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;)
I was lucky enough to capture these photos during the brief moment that the sun was rising opposite this partially eclipsed moon (approximately 4:50am). I used a 500mm mirror lens, a 2 second exposure, at 1600 ISO. In post processing I removed some noise (possibly too much), and applied a direct positive effect to enhance contrast and color.
]]>Advance by Touch Ad by Chris Guzman.
This ad will be shown at the 5,100-seat Tim's Toyota Center, during the Arizona Sundogs hockey games.
The rose pedals are from actual roses that I picked, and scanned from my home. The images are applied to simple geometry that is driven by a particle system. The particle system is reacting to gravity, wind, and drag, to produce the animation for this ad. The photos are also applied to simple geometry, and the camera is animated along a spline path.
The lighting for this ad required a far amount of work. I had to make a lot of adjustment between the actual lights in the scene, the background, and adding some self-illumination on the materials used.
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The Moon from Chris Guzman on Vimeo.
I used a Phoenix 1000mm f/8 Mirror Lens on my Canon EOS 5D Mark II to capture this video of the lovely full moon on a cloudless night. I increased the playback speed of this video, so the moon is moving across the sky at 1,246% it's actual speed.
The video quality of this camera continues to impress me. It produces results like this even with a relatively low quality lens.
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Here is a panoramic photo that I created of the great view of LA from the Getty center.
Creating a panoramic photo like this is not as difficult as you may think. It is basically a two step process, with several sub-steps.
First I shot a series of photos hand held, and rotated the camera after each shot. If you have one with you, a tripod will make this step easier. I didn't precisely rotate a set amount of degrees, but I did make sure that I overlapped landmarks from one photo to the next. If a building was in the right of the frame in my first shot, I kept that same building in the left side of the frame when I rotated my view to my right.
The second part of the process is done by using stitching software that can piece the series of photos together. I recommend Hugin, it does a great job, and it's free: http://hugin.sourceforge.net
After downloading, installing, and running Hugin, you will see the "Assistant" tab.
Click on the "1. Load images..." button to select your series of photos. Then click "2. Align...". After Hugin is finished aligning your photos you will see a preview of your panorama. You can now click back onto the main Hugin window. Now you may want to set the file output type before clicking on the "3. Create panorama...". To set the file output type click on the "Stitcher" tab, and the file output type is on the bottom under "File formats", "Normal Output:". You can then click back onto the Assistant tab, "3. Create panorama...", and typing a name for the panorama file.
Note: Setting the white balance on your camera to something other then Automatic White Balance may improve the end result. For this particular panoramic photo I used AWB, and set "Low dynamic range, variable white balance" in the Exposure tab of Hugin.
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Prime lenses are often considered to be sharper then zoom lenses. But here I am comparing a consumer level prime lens with one of the best professional zoom lens made.
From these two small previews very little difference can be seen between the prime lens, and the second photo that was taken with the zoom lens.
The sky in the EF24-70mm f/2.8L photo was a little more blue. Perhaps due to the larger optics, or the UV filter was removing more haze. I'm not sure.
Towards the center of the lens the EF50 mm f/1.4 was as sharp as the EF24-70mm f/2.8L, but farther away the sharpness, and clarity of the EF50 mm f/1.4 decreased. As you can see from this 100% crop comparison of the same bush near the bottom right of the frame.
There was also a small amount of chromatic abrasion visible in the EF50 mm f/1.4 photo near the edges of the frame, and none was visible with the EF24-70mm f/2.8L.
I did this test to illustrate that the broad statement that prime lenses are "better" then zooms is incorrect. There are several factors that could make one lens a better choice then another, and image quality is only one of them, price, weight, speed (minimum f-stop) , and durability are a few others.
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Here are two photos of flowers that I shot with my new macro lens. It's the new LensBaby Composer with the Macro Lens Kit.
Macro photography opens up a whole new world to the camera. I'm going to shoot more photos like these when I get the time.
If all you see is black you may need to click the second icon on the top right to reset it. This is just a quick test photo shot at 21MP with my Canon 5D MII.
ClosR is a neat little Flash based image viewer that lets you zoom into the image all the way down to it's full resolution.
It's not as sharp as the actual image due to it being compressed, and scaled. But I like the functionality of it, especially the full screen mode.
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Today one of my photos was featured in a news article on deviantART.com, it's at the bottom of the article.
It's really great to see it there, and among so many other great art/photos.
