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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Water with a Homemade ND Filter

Saturday, 10 March 2012

While i was out testing my DIY - Camera Polarizing Filter, i also brought my DIY - ND Filter i made from a piece of welding glass. I was really happy with how the pictures came out before when i was at Lake Erie.

Here's a slow-moving river near Flat Rock, Michigan.

The ND filter makes a very calm effect. The blurs in the picture are a flock of geese.

I used my new Manfrotto Tripod and it worked great, it was smaller and a lot easier to carry around.

The same picture as before, converted to black and white.

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ND Filter at Lake Erie

Monday, 6 February 2012

On the drive home from Cincinnati i pulled off I-75 at a Exit 5 near the Consumers Energy power plant where i had been working a lot this summer. There's a small parking lot where you can walk to Lake Erie. I've taken some pictures there before when the lake level was way down. I was still a little bummed out with some of the pictures i took in Tennessee, using my homemade ND filter.
I made an ND filter for my camera from a piece of welding glass, but when i took pictures of the rivers and Laural Falls i forgot to set my camera to RAW. That means that i had to spend a long time in Photoshop and the pictures still never turned out very good, the colors were all off.

So i walked along Lake Erie and took around 25 pictures. The exposure times ranged between 4 and 15 seconds. I couldn't really tell by looking at my camera how well they turned out because with the welders glass they all had a green tint to them. Here's what they looked like directly out of the camera.
But when i got home and processed them with Photoshop i was really happy. This time they turned out much better.

This one i converted to black and white.
Here is just a normal photo i took with the ND filter not on.
The ND filter allows you to open the lens for a much longer time then you would normally be able to, creating a glassy effect on the water.
This picture is definitely my favorite.

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