Here’s a sneak peak of a few photos from the Men’s Gymnastics Day One competition of the VISA Championships in Saint Paul. I’m not on the floor, so I am limited to camera’s that fans are aloud to bring in, so they aren’t quite up to the normal high IQ level, but it’s still a lot of fun and they turned out decent, so here they are! Or at least the first two pictures. We are about to run out the door for the the first day of women’s competition…
Here’s some pictures of the Richfield Fireworks from July 4th, and a little bit about how we photographed them.
Location:
Try to include something other than the fireworks. We weren’t able to do this with our photos this time around, but a nice reflective lake, river, or building, or a dimly lit scene, such as a downtown area work nicely.
Equipment:
We photographed these with small interchangeable lens camera called the Olympus PEN E-PL1. We bought this affordable camera to use when we didn’t want to drag our large, heavy, and conspicuous SLR cameras around, but wanted better picture quality than a typical point and shoot. We used a Gitzo CF tripod to photograph the fireworks. Having a tripod is essential, as shutter speeds are long when photographing fireworks.
Camera Settings:
We always photograph fireworks at our lowest normal ISO, in this case, ISO 100. We use the “bulb” shutter speed setting for fireworks. This means we hold down the shutter button for as long as we want, and the shutter stays open until we release the button. This allows us to choose what we want to include in the photo. We hold the shutter down, and after a few bursts we think would make for a nice photograph, we release the shutter. It works much better for us than using a set time, but if you don’t have the bulb option, you can set your camera to a shutter speed of 3-10 seconds. Shutter speed doesn’t affect the brightness of the fireworks, but it affects the brightness of the background, and how many fireworks are in the photo. A shutter speed that is too short will result in the fireworks appearing as “dots” or being incomplete. For aperture, we used between f11 and f16. Your aperture will control how bright the fireworks are in the photo. Choose an aperture that gives the photographs a nice color. If your aperture is too wide open, the fireworks will appear white, because they are blown out. You can always brighten the fireworks in your post processing, but it’s hard to make them darker if you’ve blown them out. We shoot in RAW, but choose a white balance of daylight on the camera.
We hope this was helpful. Use the comment for if you have any questions!
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Here’s a couple of lightning shots from last night. Nothing spectacular, but I haven’t had the chance to do it in over a year, so it was great to get out. It’s so much more relaxing then storm chasing, as it involves a remote release, some lawn chairs, and a beer.
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So this was kind of an odd day. We had really low expectations, so we planned a few side trips to prevent the day from being a total waste of time if nothing happened. We stopped by North Mississippi Park to check out the Great Blue Heron rookery, and saw a few orioles too. More on that in another post. We headed up to Albertsville, so Kristen could enjoy some shopping, while we waited for storms hopefully might form in the area. Eventually, the storms fired south and west of us, so we picked the southern storm. Here’s a view of it as it approached Buffalo, MN.
Thunderstorm over Buffalo Lake
Unfortunately, the storms kept dying, and we kept hopping southeast from storm to storm waiting for one to take off. Of course, right as we are getting back into the metro loop, a storm near Albertsville (where we started) takes root and puts down a tornado. Eventually made our way to a storm in Eden Prairie. It went tornado warned right over Hennepin County. It took quite the search of the southern side of this larger, semi-split storm to find the updraft. We eventually found a really odd skinny updraft quite a ways away from the precipitation. I wasn’t even sure if it was the updraft of the Eden Prairie storm, or just a little flanking line storm that wasn’t on radar. Eventually, when we got close enough and stopped driving, it became apparently that this skinny little updraft was rotating quite a bit. It had very brief skinny funnels, but of more interest was the rounded base it was developing over Edina. The is one of those storms that produces crazy color. This storm made everything a greenish yellow, similar to the color of a tungsten light bulb.
It seemed to fall apart as it moved further north, but as soon as we got into heavy traffic with no place to stop, it produced a more “serious” funnel off the southwest corner of the base. I’m not sure if it’s the same funnel that people saw “over Lake Calhoun”, but I though we were going to have a bad situation with a tornado touchdown in the metro. Fortunately, the funnel fell apart after a few minutes and the whole updraft seem to being following it’s lead. We continued to follow up up to Minneapolis, where is seemed to be dying in the setting sun.
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