Up at the Cottage - Taking out the Docks

Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Karrie and i went up to visit Katie and John at their cottage for Labor Day. We arrived on Saturday just before sunset.

Again i tried using the homemade ND filter to take pictures of the lake, during the day.

The colors didn't come out great because, just like when i first tried it at the waterfalls in Tennessee, i forgot to set the camera to RAW. So in that case it's just best to convert it to black-and-white.

You can see that max stood really still in the water during the 15 second exposure.

This was us sitting by the fire on Sunday night.

That same night i tried again to make a time lapse video of the stars in the sky. Here's the result.

http://youtu.be/5bPj0x4CZkI?hd=1

I still need more practice doing this. There needs to be trees or something in the foreground to give it a sense of scale. But i made sure to point the camera at the north star.

And this is what combining all of those individual photos into one picture looks like. You can really see from this picture how the north star stays constant in the sky.

Before we left on Monday we helped take out the docks and boat hoist. Here's another time lapse of that. It didn't take that long, less than an hour.

http://youtu.be/uPjHwmajupc?hd=1

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Cottage on the Lake - Putting in the Dock and Boats

Wednesday, 23 May 2012

Last week i went up north to our cottage to help put in the boats and docks. Also my dad and i took apart the aluminum boat hoist. We weren't sure how long it would take, but it ended up only taking a few hours.

A lot of the bolts were rusted from being in the water for several years. Luckily the nuts were at the ends of the bolt, so once we broke them free there wasn't any corroded threads to deal with.

Here is what the boat lift/shore station looked like when it was all taken apart. All of the cables and pulleys are inside of the aluminum beams. And the heaviest part was definitely the white cable crank at the top left.

Also at night i wanted to try taking more pictures with my homemade ND filter, the stars at night and spinning wool. Here's the links to some of those previous pictures and how they are done:

• ND Filter at Lake Erie
• Spinning Wool - Night Photography
• Star Pictures
• Tennessee New Year

Here's the pictures i took with my ND filter. I really like the way it makes the water have a glass surface, it's a very calm and dreamlike photo.

With the photos taken using the welding glass there is some post processing in Photoshop. I have 4 or 5 presets saved so it saves a lot of time since now with just 1 click i can fix the colors. But in a lot of cases, converting the picture to black and white is the best way to emphasize the texture and detail.

Also you can see in this photo that the ND filter acts as a polarizing filter too. It lets you see right into the water.

This was me just experimenting. I had to sit real still for the 30 second exposure.

This is a panorama photo of the lake at night. It was created using 6 pictures, each of them at 53 second exposures. Then i processed them all the same way in Photoshop and combined them into one picture using Autostitch.

(click to enlarge)

I took several pictures of the night sky, but this one turned out the best. I think at first i had the ISO set too low on the camera. I could have forfeit a little bit of added noise for more vibrant pictures. For the panorama i set the ISO at 250, you can see a couple of shooting stars in there too.

This was the spinning wool photos i wanted to try. If you click on the link above you can see the setup i used to hold and light the steel wool.

I was expecting some amazing photographs from this, but none of them were all that great. I think the hardest part was in being the right distance from the camera. You want to be close to the camera to get the dramatic effect, but not so close that all you see is the sparks from the steel wool.

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