize my pictures in folders by year/month/date, so it wasn’t too hard to look through winter ones, but for something else (say, “water” or “cats”) things get more difficult. I should probably be using a good photo browser or cataloger that can keep track of photo metadata. You’d think that I, a programmer who does a lot of work on an online digital asset management program, would have this problem in the bag. But I don’t. I’ve been using Adobe Bridge more and more lately, but I still haven’t tagged most of my pictures, and I still don’t tag most of my new ones.

What to do about these problems?
The first problem is a little more difficult, since time is one of the biggest offenders. But part of my time problem is that I’m not good at sorting through hundreds of pictures and picking the dozen or so that I want to work on. Bridge has helped me with this because it has a nice ranking implementation. I can go through 600 pics and give one star to the decent pics, then comb it again and pic out the better ones, and so forth. I still don’t have a concrete idea in my mind about what seperates a two star and a three star image. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s that I should just star trying. I may flounder a little at the beginning, but the only real way to develop this skill is to try it, to practice it, and to eventually get better at it.

Getting better at picking pics will certainly help, but I can’t really spare a lot more time to work on pictures. I have other things to do. I’m not ready to start sacrificing too many other things to work on pictures. And I sit in a chair for 9 hours a day at work. Coming home to sit in a less comfortable chair for another 4 or 5 wreaks havoc on my back. Humans weren’t designed for this much sitting.

The second problem has a much clearer solution: pick an application, learn it, and start using it. I can add metadata to pics in Bridge, but I’m not particularly adept at it yet. It’s certainly not second nature, and it’s definitely not easy for me yet. If I stick with it, though, I’ll get better.

I think a lot of this comes down to this: research and thinking help, but the only way to really change my process is by just doing it. It may be awkward at first, and I’ll probably have to do it over later when I get better, but I’m not going to get better at by thinking and researching.

From my Flickr comment:

I tried a number of different approaches to the post work. I wanted the skyline to have a little more definition than the raw files did. It was a misty morning and the camera didn’t pick up much detail. I also wanted the near shore to have the same feeling it did when I was standing there, and I think this recreates that feeling.

I’ve been really getting into learning about various post processing techniques lately. I try to use them judiciously. One of the first things I tried was black and white. It worked, but not that well. The lake lost some of the eerie quality in monochrome. Once I decided to do color, I tried some various thing. It was apparent early on that the top and bottom would be processed differently, so I put them on their own layers. The tough part was getting the skyline to pop a little more without making it gaudy or too obvious. I tried burning it a little, and adjusting the contrast, but it was hard to do that without affecting the water too. Eventually I came up with a combination of two or three techniques (I believe it was curves, some midtone burning, and creative sharpening) that, paired with the proper blending mode, achieved the effect I wanted.

The water at the bottom was pretty striaghtforward. I did a feathered selection and put it on its own layer. I used selective color to get it the way I wanted, did some sharpening, and blended it in. I’m pretty pleased with the result.

In other news, I’ve been thinking of buying a new camera. I was out taking pictures at the Devotchka show when the biggest shortfall of my Rebel 300D (the first digital rebel) was glaring me in the face: you can only take 4 pictures in a row before you have to wait. At concerts and sporting events, this is a problem. Things happen spontaneously and if you’re sitting there waiting for your camera to clear its buffer and write to a flash card, you’re missing photo opportunities. There were a number of times at the show where this happened to me, and it happens at roller derby matches too.

I’ve decided on the Rebel XTi. It’s spec’d to take 10 shots in a row, although I played with one at a store and fired off 11 without a pause. Digital Photography Review has the continuous firing scoop. It also has the option to show an RGB histogram rather than a brightness one. This would’ve also been great at the show. The lighting in there is so skewed to certain colors that an average brightness histogram just doesn’t cut it. Most often, red will be completely blown out while green and blue will be much better. With an RGB histogram, it’d be easier to notice problems like that.

So I’m probably gonna grab it from Dell. There’s a deal if you buy it from Dell home, and you can find stackable coupons on eBay that make it about 25% off altogether.

UPDATE: I wrote this post this morning but Blogger was broken all day long. Urgh. I did buy the camera! I got it from Dell for $611 before tax and shipping. Heck yeah

This was taken late one night when walking home from a friend’s birthday party. The light looked really amazing so I took a few shoots. I had the ISO cranked up pretty high, so it’s a noisy picture, but I rather like the way the noise textures it. Although I would really like to experiment with a really good noise reduction plugin for photoshop. Since I’ve been doing more concert photography the need for it has become more apparent.

I haven’t been posting much here. There are two reasons for that:
1) I was angry that using Picasa to post pictures, which is very easy to do, results in Blogger hosted pictures that won’t show up in Bloglines. This annoys me to no end. I’ve been tossing around hosting my own photo blog. I already have a few websites and another blog.

2) I’ve been using Flickr a lot. I usually put photos up there now. People actually see them and comment on them, whereas here I’m not really sure if anyone’s looking and comments are pretty rare.

I just realized that I didn’t post AT ALL in November. Yikes. I would like to keep going, though. So I’m going to try to post, for now, two pictures a week here.