Photography of Emil Kepko

This past weekend I woke up at 4 am and drove to my favorite sunrise location: Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. I have been enough times now to notice a pattern. About 20 minutes prior to sunrise, the thousands of snow geese fly from one pond, over my head, to the other pond, in a glorious flock of honking mayhem. It is, unfortunately, far, far too dark for me to take pictures. That may explain why I’m the only one out there so early, but those late-comers are missing something very special.

I became a bit discouraged as the sun rose and I had taken nothing of interest. Then I noticed the snow geese in the distance, flying towards the rising sun. I jumped out of the car, prefocused my lens, then quickly swiveled the camera towards the sun and snapped a few pictures, while avoiding staring directly into the viewfinder. I zeroed in on the proper framing rather quickly, and wound up with a couple of shots I really like (particularly the one at left).

The black and white photo below was taken well before sunrise, when the sky was blood red. I converted to B&W, and increased the contrast a bit. I think it works… but I won’t be certain until I come back to it again in a few months. Sometimes I need some distance before ‘knowing’ if something is good or not.

My experimentation with my new flash continues with a couple of more pictures of the christmas cactus, this time in black and white (click for larger images).

I carved out some time to use my new SB-700 (thanks Santa!) and my 105 macro, which I had given myself for my last birthday but has mostly collected dust since. I had tried some flower macros with the built-in popup flash, but they looked just awful. Too much direct reflection, so the flowers looked quite harsh. I wanted to experiment a bit, and for this setup I placed the flowerpot on a high-back, black, chair to provide a ‘blackdrop’ (see a previous incarnation here). I turned off all lights and handheld the flash, and found the best position was about 10 inches above, and slightly behind flower. This lit up the inside of the petals, projecting a very smooth, soft light. The key, I found, was to avoid direct line-of-sight reflections between the flash output and the lens. You can see the bright speckles in some of the shots – those are direct reflections.

The photos aren’t as sharp as I’d like, despite having used a tripod. Partly that was a result of the flower pot, which had a tendency to wobble and mess up my depth of focus.

With the power of a remote flash, I plan on spending 2012 exploring the world of macro. Something to look forward to, for sure.

Christmas cactus gallery.

I currently have a piece up at the Maryland Federation of Art Member’s show, and since it won an ‘Award of Merit’ (second place, I think…) I thought I’d step through some of post-processing I used to make it.

I described the capture of the shot on this post. To add a bit more detail, the photo at left (taken from the most picturesque Starbucks I’ve ever seen) shows the context. (As an aside, on the right, just off the edge of the photo, was a small cliff and is where I took the 737 landing, about 30 minutes later). I had wandered out on the causeway, about halfway down, with the setting sun to the right, hoping to get the monastery lit up at sunset. I did not have a tripod, so I sat the camera down on the concrete, and adjusted the view the best I could using my lens cap. One thing I didn’t count on was that my neutral density filter, which I had screwed on to increase the exposure time and smooth out the ocean, was covered in dust. Here is the original shot (click to see all those spots).

Yuck! Which brings me to step one in post-processing. I was unable to shoot level, so I first rotated. Then I edited out most of the dust. Big improvement!

I didn’t remove all the spots, because I knew I’d be cropping out some of the water and sky. Next some minor level enhancement to improve balance

And then the hardest step: cropping. My camera shoots in an aspect ratio of 2:3, but the ‘standard’ medium size print is 8 x 10 (2:2.5). You can see in my original blog post that I had cropped it down to 2:4 ratio, emphasizing the monastery and the walkway to the left, defocusing the eye away from all the sky and water. But it’s hard to find that print size, and I wasn’t about to submit an 8 x 10 ratio print, which looks like this:

That ratio throws off the composition. For some reason that I still have not figured out, 8 x 12 prints, which fit the images from my camera, are impossible to find. Frames are even harder! In the end I went with an almost panoramic aspect ratio, which does work quite nicely:

I typically don’t spend much time post-processing (and even this photo did not take too long), but I have always liked this photo, and that tedious work of removing dust spots, all 93 of them, was worth it.