Life through a lens

The story of this shot is strange. I was walking on a mountain road, wondering about life and photography, when I saw a group of nice violet flowers standing just in front of me. In by backpack I had the camera with my 55-250mm mounted, so I dediced to try a macro shot with that non-macro lens. After a couple of shots, just when I was going to leave the flower, a bee (or bumblebee) "landed" on it and started to do something, probably impollinating. What a wonderful occasion! But it was so difficult to follow the movements of the bee, and I was forced to set the AI Servo on my camera. 

The AI Servo is used when the subject is in movement, so the camera focus every time the subject change its position. To improve the precision of the focus, I used only one AF point, the central one. Because of my lens is not a macro lens, I was forced to stay at one meter from the flower, so I had to zoom on it, shooting at 250mm. It's incredible, here, the sharpness of the scene: consider that the shutter speed was only 1/80 and ISO 100. This is the miracle of the 4th-generation Canon IS. 

Like always, I shot in RAW mode and then, in the digital darkroom process, I worked a little bit on the image. For completeness, I want to show you the original shot: now you can evaluate the real power of post-production that is that of improve photographs.

Two days ago I didn't know what to do (well, I had to study, obviously) so I took the train. Direction: Verona. That beautiful city, location of the world-wide famous love story between Romeo and Juliet. Verona is a medieval city, full of towers, old palaces, castles, and monuments. All this is sorrounded by wonderful hills and one of the longest rivers in Italy, the Adige. The weather was good, the sun shined and the sky was totally blue, without any clouds.
I took about 240 shots, but not all are good: some aren't sharp, some overexposed, some underexposed, some pictures are not so well composed and other simply are not interesting. In order to have an improved flexibility in what concern the post-production operations, I shoot always in RAW mode. In this way, I had the possibility to make all the important regulations (like white balancing, sharpness, contrast, saturation and other things) on my computer with its processor that is more powerful and accurate that that of the camera.
The major problem was that of the exposure: whene photographing with the sun behind me, there wasn't any problem. I just overexposed of 1/3 using the evaluative metering mode and the results were pretty good. On the other side, when the sun was in front of me, the photos were all dark. This is fundamentally due to the fact that the metering system of the camera takes the sky as a strong light source so, in order to obtain the correct exposure, it underexpose automatically of one or two stops. But that "correct exposure" is that of the sky! In that way, the subjects are all dark. To solve this problem, one usually overexpose of one or more stops, in order to have the right light balance.
However, in extreme conditions, even this technique doesn't work very well. Here is an example.
In this photo the metering mode was evaluative and the exposure compensation was of +1/3.

Finally, today I had some time to dedicate to photography, so I picked up my D-SRL camera and went to Venice. The weather was not of the best, but it was good enough to let me take a lot of photos. Unfortunately I had only 4 hours, so I didn't walk all over the city but only in famous places like Rialto and San Marco. The purpose of this photo-walk was that of improve my composition technique together with obtaining the right exposure in different light conditions. The white clouds didn't help me in this, so I had to compensate the under exoposure of the on-board metering system, over exposing of about one stop. However, sometimes, the over exposure produced washed out highlights. Anyway, here are some of the best results of today. Let us comment the single shots.

These are only four of the many shots I have taken, so stay tuned on my Flickr page for further updates. Note that I've also created two HDR versions of Canal Grande, seen from Rialto. When I finish the producing work, I put them online.

Let me know what do you think about these photos, thank you.

In these days I have no time to improve my photographic technique, but I'm experimenting black and white (hereafter B&W) photography. I have to admit that I prefer colored pictures, but actually even B&W could be funny.

Indeed, as in colored photos, even with B&W you have to take enough time in the digital darkroom. Obviously, the parameters you have to modify are less than the previous cases, but you still obtain nice results.

Here I post two photos (larger versions can be found by clicking on the thumbnails, re-directing you to relative Flickr pages) that have been corrected in some parts with different editing programs.

In the first photo there is something like a barbed wire on a blurred fields and hills background. At the moment of the shot, the problem I had in mind was that of highlighting the wire but, at the same time, not to loose too many details of the background. There was another problem: it has just started to rain and I had not the time to adjust properly the settings of my camera. So I shot in "P" program (something like a semi-authomatic mode) in JPEG with only the B&W setting selected. The result is amazing: the wire is visible and you still can distinguish the background (I mean: you see the blurred hills and fileds, but that's enough to contextualise the wire). At home, I imported that picture in Apple's iPhoto and adjusted it working on sharpness, color tone, contrast and levels. The result is this.

I hope you like those first attempts in taking B&W photos. Let me know what you think about that.

Today I finally had the opportunity and time to devote myself to photography, especially in the composition of frames. The beautiful locations of these shots are the hills near the italian border with Slovenia, where between 1915 and 1918 Italians and Austrians fought hard, resulting in the famous Battle of Caporetto. Hence, I visited the trenches and taken so many photos. As I explained earlier, I focused my attention in the composition, expecially in the "rule of third". I also tried to improve my technique; however, the results are not so exciting: indeed I shooted almost all the photos in "Apeture Priority" mode, with an aperture of about f/5.6. That is: the depth of field isn't very large. Furthermore, I shooted only in JPEG mode, so the quality is not of the best. Another feature, common in all the shots, is the fact that I used the circle polarizing filter in order to avoid the reflections (it had just rained) and to saturate colors.
Anyway, take a look to the photos and let me know what do you think about them.

These are only few shots. To see more, stay tuned on the corresponding Flickr's Set (named, of course, "Caporetto").