100 Years of Dental School

Being in dental school has a way of keeping you from getting out and taking photos, so I decided to bring my camera to school and take photos there! The Evans building of the Penn School of Dental Medicine is 100 years old this year, so I thought I would pay a little tribute to my school. By the way, the dental school itself was founded in 1878 and is one of the very oldest dental schools in the nation! Being in a 100 year old building has its pros and cons. For one, the building is in dire need of renovations, (which are beginning to take place). On the other hand, there is some amazing architecture from stained glass windows to hundreds of unique gargoyles.

Architecture photography is really different from other forms of photo taking because buildings are full symmetry and straight lines. That means that if you don't center your perspective on your subject and aren't 100% level then things tend to look distorted or unbalanced; especially if you are using a wide angle lens like I did. The easiest way to overcome this is to purposefully stand off center and maybe even tilt your camera at an angle to bring in dramatic diagonal lines onto the composition.

Here are a few of the photos that I've taken so far. These and more photos to come will actually be part of a photo book that I'm making for students and faculty.

Getting Closer

In my latest round of photos from Longwood Gardens I tried to look for interesting patterns and details and zoom in on them. I really like macro photography. I even liked it as a kid before I knew what macro was when I looked at the 'guess the object' pictures from the Highlights magazine. My problem with macro photography is that I don't have a good lens for it. The best thing I have is an inexpensive 55-250mm telephoto with a 3 ft minimum focal distance and the glass isn't very sharp. I still used it, though, and I think the shots turned out pretty well. Not all of these are truly macro shots, but they constitute a closer look.

1/80 sec at f/4.5, ISO 400, 50mm

1/250 sec at f/5.0, ISO 400, 100mm

1/125 sec at f/5.0, ISO 400, 123mm

1/100 sec af f/5.0, ISO 400, 145mm

1/125 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400, 171mm

1/60 sec at f/5.0, ISO 400, 55mm

In the Hangar

When I was a kid I had an encyclopedia of airplanes, and I loved to look in it. The National Air and Space Museum holds some of my favorite planes, so naturally, I spent an inordinate amount of time photographing them. Here are some of my favorite shots.

HDR: 1/60, 1/25, 1/10 sec at f/4.5, ISO 1600, 20mm

1/50 sec at f/3.5, ISO 1600, 10mm

1/20 sec at f/4.5, ISO 800, 22mm

1/30 sec at f/4.5, ISO 800, 19mm

1/40 sec at f/4.0, ISO 1600, 16mm

1/100 sec at f/3.5, ISO 1600, 12mm

Space Shuttle Discovery

It's always been a dream of mine to see a shuttle launch, but that era has passed. The next best thing is to see one in person at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. I've watched the Shuttle Discovery launch and land many times on TV, but I really wasn't prepared for just how magnificent it is in person. I literally spent hours staring at it, taking hundreds of photos, and reliving my childhood fantasies of spaceflight. My wife finally had to pry me away to go see the other exhibits, which too were very cool. I'll post more on that later.

The hanger that held the shuttle was dimly lit except for bright splashes of direct sunlight creating a very wide range of light from dark to bright. In this situation I'd normally use a tripod and shoot bracketed exposure HDRs, but tripods weren't permitted in the museum. This made it really difficult to get great shots, but I think a few turned out pretty well.

1/80 sec at f/4.5, ISO 1600, 22mm

1/250 sec at f/5, ISO 1600, 123mm

1/40 sec at f/4, ISO 1600, 16mm

1/40 sec at f/3.5, ISO 1600, 10mm

1/80 sec at f/4.5, ISO 1600, 22mm

Atlantis

This post has been a long time coming, but dental school has a way of keeping me from my photography. My family went to The Bahamas over thanksgiving for my mom's 60th b-day. We were lucky enough to stay at the famous Atlantis resort, and the photography was pretty good. I must say, my kind of vacation is one where there's a camera in my hands. I only half joke that I usually don't take photos while I'm on vacation, I go on vacation to take photos. Atlantis did not disappoint.

This was an interesting shot to post-process. I originally shot this as an HDR (I bracketed three shots with different exposures to merge them later), but after processing them through my HDR software a couple times the photo just wasn't coming out. It just looked kind of unrealistic and I couldn't get the contrast that I wanted.

1/30 sec at f/11, ISO 100, 22mm

Then it dawned on me that HDR was designed to take scenes with light ranges beyond the ability of a camera sensor to capture and then merge them into one shot. Well, interestingly enough, all the light in one of my exposures actually fit in my cameras sensor range so no parts of the image were overexposed or underexposed. I realized this when I looked at the histogram for this shot. The left side of the histogram represents the dark tones starting at black and represents brighter tones to the right, so the big bump kind of in the middle means that most of the light was about medium brightness. You can see that the range of light in my shot just barely fit my camera sensor's range. If there were completely under or overexposed pixels, you would see tones piled up on the far left or right of the histogram respectively. Achieving this wide range of light in one shot is one of the keys to getting a good exposure, and I did it rather accidentally. So instead of trying to process an HDR, I just took the original shot as is and I think it looks pretty good. I just enhanced a few things in Adobe Lightroom like contrast and sharpness and I also photoshopped out some distracting buoys in the foreground. That's not cheating right?

I normally only put up one photo per post, but seeing how infrequently I've posted lately, I might as well show you a few more from the trip.

HDR: 1/250, 1/60, 1/15 sec at f/11, ISO 100, 10mm

1/15 sec at f/3.5, ISO 800, 10mm

1/25 sec at f/4, ISO 1600, 15mm