June 2010: elf's Canon 50D Journal

FromFriday Foto

This unimaginably fragrant flower of the rose family, is called the Pasture Rose, photographed in a parkette behind the Adelaide Street Courthouse.

This photograph is subtitled, "The Unseen Hand", because I had to shift the flower slightly so the sunlight fell directly on the center (it was easier to move the flower than to move the light). I also increased the ISO to 200 to get a faster shutter speed because it was awkard holding the camera steady with only one hand.

From Friday Foto

There was some (10 hours) Photoshopping (a distracting white fence was removed and the background fill was cloned) involved in this photograph because the photo I wanted to use was mis-focused.

I find it remarkable that only one of the petals of each flower in the group has a spray of yellow dots on it.

I was watching an early episode of Seinfeld involving a dentist being investigated for insurance fraud when I noticed a familiar photo of a railway station, on the wall of Jerry's apartment. I didn't remember who had taken the photograph or which station it was, but Google found it for me— it was Penn Station in New York, tragically demolished in 1963 to be replaced by Madison Square Gardens. The photo in his apartment is the photograph that appears in the top-left corner of the linked page.

From Friday Foto

This photograph was taken at 8:30PM (during the Golden Hour), on a perfectly calm, windless evening. Av, Cloudy WB, f/2, ISO 100, 1/60s. It was the last photograph I took on that evening. I took only one photograph; I didn't even zoom-in to check the focus because I knew it was perfect. There was no post-processing of any kind performed on this photograph.

Assignment Chicago is the photoblog of Alex Garcia, a photo-journalist for the Chicago Tribune.

From Friday Foto: Downtown

The Michael Jackson mural at the "Harlem" restaurant on Richmond. Note all the hand-written tributes on both sides of the mural. I couldn't find an angle to photograph the restaurant and the mural without the pillar being in the way.

From Friday Foto: Downtown

A sequence of 7 photographs were overlayed in Photoshop Elements and a portion of each layer was erased to expose the subject in the layer below. This was a proof of concept done on a small scale. The images need to be corrected for prespective so the vertical lines along the edges line-up properly (look closely at the top right).

I had originally envisioned this sequence as an animated GIF but it wouldn't work in the Picasa gallery. This morning, I woke-up with the idea overlaying the images and showing-through the bottom layers by erasing the layer. I suspect this was subconciously influenced by seeing a photo of a skier on 1x.com, sometime last week.

The digital version of a traditional multiple-exposure photograph. It is an alternative way of depicting motion usually done with a panning shot. Of course, it requires more post-processing work.

From Friday Foto: Downtown

The first photo of the CN Tower is a composite of two nearly identical photographs. When I took the first photograph, I noticed that the CN Tower was slightly blurry. When I re-took it, I didn't notice that the flag on the Dominion Building was no longer fluttering in the cold wind.

So, I created the final photograph by combining the Dominion Building and fluttering flag from the first photograph (the entire left third of the image) with the sharper CN Tower of the second photograph.

From Friday Foto: Downtown

The photograph of the U.S. flag in front of the Royal York Hotel has also been post-processed, by mirroring it horizontally so the stars and stripes appear in the "expected" configuration.

I had a lot of suspicious looks from men in dark suits when I was photographing the flags (back in March) since the summit was going to be taking place in a few months and the world leaders would be staying at the hotel.