Week 154 - Crowd - May 22-28, 2016
Jerry-
I found my crowd at the school picnic at North Park Elementary in Fridley. The photo includes happy teen girls, a hula-hooper, an ice cream cone gnawer, a balloon animal, a hijab clad girl, and a mysterious person in black at the top of the steps.
Camera was the Sony A6300 with 16-50 set to 33mm. Exposure was 1/400 @ f11, ISO 400.
I found my crowd at the school picnic at North Park Elementary in Fridley. The photo includes happy teen girls, a hula-hooper, an ice cream cone gnawer, a balloon animal, a hijab clad girl, and a mysterious person in black at the top of the steps.
Camera was the Sony A6300 with 16-50 set to 33mm. Exposure was 1/400 @ f11, ISO 400.
Don-
8 bikes with 9 people made my crowd. Here we were
spread out going through the Ute reservation coming
from Pagosa Springs, Colorado and heading home.
Camera is an Nikon AW110 that I use to shoot from
my bike while moving hence the tilted horizon as I was
going through a curve. 1/1000 sec; f/7; ISO125; lens 85mm
and the camera setting was automatic.
8 bikes with 9 people made my crowd. Here we were
spread out going through the Ute reservation coming
from Pagosa Springs, Colorado and heading home.
Camera is an Nikon AW110 that I use to shoot from
my bike while moving hence the tilted horizon as I was
going through a curve. 1/1000 sec; f/7; ISO125; lens 85mm
and the camera setting was automatic.
Byron-
This week has been turned on it's head for me. I haven't thought much about this weeks photo since Wednesday. Fortunately, I came up with an image before that. I noticed in the Lilac bush beside my porch is a nest of baby Robins. There are 4 babys crowded in the nest. To get a clear picture I used my GoPro camera on the end of a monopod. In order to get this photo I needed to shoot in the video mode at 4K resolution and grab a stillframe. When the little birds heard my camera sliding through the branches they thought it was their mother so they opened there beaks in the hopes a fresh worm would be dropped in.
This week has been turned on it's head for me. I haven't thought much about this weeks photo since Wednesday. Fortunately, I came up with an image before that. I noticed in the Lilac bush beside my porch is a nest of baby Robins. There are 4 babys crowded in the nest. To get a clear picture I used my GoPro camera on the end of a monopod. In order to get this photo I needed to shoot in the video mode at 4K resolution and grab a stillframe. When the little birds heard my camera sliding through the branches they thought it was their mother so they opened there beaks in the hopes a fresh worm would be dropped in.
Deron-
A herd of cows.
A pride of lions.
A fleet of ships.
A murder of crows.
A crash of rhinos.
A crowd of golf balls.
A herd of cows.
A pride of lions.
A fleet of ships.
A murder of crows.
A crash of rhinos.
A crowd of golf balls.
Kevin-
During this weeks WPOTM it feels like I had ideas, but executing them was another story.
First I was focused on a crowd of stars. Now you can debate whether stars that are in reality many, many light years apart constitute a crowd. But by Jerry’s “three or more” definition they qualify, as there are hundreds of billions of them in our galaxy alone. The challenge is that I didn’t want to do a star trails shot again. So rather then capturing them in fixed position I planned to crank up the ISO enough to make a trails-free exposure. You know, sort of showing off the Milky Way. Unfortunately the other thing it required is clear skies, and while we have had some clear skies in Minnesota this week, they haven’t been clear at night and far enough away from a population center to avoid the glow of city lights. So I had to abandon that idea.
Well, now being in the midst of travel to North Dakota and South Dakota, I wondered what could I shoot there. Areas around the Theodore Roosevelt National Park are filled with large crowds of Prairie Dogs. They are especially cute little buggers. But we won’t arrive there until Saturday and I can’t 100% guarantee I will be able to transmit the images that night, before the WPOTM deadline. So I visited the Minnesota Zoo before departing. The zoo is located in Apple Valley, Minnesota and opened in 1978. This might only have been my second visit, which says something I suppose.
My time there was short, but there were three animals I was focused on. Lesser Flamingos (a crowd of very, very thin legs), Bactrian Camels (quite a crowd of humps) and yes, Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs which of course were adorable. The prairie dogs were the only animal that I was even able to capture a half-decent images of. But it still seemed blah to me.
But when traveling through Bismarck, North Dakota I was struck by a cemetery. It felt like many, many veterans were buried there. And being Memorial Day weekend every single grave site had flags, flowers or other forms of honor. The sun was setting behind the grave sites, the colors really popped and I realized that I had successfully captured a Crowd of corpses.
Nikon D4s, handheld, 70-200 F/2.8 Nikkor zoom set to 160mm. ISO 6400, f/22 @ 1/250th of a second.
During this weeks WPOTM it feels like I had ideas, but executing them was another story.
First I was focused on a crowd of stars. Now you can debate whether stars that are in reality many, many light years apart constitute a crowd. But by Jerry’s “three or more” definition they qualify, as there are hundreds of billions of them in our galaxy alone. The challenge is that I didn’t want to do a star trails shot again. So rather then capturing them in fixed position I planned to crank up the ISO enough to make a trails-free exposure. You know, sort of showing off the Milky Way. Unfortunately the other thing it required is clear skies, and while we have had some clear skies in Minnesota this week, they haven’t been clear at night and far enough away from a population center to avoid the glow of city lights. So I had to abandon that idea.
Well, now being in the midst of travel to North Dakota and South Dakota, I wondered what could I shoot there. Areas around the Theodore Roosevelt National Park are filled with large crowds of Prairie Dogs. They are especially cute little buggers. But we won’t arrive there until Saturday and I can’t 100% guarantee I will be able to transmit the images that night, before the WPOTM deadline. So I visited the Minnesota Zoo before departing. The zoo is located in Apple Valley, Minnesota and opened in 1978. This might only have been my second visit, which says something I suppose.
My time there was short, but there were three animals I was focused on. Lesser Flamingos (a crowd of very, very thin legs), Bactrian Camels (quite a crowd of humps) and yes, Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs which of course were adorable. The prairie dogs were the only animal that I was even able to capture a half-decent images of. But it still seemed blah to me.
But when traveling through Bismarck, North Dakota I was struck by a cemetery. It felt like many, many veterans were buried there. And being Memorial Day weekend every single grave site had flags, flowers or other forms of honor. The sun was setting behind the grave sites, the colors really popped and I realized that I had successfully captured a Crowd of corpses.
Nikon D4s, handheld, 70-200 F/2.8 Nikkor zoom set to 160mm. ISO 6400, f/22 @ 1/250th of a second.
Paul-
Perhaps I should have been a smarmy lawyer or some sly sycophant to a Congressman in the way I like to look for loopholes and dodges. (That’s not altogether a bad thing in some contexts, though. How else are seemingly intractable challenges surmounted?) If I remember correctly, this theme allowed for even just two or three people to qualify as a “crowd.” And nowhere did it say the crowd needed to be flesh and blood. Ah, a loophole. An artful dodge!
This picture captures part of the Soldiers Memorial in Antelope Park (Lincoln). It’s adjacent to the Veterans Memorial Garden. Unlike the Memorial Garden which is, sadly, an expanding site, the statute (designed by the great regional sculptor Ellis Burman) was dedicated in 1935. Years before anyone was ready to consider, much less image, how carnage on a truly global stage might manifest itself. (Even though the stage was already being set in Germany at the time.) Then, World War II.
As a consequence of its date, the figures (one of which you can’t see in the picture) represent soldiers of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Much higher above on a central column is a nine-foot figure that is supposed to embody the spirit of War and Victory. (Personally, I’ve never equated that last term with concepts such as “Enduring Peace” or “Collective Justice.” But that’s just me.)
On second thought, I should probably excise the word loophole from the first paragraph. Here, this intimate little crowd of every-man warriors represents a much, much vaster “crowd.” And there’s no place on earth where all of them would also get to be memorialized quite like this—in stone, statuary, and stoic silence.
Two’s company, three’s a pretty small crowd: Two picture, HDR composition. 55-200mm lens set at 66mm; aperture priority; ISO 800; 21-point auto focus; -0.33 EV; 1/500 sec. at f/4., slight differences in tonal values between the two shoots. To make a more dramatic picture, as I felt was befitting this picture, I used an HDR program to: a) de-ghost the two images what were slightly off the same vantage point; b) use a “smart merge” algorithm that did some extra auto alignment the first process didn’t; c) reduce the amount of resultant noise; and d) select from several pictorial treatments the one I liked. This was exported to, and further cleaned up in, Adobe Lightroom.
Perhaps I should have been a smarmy lawyer or some sly sycophant to a Congressman in the way I like to look for loopholes and dodges. (That’s not altogether a bad thing in some contexts, though. How else are seemingly intractable challenges surmounted?) If I remember correctly, this theme allowed for even just two or three people to qualify as a “crowd.” And nowhere did it say the crowd needed to be flesh and blood. Ah, a loophole. An artful dodge!
This picture captures part of the Soldiers Memorial in Antelope Park (Lincoln). It’s adjacent to the Veterans Memorial Garden. Unlike the Memorial Garden which is, sadly, an expanding site, the statute (designed by the great regional sculptor Ellis Burman) was dedicated in 1935. Years before anyone was ready to consider, much less image, how carnage on a truly global stage might manifest itself. (Even though the stage was already being set in Germany at the time.) Then, World War II.
As a consequence of its date, the figures (one of which you can’t see in the picture) represent soldiers of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Much higher above on a central column is a nine-foot figure that is supposed to embody the spirit of War and Victory. (Personally, I’ve never equated that last term with concepts such as “Enduring Peace” or “Collective Justice.” But that’s just me.)
On second thought, I should probably excise the word loophole from the first paragraph. Here, this intimate little crowd of every-man warriors represents a much, much vaster “crowd.” And there’s no place on earth where all of them would also get to be memorialized quite like this—in stone, statuary, and stoic silence.
Two’s company, three’s a pretty small crowd: Two picture, HDR composition. 55-200mm lens set at 66mm; aperture priority; ISO 800; 21-point auto focus; -0.33 EV; 1/500 sec. at f/4., slight differences in tonal values between the two shoots. To make a more dramatic picture, as I felt was befitting this picture, I used an HDR program to: a) de-ghost the two images what were slightly off the same vantage point; b) use a “smart merge” algorithm that did some extra auto alignment the first process didn’t; c) reduce the amount of resultant noise; and d) select from several pictorial treatments the one I liked. This was exported to, and further cleaned up in, Adobe Lightroom.