150/365 - fireflies

150/365 - fireflies
Originally uploaded by ddiemont

it's been a while since i blogged about a photo i've taken, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity to start back up...

as summer approaches in my neck of the woods my yard gets filled up with fireflies. The spectacle is kinda magical, and i wanted to try and capture that a bit for this photo.

So, I took 88 photos. which may seem like overkill to most of you, but here is why approached the shot this way.

I wanted to open up the aperture wide open (1.8) so I could capture as much of the flashes of light from the fireflies as possible. But with the aperture wide open I couldn't keep the exposure open very long without completely overexposing the shot. So to compensate for this issue, I took one base shot at 8 seconds f/1.8 (which is the picture that allows you to see the fence, tree, etc). next i took 87 shots at f/1.8 and 3 seconds... these are the shots that capture the fireflies.

I then imported the 88 shots into photoshop as a stack, and then set the stack mode to "Maximum". This would combine all the pictures by showing the brightest pixel available for that location in any of the 88 shots. And that is how I got the fireflies to show up.

The process takes a while (about 2 hours of processing tim on the mac), but at the end of the process, it worked out ok ;-)

121/365 - A Walk To The Back

121/365 - A Walk To The Back
Originally uploaded by ddiemont

A quick little blog here to explain how this was done.. then it's off to throw some stuff in a bag before i head off on vacation ;-)

So, first things first, you need a lot of pictures... this is a combination of 883 pics at 12 pics/sec... So, I set my camera up to take a burst rate of about 3 frames per second and set it to the lowest resolution JPG it could take (no need for super high res RAW here)... Then I set a low aperture f/4 and focused to infinity (while setting the focus mode to manual).

The camera was then set to aperture priority (so it could adjust the shutter speed on the fly) and then i held down the shutter and started walking... my buffer will allow me to take about 130 shots or so before i had to stop for a moment.

Once I had gotten all the shots I then headed into the house and then imported the images as an image sequence in quicktime pro (Open > Image Sequence)... here you just navigate to the first image in the sequence and the rest will be imported in in order.

I then exported the movie and used iMovie to add some Muzaak and a little subtitle... and that's was it ;-)

Well, I'm off to pack for vacation. Thanks for stopping by ;-)