Tag: Photography

This is a real car, driving next to a real man on a real bike in downtown Phoenix. Why does it look like a toy car on a model set? Because I used a miniature faking effect that simulates a shallow depth field and fools your eyes into thinking it’s looking at something up-close.

Another component of the miniature illusion is selective focus, which in its purest form is achieved with tilt-shift photography. However in this case, I faked it with Photoshop and directed your attention to the car in the picture for this miniature effect.

Not bad for a first attempt, although I should have spent more time fiddling around in Photoshop to make the guy on the bike less blurry. This tutorial made it surprisingly easy to achieve this effect.

See more photos like this in this tilt-shift miniature fakes flickr group.

Photo details:

• Exposure: 1/400
• Aperture: f/9.0
• Focal Length: 50 mm
• Taken from the fifth floor of a parking garage at 10am

My shot of the super perigee moon – the biggest since 1993 – looking east over the Phoenix sky on March 19, 2011. This moon was the closest a full moon has gotten to Earth in nearly 20 years, although I really couldn’t tell by looking at it…and you can’t really tell by looking at this photo. And despite not capturing the change in appearance of the moon on this rare event, I like the effect the light cloud cover had on the moon in this shot, and I’m glad that I stood on top of that hill for an hour and a half taking pictures on my Saturday night.

Photo details:

• Exposure: 1.3
• Aperture: f/8.0
• Focal Length: 55 mm
• ISO Speed: 1600
• On a tripod
• Time: Shortly after 7pm

Time in the shade

This image is composed of six different photos I took of the December 21, 2010 lunar eclipse and stitched together in Photoshop. The progression is the first half of the eclipse, before the moon went into full obscurity behind Earth’s shadow. The shots, which span about an hour, are arranged in chronological order, starting from the 12:00 position and progressing clockwise.

I think this mosaic is cool, and am looking to make a clock out of it, but still, I was hoping for much more color and clarity from these photos. There’s a somber rush that I get from shooting the night sky and I couldn’t wait to capture the vibrant colors of this unique event.

Unfortunately, there were a few things working against me. Some could’ve been avoided, others not so much:

• Heavy cloud cover over Phoenix skies (bleh)
• Equipment: 50mm/f1.8 lens; 18-55/f5.6 lens; tripod (not much zoom there)
• Location: my patio, surrounded by street, holiday, housing and city lights (not ideal for night shots)

For these photos, I set the camera on a tripod extended to it’s highest point. I played around with the aperture mostly and found that the larger stops created too-bright and too-blurry images, so I opted for the smaller stops. Most of the photos in this image I used about an f22 stop and kept the shutter speed set to about 1/4″ – 4″ to compensate.

This is my lunar eclipse photo. There are many more photos like it. But this one is mine.

I shot a few family portraits over Thanksgiving and learned something from each shoot. So, now that the dust has settled and the food has finally been digested, I wanted to share a few tips that can help anybody when taking pictures of family and friends…just in time for the holidays! But before we get started, here’s one of my favorite shots I took for my friends’ holiday cards.

The baby’s expression and turn to the camera really made this photo special.

Here are my tips and some of the lessons I learned:

Continue reading 8 tips to sharpen your family photos