2011.01.01 New Years Eve Seattle Style
We celebrated New Years Eve in Seattle with good friends. Fortunately, it was a four day weekend with amble time to pull out the old camera. I say old because Canon needs to get there butts in gear and release the 5d Mark III. Canon Rumors reports the next 5d model will not come until Q4 2011. Its a huge bummer but it will allow to say up from for my first full frame camera. New Years day the Scott, Brad, Mike and myself went out to find some interesting subjects to shoot around West Seattle. Scott brought along the his 5d mark II and 90mm tilt shift for us to play with. A Tilt shift lens allows a photographer to modify the relationship between the sensor plane to the image plane. This ability can be used to reduce image distortion, reduce perspective, and tweak depth of field. Conversely, a ts lens can be used as a creative tool to exaggerate perspective and create selectively focused subjects within a scene. It was difficult to miniature-like scenes with the with 90-mm Tilt Shift lens because APSC camera camera transforms the 90mm to 144mm. Ideally it would be nice to use a wide angle ts to create the miniature like images, but here are the images from the 90mm ts. I am not completely comfortable with using a TS lens and i will need more time, but check out the selective focus!
My friends gave me sh$t for re-positioning the chairs, but they did not get these images. I very much enjoy simple and deliberate composition because its all about graphic design and the subject. I desaturated the color from this image and boosted the reds. I wanted the image to look gritty, so I increased the contrast and added some vignetting.
Photo of the Day for January 1, 2011. Nice abstract of a metal sculptor again a Seattle Blue Sky.
After playing the TS lens we stumbled upon a very accessible train yard. The area was void of people and it made for nice photos. Seattle is a much higher latitude than San Francisco cause the sun to be lower in the sky during the afternoon. This reduced the sun’s harsh light and made the images warmer.
We finished up the day by shooting the sunset over the Olympic Mountains.
Dan O'Keeffe Photography 