Keeneland in another light

One of the things I enjoy most is showing people things they don’t normally get to see. The infrared camera is another way to do that.

We all know what horses look like, and most of us in Central Kentucky have a good idea what Keeneland race track looks like. But I’m pretty sure none of us have ever thought about what Keeneland might look like in the infrared light spectrum. Read more

My vacation camera comes in handy

I recently bought a nice little vacation movie/still camera called the Sanyo CG6 Xacti. It’s 6 megapixels, shoots stills and MPEG4 movies, 5x optical zoom, and does a very credible job, especially for Web use. I tucked it in my pocket when I covered, using my Canon SLRs, former President Bill Clinton as he campaigned Read more

An international prize

The 65th annual Pictures of the Year International competition announced Monday that Herald-Leader staff photographer David Stephenson won First Place for Best Multimedia, with his entry A New Dawn. Read more

A True Wide Angle

One advantage of the new Canon 5-D camera all the staff has now is that it is a full frame digital.  That is, the sensor records the image, at the true millimeter, just like the "old" film days.  So while our Nikons (and, yes, some other models of Canon like the Mark III, 30-D, etc.) record a magnification of the actual focal length (a 20mm would become a 30mm due to the smaller digital sensor in those cameras), the 5-D gives a much wider view.
The photo below of Mid-Town Barbers owner Brian Stortzum was my hot weather feature I shot Aug. 8 as he used an umbrella to carry his own shade.  It was one of our Kentucky.com updates and was up on the home page for a couple of hours.  You may have heard of photogs doing a "Hail Mary", shooting blind by holding the camera overhead and hoping the framing is good.  Well, this is a little like that, but I shot very LOW to the ground, not looking through the camera and hoping the framing was good!  You can see from the other shot that shooting a low "Hail Mary" takes a lot of frames to make it right.  The power lines are brutal.

Canon 5-D, 400 ISO, 20mm (zoom lens) f13, 1/400th, aperture priority.

Done in 75 seconds

For those of you who live in Lexington, you know how frustrating Man o’ War Blvd. can be. For a Sunday story about some of the proposed solutions to the growing traffic problems on the road, Charles Bertram and I put together a time-lapse video of the road.

While it plays like a video, it is actually a sequence of 1,044 still images. Here’s what we did:

We clamped a Canon 5D to Charles’ sunroof using two Bogen magic arms and various clamps. We used a Canon intervelometer and set it to take a photo every two seconds as we drove the entire 16-mile length of the road. It took us 27 minutes to drive it the first time at around 3:30 on Thursday. On the way back, beginning at around 4 p.m. at Blue Grass Airport, it took us 35 minutes.

You’ll notice that we got pretty lucky and hit some crucial green lights during our trip – something we weren’t expecting, even at 4 p.m. We joked about doing it again at 5 p.m. to see how long it took us, knowing that rush hour would be picking up steam.  Twice was enough for us, though, even with the green lights. 

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