Author Archives: Justin Le

#52weekproject: Week 31 – Chicago Subway – Monroe

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Monroe Subway

 

The Accordion Player

Taken Tuesday, Jan 6th, 2015. I’m working on a bunch of new years resolutions, one of which is to continue taking pictures in Chicago. I’ve started to take the Red Line from the Monroe stop in the loop, since it means I get on the train one stop ahead of the other half of the rush hour work crowd. The station here is a little darker, and doesn’t seem quite as lively, but I did find this lady playing her accordion for the waiting passengers. Doesn’t seem to be quite as popular as the singers, but she isn’t quite as interactive either.While I can’t even recall what she was playing, I will say that it takes an immense amount of confidence and thick skin to ply your trade on the subway, where the only feedback you’d get is from the expression of hurried commuters trying to get somewhere. Thanks but no thanks; I think I’ll stick to just sharing my photos on the internet. 😛

So as I watched her play, I took out my camera and waited for the train to pass in the background, and snapped a few shots before I shoved my camera back in my pocket, and dropped the only dollar I had in her bag and boarded the train. Although it was a quick photo, and I was actually able to eyeball exposure and had the settings dialed in just right without even having to futz with my camera too much. Which is something I feel kinda proud of… Like that should earn me a ribbon or something!) Even the the camera is slower, and with the manual controls (or especially because of the manual controls), I am still able to take a quicker shot than I probably could have with this other newer camera I have.

Black and White vs Color

One of the other things I’ve done is converted this to black and white, and brought it into photoshop to do some dodging (to decrease the exposure in some areas, and increase the overall contrast of the image). I’m finding that I like doing that for my black & white conversions, but it would be a terrible pain to include into a workflow for an entire series of photos, but I’m sure that’s just my laziness talking there…

I’m a little torn between whether I like the black and white version, or if I prefer the color version (also dodged a bit). I think each have their own merits.What do you think?

Monroe Subway v2 color

#52weekproject: Week 30 – Jimmy’s 34th Birthday

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Dilapidated Jimmy v01

 

Week 30: Jimmy’s 34th Birthday

Taken Monday, December 22nd, 2014 just off of the barely traversed back country roads of Montana. I spent my Christmas out there visiting my brother, and just happened to take a picture of my bro with his dog, Zipper in front of this finely constructed home. We had taken some time to walk around and check out the inside of this… Can you even call it a house? It’s kind of a creepy thing, checking out an abandoned structure. It had 3 rooms, with a roof, walls and floorboards, all warped and coming apart at the seams. An old mattress lay in the middle of the room, revealing it’s rusty and decrepit springs for the world to see; while old torn clothes, various broken furnishings, and beer cans littered the rest of the room. It felt creepy in broad daylight, so I can only imagine how it would be in the dead of night, with the wind howling and whistling through all the nooks and crannies in the walls.

Anyway, we didn’t stay long enough to find that out in person. We had our own scary encounter later on. As we tried to head back to the cabin were we staying, we took an alternate backcountry route, which, come to find out, was fairly iced over. As night was falling, the temperature dropped, and we almost slid off the side of an iced over single lane road into an 50 foot ravine. Luckily after some white knuckling, we were able to do some controlled sliding back down the sloped road and turn around and head back to our cabin the same way we came. Maybe this year, I’ll get my brother some snow chains for his truck for his birthday.

Anyway, I’m trying to catch up on posting my photos, so hopefully, I’ll be sharing more soon!

#52WeekProject: Moonrise over Chicago Harbor

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Week 28: Moonrise over Chicago Harbor

Taken on Saturday, December 6, 2014. It had been a while since I had gone out to take a picture. The last time, it was of a boat in the harbor while I was trying to do some scouting for this photo. Unfortunately, the day I originally wanted to take this photo (Nov 6th), the weather was crazy and the winds and waves ended up tearing up a lot of the lakefront and even sunk a barge. So wisely, I waited until the next full moon to take the picture. (And hooray, I didn’t get swept out to sea!)

The top picture was taken at around 4:20pm, as the sun was setting. The bottom picture was taken at around 5:01pm just after the moon rose over the horizon. The downside of having moved to December, was the moonrise ended up being 40 minutes after the sunset, so because of the darker scene, I needed to boost the exposure when caused a lot of issues. (As you can see in the blurrier bottom picture.)

In order to emphasize the moon, I wanted to use the longest focal length I could, which meant a 300mm f/4.5 manual focus lens stacked with a 2x teleconverter and a 1.4x teleconverter. This makes it an effective focal length of 1000mm and the increased distance from the focal plane reduces the overall exposure by 3 stops, so an effective aperture of about f/13. Unfortunately, because of these limitations, and the decreased ambient light, my shutter needed to be open much longer (from 1/125s to 1/2s), and with the long focal length and heavy gear on my tripod, every little vibration resulted in major blurriness in the photo. Even after I switched out the lens to the 200 f/2.8 with and only the 2x teleconverter (EFL 400mm f/5.6) at 1/6s, and you can still see major blurriness in the photo.

So, while the idea was pretty solid, the execution was pretty terrible due to the conditions and limitations of my equipment. I’m definitely going to try this photo again, and will likely aim for next year’s supermoon (Sept 27th, 2015) when the moon will be about 14% bigger, and the moon rises at 6:32pm, 7 before the sunsets. I’ll bring a sturdier tripod, and keep my fingers crossed that the weather holds up so I can shoot at some reasonable settings, so it’ll look like that top picture with a giant ass moon (not my own) in the background!

Also, I made a timelapse, which you can see below…

#52weekproject: Week 27 – A Boat at Sunset

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A Boat at Sunset

 

Week 27: A Boat at Sunset

Taken Monday, October 27th, 2014. I took my sweet time posting this photo, although, I’m just behind on blogging in general.

On this excursion, I went out trying to scout for a picture I was planning to take the following week. The photo I was planning on taking was a shot of the full moon rising on the horizon, with the lighthouse in the foreground using a 300mm lens with a 2x teleconverter. Using The Photographer’s Ephemeris, it would have been perfect with the moon rising around 4:46pm on Thursday, November 6th, and the sun setting around 4:38pm, which would probably have given enough ambient light to illuminate the lighthouse and not have everything else be pitch black. Unfortunately (and anti-climactically) though, on November 6th, it was majorly hazy and there were huge waves on Lake Michigan, that actually tore up the Lakefront path pretty bad, so I didn’t end up going to take the photo (and I got stuck at work a little later than planned anyway).

I think I’m going to try again on the next full moon, December 6th. We’ll see what the weather is like then. But I digress.

Anyway,about this photo. Nothing spectacular about this photo, but I just really like the light. Just the hint of orange sunlight touching the boat,  the slightly choppy dark blue waves, and the vibrant red sail. Compositionally though, there’s no real balance to it. The boats directly behind it are a little distracting as it jumbles up with the mast. Ideally, if those boats were a little further to the right, it would definitely have balanced the photo out better. If I were a more dishonest man, I would have just photoshopped this photo and placed some photos to the right. I mean… It’s never too late, I might revisit this photo someday and do just that.

So what do you think?

#52weekproject: Week 25 – Anthony and Celine get Married

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Tuan and Che

Week 25:  Anthony and Celine get Married (and Subsequently Photobombed in Yosemite)

Taken on Saturday, October 4th, 2014, in Yosemite National Park near the Swinging Bridge.

In the latter part of my vacation week this fall, I just happened to meet up with my cousin Anthony (aka Tuan), and his awesome and beautiful (very soon to be) wife, Celine (aka Che) for a “casual” get together with a bunch of family and friends. Not sure what the occasion was, but they seemed to be dressed up and celebrating something (okay, so it was their wedding). They had asked me if I would do them the great honor of taking photos for them, which I gladly obliged.

I’m not a wedding photography, although, but by this time, I have shot a handful of weddings (maybe this is my 7th?). My wedding photography has really been for close friends and family on destination weddings. So it combined my 2 favorite things… people I love, and the people they love. And travel. And photography. So, 4 favorite things.

Anyway, back to the photo… After the ceremony at Sentinel Beach, we had an awesome reception at the lodge, and we ended up taking some group photos with all the friends and family over by the Swinging Bridge area. As I fiddled with some settings to take this picture, their niece decided to pop in the frame and see what was going on.

Here are a few more from the day…

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