Not a fan of the vignette but I always love a super shallow depth of field even though there doesn't seem to be a definite subject to be focusing on; I feel the angle is a bit low to really add to anything.. However, here. The vignette, lack of subject and, the shallow depth of field kind of give them allusion of tunnel vision.

I use vignette as a composition resource to redirect the eyes to the center of the photo. It can be better executed.

Now I'm trying to improve my photos compositon.

I'd try a more perpendicular angle. Maybe so that the calculator is in focus but the page of the textbook is slightly out of focus. Should be manageable at f/1.4. Maybe not the whole calculator either but I'll leave that up to you.

Then some lens corrections for any distortion and to remove any vignette from the wide open aperture should make the photo look crisp and natural.

Alright. With help from Tari we've added a way to embed the photos from my new camera here onto the forum. I'm really excited to share the photos I've taken with you guys. Some background:

About 3-4 years ago a company named Lytro came out with a camera that claimed you could refocus the photographs. For $300, you could get a 10 MEGARAY (read: 1 Megapixel) camera with built-in 8GB of storage and 8x optical zoom. It was a lot of money but, yes I was an early adopter. The low megapixel count was an initial turn off but I realized these photographs would be on screen and not something that'd be printed and I eventually relented and bought one. It was a fun novelty but the tech just wasn't there. Edges between objects were jaggy when refocusing and the picture sharpness just wasn't perfect.

Through software updates the camera got features such as shifting the perspective of the photo and WiFi. Eventually the PC software stopped supporting my computer and the phone app became buggy and I lost all interest in the platform.

A couple years later the company released Generation 2, the Illum. It was a 40 Megaray camera for $1.3k. I didn't go for it. It was too much for a technology I wasn't initially impressed with. Now, about 3 months ago the camera was listed on Amazon Prime for $300. I checked the software and it worked on my new computer. How could I even resist. Two days later, I had a brand new Lytro Illum. And man, it's so nice.

With Canon cameras, the first party lenses have a focus ring that moves towards infinity when you turn focus ring to the right. Third party lenses move towards infinity when the focus ring goes to the left. It's a really disconnecting experience. Now, the Illum doesn't support interchangeable lenses but it does support either direction. Through the menu you can alter how the focus and zoom rings work. Pretty handy. Another cool feature is the focusing. When reviewing captured photos on the camera, you can use the focus ring to refocus pictures when viewing them which is really neat; of course you can tap to refocus or move a digital slider.

Another cool feature, depth assist. The camera will highlight the outline of what is in focus and what can be refocused. Which takes out the guess work and it's also just really cool to see on the LCD. The PC software is cool too. I can adjust the aperture as well; I can do it on camera as well! The camera uses a constant F/2.0 lens. I'll be putting the camera through regular paces, doing night and long exposures over the next few months but for now enjoy some photos I've taken. Starting with the interactive version of the above photo:



This one is currently my profile video on Facebook. Bought some 1' tall trees and some fake snow. Used some Christmas Tree ornaments and viola.



There was a monster in there, I swear!



Now you're thinking "That's great Alex but what about movement? All of those photos could have been taken with an array of lenses" or whatever. Well, the first photo with the leaves has a falling leaf but okay. Here's a photo with a Pelican in flight.



And of course, people too.



Lastly, here's a photo of Kerm from my last trip to New York in 2013 taken on the first generation camera. Yes, it took square photos.

Whoa, those are really cool! I didn't even know that was possible without video.

How the hell does it do that?!
Is that a PFCA or what?!

I think it's something similar to a micro-array. I have screen shotted the preview of the Lytro Raw Image and again once the software processed the image and rendered a proper preview.





If you compare the two, you'll see what looks like color noise in the background. That noise, is really the micro array on the sensor itself. I'm no expert so I won't say much else but whatever it is, it is really cool and works really great in this second generation camera.

I spent my New Years in Yosemite with 43 acres and an off-road Golf Cart to myself and some friends. The first night we went out and explored and captured this photo. The other nights were overcast and foggy, it snowed but none of it stuck on the ground.

I like this one the most. The lantern really helped distinguish myself from the background and it didn't ruin the view of the sky.

Walking Under the Stars by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

This one is pretty poorly edited. The next time I do star photos with a light source I need to make sure the light is a bit warm, other wise when I go to color correct the colors for the ground or the sky will be off. It's also a bit subpar because my friend is pretty hard to see amongst the background/sky/stars. I wish there was some more separation but it's how it worked out pretty decently.

IMG_0026.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

There was a rope swing where we were at so we had some fun there. It goes over a river which feeds into a lake but with Californias' drought the river is dried up and the lake low which allowed me to set up in the river bed and capture this photo.

IMG_9964.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

You should focus less on gear and software. It's easy to go down that path, but technically interesting does not really map into interesting to look at.

California District 24 held their Democratic Assembly District Delegate voting on January 7th, 2017 during the Assembly District Election Meeting (ADEM). Of which I took some photos of for both the candidates and the town newsletter:


IMG_9913.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr


IMG_9557.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr


IMG_9831.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

One of the seats went to someone who is in his mid twenties. It's amazing to see my generation get engaged in politics, no matter how small. This recent Presidential election has motivated a few of my friends to set out to make the world better. Even before then, I had friends who were political. One of my friends had a four month internship at the UN in Scotland.

I don't care if you're democrat, republican, libertarian, independent or, something else. Get involved in your district elections. Get involved in city politics and elections. Be the change you want. We're going to have the same old system if we do nothing.

Nice photos Alex!
I've heard about Lytro cameras, and now canon is partially copying that in the 5D mk IV, with the dual pixel raw.

Thanks Frank! I've heard that the 5D MkIV has the Dual Pixel RAW thing but had no idea what it meant. I just thought it was some marketing hype, I guess I'll have to read up on that a bit more then.

Anyways, I have spent the past week or so trying to figure out how to edit my infrared photos again and I finally got it and maybe even improved upon it! Now, I just need to actually back up the preset and photoshop action so I don't lose them again. A while back I converted a Canon T2i to Infrared. Not the FLIR systems that you commonly see from police footage or to gauge the heat of stuff. Those are both IR but the IR I'm talking about is closer to the visible spectrum, the short wave IR.

I commonly use IR for black and white since it creates some really drastic contrast but IR is also interesting for color photography which is what I'm sharing below. In this screenshot here, there are 3 versions of one image. Top Left: Original RAW file off the camera. Top Right: After I've done editing in Lightroom CC. Lower: After I've swapped the color channels (Red & Blue) in Photoshop CC. The straight RAW file is really red because IR is on the red end of the visible spectrum. If I were to take the photo as a JPEG, I'd be the photo that I edit it to in Lightroom. The reason I don't shoot in JPEG is because I lose a lot of freedom in editing. Now, when I shoot IR I have the camera save both RAW+JPEG.

Now, the real reason the RAW file is red is because the temperature of the photo can only be between 2000K and 50000K, K for Kelvin. In fact, the version that's straight off the camera is at 2000K already. I'm not sure why we can't go below 2000K but oh well. So, I have to do some tricks with other color sliders to get a useable photo. I try to do as much editing as I can in Lightroom so I can make Photoshop the last step in my process. Some tweaks still happen post-photoshop but all I do in photoshop is swap the red and blue channels. Tweaks that happen post-photoshop is typically color calibration and contrast adjustments. Which, is part of what I improved by redoing everything again. So the color calibration shouldn't be required in post-photoshop anymore but I'll need to take more IR photos to be sure.

If you compare the Channel Swapped version from the screen shot above to the Flickr file below, you'll notice I did some color calibration to make the sky a more natural blue and made the pink pop a bit more. A contrast gradient was also added going from bottom to top and I brightend up the whole thing a bit. I plan to take some more IR photos while it's sunny to make sure I have the Lightroom preset tuned correctly as overcast days, like the one pictured, are the worst days to capture IR photos.

This photo was taken while I was in Yosemite National Park for the New Year. Some of those photos are in a post above.


IMG_9282-Edit.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Here's a cow. It was taken with a camera of some sort.

Oh hello there humans by Nikky, on Flickr

Wow. How dare I let this fall off the first page. Anyways, bumperino duderinos.

I've been busy!

It's almost Summer which means it's Milky Way season! I've been hunting around and planning trips. On August 21st we have the Solar Eclipse and I'll be viewing that and I'm really stoked. Likely won't get a photo of it as I just want to focus and take in this amazing sight. If I do get a photo it'll just be a quick snap shot, nothing planned or thought out. I'll probably set a camera on a tripod with my fisheye and video of it though!

Outside of that I've got plans for almost every weekend starting in June and ending in September. I've been using primarily a phone app to see when the Milky Way will be where I would like it. I tried using Google Earth but the Milky Way preview seems to be off by a few hours though I can't be sure of this because for some reason I can't look at the position of the Milky Way before December 30th, 2016. But, comparing the same date on the App I use from last year to the this year, the galactic core hardly moved. So, I'm going to see if it's something I can correct for in Google Earth.

Anyways, in preparation I've been increasing the frequency in which I go out and take star photos. While I liked my last photo, there were a few technical mistakes that I wanted to clean up. Mainly the elongated stars on the edges of the photos. I cut the shutter time by half (30s to 15s) and got a much crisper result. However, I'm still underexposing my photos quite a lot. So, next outing is going to see what it takes to get a properly exposed shot. I went to the same road as this photo from last May. Coincidently, not long after that photo I posted about my intent to photograph the Milky Way that summer. It didn't pan out as well as I'd hoped because I put work first and it was cloudy the days I wanted to go. Here's a photo that I did manage to get of the Milky Way.

This time around I no longer have that job which will not only let me photograph late at night more often but allow me to change plans around. If the weekend is looking like clouds, I'll go a few days early. I might lose a few friends who don't have the same schedule flexibility I have but I'm still doing this.


Ursa Major by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

I've also been playing around with my car as a subject in the photo. One of the cool things about my car is that I can plug a computer into it and adjust certain dynamics about it. I can change the brightness of the Daytime Running Lights, which are on in the photo below. I love the idea of that photo but it can be executed better. My headlights are just a bit bright but my tail lights can be much dimmer. My previous laptop broke so I'm currently hunting for another one. I'd use my MacBook but the software is Windows only and doesn't work in Wine I'm hoping to have a laptop by mid-June.


Constellations by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

I also feel like the headlights give a better white balance in the end as well. I've copied the white balance value over to the other photo and it's definitely better. Just wish I didn't rush to upload it everywhere. Thankfully, these Milky Way shots will not be uploaded as fast as this. I'll be sitting on them for a while so I'll have plenty of time to tweak and learn from my mistakes between each month. Only after the season is over will I upload a few. With my knowledge from this year I'll book a vacation closer to the equator and go from there.

Is that really what Nikkybot looks like?

Alex: Those photos look really well done! I agree that the lights were a little too bright, but overall amazing job!

A few weeks ago I received an invite to a party for last night but teetered on the fence on whether I wanted to go or not. Last night a friend hit me up and asked if I was going, so I went. We both took photos and mingled around. Here are some of my favorites.


IMG_0749.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr


IMG_0817.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr


IMG_0876.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

Here's a tunnel I guess.

_MG_9809 by Nikky, on Flickr

The more I take star photos the more I realize the night sky varies from photo to photo. Some photos I edit and post, the sky is a deep blue, another is a teal-ish blue and then there's the "blue but not super blue." So, I need to start having some sort of consistency across the photos.



I'll be doing that over the next few months. Lastly, I told myself I wasn't going to share photos from my trips to photograph the stars but I can't help but share these anyways. Haha


IMG_0922.jpg by Alex Glanville, on Flickr

And here's some more Lytro pictures I took this weekend as well:

I really like the lines and patterns you created by decreasing the shutter speed.

Here is a picture I took last summer that I quite like.