Stefan Arnone - Digital Nature Photography

I went out to Riverfront Park on the afternoon of September 27, 2018 with the rest of Mark's Digital Photography class to shoot birds. The lighting was nice and diffused from the clouds, and despite the cold wind and occasionally sprinkling rain, it was a very productive shoot and I got lots of good pictures. One of my favorite pictures is of this goose getting ready to land on Lake Josephine. I was in Aperture priority mode, and had my ISO set at 100. To minimize the shutter speed and freeze the motion of the goose, I went to an aperture of 5.6. The result is quite pleasing and the goose was well framed. There is some motion blur on the outer wings (especially the wingtips) that could have been eliminated by shooting at a faster speed (probably in Shutter priority, which I later switched to for the rest of the shoot), but I kind of like it because it gives a dynamic feel to the picture. I removed three ducks from the perimeter of the picture using the heal tool--they were all pa...

September 24, 2018 07:11 Canon EOS Rebel T3 Lens: EF-S18-55mm Aperture Priority 1/13 f/16 ISO 100 Focal length: 55.0 mm September 24, 2018 18:33 Canon EOS Rebel T3 Lens: EF-S18-55mm Aperture Priority 1/25 f/16 ISO 100 Focal length: 18.0 mm

I made my first attempt at combining two pictures using Photoshop's Merge to HDR function. I've included the two input photos for comparison. I'm impressed with the algorithm's ability to figure out proper exposure, and I think it does a pretty good job. However, I would like to explore some more with how to possibly reduce the color changes that come with HDR--for example, the yellowness of the sunset. It might also be interesting to compare the HDR function to comparable tools in Lightroom, as well as to alternative techniques for balancing exposure such as selectively applied filters.

I wanted to try out the graduated filter setting in Lightroom, so I took two photos from the evening of August 30 that I took up at the airport during my work study shift, and applied the graduated filter to different parts of each picture. I've included the originals for comparison. I like the exposure of the airplane and ramp in the foreground, but the sky is a little too blown out. I used the graduated filter to reduce the exposure of the sky 1.87 stops. The result is below: The photo feels more natural and balanced, and more representative of what the scene actually looked like to the human eye. This second photo has a nice exposure on the sunset and sky, but the foreground and airplane are underexposed, so I used the graduated filter again to increase the foreground exposure (I don't recall how many stops): Again, the difference is fairly subtle, but really adds to the natural feeling of the photo.

August 30, 2018 approx. 22:00 Canon EOS Rebel T3 Lens: EF75-300mm f/4-5.6 Manual mode Exposure: 30.0 sec f/16 ISO 100 Focal Length: 80mm Stabilized on car roof rack (no tripod)

I had to stay fairly late at Rocky Flight Ops for my work study job on the evening of Thursday, August 30. I had been seeing some lighting to the south of Billings while putting airplanes away, and a couple big flashes caught my eye while driving out of the parking lot at around 9:45, so I spontaneously decided to pull over next to Airport Road on top of the Rims and try to take some pictures. I don't have a tripod (at this point) and so I knew I would need to stabilize my camera in order to get good pictures in the darkness. Fortunately, my car's roof rack works pretty well for propping up the camera, so I parked with my car nose-east (perpendicular to the southern direction in which I wanted to shoot) and did just that. The lightning was fairly sporadic, maybe a flash or two a minute, so I knew I would need a longer exposure to capture the strikes. I set my camera (in Shutter Priority mode) to ISO 100, the slowest possible shutter speed (30 seconds), focused on the city lig...