Photographs you took

Sxotty

Legend
So I think we should start a thread of photographs members have taken themselves.
If you link from picassa you can just take the URL and change the s800 for 800 pixel picture to s1600 to make them bigger, or s0 to make them original size. I think 1600 is probably plenty for this though. Maybe I should be focusing on even smaller.

Here are my first two contributions.
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Pretty awesome images, I wish there were still bugs out here in Estonia so I could go chase them.

I've had had a decent camera for roughly a month now and I consider myself a rookie still, I constantly mess up settings and basic guidelines but I also occasionally get lucky and manage to get something decent :)

A small selection of the photos I've taken over past month up on my gallery:
http://hoho.dyndns-at-home.com/gallery/v/bestof60d

From those I personally like the macro of my eye showing the reflection of my room the best:
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See here for the original full-resolution image and exif information. Note: I have red eye there because it took nearly 1.5 hours of trial and error to finally get decent images like that and it strained the eyes quite a bit :)

I absolutely love macro photography but as work has been busy and I haven't had a chance to actually go out and find stuff to take photos of I haven't managed to take many photos. This one I actually took with regular zoom lenses before I got macro ones. Shooting from hand and in generally awful conditions, it was pure luck that I got anything on the image :D
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I have a TON more photos that I haven't yet had the chance to go through and find the best ones out. If I finally do it I'll post the results here as well.


Another thing I occasionally toy around with are timelapse videos. I managed to get the post-processing workflow almost-decent about a week ago. It's still not quite perfect but at least it's not as horrible as it used to be. I have no background music, decent intro-outro or transitions in them so far so they definitely don't compete with the true masters of the art but if you are interested you can see some of them on my channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ho11ho
Latest one is here:

This image was supposed to be a frame from another timelapse but as I forgot to turn off image stabilization and I haven't figured out how to do it manually after then that video didn't work out:
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One big problem I'm having atm is that as I broke my collarbone a month ago I can only use the tripod and can't really move around with all the equipment that easily. Though luckily I can feel the hand getting better every day so I hope to be back on track shortly.
 
Hoho those spider shots are awesome. Do you do any noise reduction? I noticed on full res there was a decent amount of noise in the background still.

I have always wanted to do a time lapse type thing with a tripod, but I never got a big tripod I could use, just a small gorilla pod to wrap around tree branches and things. How do you do the time lapse roughly? Do you hook the camera to a laptop, or just have it do it by itself? What is the difference in time between shots? 1 min? 10 min etc?

Here is one more to keep ball rolling. If anyone wants a shot full size just let me know.
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I don't have much yet - I take way more 'emotional' pictures than pretty ones. :D And often when I see something nice, I film it instead.

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Still very much learning, and also just got this camera (which at €240 and no frills isn't very high-end ... )

Speaking of spiders, I was testing on a spider as well, and again by the time I got it figured out how to get it to Macro properly, I thought it would be more interesting to try to film it Macro, as it was working on its web. That turned out quite well. I'm uploading it now, be sure to watch it in 1080p when that's done.

EDIT:

 
Hoho those spider shots are awesome. Do you do any noise reduction? I noticed on full res there was a decent amount of noise in the background still.
Nope, nothing. Only the last night sky image has had some manipulation (HDR stiched together from several shots), the rest are either directly from cam and/or have been cropped and resized.

The noise was quite likely pretty bad as they were taken outside after sunset with nearly no natural light, without tripod and shooting at rather weird angle so I couldn't really see what was focused and what not.
How do you do the time lapse roughly? Do you hook the camera to a laptop, or just have it do it by itself?
1) install magic lantern
2) turn off image stabilization, autofocus and turn on mirror lock
3) find something interesting
4) set exposure, ISO and aperture from camera menu/buttons
4) set up shooting interval from the magic lantern menu
5) take a first photo, magic lantern will take over and shoot at the given interval
6) sit back and let the camera do it's work. I prefer to read Kindle or watch movies from cellphone during that :)

You can also set the magic lantern to take HDR shots but you'll have to combine them later on in your PC. It generates shell scripts and expects some software to be on path but I guess you can get it running on Windows as well.

You could probably also use it through laptop or with some expensive timelapse HW addon but for me the free software solution works perfectly and is the easiest. I might modify my cellphone into a remote trigger though if I finally get some time to do it :)
What is the difference in time between shots? 1 min? 10 min etc?
Depends on video. Most daylight ones have frame every 3-5s, darker ones often 15-30s per frame. Most videos use 25FPS but some are also at 15FPS. I should probably add that information to future videos I upload.

I don't have anything to show in this post but if I get lucky I might have a HDR timelapse to show "soon". I'm a bit afraid though that I might have used a bit too short exposures for it so it might also be rather crappy.
 
These are some really great photos. Tons of awesome ones. BTW hoho noise reduction isnt really manipulation since the camera does it anyway to make a jpeg, if you shoot in raw when you convert some happens naturally, but I noticed on my own shots as well that I could probably use a tad more.

Arwin your video is especially nice.

Banksie I like the wave on rock picture :) and NRP the half dome shot is great. I will add some more later.
 
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I got magic lantern installed now hoho. It is definitely pretty neat there are so many option though it will take me a bit to sift through them. One unfortunate thing though is it works strangely with 600d digital zoom in movie mode. One of the cool things was originally it smoothly changed zoom levels like a zoom lens. Now it goes in jerky steps 0 --> 3-->5 -->10 before it went jerky from 0-3 but then smoothly up to 10. However anything over 3 results in degradation of quality.

The detect motion, and trap focus both seem like they would be stupendous.
 
One unfortunate thing though is it works strangely with 600d digital zoom in movie mode
Unfortunately I can't help you with that as I rarely shoot videos with my camera and haven't even tried digital zoom yet.


Last Friday I tried taking some photos of the sky. It was extremely humid outside so I had to dry the lenses every few minutes to prevent too much haze on images.

The bright "star" is actually Jupiter here:
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Here it is with maximum magnification my 270mm lenses could pull off:
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The haze around it is combination of clouds and fog. I tried all kinds of stuff to get the stripes show on the image but I'm afraid my optics aren't good enough for it.
 
Man those fireworks shots make me want to get tripod, I took some last summer on the 4th and they are are squiggly from my hand shaking :)
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Hoho, I wonder if the atmosphere was changing enough to hide the stripes.

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Hoho, I wonder if the atmosphere was changing enough to hide the stripes.
Maybe but as I said I probably simply don't have good enough optics. The closeups are 1:1 image straight from camera with no resizing. It's not exactly easy to have decent details in ~50 pixels and I think I had the focus off as well there.

I also had an old telescope availiable that we used that night that had at least 2-3x higher focal length. With it I was able to see the stripes but just barely, the telescope was at it's limits and was already showing it only in grayscale. Unfortunately I don't have the equipment to attach the camera to that telescope but I might get myself this or just gather money a couple of months and then get a "real" telescope :)

And to not have a post without images I'll add something I took the next morning:
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I also had an old telescope availiable that we used that night that had at least 2-3x higher focal length. With it I was able to see the stripes but just barely, the telescope was at it's limits and was already showing it only in grayscale. Unfortunately I don't have the equipment to attach the camera to that telescope but I might get myself this or just gather money a couple of months and then get a "real" telescope :)

I have a 500mm catiodaptic lens, it is what I used to take the moon shot above, and it is an amazing lens but be aware of a few drawbacks. They nearly all have fairly high F numbers. Mine is F8 which means other than really bright sunlight you can't do handheld without pushing the ISO up. My camera body doesn't do very nice ISO above about 400 (800 gets really grainy and looks awful) so make sure you have a newer body that can do decent work at high ISOs. (I have been watching the latest bodies that do amazing work at 6400 or higher with a certain amount of interest as a result.)

Second being a mirror lens means the bokeh tends to the circular and can be a little harsh rather than a soft blur. They also seem to flatten the colour tone which can be compensated for in post-processing but can result in slightly scrunched colour with banding if you aren't careful.

Finally they are light enough that they are very, very sensitive to wind. Even a light breeze can produce a strong wobble in them making tripod shooting often want some wind shelter. Again pushing the ISO up helps here but you can't always achieve a shooting speed of one over your focal length due to the low light levels.

All that said these things are amazing for wildlife photography where you can get detailed shots without crowding the animal. My lens is a manual focus one so I have further restrictions on the kind of shots I can take with it - moving targets tend to be a pain. But the amount of resolving power for the weight is just incredible.

Finally seeing as we seem to be on an astronomical bent here...

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