I had done a close up sunset recently, but wanted to do a series where the sun would completely fill the frame.  It takes a 2000mm lens to do that, but my longest lens is the Nikon 200-400mm f/4 zoom.  To increase the focal length I attached the Nikon 1.4x tele-converter.  Next I also attached a 3x tele-converter by Kenko, which is the only company that makes a 3x.  That gave a total of 1680mm.  Still not enough so I used the Nikon D7000 because its APS-sized sensor has a 1.5x multiple and resulted in a 2520mm focal length.  That was too much so I backed off the zoom to 320mm for a total of 2016mm.

It is extremely dangerous to look directly into the sun.  By putting the D7000 into live-view mode I was able to compose the each shot on the camera's LCD screen.  Auto-focus would not work in a situation like this so I obtained infinity focus by focusing manually on a distant building.  Later I re-composed the image with the sun in it. The base exposure I used was f/14, 1/4000 second, and 100 ISO.  Variations from that produced different results.

These are four examples of the nine final shots that resulted from just the one sunset.  This one is yellow because it was shot the earliest and had a more open exposure of f/11.

Towards the end of the sunset the sky went red and the sun yellow because I dropped the exposure to f/32.  The entire sunset photo session lasted about 25 minutes.

Lower Manhatten taken after sunset from the Brooklyn Bridge.  Leica M9 and 21mm Elmarit lens at f/2.8 and 1/4 second.

Hurricane Irene inspired me to do a stock image reflecting the idea of global weather.  So here it is, a hurricane superimposed over a map of the world -- all done in Photoshop. 

While waiting out hurricane Irene here in New York, I decided to create a blog image totally in Photoshop using some old material I keep on hand.  Off to the left is a image of the moon I took some time ago.  I darkened the left side of the moon to put it in shadow and added the star burst on the right, which is a combination of the rendered star filter in Photoshop enhanced by some other techniques.

A model we had used several times in the past is now eight month pregnant.  She came by the studio to do a shoot with another model.  During a break, I asked her to pose if front of a curtained window where she would be completely back lit.  Because I didn't use any reflectors the light is soft, bright, and low in contrast.  Shot with the Nikon D3s and one of my favorite lenses, the Defocus 135mm Nikkor used wide open at f/2.

This is the sunset we saw last night at the party on our studio terrace.  It is a composite panorama of two hand-held images taken with the Nikon D7000 and 24-120mm lens at 24mm.

Yet another flea market find, a retro portable radio.  The colors were muted and the image softened in Photoshop to enhance the retro look.

One more of the items I picked up at the flea market this past weekend.

Sometimes the nearest stock shot is right in front of you.

Over the weekend I went to a flea market, always a rich source of iconic props to use in stock photography.  For the next few days I will be taking photos of the items I found and displaying them on this blog.  First up is this very old watch, totally rusted out and corroded -- perfect for lending some character to a stock shot.  Photographed with the Nikon D7000 and 60mm macro lens.

Another bike ride this weekend along the closed Park Avenue in NYC.  This time I had the 10.5mm Nikon fisheye mounted on my D7000,  just returned from the shop for a repair.  I made only a slight correction to the fisheye perspective in Photoshop and opened up the shadows for this shot of office buildings along the route.  I purposely included the tree to lend the business concept of the image a "greening" effect.

There is always something riveting about a close-up of the human eye.  For this one I jammed it off to the side, even cutting into it, and left plenty of blank space on the bottom and right to add copy.

While driving back from our location shoot, I photographed these two images from the auto during a flash thunderstorm.

For the truck shot, I held the camera out window at a low angle alongside the car and used a wide angle setting of 24mm on the 24-70mm Nikon zoom lens.  The combination of low angle and wide lens helps give the image more impact by placing the viewer directly in the scene.

Last week I photographed a partially empty glass of beer.  When looking at it again, I thought it might be interesting to add a story element of lipstick on the rim of the glass.

I wanted to create some beer situations that looked more like they were actually photographed in a tavern.  So I added the wood background and warm tungsten light.  Of course this created a problem photographing the beer itself, which is a transparent liquid and needs to have light passing though it.  The wood background was dark and would have made the beer come out very dark.  By taking a small, white card and cutting it to the shape of the mug and then placing it behind the mug at an angle it caught the light from one of the tungsten lights and reflected it through the glass creating a light background for the beer.

To create an interpretive photo reflecting the recent financial crisis I shot this handful of worn pennies.  A side light from the window with no fill accentuates the shadows on the hand giving it more of a candid feel.  Of course I also did a version of the photo with Euros.

I spotted these old law books sitting on a shelf in our studio prop room and decided to use them for a blog shot.

To create the warm color two tungsten lights were used  --  one on each side of the books.  By narrowing the barn doors on the lights the light was kept very direction with soft shadows.

All images were photographed with the Nikon D3x.  For this image the aperture was f/22 for maximum depth of field.  The rest of the photos were shot around f/5.6 to keep the background a little soft.

I was impressed with the elegant dress and stance of the family relative in this picture taken in 1927 so I accessorized it with props from the same era and took this photo with the Nikon D700 and 60mm macro lens.  The photo was taken by soft window light, and the enhanced warm tone and some vignetting were added later in Photoshop.

On August weekends in New York Park Avenue is closed to auto traffic and people can ride bikes, jog, or walk from uptown to the Brooklyn Bridge.  I took this photo while riding my bike.  With the camera in "A" (aperture priority) mode, I set 16-35mm Nikon lens to 20mm and  f/8.  That yielded an average shutter speed of 1/30th to 1/60th second as I rode along, which was sufficient to blur the street.

I was shopping today in a restaurant supply store when I spotted this sign and bought it to do this blog shot.  The scene is back lit by window light.  I added the candles to give the light some warmth and included a candle in the foreground to reflect in the metal sign.  Shot with a Nikon D300s and 60mm Nikon macro lens wide open.

Today we photographed beer -- all types, all colors, different glasses -- in the studio...

...but I think this was my favorite shot.  Between takes this mug was partially empty and looked like someone had been drinking from it.  All the foam made it look refreshing.  Nikon D3x with 105mm Nikon macro lens.

We were doing a really large location shoot when the sky opened up and it began to rain.  Once indoors I asked this model to sit by the window and look like he was hoping the rain would stop.  Nikon D3s and 24-70mm zoom lens.

For today's blog post I did a stock video clip using the Nikon D7000 on a Glidetrack slider.  Two tungsten lights were placed behind the scene to flare the lens as the camera moved from left to right. The camera color temperature was set to 6800K to create the warm tone.

 

...and of course I grabbed a still shot of the scene.  This is actually two images put together using the photomerge feature in Photoshop CS5.

I needed to take a photo of a camera with pop-up flash for my DSLR teachng website, and decided it would also make a good stock photo.  Originally, I planned to do this in two shots -- one of the camera with flash and one without -- and combine them.  As it turned out, I was lucky with my timing and captured the exposure with flash and pre-warning timer light in just one shot.  This was due to the fact that I used a very slow shutter speed that was long enough to capture both lights.  The subject was lit by the pop-up flash on the Nikon D7000 I was using to photograph this.  Lens was a 50mm at f/16.  Stopping down to f/16 allowed me to use the slow shutter speed of 1/2 second that captured both flash and warning light.

Photographed directly into a tungsten light with blue gels on it.  A pin-point focus on the bead at the end of the syringe is given further emphasis by the shallow depth of field from shooting wide open with the Nikon 105mm macro lens.

Both of these shots were done in two exposures, one with the light bulb off and one with the bulb turned on.  They were superimposed so that the "off" shot provided the background color and bulb detail, while the "on" shot supplied the glow.

The shots were done with two different background colors, with and without an ecological tie-in.  Shot on the Nikon D3s and 105mm macro lens.

For this shot of the sun at sunset I knew I needed a very long lens.  Using my 200-400m Nikkor zoom at the 400mm setting, I attached a 3x teleconverter by Kenko (Nikon does not make one this long).  This produced 1200mm, but I still wanted it to be longer.  So I used the D7000 because of its APS sensor size with a 1.5 multiple factor.  This gave me the equivalent of an1800mm lens -- just what I wanted.  One problem with such a long lens is controlling motion blur.  Keeping the tripod very low helped.  So did the shutter speed of 1/2000 second.  I put the D7000  into mirror lock-up mode to eliminate camera shake.

I lucked out here when a plane taking off from a nearby airport passed directly in front of the setting sun.

This photo of the Brooklyn Bridge was taken just after sunset with one of my favorite setups for travel shooting, the Leica M9 and the Voigtlander 12mm lens.  The 12mm is the widest rectilinear lens available for full frame cameras and gives a highly pointed star effect on city night lights.

Exposure was 2 seconds to blur the lights of passing traffic, aperture of f/5.6 and ISO 160.

I am working on an article on how to use a camera pop-up flash and needed a situation to illustrate slow-synch.  A birthday celebration with candles is one of the toughest scenes to capture naturally with pop-up flash so I choose to include it in the article.  While I was at it, I picked up a few stock shots from the situation including this one and the one below.  Camera was a Nikon D7000 with pop-up flash and natural light, 85mm lens at f/2.

I picked up some other stock shots of the cake and presents using just available light.  These were only intended for stock, not for the article.  If you are interested in reading the article it should be available this weekend on my Learning Photography blog site.

The maze we had built by a model maker arrived in the studio today and I was anxious to try it out.  Here are a couple of shots of it.

Both images were taken with the Nikon 24-70 zoom at its wide angle setting to give a feeling of hovering over an expanse.  The light was tungsten mixed with soft daylight.  Setting the white balance for the tungsten gave the blue tint wherever the daylight lit the maze..

Today I got carried away photographing just a laptop and wound up with twenty variations.  Here are two of them.  There was only one light, a 650 tungsten shining on the wall behind the setup.

For this image I switched from using the 105mm Nikkor to the 85mm tilt-shift Nikkor, which enabled be to have both the hand and stethoscope in focus even at a wide open lens aperture.  Both images were photographed on the Nikon D3s.

I picked up this natural garlic, fresh from the ground, at the farmer's market and photographed it with soft window light from behind with two silver cards in the front to fill in the shadows.

Shot with the Nikon D7000 and 60mm macro.