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

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Justin Le

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

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Justin Le

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 23: Mazama Village Campgrounds

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Justin Le

Crater Lake, Oregon

52wp-W23 Crater Lake Mazama Campground 2014-09-27

Taken Friday, September 26, 2014.

Drove into Crater Lake National Park, well after sundown. After we set up our tents, I decided to set up my cameras for some long exposure timelapses of the sky, even though I was kind of exhausted. Really wanted to do this timelapse over Crater Lake, but driving back up those switchbacks in the dark from the campground didn’t seem appealing. Unfortunately, putting off til tomorrow what could have been done that day came back to bite me, as the following night was cloudy, and windy, so unfortunately, I didn’t end up getting any starscapes over Crater Lake. Looks like I’ll have to go back out to some other time!

I did crop the photo a bit to balance the image, and cut out the truck and the light from the bathroom. And, since I did do a timelapse with this, I was also able to stack the photos into a startrails photo. Using a different method than I have before, I stacked these in photoshop, grouped them as a smart object, and set the Stack Mode to median, which I think gave a more pleasant result than I typically get (the trails usually look more jagged and noisy). I’m still learning some of the post-processing on these photos, but overall, it’s pretty solid! Let me know what you think, or if you have any tips, or tutorials to share!

#52weekproject: Week 19: State Street Bridge

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Justin Le

Week 19: State Street Bridge

Taken Sunday, August 10th, 2014 in downtown Chicago.

After catching up with my friend Joanna the night before, she mentioned that she there happened to be some construction work on the waterfront walkway and that the State Street bridge was raised up during that time. Even though I have been in the city for over 2 years now, I can’t recall ever seeing one of these main bridges up, so I knew I had to go check it out.

Fortunately, it was not raining by the time I went for a wander downtown, but it was misty and the fog had rolled in. I was half-worried the clouds would just open up and start pouring, but I’m glad it didn’t. I ended up with a few shots I liked, but since I was looking for a square image, this one seemed to fit the bill the best. Taken from the Dearborn Street Bridge, shooting east. I’ll post a few more photos below.

Fun Fact:

The State Street bridge is also known as the Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Bridge, in honor of the World War II defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (Which is a peninsula and island in the Philippines which played an important role in World War II).

#52weekproject: Week 12 #Jesstin2014

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Justin Le

Week 12: #Jesstin2014

Photo taken on Friday, May 9th, 2014. This technically falls under Week 11, but I’m willing to fudge this so it gets it’s own week.

Misty Farms, Ann Arbor, MI

Jessica and Justin chose an awesome farm to host their awesome wedding festivities. They were awesome enough to allow me to pull them away for a couple of awesome minutes during the awesome welcome reception to take this awesome photo.

There had been couple of crazy short storms rolling through the area that day, but it made for some really beautiful evening light. I think this could have been even better as a portrait panorama, but didn’t think of it at the time. I might have been a couple beers in. Thanks for an awesome weekend guys! And congrats! (And did I mention how awesome they are?)

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