Sean M. Leahy Photography

Is there a better MSU spartan icon better than Sparty himself?  I think not.  So here is the next installment of the Spartan Landmark series.  This is a shot of the newly placed Sparty.  The original Sparty statue is now inside the new football stadium, protected from the weather.  The original Spartan was created in 1945 by Leonard D. Jungwirth and measures 10 feet six inches in height weighing in at 3 tons making it one of the worlds largest free standing ceramic statues.

Picture Specifications:

• Camera: Nikon D300
• Lens: 18-135mm @ 40mm
• ISO: 200
• Aperture: f8
• Shutter: 1/125

OBJECTIVE: Shoot MSU’s Beaumont Tower as a vertical panorama.

RESULT:

This is what I came up with. I was waiting for the weather to cooperate with me all evening, and just as I was about to give up on the possibility of shooting this location, the sun peaked out behind some clouds just as it was about 15 degrees above the horizon. So I raced to the spot, set up the tripod and stared firing away. This image is a vertical panorama so it consists of 4 shots, layered vertically from the ground up. To ensure the exposure was metered the same for each shot in the series I set the camera to manual mode and controlled both the shutter speed and aperture.

The image below is scaled down for a more web friendly version, the full version measures 14″ x 24″ (which was dramatically cropped form the FULL image). I am thinking that this might make a great gallery mount for my office

Image Specifications:

• Camera: Nikon D300
• ISO: 200
• Aperture: f8.0
• Shutter: 1/30
• EV: -1

RAAAARRRRRRR!!!!!

No this is not a picture of someone (me) chewing on some ecto plasm or other radioactive substance, rather it is the result of 2 photogs sitting around with a bunch of camera equipment and a jar full of candy (and well, nothing better to do) This image of me chewing on some salt water taffy was captured with a macro lens and a mini-softbox affixed to a speedlight. (Picture courtesy Brandon Blinkenberg).

To get this shot Brandon used his Cannon 40D with 100mm Macro lens with a variation of extension tubes (to allow for a closer focusing distance) and a Lumiquest MiniSoftbox attached to his Cannon 580EX speedlight. For this shot, the lens is position about 2 inches from my teeth with the Lumiquest softbox about 1 inch to camera left, a business card was held on camera right to act as a fill card. What you get then, is a wonderful example of a close-up macro image that has tons of soft, brilliant light that really shows off the detail in the image. Using the Lumiquest mini-softbox made all the difference in this image, without it the light is just too harsh and it throws unflattering shadows across the detail washing out all the interesting aspect of the image.

For this close up shot, the small Lumiquest softbox works the way a 9′x9′ softbox would on a human subject, it provides a large light source that falls very soft onto the subject (assuming you get the softbox in real tight to your subject)

The Lumiquest mini-softbox is a wonderful little device to keep in your camera bag, it’s small, folds flat, and has a lot of uses, but the best part is its price, you should be able to find one for less than $30 and will attach to just about any hot shoe flash/speedlight (it simply uses Velcro). Here is a link to it at B&H Photo Video.

One of the more popular image styles that has been gaining attention and seems to be popping up everywhere are surreal images. What is a surreal image you ask? Well surreal images are images that normally start with a regular photograph that are manipulated in a Photoshop, Lightroom, or some other photo editing software. Surreal images can really grab attention, as they tend to have an imaginary or dreamlike quality (or nightmarish in some cases).

Here is an example of an image that was processed to have a surreal quality to it.

Here you can see the original image straight from the camera.

And here is the same image after it was processed to give it a surreal quality to it:

So how was this look accomplished? All that was done to this image was the following steps:

1. Image was first modified in Adobe Photoshop’s Camera Raw where the image control sliders were used to push the Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness far to the right around values in the +80-90 range. Then the Vibrance and Saturation were knocked down to around -20 or so to lessen the overly coulorful result of pushing the sliders too far to the right.
2. Once in Photoshop a Black and White Adjustment layer was added to increase the contrast and to turn the sky into a greyscale leaving no color in the sky.
3. A soft edge brush set to 50% opacity was used to paint with BLACK in the Black and White Adjustment layer layer mask revealing the colors of the layer below (the building). I used a brush opacity of 50% on the building and an opacity of around 20% for the foreground and fenced area.Next
4. Next I merged the image onto one layer and created a duplicate layer and selected the blend mode of the duplicated layer to overlay giving the image a darker grainy look. (you will want to adjust the opacity of the overlay layer to get the desired look).
5. After that, the final steps I took where to crop the image down to remove so much dead space above the building roof and add lens vignetting to really help draw the viewers eye into the building.

I am working on developing a few video tutorials, one being on this very same technique so hopefully that will be available soon.

Now go out and try this yourself!