Tag Archives: photography

the moment (lens) has arrived!

the moment (lens) has arrived!

i’m going on a trip to far, far away lands next week and while i’m very excited for the trip, i was not very excited about the prospect of lugging my aging nikon dslr around with me. i’ve been looking at mobile photography lenses for awhile and really believe they are going to be the future of a certain segment of photography. don’t get me wrong, I WOULD TOTALLY TAKE A LEICA Q IF YOU WANT TO BUY ME ONE! but the reality is that it’s super hard for me to justify a four thousand dollar camera when it’s not providing me with some sort of income. i imagine i’ll get another “rea” digital camera at some point but for now – for this trip – i just don’t want to deal with it.

i noticed a long time internet friend was posting some gorgeous photos on instagram with moment lenses and saw the fine folks at wire cutter declared them “the best lenses for iPhone photography” so i picked up a wide lens, neck strap and a case that gives you a dslr-like shutter button and they arrived before i leave! YAY!

what i didn’t get was a lens cap. so boo! i just rectified that error but i’m not sure it’ll get here in a week.

can’t wait to try it out!

i’m suuuuuuure it’s an honest mistake on apple’s part.

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

day 4103: shooting the super blood moon with odin!

day 4103: shooting the super blood moon with odin! I.

i had a great time with odin shooting thesuper blood moon eclipse! he’s been slowly showing an interest in photography and was asking questions about how to shoot with the dslr. one of his shots is in the sequence in following photo. he’s a natural!

day 4103: shooting the super blood moon with odin! II.

he tried to get a few shots with his iPod touch and while he was not happy with his results, i was happy with mine 🙂

day 4103: shooting the super blood moon with odin! III.

i’ve tried to shoot a few eclipses in my time and they’ve never really turned out. pretty happy with the sequence. odin took the first shot without a tripod!

day 4103: shooting the super blood moon with odin! IV.

full super blood moon eclipse! shot with a telephoto lens and 4 second exposure. i don’t have a tripod so i macgyvered it and put the camera on top of our car and positioned the lens with books so i could get a non-shaky shot.

day 3711: shooting selfies with the DSLR, thinking about photography.

day 3711: shooting selfies with the DSLR, thinking about photography.

we’re out and about chasing the wind with the kite aerial photography rig and odin grabs the dslr and follows me around shooting away. it didn’t take long before he starts shooting selfies.

“poppi, i never told anyone but i’d really like a camera like this. i think i’d like to take more pictures.”

he takes a ton of photos with his ipod but he thinks the pictures on the DSLR look much better and likes how he can have more control. i think our future will be filled with photowalking adventures!

and in case you’re wondering day 253 was the first time he took a picture with the DSLR and day 1000 he shot his first selfie ( before they were called selfies ).

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig!

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! I.

a little over a year ago i thought about getting into kite aerial photography with odin and almost exactly a year ago we beta tested the rig and took frida goes for her first ride in the galaxie 500 in search of the wind. and then we waited. and waited. and waited for a non-stormy windy day when we had the time to fly a kite. turns out that combination of conditions is a rarity! and i started to believe that waiting for the wind was the wrong strategy and we needed to start thinking about heading to windy places.

so we planned ahead and brought the gear on vacation in the upper peninsula of michigan where odds are good we’d find a good breeze coming off lake michigan.

sure enough, just a few hundred feet from where odin and his cousin flew kites for the very first time almost exactly 8 years to the day, we launched the rig into the air.

but first, we tested without the camera attached to see if the breeze seemed strong enough. sure seemed so!

the kite was up for about 10 minutes and took 40 shots and i we got 1 that was perfectly aligned when shooting every 15 seconds. i’m sure there’s probably some sort of optimum to be found between decreasing the time between shots ( and reducing the battery life ) and just leaving the kite up longer.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! II.

we mounted the canon sd450 running the canon hack development kit onto the kit and using the super simple intervalometer that comes with the stock kit set the camera to take a picture every 15 seconds. i was hoping we’d get into the frame on take off. odin’s feet did 🙂

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! III.

the results turned out awesome! it doesn’t have any fancy stabilization sytem and it was really windy so odds are low that at any given moment the camera is going to be perfectly aligned with the horizon. i think in the future i’ll set the time between shots to a shorter duration to increase the chances if getting aligned with the horizon.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! IV.

at this point the kite was maybe a 150 feet up with the camera swaying around around 20 feet below. odin and i started thinking how cool it would be to get a much longer line and a reel to make it easier to get the kite higher up and down faster ( yes, that’s foreshadowing ).

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! V.

the kite was up for about 10 minutes and took 40 shots and i we got 1 that was perfectly aligned when shooting every 15 seconds. i’m sure there’s probably some sort of optimum to be found between decreasing the time between shots ( and reducing the battery life ) and just leaving the kite up longer.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! VI.

it took a lot of effort in the stiff breeze to bring the kite down with the awkward “reel” that came with the kite. we though surely grandpa must have a old fishing reel! we raced back to the house and of course he did. so we hooked up the kite to the fishing line and went back to the beach.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! VII.

we tried to let the kite out slowly with the reel but the winds were soooooo strong it just went zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz all out at once – the entire 300 feet or so of line. i thought the reel was going to catch on fire!

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! VIII.

and much to our surprise we couldn’t reel it back in as there was too much drag on the line.

what to do?! i thought i could run the line under a picnic table and keep walking backwards until i pulled the kite down. i got about 10 feet before the line snapped and the kite went sailing away out of sight. at that point we were both very happy we decided to test it without the camera attached.

it took about 30 minutes of wandering through people’s back yards before we found the kite. it had floated about 4 blocks away and thankfully landed in in some trees without the fishing line getting tangled in powerlines.

a very nice lady helped us get it out of the tree by giving us a length of gutter that was just long enough to knock it down. i think she really enjoyed hearing about our adventure as we pulled down the kite and yanked the hundreds of feet of line that draped over her house and across the street into the next block.

odin commented that the kite aerial photography rig was a 110% success but maybe we needed to do a little more work on building a better reel. i couldn’t agree more! i thinnk there might be a outdoor kite line reel winder with lock in our future, but what to do until then? surely we must be able to build something from stuff lying around.