Backlight - St Joseph, Michigan

Backlighting can give you some pretty dramatic effects. This series of four photos were taken from the same tripod placement within minutes of one another with only slight reorientation of the camera between shots to obscure varying degrees of the sun. By doing this, in combination with manual control of shutter speed and aperature, you can literally dial in the degree of silhouetting you want.









When you shoot shots like this, be very careful not to look directly at the sun through the viewfinder of your camera, especially with a telephone on the body. You can PERMANENTLY damage your retina!!!

Gary,

I understand the part about not looking directly at the sun, but the telephone part eludes me.

Expound please.

Dennis

Dennis, telephotos magnify the light. 50 mm is a normal focal length. So 100 mm gives you twice the light intensity, 200 mm four times, etc. so the intensity of what would hit your retina gets correspondingly worse as the focal length of the lens increases.

Gary

Gary,

Reread your post and my question and you might understand my confusion.LOL.

Dennis

Goes to prove you can't proofread your own writing! LOL... Oh well!

Gary

I'm always gringing after I see my post and see something misspelled.

I just did not at first put the photo on the of the tele. I was truly trying to figure out why a telephone on your body was more dangerous.

Dennis

Not to tease too hard, Dennis, but could you please define "gringing?"

Gary

Gary,

That was my feeble attempt at a joke- I misspelled cringing on purpose.

I do that after I read some of my posts because i did not check the spelling carefully. I use the modified hunt and peck method of keyboarding.

Dennis

Dennis,
Obviously I've been up too late too many nights recently scanning slides... Oh well.

Gary

Wow! You are very talented. After seeing your beautiful pictures, I'd be embarrased to post any more of mine.

Still waiting to hear if you have any photos of Split Rock.

Tammy

I agree with Tammy. I'm almost happy now that Photopoint.com went down or else I'd have embarassed my self long ago.

OK,my pictures aren't the best but sometime I get a good one. I don't post my pictures to impress, but to share. I've learned a bunch in the last few months by doing so. I welcome comments to help me improve. So, post your shots and share your lighthousing with us! That's what it is all about. Ask Gary how long he has been shooting, I'm sure he isn't a beginner like many of us. Sooooo- post those shots!

Bud

To answer Bud's question, no, I'm not a beginner in any sense of the word. I've been doing photography now for over 30 years and have gone through a series of cameras of increasing sophisticaation. My idea of sharing here is to encourage others to try taking some shots that the might otherwise be afraid to try for one reason or another. May of these can be taken effectively and can give you great results if you're willing to experiment.

Gary

Gary,

Of all of the photo storage sites out there on the web, which one(s) do you recommend for us to use? And would any be more economical than others to use if you're just a casual user/poster?

Thanks!

Mitch,

At the momeent, I'm using www.clubphoto.com which is free if you don't want permanent galleries. They hold for 90 days unless you make the permanent. Depending on what you're inclined to do that might be sufficient. If you want them permanent, there are two levels the higher cost being a pretty modest $35/year. The size file that you can post from there is 512 pixels in the maximum dimension, which is about 20% larger than most of the others that I've looked at. The other alternative is to post photos to

www.shuttercity.com

but there you can only upload 3 photos/week although they can be consdiderably larger and are uncompressed from the size of the jpeg that you post at so you can have jpegs up to 150 Kb as opposed to the 20-30 Kb compressed size that you get from clubphoto. If you compare my photos on the Pigeon Point thread, the large late sunset photos is linked to there from Shutter City while the smaller ones are linked to Clubphoto. I guess those are the choices. One advantage with Shutter City is that you will get feedback from other photographers using the site and viewing your photos. A number of us use it, including myself, Terry Forrest, Bud Schrader, and Steven Sostaric that I can think of off the top of my head.

Hope that this helps some.

Gary


[This message has been edited by lighthouse_photo (edited 05-01-2002).]

OK... I won't be discouraged from posting photos again after my next lighthouse adventure... but not next to Gary's wonderful pictures. I'd rather just post them to share my trip. So, maybe that would be on another HL forum.

Some day I'd love to attend a photography workshop where we practice at a lighthouse.

My pictures aren't that bad. But I'm not happy with the scanning. I don't have a scanner at this time. So, I've been using PhotoWorks (formerly Seattle Filmworks). My scanned images don't look as nice as the printed photos.

Does anyone have any suggestions where you can get good quality printed photos as well as scanned images?

I'd also like to invest in a reasonably priced scanner that does a good job scanning both photos and negatives. I haven't researched this for a while. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

By the way, I don't see the original topic listed below or replies as I'm typing. Is there something I can click on to get them to display here. Seems like they automatically display when I was typing my previous posts. (I'm still a Newbie, can you tell?)

Tammy

Tammy,

I can't help you much on a scanner for prints. I use a Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED slide scanner but that has a pretty hefty price tag but it does an absolutely superb job. You might want to start a separate thread to get a discussion going on scanners and the like on this forum.

As for posting alongside my stuff, don't worry about it. This isn't a competition. I do enter photo contests - that's where the competition belongs.

Gary

Great! Thanks, Gary! I think I'll check them out this weekend. I'm assuming I could use clubphoto to also post my eBay items since images are, as you say, cleared every 90 days if you don't make them permanent.

Mitch,

Using Clubphoto as a site to link photos to e-Bay would be a great idea. You're allowed multiple albums on that site even for free usage, so you could devote one just for stuff you're posting to e-Bay and then delete the photos in that album and replace
them with others when they've served their purpose.

Gary

Gary: I forget what size we're supposed to use for posting to Harbour Lights? I deleted everything that I had on that jerk site that locked us out of using them here.

------------------
Terry (Only my mother, brothers & sisters call me Teresa) Forrest

I second Bud's message- post away everyone! Once your photos are scanned it only takes about 30 minutes to figure out how to get them to appear here - at least for me, and I'm a little slow

I for one am just happy to see places I haven't been- it will help to decide which ones might be worth checking out in the future. Plus everyone sees things differently and therefore has something to add. I have found this is a great place to work on improving both technique and composition. So post away!

Terry, I scan at about 700 dpi for things I want to post to the web. After that, I generally resize to a maxium dimension of about 700 pixels and then convert to a jpeg of <150 Kb for uploading to clubphotos. At that point you're ready to go. Hope that this helps.

Gary

Thanks, Gary!

------------------
Terry (Only my mother, brothers & sisters call me Teresa) Forrest