April 24, 2020 by Ming Hung in Black and White, Landscape

Checking in with a short post today. Many of us are stuck at home, and we will not be able to travel for a while. When I took the image above I had intended to make it look like somewhere else. I am pretending I am somewhere along the southwest border of the United States and Mexico. This was really just a road along one of the borders of the airport where I work. those are not hills in the distance but just mounds of dirt.

I leave you with two mirror selfies I took this morning.

Click images to view on black.

Solar Eclipse, August 21, 2017, Chicago

August 23, 2017 by Ming Hung in Photography, Nature, Astronomy

Chicago was not in the path of totality, and it was a cloudy day so I nixed the plan I had to photograph the event. Instead of leaving a little later for work I went on my commute as usual, leaving my tripod and longest lens at home. The following images were shot from the parking lot at work over the course of about ten minutes whenever the sun peaked through the cloud cover. The moon was already on its way away from the sun, but I got something.

I did not have eclipse glasses so I just stuck the camera out of the car window and used its LCD screen. I had an eclipse filter on my lens, but I did not use any long shutter speeds. These images were shot at ISO 3200 even though I did not need that amount of sensitivity. I felt that there would be plenty of people making great, clear, sharp pictures of totality and the different phases of the eclipse so I wanted to differentiate the images I was taking. The result was these grainy, toned, dramatic images.

I wish that I was able to catch this a bit sooner for a thinner crescent shape.

Three tones, three different moods. All of these were shot with a 150mm full-frame equivalent lens.

Click images to view on black.

Land/cityscape in Black and White

May 09, 2017 by Ming Hung in Black and White, Landscape, Cityscape

There are not that many obvious or "traditional" landscape shooting opportunities in Chicago. I am not looking hard enough. I live just over two miles from Lake Michigan so the lakefront is a good spot for doing some landscapes. But they are technically cityscapes.

This particular day was a fairly nice day. It started with nice blue sky with puffy white clouds, but it was windy and rain was coming. Thicker clouds started rolling in. I envisioned taking these shots as monochromes from the start. Even though the sky started nicely blue, the images were just too blue because the water was blue as well, and there were no other interesting colors present.

I used Fujifilm's Acros black and white film simulation with a red filter as my base. Then I adjusted whites, blacks, highlights, and shadows in post.

I wished there were some more clouds in the sky for the shot below to balance it out better.

The clouds thickened and made for more drama.

As an aside I do not currently own any zoom lenses on my Fujifilm X system. When I was shooting Canon my main lens was a zoom lens. For all of these shots I may have either zoomed in or out if I had a zoom. However, I am enjoying using just prime lenses. I see things differently, and I do not miss having a zoom at all. I used to shoot just primes prior to my Canon system so it is not something new to me. I also do not feel that one type of lens is "better" than the other. They are all tools, just with different applications. It is up to the individual to utilize them as they see fit.

Click images to view on black.