Iowa Barns

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

Today, I joined my father-in-law and my sister-in-law's husband for a few hours photographing barns near Dubuque, Iowa. I didn't get any great images but I did have a great time.

In my opinion, the best of these images is the first, and really, it should've been an excellent shot. I think I did a nice job of framing the image. Unfortunately, I did a terrible job focusing it. As I've mentioned here before, I am a big believer in manual focusing- this time, it burnt me. I really don't know what happened.

I've got another week off here, and then, my life is going to get especially busy. I'm hopeful that I'll get at least one more chance to get out for photography in the next week and at least occasionally after that.

Eagle on the Mississippi River Bluff

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

Today, I spent an hour or so on the banks of the Mississippi River with Stephanie and her dad. The weather warmed to a balmy 37 degrees, which gave us a chance to enjoy the outdoors before a heavy early afternoon fog settled in.

We pulled out our Canons and tried to take some shots of the many eagles taking advantage of a rare break in the ice just below the lock in Dubuque. Overall, my efforts were a monumental failure- even maxing out the zoom on my borrowed 100-300mm lens left me not nearly as tight on the eagles as I wanted to be. As a result, this image is heavily cropped, which cost me a lot of sharpness. Those who have their browsers set to a large view format may be fairly disappointed with this image- the resolution just isn't there to get any bigger than about 4x6.

Yates Mill

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This images come from Yates Mill, just outside of Raleigh. It's a subject worthy of a photographer's attention. I actually think that there are a number of good shots for the taking on the premises. Unfortunately, I didn't nail any of them on my visit, but I got enough of a taste to want to try my luck again sometime soon.

Puffin

Images Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

For the last two pictures from the zoo trip, we leave the mammals and make our way to the Horned Puffin, Fratercula corinculata.

I alays enjoy the puffins at the zoo. Unfortunately, they are in an indoor facility on a light cycle coordinated with the Arctic Circle or somewhere thereabouts. As a result, in addition to the normal challenge of shooting through fiberglass, I had to deal with really low light. To take these images, I maxed out my sensor sensitivity, setting the ISO to 1600. Then, I opened up my aperture as far as it would go, and I went with the longest shutter exposure (1/100 sec) I could without getting movement in the image. Even then, I needed to add some light in Photoshop.

The final result are probably better technical feats than artistic ones, but I think both are okay shot anyway.

Chimp

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

The subject here is a 33-year old male chimpanzee. He was sitting perhaps four feet from me, on the opposite side of a clear fiberglass wall. I took several shots of him. Unfortunately, most have a distracting reflection that distracts quite a bit from the shot. As for this particular picture, if I had the chance to retake the image, I might frame it slightly differently, but overall, I like the shot. It's probably my favorite picture from the zoo trip.

Gorilla

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This is a second of the three gorillas at the North Carolina Zoo. Unlike the male in the previous post, she and the other female were especially cooperative subjects. I think I took around 30 shots of them altogether, and I am decently satisfied with many of them.

In terms of the mechanics of the image, again, it was taken through fiberglass. I should credit a borrowed lens from my cousin for this and all of the other images posted. The lens that came with my camera is a great option for a lot of pictures, but the 100-300mm from John gave me some options that I wouldn't have had without it.

As for the decision to go black and white with this image, more than anything, it's because of the leaf that she's holding. I think it looks better in grayscale.

Silverback

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This image will be the first of three pictures I'll post from the primate exhibits at the NC Zoo. This massive male silverback was a tough subject. The picture was taken through fiberglass, and to the most part, he spent his time with his back to me. Of the six pictures I'll post from our zoo trip, this one is my least favorite.

Arctic Fox

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

With the fall semester some 24 hours in my rearview mirror, today I had the chance to spend some quality time with the new camera. Steph and I took a day trip to the NC Zoo. It was a beautiful 70 degree day in the Carolinas, and the animals were the most active we'd ever seen them. I took about 200 pictures, of which only six made the cut for posting on this blog. If you're keeping score at home, that puts my success rate- even with a nice, new camera- at 3%.

This first subject is the Arctic Fox. Truth be told, I made some mistakes in this image. The depth of field is too narrow, meaning that the fur beginning at about the ears isn't focused. I realized my error early in the sequence of shots and changed the aperture for better focusing. However, the fox never gave me such a nice look at its eyes again. Hence, I'm left to compromise based on the pictures I got. Even if this picture is a bit technically flawed, the subject was too good not to post if.

Credit goes to my mom, visiting from Illinois, for the matting on this image. She chose a variation on my normal black and white scheme, stealing this slate gray tone from some pixels on the log in the image.

What's in a Name?

On his recent visit to this blog, Jack Graham commented that a name change might be in order.

"Lucky Shots" implies a shotgun approach to photography. Point the camera enough places and snap enough shots and, by chance, eventually something good has to come from it. It's akin to the old adage about enough monkeys with enough typewriters eventually being able to reproduce all the works of Shakespeare. In fact, when I first started taking pictures, my strategy wasn't all that different from that. I'd take 100 shots to get 1 or 2 okay images.

Part of that was just the equipment. My first real foray into photography came on a trip to Colorado in 2005. I took hundreds of shots on an old Olympus digital with somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 megapixels of resolution. It was a point-and-shoot in every way, which lends itself to a 1-in-100 type of strategy.

Later that year, my family (parents, in-laws, and wife) bought me a transitional camera, a Kodak P712 that gave me all sorts of new capabilities and really changed the way I took pictures. The P712 let me do things that the Olympus didn't.

Then, last Spring, I got my hands on my father-in-law's Canon Rebel XTi, and my wife sent me to a photography workshop to learn how to use it. With that, photography went from being a hobby to a passion, and my shots stopped being "lucky" and started being thoughtful and planned and, on occasion, even artistic. That's not to say that they are great images, but the process is definitely different.

The change didn't go unnoticed, and recently, my family bought me another new camera, the first DSLR of my own. Soon, I hope to start posting images taken with this treasured addition to my camera bag, and with it's help, I hope that my pictures will become less-and-less "lucky" and more-and-more "earned."

Jack Graham on getting sharp images

Jack Graham, the photographer who taught the course I took last summer, just posted an exceptional article on shooting sharp images. Definitely worth checking out. (I was relieved that no pictures of me and my tripod appeared in his tripod critique!)