Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Posted on May 13, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Street life in Lagos

Lagos is an adventure that I maintain any African should experience at least once in their lifetime. Lagos reminds me of one really big township and it has a real sense of adventure about it. This photo was taken while driving and depicts a typical scene of what street life is like in Nigeria. You can buy anything from vegetables to recharge vouchers for your mobile phone and on the streets everything is dirt cheap. I have to admit it’s not a city that one really wants to walk around in by oneself but if you’re with a local it’s pretty safe to do so.

Over the coming days/weeks I’m going to be posting a series of photos I took while I spent some time in Lagos. I know that everything in Lagos was an experience to me and I hope that some of the photos will help depict that experience to you.

 

Posted on January 26, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Today’s Solar Eclipse

I knew an eclipse was imminent – I just didn’t know when it was. Luckily though the cloud cover around this morning’s solar eclipse allowed me to get a few shots. The beauty of this shot is that I wasn’t expecting it and I only had a window of about 2 minutes. Soon after I took this pic the cloud cover disappeared and I could no longer look directly at the eclipse and it was impossible to take further photos.

 

Posted on January 19, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My first Tilt-Shift photo

My good pal Gregor has been posting a series of Fake Tilt-Shift photographs and I’ve been dying to try it out myself. Wikipedia describes Tilt-Shift faking as:

Tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature scale model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is.

I recently acquired a new Canon 55mm-250mm IS lens for my 400D and with new lens in hand I was able to take some cool shots from our balcony at work.

I took a number of different shots and then tried to follow this online tilt-shift tutorial to create my first masterpiece but the results were not fantastic. I was not happy with the output as it didn’t seem to create the miniature effect I was hoping for.

So, I created my own selection band by manually selecting the road, carefully following the natural curve and shadows, as well as other elements like the flags and robots to give it more precision. It literally took me hours to do but I am more than happy with the output.