365 solar eclipse

Tuesday january 4 there was a solar eclipse. It was total in parts of North Africa and Russia, only partly in West Europe.

It would start as from sunrise (around 9.15am), be at its maximum around 10 and be over at 10.45.
I woke up and.. the sky was totally cloudy :-( Aaaaargh.
Not individual clouds, but a complete layer of clouds leaving no space in between. And I couldn't feel a lot of wind, so they were not going to go anywhere.

Went out a few times in the garden but could not see the sun at all.. sometimes there was a bit of a highlight showing behind some clouds but you couldn't see the outline of the sun itself.

I was in the house, playing games with Maya, when suddenly I saw sunlight at the border of the kitchen window. Sunlight - so the sun is shining through the clouds !
It was almost 10.30 so at the very end of the eclipse.

Ran outside with my camera, yelled at Maya to come too - who was for once a good girl and ran into the hallway to put on her jacket - while normally she never puts on a jacket to go in the garden..
Quickly shot some pictures, and when Maya arrived I lifted her onto my shoulders and gave the goggles to her so she could see the eclipse too. She was just in time and watched the a few minutes. Then clouds became too thick again and the sun disappeared.

Technical info - photo taken with my 70-300mm lens at 300mm.
As I wasn't sure about how bright the sun should be as it can damage a camera (and one shouldn't look directly into the sun either), I had put two ultra-violet filters on my lens (took one from my other lens which has the same size). In this photo I also held welding goggles by hand before the lens. I don't have an ND filter (neutral density filter) which is something you would use for this type of photo - but the welding goggles served the same purpose.

Also took some pictures without the welding goggles but they're not as good - I did manually adjust exposure for the bright sunlight, but the clouds are also overexposed so you don't see the edges of the sun as well as on this picture.
Maybe a polarising filter would have helped too (which I don't have in the size for this lens).

So I'm not unhappy - despite the clouds I was able to shoot a few pictures of the solar eclipse.. not as impressive as others have (at its peak 77% was covered here in Belgium), but luckily enough the sun did come out for a few minutes from behind the clouds so we could see something..

365 sushi rolls

Picture for january 3.

Sushi rolls from my restaurant photoshoot.
Same concept as my jan 1 post - tried some different viewpoints, flash setups, ..

This looks best with the shallow dof and only part of the plate visible (it was a large round plate completely filled with sushi).
TTL flash was used, strobe in my left hand, aimed at the back into a mirror to give an overhead fill light. Other shots aimed at the sushi directly gave too much shadow/highlights.

Things to improve: the badly cut sushi at the left of the center tower.. I should have seen this and turned to plate so only 'good looking' sushis are showing.

365 jan 2 - gorilla

Picture of january 2nd..

Been to the zoo today with my family. Didn't take many pictures, the weather wasn't very good, we didn't stay that long at the zoo. This is the best picture I took.

The gorilla sat near the glass and was eating some lettuce. When she finished (I think it's a she), she sat and looked straight ahead. Suddenly her head turned a bit and she looked at me.

When taking pictures of animals (and people) the eyes are important. That's a rule - the eyes have to be sharp.

Points for improvement:
- I should crop the top a bit, so the green lettuce in the back isn't showing, leaving a whole sand colored background)
- the dark stick behind her head in the background, picture would be better if that was not there

365 jan 1 - cake

Picture I made on dec 31, at the chinese restaurant where my wife works.
She asked me to go their as they need new pictures for the website and the buffet for the New Years celebrations were impressive.

Took a lot of pictures, but had to work quickly as people were arriving (and were starting to eat, taking away food from the buffet I wanted to take pictures from).

Had my strobe with me, quickly tried different combinations.. had an idea about what I wanted to achieve but took different types of pictures, to see later what was good and what not.

(ie took this picture from different viewpoints, with and without flash, flash aimed at different angles, ..).

This one was the best. Food photography isn't easy (but I love it ! - and I have the feeling I will be doing it much more as my wife recently started a dutch blog about food).
The food needs to look tasty - usually this means lots of light, food has to be bright and show highlighs. Usually it's best to have light coming from behind.
Shoot it the internal flash of your camera (or above camera) and it all looks flat and disgusting. Some shadows and highlights are needed.
You also need to show texture, so your position and the light is very important.
Usually you want to have a small dof (depth of field) to concentrate attention on a specific piece.
Of the whole series I took of this plate, this picture looked best in my opinion..

Points for improvement:
- crumbs at bottom left are something I should have noticed and removed, they have no place in professional food photography

Project 365 photography

Happy new year everyone !

I've decided to start a 'photography project 365'..
This type of project means someone takes (and posts) a picture every day, for a year long. 365 pictures. Using a camera often should make a person a better photographer (or show the world how bad someone really is..)

A friend of mine, John Wart Jr had posted last week on facebook that he'd start such a project. It reminded me about photography, and that I should also start practising more.

About 2 to 3 years ago I had a similar idea. I even started to take a small camera with me to take snapshots - sometimes you encounter things of which someone says 'wish I could take a picture of this'. But after about 2 weeks I stopped with it, as most of them were just bad snapshots and I didn't encounter much interesting opportunities. It did inspire me to open my eyes, and actively look at the world around me, search for photo opportunities, appreciate the beauty everywhere around, ..

2010 is over, and reflecting back on the past year I noticed that I had again too many things planned to do and just didn't do them in the end. Since last summer (until next summer) I work only 4 days a week. That extra day at home was meant to work in the house, get things fixed, do things I want to do (like repairing pinball machines), so evenings and weekends are free for my family.

Partly I succeeded in these objectives. The whole summer I spent every tuesday with my daughter. I (almost ?) didn't do any jobs then - daddy at home during the holidays was for spending time with her. When school started for her, these days off were used to do a lot in and around the house.. everything that needed to be done was always planned to do on that one day, so the rest of the week I don't have a list of things to do during the evening or weekends. We also remodeled the living room, which took more than a month, at some point it seemed the list of things to do never reached an end.
But now it finally has. Although new tasks always pop up, the majority of them is done.

As from next week I plan to find more time to do things I want to get done for myself. Repair pinball machines :) I still have a Williams Cyclone to shop, a Funhouse and Black Hole to repair, .. I have an ultrasonic cleaner I want to use, I have sandpaper and metal polishing stuff I need to test. And about a dozen of other ideas I want to do some time..

But back to photography. Last year I got me a new camera, a D90 with a lot of lenses (Sigma 10-20mm, Nikon 18-105 and 70-300). This summer I also bought a Metz strobe.
Most pictures I take during holidays, or when we go out on a trip with the family.

My wife gave me a small white lighttent/mini studio set as a gift for Christmis last year, and I haven't used it yet :( Despite studio photography (esp. of objects, where you control all light sources) interests me a lot. On my todo list there's still 'take pictures of Cactus Canyon and Majorettes pinball machines'. I play these games often but haven't taken nice photographs of them yet. I should take good photos of all my other pinball machines as well and update all their descriptions on my site.

Reflecting on all this, a project 365 sounded like a good opportunity to do more with photography. But as there are days I hardly have time to even check email in the evening, I'm sure taking a picture every day is something I won't succeed in. Therefor I give it my own twist - I'll make and post 365 pictures in 2011. Every picture is maximum 1 week old. This means one day I could take 7 pictures and use them for the next days, or when I run behind (as I'm not sure tonight I'll have time i.e.) I have max 7 days to catch up. That's a goal I should be to keep for this year.

It should make me a better photographer. At least force me to use my camera more. And also try to get a 'good' picture. Not just a series of snapshots, but make sure I have at least one that's worth of showing to the world. I will also start to review my photos better (now I dump too many on my harddrive and leave them there), searching which are the best and critisizing myself to see how I could have improved them). It should allow me to put everything in practice of which I read the theory of.

You don't want to know how many books and magazines about photography I've read the past 3 years. That's how I am - I like to read, gather knowledge. Photography mags bore me nowadays - their tutorials are nothing new to me - I understand how I have to shoot each subject, how to set the camera and light, .. I can explain it. It all makes sense to me.
But I just haven't done most of it (maybe because I understand how it's done it's no challenge anymore, it all seems obvious). So it's time to tackle some projects, find some challenges for myself, keep me motivated, interested and produce some great results.

Now for those people that come onto this blog post from my pinball website, sorry, this year you're going to read a lot about photography here and see non-pinball related photos. I don't want to start another separate blog. As my hobbys are mixed I'll probably post a lot of pinball machine pictures here too.. (I got interested into photography after all when I wanted to learn to make better pictures to use on my website).
These picture posts do have '365' in their title and only have 'photography' as label, so they can be easily identified from other pinball-related posts.
Hope you'll enjoy them..