This week’s last minute photo was one that I took back in December of 2010. I was walking around in Langhorne PA one day by Core Creek and I happened to look up and notice some shoes dangling from the power lines. I love the lines and angles that the power lines create. The shoes were spinning because of the wind so I had to time my shot so that the broad side of each shoe was facing me. I added some film grain later in Photoshop to give this image some texture. Enjoy!
This week’s photo was one that I took back on 12/9/09 in Langhorne, PA. As I was driving around aimlessly I came upon this old house that I had used in a photo shoot before. It is abandoned, boarded up and just sitting off the road a little bit. So I pulled over and walked around the perimeter hoping for a cool photo. I like old run down places, buildings, people etc. so this naturally caught my attention. I walked around the building until the sun was just sitting over the house in a very interesting manner. Then I carefully adjusted the camera to make the house a silhouette against the sun. This changed the entire picture into a dark twilight-ish type of image that I fell in love with. In Photoshop I manually added a sepia tone and then added some selective blurring to give it a hazy, foggy sort of feel. It just has such an eerie feeling to it. I think this image has caused me to start staying up late and watching The X-Files again because it reminds me of the show. It’s worth losing some sleep over; the picture and the show:)
This was a photo shoot with writer and apple eater Jeremy Dorfman on 2/18/2010. The apple came into the picture for no other reason than he was hungry and we were looking for any props. You can really see the progression of joy and pleasure in this series. This is a typical lighting setup with a main light to the camera left, a background light and a reflector on the right hand side to bounce some light back onto his face. To add some contrasting color to the image I used a rim light behind Jeremy camera right with a blue gel on it. You can see it separating him a bit from the background and adding some interest to the photograph.
I took this picture standing on a bridge over the Schuylkill expressway in Philadelphia. I had to park my car at the art museum and walk across the street and to the bridge. This is an HDR image showing lots of motion on the highway.
In this post I want to discuss how I took these pictures of lightning and share some 
tips that I discovered along the way.
I am an equal opportunity photographer; by that I mean I will take pictures of anything if I think it’s interesting. And what could be more interesting than lightning? Well recently I found myself in the middle of a very large thunderstorm with an abundance of thunder and lightning. I kept peeking outside and witnessing incredible lightning streaking through the Pennsylvania sky; so I grabbed my camera.
I had done some research about photographing lightning before but I had never had the chance to actually try it out before. The first complication with lightning photography is location. You have to either wait for a thunderstorm or you have to go find one. When you do find a lightning storm you need to find a relatively safe place to set up the camera and take pictures from. This presents a very difficult situation because you don’t want your camera to become drenched and you also don’t want the tripod to become a lightning rod… The other issue at hand is that by sheltering yourself you will likely be blocking off your view of the lightning.
I chose to set up right at the front door of my house with the door wide open. There I was reasonably protected from the rain because it was blowing away from the house and I was also able to have a relatively unobstructed view for about 180 degrees. In this scenario that was the best I could do. Luckily the lightning show was directly outside my front door making for potentially great pictures.
To take pictures of lightning, or pretty much anything else at night you have to have a sturdy lightning rod… I mean tripod. This enables you to frame the shot and keep the shutter open for long periods of time to capture the bolts of lightning.You will also need a camera capable of shooting in bulb mode (you can manually control how long the shutter is open), and preferably a wide angle lens, (I used a Canon 10-22mm). The trick to capturing lightning is anticipation and focus.
Lightning is very bright, while the rest of the sky is very dark… duh. So it is going to take a few shots to get the correct camera settings. Full manual mode is really the only way to take pictures like this. I am a big fan of manual and I use it 95% of the time when I’m photographing. The trick with lightning is to set the shutter to bulb, meaning that you control how long the shutter is open by pressing and releasing the shutter, and adjusting the aperture to compensate.
By setting the shutter to bulb you are able to open the shutter to capture a few bolts of lighting and then close it before too much lightning overexposes the image. This is very important because if you were to pick a regular time for the shutter instead of controlling it manually you would likely miss the lightning or get too much of it in one shot. So controlling the length of the shutter is one of the keys to lightning photography. The other key is aperture.
Aperture is how much light is let into the camera. Much like our pupils the aperture expands and contracts to let in the correct amount of light to expose the picture. For lightning photography an aperture of f8-f13 is probably a good starting point depending on how bright the lightning is. I captured these images at f6.3. Lightning is going to require specific settings each time you attempt to capture it so there are no definite rules or settings. The most important thing is to keep checking the pictures that you have taken. One important thing to mention is that you need to be very quick and efficient when viewing and adjusting your camera’s settings. If you take too much time looking at the pictures you will definitely miss great lightning strikes. It will always seem like the best lightning bolts were the ones you missed by looking at your camera…
Looking through the viewfinder is also not necessary for lightning photography. As long as you have framed the shot decently and focused manually either on a cloud or something farther away you can just watch the sky and 
keep a finger on the shutter to take the picture. You need to be able to react very quickly and watch the lightning as your take each picture. If you let too much lightning in the shot it will be overexposed and you will lose any detail in the lightning. If you don’t let enough lightning/light into the camera the shot it will be dark and underexposed. So there is a fine line that you have to find each time you take a picture. Basically you are just crossing your fingers hoping that the big bolt of lightning that streaks across the sky will occur when you are taking a picture. As you take more and more pictures of the storm you will get a feel for how long you need to keep the shutter open. Basically I set my camera to expose for a brilliant bolt of lightning and keep taking pictures until I finally got one.
If you spend enough time taking lightning pictures you will get lucky and capture that big bolt streaking across the sky. I got lucky a few times but some my images were overexposed and too bright to be useable. So I adjusted the aperture to let in less light and I set my camera to capture those big bright bolts of light. Then it was all just waiting and trying to focus on the sky and not miss anything.
So the next time there’s a big lightning storm outside, instead of hiding under a blanket reach for your camera. But please be safe about taking pictures during a lightning storm. You don’t want to endanger your camera or your life.
This picture was taken at the Masonic Village in Elizabethtown PA way back in July of 2009. It is a statue in the Veterans’ Grove Monument dedicated to honor all veterans – past, present and future. Unveiled on November 11, 1927 the palms in the hands of the woman symbolize peace and victory according to the original sculptor Augustus Lukeman. This is an HDR picture where I take three exposures of the scene on a tripod and merge them together in post production. I had been up to this monument before and wanted to go back and try some different images of Veterans Grove. I’ve wanted to share this image for awhile now. Enjoy!
Displayed above are two rustic robots standing outside of a house in Penndel, PA. I noticed them while on a walk on Dec. 15,2009. I took one look at them and just thought to myself…”What the…?” It looked like the perfect picture to me. It didn’t look like anyone was home so I walked up with my Canon 10-22mm lens and snapped this shot from my hip facing up into the dramatic robots. This was the only shot I took of these robots because I heard a big dog barking inside the house and I didn’t want to disturb anybody inside. I was glad that I did get this shot because since then they have miraculously disappeared… I was very happy with this exposure because the sky was so interesting and blue. I added some vibrance in Photoshop as well as some selective sharpening to the sky and the robots. Enjoy!
View the album on FACEBOOK or download it on the gallery on my website McMastersPhotography.com. You can also buy prints of the Garbage Robots: HERE.
I have decided that I have too many great photographs just sitting around on my computer hard drives. The adventure of making a photograph is such a creative process for me. But when there is no reason to finish all of the pictures, especially the ones I just took for fun, they tend to just reside on my hard drive and slip into the past. Thus I am going to publish a new picture every week with shooting information, a description, and any additional information. I have no rules for this project other than to put at least 1 image online per week. The subject matter will be a myriad of objects, people, buildings, animals, etc. that have at one time intrigued my creative eye. I will keep the photographs on an ongoing album on the McMasters Photography FACEBOOK page as well as on a gallery on my website McMastersPhotography.com. I will also include a link to a Pictage website where you can buy prints and download these images click: HERE.
Here goes number one:
This picture was taken on 12-9-09 in Langhorne, PA. It is an HDR image looking onto the decrepit “Bridgetown Mill House.” I’m actually shooting through one of the windows with my camera resting on the bricks in the window frame. The wall above me was casting a very interesting shadow on the opposite wall which made the scene perfect for HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. To make the image decidedly more bleak I lowered the saturation on the highlights which leaves the image very dark. The upper half of the image is transitioning to black and white while the bottom still retains it’s color. I think that both halves of the picture are equally dark in their own ways.
An Irish Dance Music CD: Champtrax by Mark Arrington
Recently I had the honor of working on an album design for an Irish Dance musician in the Langehorne, PA area named Mark Arrington. Please visit his website http://www.markarringtonmusic.com/home.html and check out his new CD Champtrax. All of the photography on the album as well as the design were done by McMasters Photography. In the end it took a 2 hour photo shoot in the Northeast Philadelphia region and about 2 weeks to finish the album.
This type of project usually starts with brainstorming over the phone and in person. It’s important to decide what type of feeling/ mood/ personality the musician wants to convey with their album design. It helps to narrow down in some degree the types of locations, poses, shots, and props to be used so that you can focus on a more specific mood with the photography. Mark had definite idea’s regarding what he did not want since he has other albums with pictures of him on them.
One of the important points that he conveyed to me was that he wanted people to be able to see him on the cd and recognize him. So we needed to take 3/4 shots of him instead of full body shots or more scenic pictures. Knowing that I was able to focus specifically on those types of shots and not waste our time with random images that he wasn’t going to use.
So after discussing in depth what types of images he wanted we got together on a Sunday afternoon in the beautiful golden light around Langhorne Pennsylvania. Generally I like to wander around within a pre picked location and let the surroundings inspire my creativity. We chose a convenient location to meet at and walked around taking a few shots trying to establish some interesting ideas and photos. We actually ended up with a lot of wonderful pictures that he can use on his website. Thanks Mark and keep on fiddlin!
Forget waiting weeks to get your print proofs in the mail; forget the hassle of sharing your pictures with friends and family; forget complicated ordering procedures and mistakes. With McMasters Photography you will be able to:
- View your pictures within a week of the event
- Share your pictures with friends and family through e-mail
- Easily order prints in a variety of sizes
How can we do this? We have teamed up with an online print company called Pictage. It’s a very simple process to understand that delivers immediate satisfaction and ease of use. Let’s go over how it works.
This is the basic process:
To see how this works first hand view this Pictage event.
Let’s go over this process in more detail.
The initial step towards using our online proofing is booking your event or photo session. Once we have solidified the date of your event, wedding, or portrait session we will pre-schedule the event on Pictage. Pre-scheduling your event early gives you lots of time to add friends and family to the guest list so they can see the pictures when they are available. Another benefit of pre-scheduling is that if you pre-register guests they can get $5 off any pictures that they order. So what happens after McMasters Photography pre-schedules your event?
The most important people in the event are called “event owners.” The owner is likely the one paying for the event or the subject of the photo session. An example of the event owner for a wedding would be the bride and groom. When McMasters Photography schedules your event we need to know the e-mail address of the event owner. We input the information of time, location, event owner, as well as any promotional details like discounts when we schedule your event. After the event is scheduled the event owner(s) (there can be up to 2 event owners) will receive an e-mail telling them that their event is scheduled and they can log onto Pictage and view it’s progress.
At this point the event is ready to go and all there is left to do is add friends/family to the guest list and wait for the event to be uploaded. To add friends/family to the guest list all you have to do is add their e-mail address and Pictage will notify them via e-mail that they can register to view the event. Registering simply involves putting in an e-mail address and creating a password. This way you have your own account and can add pictures to favorite folders, shopping carts, and purchase pictures.
The final step in the process is shooting the event and uploading the pictures to Pictage. Once the event is shot McMasters Photography will edit your pictures and put them online within 1 week of the event. To assist in finding pictures we may break them up into different categories like “reception,” “Ceremony,” etc. Once this is done we will release the event to the event owners to view and edit. This is a nice feature because it lets the owner see the pictures first and make pictures private if they would not like them to be viewed by all of the guests on the guest list.
After the event owners feel comfortable with the pictures they can release the event to the guest list. If you are on the guest list you will receive an e-mail notifying you that the event is ready to be viewed. From this point it’s just a matter of enjoying the pictures, creating favorite lists, and ordering prints.
McMasters Photography makes it very easy to view and order your pictures. We hope this tutorial will help you understand how effortless and quick this process is. If you have any further questions please contact us via e-mail at matthew@mcmastersphotography.com Telephone: 717-330-1437
