HegdePhotosBlog

Some photos from Palouse...

2007-10-12T23:46:00.000-07:00

This summer we made a day trip to Palouse. Just took some pictures along the way. Did try some experimentation with Zooming and panning on the Garbanzo Fields. You can find the photos at: Palouse Summer Gallery

You can also find these photos at Palouse Flickr Gallary

Yellowstone and Grand Teton Trip

2007-10-08T10:40:00.001-07:00

We recently (Sep 2007) visited Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. We had a really nice time photographing various animals and enjoy the fall colors. Photos have been posted to the following Galleries:

For those who crave for bigger images, I have posted many photos on our Flickr Gallery.

Deers in Mt. Rainier National Park

2007-01-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

These images have been due for a while. There are not enough images of wild animals with us to create a new gallery, so posting a few here.

During 2006 summer, we visited Mt. Rainier a couple of times hoping to take some sunrise shots. On every occasion we were there there wasn't a great sunrise. However we came across a herd of deers near upper and lower parking lot in Paradise. We stalked them for few hrs before they disappeared in to the wild.

We were able to get very close to them by not making any sudden movements and slowly walking with them to get them accustomed to our presence. One deer even came very close and checked us out! All these images were made with Nikon 80-200 f2.8 on a D200 and all were hand held.

Fireworks on New Year's Eve..

2007-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Usually we avoid going to Seattle for viewing the fireworks on the Space Needle since it will be overcrowded, cold and there will be a lot of drunk drivers! Above all, finding a good viewpoint for photography is a challenge. This year we decided to take a chance and headed to Kerry Park on the Queen Ann hill. This park offers perhaps the best view of Seattle downtown.

As this park is crowded by photographers on most days, we were thinking we won't get a spot today. To our surprise, there were not that many photographers when we got there by 8pm. There was no rain and the sky was clear! But it was freezing cold!

We waited for 4 hrs for the fireworks along with many other photographers. By 10pm the park got jam packed.

The fireworks started at 12am and lasted for about 10 mins. To be honest, there was everything this year (clear day, great parking spot and cheering crowd) except for great fireworks (compared to previous years)! :( Once the fireworks were over, we could hear people saying "This was an economy package fireworks..."

Here are few shots that we got. All these are composite of two or three shots. We used Photoshop CS2 and created layers for each of the images and merged them.

Update: Wednesday, January 10, 2007

We got many requests on how these shots were made. So, posting the techniques used for these photos.

We used a sturdy Tripod (of course!)

We took couple of test shots of the space needle before the fireworks and adjusted the compensation by -0.7. then kept the same settings. We used Auto WB which worked out pretty well!

We used Nikon 80-200 f2.8 and zoomed in on space needle (vertically) still leaving some space on the sides and at the top for fireworks.

We didn’t change the frame at all. This helps combining multiple firework shots easily (during post processing) and we knew that the fireworks would only last for about 10 mins.

Since we wanted slower shutter speed to catch as much action as possible at once, we used f14-f16 and this got us about 6-8 seconds.

Mostly we just kept tripping the shutter as soon as it returned as it got us some actions in sequence.

Whenever possible we started the shots in-between the batches of fireworks – doing this allowed us to have slower shutter speeds while exposing the shots correctly. Starting a shot when the fireworks are in progress, would have resulted in faster shutter speeds (as there is more available light) and we wouldn't have been able to capture the long light streaks of the fireworks.

New Blog in the New Year!

2006-12-31T13:51:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I wanted to add blogging to our website but didn't get enough time to do it so far. Google Blogger has a publishing feature where it will let you publish the blog to your own hosting website using FTP. So, I decided to give it a shot and save some time! It's a work in progress as it will take some time for me to completely integrate the UI in to this website. (So expect to toggle back and forth between this website and blogger UI for now!)

While doing this, we also posted some new images of Canadian Rockies, Tulip Festival 2006, Arboretum, Portland Rose Garden and Palouse Summer . In addition we also added few images of a running Pinwheel to General Gallery! Please feel free to check them out!

For those who don't know us, we are a husband-wife photographer team living near Seattle. You can learn more about us here.

This blog will mostly be about Photography and may be some random thoughts. Any comments, questions or feedback are always welcome! We hope you enjoy the blog!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

- Anand