Project 52 by Mal Schulstad

[Letrow]

Nice shots Mal. They look a bit cheeky actually these birds. It seems you got close, which makes me wonder about how used to people these birds really are.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Nice shots Mal. They look a bit cheeky actually these birds. It seems you got close, which makes me wonder about how used to people these birds really are.

Kookaburras are pretty cheeky birds, and a lot of them are comfortable with people. I've seen many swoop down and steal food from people's plates before.

[Nicola]

very nice serie Mal!
my favourites are #5 for the expression of the bird and #8 for composition
good work!

[jprzybyla]

Hello Mal, great set of images of the Kookaburra. I read your comments concernng the 55-300mm lens. I can offer some suggestions because that is my primary lens for nature photography. I noticed in the EXIF data in a couple of your photographs that the aperature was f5.3 and f5.6, with that lens the sweet spot is between f8 to f16. I have my camera set to aperature priority at f8 and increase that to f11 depending on the depth of field I need. I also have the ISO Sensitivity set between 100 and 3200 with a minimum shutter speed of 1/400 increasing to 1/500 if the light allows. With the high resolution sensors the old axiom of 1/the focal lenght of the lenses with super telephoto lenses doesn't work well. If the light is insufficient there is noise in the images but in post processing noise is easier to deal with rather than soft images. I do not use a tripod for any of my bird/nature shots because I am as likely to shoot a bird flying over head as a dragonfly on a branch, the tripod restricts being able to respond quickly. I also have the Nikon D7000 and have fine tuned the autofocus of that lens to the camera using the Fine Tune Autofocus function. I hope you do not mind me expounding but it was a struggle for me to get everything working together correctly. Anyways, I wish there were Kookaburras in Florida, a lovely bird I would love to photograph. Nice images Mal.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Hi everyone! I thought I'd better come back and finish off what I started. It's been a rather challenging year, particularly with my new job consuming pretty much all of my free time. But I have actually still been taking photos all this time so I thought I'd try and catch up Project 52 (this should be an interesting challenge!)

What you should see is the evolution of my photographic journey, although it's not as dramatic as it sounds, particularly given a lot of it was underwater. But light is light and even underwater, you eventually realise there's so much more you can do once you understand how light behaves in different environments.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I thought I'd start back into it with a photo of one of my favourite subjects... taking a photo of me. Just a simple portrait

[Donald]

Mal - It's great to have you back in the saddle here at CiC and that you launch your return with an image of this lovely young lady. She's starting to get the techniques, but needs to watch that little finger on her left hand!

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Onto the what was my newly acquired Olympus underwater rig. I thought I'd see what I could do to capture some memories of the kids playing at the beach, but actually in the water. It was the middle of the day so the contrast was quite high and the colours somewhat washed out - hence the conversion to black and white. I did try and take a few shots underwater but unfortunately the waves were just throwing too much sand and sediment around for a decent photo.

Compositionally, these aren't my best. But I thought it was an interesting perspective in any case.



I really wish that I'd captured her left hand in this shot.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Mal - It's great to have you back in the saddle here at CiC and that you launch your return with an image of this lovely young lady. She's starting to get the techniques, but needs to watch that little finger on her left hand!

Yes she does. She's receiving a more up to date camera for Christmas - something not as heavy so she can hopefully have her hands elsewhere!

[Teton Chuck]

Mal, Great to have you back. I'm looking forward to seeing some of the photos you have been saving up. As I recall you were just getting into underwater photography when you took your vacation from CIC. It will be fun to see how that has progressed.

Cheers, chuck

[johnbharle]

Great to see you back, Mal. I'm anxious to see your catchup shots.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Event photography is something that I tend to struggle with. Trying to catch the essence of a situation when people are randomly mulling around in less than ideal lighting is one of the most challenging situations that I find myself in. Although I may notice the occasional moment to catch, the majority of the time I find myself taking random photos in the hopes that when I review them later, I'll find something of interest.

So for me event photography ends up becoming more of an exercise in post processing - finding a moment in a scene somewhere that I can do something with and then editing the photo through cropping, touching up, and cleaning up the background to hopefully find something special. Such was the case at my house warming party many months ago. All of these edits were done in Lightroom - I've only recently started delving into Photoshop.

[johnbharle]

Mal, thank G*d that I don't do event photography. I find that if I want to enjoy the party, I should leave my camera at home. I really like the top shot.

[Donald]

I love it. The expression on you daughter's (that is your daughter, isn't it?) face is gorgeous. Is just sits beautifully against that 'serious' look of the guy who's getting right into role.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

I love it. The expression on you daughter's (that is your daughter, isn't it?) face is gorgeous. Is just sits beautifully against that 'serious' look of the guy who's getting right into role.

Yes, that's Jazz. She's actually pretty good with both nerf guns and blowing bubbles

[Goldcoastgolfer]

I'm getting to the point where I wasn't taking too many photos because I was working too much. On one particular weekend Kerry insisted that I have a break - so we went down to a nearby lake and I took my camera (and my laptop). I snapped off these two shots which are nothing to extraordinary, particularly if you're not a fan of a bright (ala overexposed) background behind someone. However Kerry got a great response to these when she posted them on Facebook.

The lesson? A technically not so great photo can still be a great memory.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Nothing particularly special about this photo other than the fish themselves. I took this photo just before sun up - which is a point in time when I find some of the sea creatures doing things I wouldn't normally be expecting them to be doing. I think this is the last of the underwater photos I took where I didn't actually have a strobe attached.



Incidentally, one of the biggest challenges of underwater photography is to actually find a subject that stand out against the background!

[Donald]

Week 20. Indeed and example where the images that might not be of the greatest technical quality may still have huge importance and significance and should not be easily dismissed.

Week 21 -

Incidentally, one of the biggest challenges of underwater photography is to actually find a subject that stand out against the background!

Obvious when you say it, given how camouflage is used in the marine world, but one of those things that those of who don't go down there would never think about.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

I think this photo might have been one of the first that I took with a strobe on my camera. In winter (middle of the year down here) we tend to get a lot of rays in our local river dive spot. This particular fellow looked like he was actually having a conversation with a fish.

Technically - we'll, there's not that much that's technical about it other than trying to sneak up on the pair without scaring them away while being pushed around by currents and bobbing up and down as the air in my lungs went in and out!



And what the little critter looks like in colour...



I think black and white photography can be just as dramatic underwater as it is above it.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Here's another underwater photo of my early days with a strobe - an example of how not to do it. The subject I is a friend of mine who is feeding some fish. The challenges of this photo include:

• Subjects at different distances from the flash - light falls off at a much faster rate in the water than it does in the air;
• The front subject being silver (the fish obviously) causing a reflective hot spot because they were the closest to the strobe;
• The water visibility being less than ideal (a usual phenomena where I dive) resulting in a lot of sediment between the subjects and the camera being lit up by the strobe; and
• The timing of bubbes being breathed out by the divers - I managed to time it right with the closest diver but the other diver obviously didn't get my telepathic instructions to breath in time with the first diver.

Could I have taken the shot differently? Probably not without scaring the fish away. But it certainly highlights some of the challenges of underwater portrait photography - particularly in an uncontrolled environment such as the a river or the sea.

[Goldcoastgolfer]

Some more underwater portraits but this time against the plain, blue background of the Indian Ocean. In hindsight, given the gradient of some of the blues in this photo it would have been interesting to see what some of these would have looked like in black and white.

The usual challenges exist with underwater photograph - getting the light right, reducing backscatter (floating stuff in the water that the flash reflects back), and of course currents moving both myself and the subjects around.

The main challenge of full body portraits under the water is the magnification effect water has on the camera. It basically means you have to be further back (unless you invest in an underwater wide angle lens). That's not a great thing for light fall off or minimising back scatter. But that is yet another challenge of underwater photography!







The happy diver is Kerry incidentally. She conquered her fear of the water that day and came back from the dive an certified Open Water diver and was ecstatic. The fact that she survived a shark encounter probably helped...