Anthony Turns Six
Cake Arrives six candles: confirmed! -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/5.6, ISO 3600 — full exif
Cake Arrives
six candles: confirmed!
Basking in the Song “Happy Birthday to You”, of course -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1400 — full exif
Basking in the Song
“Happy Birthday to You”, of course
First Attempt -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 3600 — full exif
First Attempt
50% Success Rate -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2800 — full exif
50% Success Rate
Big Enough to Cut By Himself -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — full exif
Big Enough to Cut By Himself
(Maybe I Spoke Too Soon) must talk to him, again, about safe knife-handling procedures... -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1250 — full exif
(Maybe I Spoke Too Soon)
must talk to him, again, about safe knife-handling procedures...
Inspecting His, Er, Handiwork -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 900 — full exif
Inspecting His, Er, Handiwork
Serving Others... -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1100 — full exif
Serving Others...
... Sort Of -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1000 — full exif
... Sort Of
Guilty Pleasure -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 2800 — full exif
Guilty Pleasure
used to be his Name Written in Chocolate -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1800 — full exif
used to be his
Name Written in Chocolate
Washing It All Down with cold, tasty milk -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/125 sec, f/3.2, ISO 1000 — full exif
Washing It All Down
with cold, tasty milk

Looking in my photo archives, I see we've done this type of thing a few times before. We did it last year, and the year before as well. It's almost as if we do this every year. 🙂

I'm not all that happy with the photos... the lighting was horrible (mixed incandescent and fluorescent) which makes for a white-balance nightmare, and for the dark, candle-lit shots.... I dunno.... I just expected more from a D700 that can take pictures in the dark. One of the problems was nailing focus... the lack of a good focus screen on the D700 is maddening.

And when I had the autofocus Nikkor 24-70/2.8 on there during the brighter times, it still had a lot of issues in letting the shutter release after focusing. It focused just dandy, but it didn't think it did, and so held the shutter back. Maddening. I eventually switched to manual focus, but then we go back to the first problem.

Then there are problems that I brought on myself by not paying attention to what was going on. Every single shot of him and the cake shows what looks like only five candles. I just got really really unlucky with the candle alignment WRT my position. Sigh. Because I wanted the first photo on his “turns six years old” post to show six candles, I went ahead and “enhanced” that first photo by adding an extra candle and two extra flames. (All in Lightroom, no less.) Had I not done it, it would have appeared at first glance to have only four candles. As it is now, upon very close inspection, you'll see seven candles.

Then to add insult to injury, there's apparently a bug in the color-management support in Firefox 3 that, when color-management is enabled, causes the darkest parts of the candle-lit photos to be rendered in a horrible pixelated, striped way that I'm at a loss to explain. Firefox on the Mac works fine, as does Firefox on Windows if I turn off color management. Sigh.

Luckily, Anthony doesn't care about these photo woes. He got toys.


All 11 comments so far, oldest first...

Happy birthday Anthony!

— comment by Beau Harbin on October 24th, 2008 at 12:09am JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

I think this is a great sequence, especially the candle-lit ones – I’d be very proud of them. I don’t think this sort of shot requires pin-sharp focus, and certainly none of them worries me at all in that respect. The first one, especially, is a real cracker.

As for Firefox, I have CM enabled and can’t see any pixellation or stripes BUT, having read the text, then gone back to the first photos, I get a long lasting after-image of the text – I expect it’s my age! Be interesting to see if others see what I can’t.

Happy sixth, Anthony!

— comment by Peter on October 24th, 2008 at 2:04am JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Happy birthday, Anthony!

Jeffrey, with regards to the AF problems you mentioned. Try setting the camera in release priority (options a1 and a2 on the D200). This way when you trip the shutter the shot will be taken, even if the AF module might think otherwise.

I’ve combined this by using the AF-ON button to focus. The combo works for me.

— comment by Gustaf Erikson on October 24th, 2008 at 5:27am JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Many happy returns.

Don’t fret the technical stuff (you take some great family memories). My seventh (a long, long time ago – Star Wars, galactic time) was the “day that Birthday Parties Stopped”.

I think Anthony demonstrates a degree of contentment and restraint that I think my parents only wished I had at his age.

— comment by Martin Doonan on October 24th, 2008 at 7:30am JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Happy Birthday little man!
-Aunt Marci

— comment by Marcina on October 24th, 2008 at 4:19pm JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

I think you’ll come back to these and end up liking them a lot. Your memory of the scene as it looked looked to your eye and how you wanted them to look is still strong – too strong, perhaps, to let you see how good the photos are. Before reading your comments, I was left thinking that this was an excellent set. There’s a relaxed, genuine and unforced atmosphere about the candlelit pictures – the kind of thing we could never have dreamt of before cameras like the D700. All the birthday pictures of my own childhood were lit with those four-shots-per-cube disposable units that my father used with his little Kodak. 🙂 They have their own charm but you can’t beat ambient light.

— comment by Bahi on October 24th, 2008 at 9:04pm JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

First of all, happy birthday to Anthony!

The problem with shooting in candlelight (when the light source itself is part of the exposure) is more a dynamic range problem than a low light ISO problem. The range of brightness between the candle flames vs the shadows on Anthony is huge. I’m sure there might be some sort of fancy way to light this strobist-style and arrange the light to get it all to look great and be within range but don’t ask me what it is.

— comment by Jon on October 24th, 2008 at 11:55pm JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Oh and by the way, I think the photos are great

— comment by Jon on October 24th, 2008 at 11:56pm JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Happy birthday, Anthony!

The photos look very good to my eye (having tried the same recently with D200 and seeing the results 😉

I have a question though. You said: “I went ahead and “enhanced” that first photo by adding an extra candle and two extra flames. (All in Lightroom, no less.)”. How did you do that purely in LR? I was not aware LR2 allows cloning?

Alex

There’s a dust-spot cloning/healing tool, which can be used for more than just dust spots. It’s only circular, so I needed several for each item, and a bit of luck, but it happened to work out. —Jeffrey

— comment by Alex on October 25th, 2008 at 12:07am JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Lovely photos of Anthony’s birthday. In the second photo of the cake cutting set, looks like cake is going to be obliterated!

— comment by parv on October 25th, 2008 at 8:46pm JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

あんと、おたんじょうび、おめでとう!!

— comment by ひなた&ふうた on October 26th, 2008 at 3:27am JST (15 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink
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