One day last fall I had field trips for two of my Chester County Night School classes; one was in the morning and one in the afternoon. After getting a bite to eat I took a few minutes to do some shooting myself. This is may favorite image from the shoot.
The sunburst is a result of shooting a point light source with a wide angel lens set to a small aperture (large f-number), like f/16 or higher.
For this image I was more concerned with getting the star burst effect than with loosing a little sharpness due to diffraction and shot it at f/29. That resulted in a shutter speed of 1/20 sec.
One of the classes that had their field trip that day was my Digital B&W class so I created a B&W version. For the conversion I was going for a high contrast infrared effect.
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One last post with pix from Hagley Museum. This first one was shot as an HDR but I couldn’t get the software to give me a realistic tone mapping that I liked.
So resorted to the old fashion way. I blended the normal exposure with the –3EV exposure to get detail/color in the bright areas of the bass hand wheels. I used a luminosity mask with just the highlights selected to bring in those areas from the dark exposure.
Compare this to what I got out of Photomaticx.
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Part 2
One of the fascinating aspect of shooting in Hagley’s Machine shop is the light. There are two available light sources. The window light provides most of the light and acts a strong directional side light. The kerosene lamps provide a warm accent light. Bill Westerhoff had warned me to expect to see a lot of blue in the floors that is not apparent to the naked eye. And was he right! I did some work in Photoshop to remove the blue in the wide angle shots posted yesterday in Part 1.
But in these detail shots I like the color contrast of the warm and cool so I decide to leave the blue. I’m not sure what causes the wooden surfaces to become blue but one guess is it has something to do with the oil that has soaked into the wood over the years. (The blue does not visible to the naked eye.)
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Hagley is but one of the gunpowder works that contributed to the early wealth of the du Pont family. It is located just outside of Wilmington DE. Today it is a museum that is operated and interpreted by a not-profit organization.
This was my fist visit to the museum. I was particularly fascinated by the restored operational machine shop. I think this will be a three part series. These were all shot a HDR sequences.
Here is another version of the milling machine.
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I’ve been away on a scuba trip, actually a Great White Shark expedition. I’ll show some pix from the trip later. Because of the trip, the posts over the past two weeks were prepared in advance and scheduled for posting. (That’s why the narrative that when with the pix was a little short.)
For today’s post I what to show how fast the light can change by showing three images shot within a 35 minute period. I’m going to start by showing the last one, the one shot during the blue hour. The blue hour is another name for twilight and is named for the characteristic blue color cast the light has at this time of evening. According to the metadata for this pix it was shot at 7:47, about 35 minutes after sunset. The natural light is all coming from the blue sky; it is dim, low contrast, and colored blue. And for a brief period the exposure for the natural light matches the exposure for artificial light.
The blurring of the clouds in the sky is a result of the long exposure, 4.5 sec at f/4. After all it’s almost dark out. We don’t see the blue sky, we see a dark sky. But the long exposure allows the blue that is there to dominate. It also contrasts well with the warm exterior lights of the building, Sea Colony in Bethany Delaware.
The next two images are from near sunset, 7:12, and a little after sunset, 7:29. They are of a clam evening along Little Assawoman Bay.
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One last mushroom picture before moving to a new subject.
Actually, in spite of what a lot of folks think, this is not fungus; it is a plant. It’s an unusual plant in that it does not have any chlorophyll. Hence, it’s white color.
They turn blackish when spent. So this one must be on it way out. But I like the blue and purple.
This one is also lit with the small macro flash units.
Here is another mushroom from Assawoman Wildlife Area in southern Delaware. This one has a snail on it.
Wondering what the snail was doing on the mushroom I Googled What do snails eat and got a site by that name. There they said, “In their natural habitat, land snails eat mushrooms, fruit, leaves and any other kind of vegetation they can find.”
As you may have guessed by looking at the lighting on this image, it is lit with flash. I used two small wireless remote macro flashes (SB-R200) placed on the ground to the sides of the mushroom. The one on the right was set to 0EV bias and the flash on the left was set to –1EV bias.
