Weekend Bliss, originally uploaded by vsacker.

Q: What does a Lensbaby have in common with drinking?

A: They both allow you creative focus on a variety of subjects.

I got two things I have been looking forward to for a while this past Friday: a margarita (or three) and a Lensbaby 2.0 lens for my camera. Amazon had a great deal on the last generation of this lens and overspending on our credit card allowed me to use rewards points to pick one up with no cash outlay.

I’m still figuring it all out, but it’s horribly easy to move the sweet spot of this lens around and get incredible blur radiating out from it. This is not a great image, but I love the focus on the drink while the stem and base of the glass dissolve nicely keeping the eye coming back to the drink.

I’ve been trying to find a good day to take off work for a little while now.  I haven’t taken a day off this year, and while that isn’t a lot of time, it has been rather stressful at work and a day off has been much needed.  I was planning to take off a day a couple weeks ago, but then I got pressed into service on a project that had a major deadline moved up on them.  A  few weeks of work on that behind me, I planned to take off Monday, but I needed to finish up a document for another task that had fallen in my lap.  So Tuesday was the day, but an executive meeting got called and I needed to be at work.

So finally, Wednesday was the day…  until about 2:45 PM on Tuesday, when one of my customers called and needed something picked up the next morning.  Rather than postponing my day once again, I decided to give up a few morning hours to play courier.  After that, I finally got on my way.  I headed off to see the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  I’ve been meaning to go for the past few years, but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Now, I love public transportation.  Especially with the sleep deficit that a two-year-old and three-month-old provide, not having to pay attention or even stay awake while getting somewhere is a major bonus (not to mention the traffic avoidance due to HOV usage and cost savings versus driving).  All that being said, sometimes public transportation can be a little tedious.  Witness my travel yesterday:

• To work: drive, bus, train, train, walk
• Work to National Cathedral:  walk, train, train, bus, walk
• National Cathedral to home: walk, bus, train, train, bus, drive

Even the next morning, it’s a little exhausting just looking at that list.  When you add in the dead time waiting for the next train or bus, it gets even worse.  I left work about 10:30 AM and got home about 3:15 PM.  Over that 4:45 period, I would (generously) estimate that I spent 90 minutes at the cathedral, walking around and taking pictures. So there was a lot of lost time for me yesterday.

Some of it was my fault, as I waited around needlessly for almost ten extra minutes after I foolishly skipped a train on a different line that would have taken me where I wanted to go.

Other times, I feel like the system let me down.  When I finally got out of the Metro system and staring to look for the bus that would take me to National Cathedral, I had no end of problems.  The schedule/map in the Metro station was quite clear that I needed to find bus stop G for the route I needed.  There weren’t any obvious pointers to the lettered stops, so I walked around for almost 15 minutes in a big (Dupont) circle trying to find this stop.  After seeing my bus go by a block away, I traced the route I saw it on and found a stop at which to wait (costing me an extra 15 minutes, at least).

All the other stuff aside, I did make it to the cathedral, walked around, and took pictures.  I’ve always enjoyed walking around churches.  I even took a Gothic Cathedrals class in college to learn more about them (and get a necessary humanities credit for graduation).  On my two trips to Europe, visiting churches has always been part of experiencing any city.  Even when I travel inside the US and Canada, I’ve sought out churches to visit.

According to the brochure, National Cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world.  Unfortunately, I felt none of the majesty of other cathedrals I’ve seen my travels. I don’t know why that is exactly.  Maybe it’s because it wasn’t a Catholic church, and therefore I didn’t feel as strong a connection to it.  Maybe it’s because it’s so young (only completed in 2000), that it just doesn’t feel weathered or broken in yet.  It really was kind of sterile.  Pretty, but sterile.

Anyway, I did get a few photos I liked.  One heads this post, and others can be found at jvasak.photoshop.com.  I’m testing that out as a place to drop early proofs as I work on final edits with a little more care.

Strobeless Jump, originally uploaded by vsacker.

One of my Christmas presents this past year was a Strobist lighting kit from MPEX photo (kits here). I hadn’t really played with it until this past weekend, but the wet and cold weather foiled my plans to go out and shoot and left me inside to mess around.

After spending a little time learning about guide numbers and proper manual flash exposure, I starting doing some tests. Headshots get boring rather quick, and I’m not the most attractive guy to look at anyway, so I started messing with the timer on my camera and stopping motion with the strobe.

I gave myself a long shutter and relied completely on the strobe to stop my movement. Well, I waited a little too long between shots this time and the flash went to sleep on me (need to change the default sleep time to greater than 90s). The result was this motion blur of me jumping in the little (non-color corrected) ambient light available.  Maybe it’s a little odd that one of my favorite images from a test of a new lighting kit was the one shot where it didn’t fire, but least you don’t have to look at the expression on my face in this frozen leap.

Piazza San Pietro, originally uploaded by vsacker.

First of all, this is my first attempt to post straight from Flickr, so we’ll see how this goes…

A little later in the week than I would have liked, I got around to processing an older image. This is actually four images stitched together with software from Canon, then roughly cleaned up in Photoshop. Far from perfect, but much better than the first attempt I had made years ago. I enjoy the photo even for its obvious flaws.

I came back to this image as I’ve been catching up on some podcasts that piled up while I was home with our new baby. One of those shows in the Daily Breakfast, hosts by a Dutch priest, Father Roderick Vonhögen. He recently traveled to Rome and the Vatican and has been talking about his trip in great detail.

Visiting the Vatican was one of the highlights of a trip to Italy my wife and I took a few months before our daughter was born. It was a little rainy that day, but my wife held an umbrella over me as I shot these images from the right, rear end of the piazza. With the clouds staring to yield to the sun, I thought the light was kind of nice on the wet stones.

On Monday, I went into the office, nominally to fill out my timecard for the pay period.  It was also a nice opportunity to have a little peace and quiet for a few minutes.  My wife also gave me the green light to take a few pictures while I was already out, so I headed over to the Air Force Memorial as it is pretty convenient to Crystal City.  I had a very clear day and, for better or worse, I was there a little after noon.  The light wasn’t the best, but the brilliant blue sky was a decent backdrop to the memorial, especially after using a circular polarizer to control the glare a little bit.

I didn’t shoot too many frames, but got a few keepers.  I processed four of these today and uploaded them to my Flickr stream.  I hope to do some others later this week, but that remains to be seen.  The collection so far (click through for access to larger versions and please leave comments here or on Flickr if you have any comments/critiques!).

I took the picture with a wide open aperture to get the very narrow depth of field and enhanced the effect with a strong vignette.   Comments/critiques would be appreciated (click for larger view).

So here’s the proof, with a little contrast boost and not much else done to it (click for full-sized version).

Back in March, our nephew came to visit and we all took a trip to the Udvar-Hazy annex to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum.  I took a few pictures, but never got around to doing much with them.  One of my favorite items on display was the SR-71 Blackbird, built by Lockheed’s Skunk Works team.  They have a fascinating history; from the official Skunk Works site:

Many times a customer would come to the Skunk Works^® with a request and on a handshake the project would begin, no contracts in place, no official submittal process. Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works^® team designed and built the XP-80 in only 143 days, seven less than was required.

What allowed Kelly to operate the Skunk Works® so effectively and efficiently was his unconventional organizational approach. He broke the rules, challenging the current bureaucratic system that stifled innovation and hindered progress. His philosophy is spelled out in his “14 practices and rules” that he and his team followed. Many of these “rules” are still considered valid today.

It’s not really the Ironman way of doing research, but a semi-autonomous group of incredibly smart scientists and engineers building advanced systems in the dark is pretty cool.  Plus, they have an awesome logo for their team.  With that background, I already like the SR-71 before I even got a chance to walk around the plane, and this photo was one of my favorites.

The lighting isn’t great inside the Udvar-Hazy Center, and I wasn’t using a very fast lens.  I was able to brace myself along a railing and take this shot at 1/6 second.  I had another version of this shot that wasn’t so lucky and was quite blurry.  In post-processing, I tried to knock down some of the really bright windows in the back ground, set a true black point, and really pushed the contrast.  Some of the colors are very saturated, but I really like the detail in the skin of the Blackbird.

As before, leave a comment if you like/dislike the photo (click for larger image).

The photo below was taken just this past weekend.  I was hanging out with my daughter in the basement as she was arranging her crayons on the table.  I decided to snap a few pictures, and liked this one the best.  I shot it in low light without a flash, leaving it a little grainier than some photos, but I like the effect.  I performed a little color corrections, levels adjustment, and added a little vignette.  Finally, I sharpened the end result and added a border.

Please leave a comment if you have an opinion or reaction for this picture (click for full-size view).

1. Create a duplicate layer from your image
2. Apply the High Pass Filter (radius somewhere between 1-3 pixels seems to work well)
3. Change blending mode to Overlay (optionally Soft Light or Hard Light)
4. Adjust opacity of the layer to your sharpening needs.

Read the linked articles for more information and sample images.  The advantage is a layer whose opacity you can adjust to increase/decrease the effect, as well as being able to easily mask the layer to selectively apply the filter.  Very cool.