Month: September 2013

Backyard macro photography with the Lensbaby Composer

What's the real difference between the Standard post format and the Image post format? The same number of images and the same result.

I'm getting better with the Lensbaby Composer, and I'm enjoying using it for macro photography. My biggest challenge has been focusing on. With macro, one has to be very steady when hand-held. A tripod helps, but it's not easy to place a tripod for the shot.

All images were shot handheld on my Nikon D5100 in manual mode. My Sekonic light-meter helped get the shutter readings for the chosen lens aperture. I used an aperture of f/5.6, which provided enough depth-of-field to get the subject in focus.

Sunday 1 September, 2013 | Nikon D5100 | Composer | 1⁄500 sec | ISO 400

The Lensbaby has no electronics to signal the DX body. The Lensbaby Composer has a novel way to control depth of field using little discs with holes that are dropped into a cavity at the front of the lens. Apertures are manually controlled and not reported to the camera. The aperture discs allow apertures of f/2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, and 22. Focus is accomplished by pushing the entire lens assembly forward for close focusing and back for distant focusing. This is a fully manual setup.

This little green guy was hopping around in the grassy area behind my home. He stopped his hopping to pose for me. I was happy about that. It can be hard to focus when the depth of field is minimal. Move your setup even just a few mm, and the entire image is out of focus.

Sunday 1 September, 2013 | Nikon D5100 | Composer | 1⁄250 sec | ISO 400

The spider built a web between the stalk of one of my palms and the side of the house. Unlike the grasshopper, it didn't like posing, and the web moved gently in the wind. I had to take about twenty shots to get these two.

spider
Sunday 1 September, 2013 | Nikon D5100 | Composer | 1⁄500 sec | ISO 100

#Pressgram image round up. Week 1.

Until I can work out the issues with my Pressgram account not posting content to this blog[1, I'll use this workaround to get my images published. The text associated with those images is stuck on Pressgram. There is no way to copy them out and I don't feel like retyping it all. Not all my images made it to Twitter so this is a subset of the 10 images I posted to Pressgram. Facebook is blocking the Pressgram servers for some bogus reason.

All these images were created and shared via the new #Pressgram app but uploaded manually to my blog via the Poster iOS app. The images are in the order in which they were posted to Pressgram.

  1. For me, the original promise of photo + filter + WordPress is yet to be realized. ↩

The Pressgram Buzz

John Saddington must be very excited. His community-backed Pressgram project is well underway. The app has been released and it's creating some buzz. The app has also caught the attention of professional photographers like Scott Wyden Kivowitz, who backed the Kickstarter project at one of the higher levels. Scott has used the alpha and beta versions of the app.

For Pressgram I backed a little more than I usually do because of what the project represents, the fact that it is a combination of both of my passions (photography and WordPress) and I really believe in the created and the product.Scott Wyden
I think what's driving the passionate buzz behind this app is the idea of freedom. Freedom from the ever-changing terms of service (TOS) from various social media network in an ever-increasing grab for giving themselves full copyright control over uploaded images. It's what got me excited about the project.

https://twitter.com/shotbyjenn/status/375673993174716416

Scott already has some ideas of what he's like to see in the app. One is a Custom Post Feature1 and the other is what Scott is calling "Party Mode".

Party Mode would be a fun feature. The idea is that an event organizer can create an event inside of Pressgram and give event attendees access to post to the event blog post. As they take pictures at the event, the organizer will get notified and has the ability to approve or deny photographs from being posted to the blog article. At the end of the event, the one event blog article could have a few or many photographs from various Pressgram users at the event. Think Google Plus Party Mode (Android users have this) but for a WordPress website. Cool, right?

I love that idea! Most of my friends and family are iPhone users. My wife's family lives close by and most weekends we are together celebrating something2. This summer we spent a week in a rental home in the Virginia Beach area. We took a lot of photos on the drive down and during our stay which we later uploaded to Shutterfly. We didn't upload many to Facebook because of concerns of who might see mostly candid family photos.

Imagine how much more fun it would be to update a web site in real-time with iPhone snapshots during our trip and keep complete control over who could view or download those photos? That's the promise of Pressgram. That's the possibility that the community has rallied around. I can't wait to start "pressgramming".

Like Scott mentioned Instagrate Pro is a WordPress plugin that allows for cross-posting images posted to Instagram to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I used it for a bit with my iPhoneography but found it lacking. I love big images and wide uncluttered blog pages. Instagram only allows a 612x612 export of images. All the photos posted with Instagrate Pro were limited to 612 square. That meant that on the 960 grid layout that I used on my blog the Instagram images looked out-of-place. I eventually deleted the plug-in. I'm hoping Pressgram will support larger images sizes.

  1. The "Press" part of Pressgrams comes from WordPress, the default posting service supported in the app. ↩
  2. Including my kids, there are 10 kids in the family. ↩