My brother was wanting to learn a bit more about taking long exposures at night, so we decided to go out on New Years Eve (after all of the festivities had died down) in our parent's neighborhood. I got a few pretty interesting photos, and I think that he learned a lot about it.

For those of you who might have the same questions, I'll try to make this as informative as possible. 

I was using my Nikon D4 and D800 with 14-24mm f/2.8  lens and my Fujifilm X-T1 with their 14mm f/2.8 lens.

Since Colorado has quite a bit of light pollution down the front range, and since the moon was so ridiculously bright that night (it had to be close to full), it was a bit hard to really get any stars, but despite the cold and light we went out anyways!

While I was using high level gear, you can definitely get pretty good results using even the entry level gear from any manufacturer out there, be it Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm, Pentax, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, etc. All you really have to know are a few basics to get you started:

1. Long shutter speeds: This is what will allow you to pretty much turn night into day. The longer the shutter is open on your camera, the more light it will gather, and the better your exposure will be at night. As could be seen in the data I included in the pictures above, all of them were around 20-30 seconds long. Pretty much every camera that allows manual controls will let you get shutter speeds this long.

Another thing to be aware of with the shutter speed when taking photos of stars is a phenomena called star trailing. Because the earth is rotating that means that the stars are actually moving in the sky, albeit very slowly. So if you get a shutter speed longer than around 30 seconds or so you will start to pick up this slight movement. Now there is a rule regarding this if you want to get sharp, pin-point stars in your photos. This is called the 500 rule. Pretty much you have to take the focal length of your lens, say a 14mm, multiply it by the crop factor of your camera, or 1.5x for my Fujifilm X-T1, and divide 500 by this number. So 14x1.5=21mm, and 500/21=23 seconds. So I can theoretically have a 23 second long exposure with that lens without really getting any star trails in my photo. 

2. Tripod: This is a necessary accessory in order to achieve a sharp long exposure. If there is any camera shake at all during your photo, then it will show up as some blurring in the photo. So you will want to get your camera as stable as possible, so don't buy a $20 plastic Wal-Mart Tripod and expect it to stand up in the wind.

And my final image that I am quite proud of:

As you can see, the full frame 14mm is significantly wider, which really is one of the strengths of Full frame cameras, I must admit.

Thanks for reading, and of you have any more questions feel free to ask in the comments.

Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios

So this is more of an "addendum" post to the prior one about the Children's museum. 

So for a long time I have really been interested in Chihuly Glass, as it is always so intricate and well made, probably some of the best in the world at this point. Since I have quite a few photos, both from the Children's Museum and years prior, I thought that it deserved its own post about it. 

Most of these photos were still taken with my Fujifilm X-T1 and 23mm lens, though a few in the middle from a while ago were with my Nikon D800.

It is always interesting to see glass being blown. It is a crazy process where the craftsmen literally use their lungs to blow air into melted glass, while shaping and molding it at the same time. A few photos here aren't from the Children's Museum, they are from the Chihuly workshop in Tacoma, Washington. 

Since the whole point of the glass is to look at, I won't post too many more words, and just focus on the photos. Though this next one is a photo of the outside of the studio. Just as nice outside as it is inside. 

And now some more from the Children's Museum.

So yeah, not too many words, more photos, but I guess that is the whole point of a photo blog. I think that glass blowing is something that I could really like to learn how to do, though I don't think there are any places that do it in the Bismarck area...

Anyways, thanks for reading!

Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios

So everyone likes a good product photo, especially one involving alcohol. Fur fun I decided to try to make a good product photo of some of the Crown Royal that we had bought. 

So here is the final photo.

Very happy with how it turned out, even though it took the better part of an hour for one photo. I kept trying to get some nice colors using just lights on the sides, but that wasn't working at all. 

I originally made this set-up to do a nice photo of my Leica M3 for a large print that I wanted, so I went to Menards and bought a large piece of glass, and Hobby Lobby to get a couple black poster boards. It was nice doing some product photos, as it reminded me of when I used to take photos of my Lego creations like 4-8 years ago. I'll probably have to get some white poster boards and do some new ones of a couple Lego sets!

Anyways, here is the photo of my Leica M3, since it isn't on here yet:

I kept trying to get a good colored photo with the lights on the sides, as I said, and it really wasn't working out. I like working with white backgrounds so much more, but the black definitely lent itself to the subject matter a lot better. Anyways, with the lights on the sides it was falling way too much onto the poster board underneath the glass, as can be seen on the Left below here. Once I finally got a picture that I liked, down on the Right, I went ahead in Lightroom and Photoshop for editing!

Now it was some fairly involved editing, and the Raw files out of my Nikon D800 are always beautiful to edit with, giving me SO much information to work with. Here is a sort of "behind the scenes" photo that I took afterwards with my new D3s!

The Gear I used here was:
Nikon D800
Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens
2x Nikon SB-600 speedlights
2x Yongnuo YN 560 III speedlights
4x Yongnuo RF-603Nii-N1 Wireless Flash Triggers

And the settings that the camera was on:
D800: 50mm f/8 1/250 ISO 100. 
Some pretty standard camera settings for using speedlights, so I mostly played with the power and positioning of the lights.

And that's all for now! Thanks for reading,

Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios

Well, I am a bit late to the party here, as this post should have been done around Thanksgiving time. However, I have been pretty busy with work and Hockey and such, so it just kept getting put on the back burner. So I guess brace yourselves for a lot of pictures.

Indianapolis seems to really have a lot going for it as a city. Pretty good sports teams (The Colts actually did well this year), a pretty vibrant downtown, and a good system of Museums. The Day after Thanksgiving (11/28/14), we decided to head up to the City to check out the Children's Museum.

I decided to take my little Fujifilm X-T1 with me, instead of the massive massive massive Nikon D4 so that I didn't have to deal with the bulk of the Nikon. I only took one lens, as well, the 23mm f/1.4, and I never really felt the need for a different one.

While being called the "Children's Museum" it is more of just an all around educational museum for everyone. You didn't have to be "escorted" by a child in order to get in, though the majority of people there were with children. 

For whatever reason, even though there were bright vibrant colors everywhere, a lot of the photos that I took lent themselves quite well to black and white. I think because, in addition to the colors, the museum really seemed to focus on nice shapes and lines, as well. But don't worry, they aren't all "super artsy" black and white.

One of the main features of the museum, for me, was the massive Chihuly Glass pillar that they had in an atrium in the center. I have always liked it, ever since I lived in the Seattle area and got to see a lot of his glass work around the city. 

It baffles me how big this thing actually is. It is probably 50 feet tall, all of hand-blown glass fitted together pretty much perfectly. This is probably the one time that I wanted a slightly wider lens, but I didn't have my 14mm or 8mm fisheye at this point.

The museum had quite a good selection of exhibits, from one on China, a fairly large one about Dinosaurs, some smaller models and trains, to Ancient Egypt and Ancient China and how Archaeologists do their work. I'll just throw up a few pictures here instead of talking about each one. 

China and Dinosaurs! (Not the same exhibit)

Then they had a few smaller model towns with model trains, and a big train too!

The last couple rooms that we went through was pretty much madness, with water and plants and cranes and blocks and mirrors and everything like that.

And machines and water and cranes and stuff! This room was pretty much just pure madness.

All in all it was super interesting and I couldn't recommend it enough. And of course, one more shot of the glass pillar, for funsies.

Until next time, Indianapolis

Thanks for reading,

Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios

So I have only shot 4 Hockey games up to this point, and the first 3 of them were Bismarck Bobcats vs. the Brookings Blizzard, so it was nice to have a new team to photograph! This week they had a couple games against the Aberdeen Wings, who were wearing Red and Black Jerseys! 

While it was a good game, the Bobcats were struggling for a while in the second period, but brought it back brilliantly in the third, but it wasn't enough to break a 4 point deficit, and ended up losing 4-2. 

Got to love how much the stick bends when they make a shot! Probably my favorite shot of the game.

Unfortunately when shooting through the plexiglass there is often some distortion caused by it, which will soften the image quite a bit. Really wanting a photo hole so that I don't have to worry about it... 

Anyways, I didn't feel like doing as many photos at this game, probably because I got up early to take photos at a Masters Swimming event. 

Thanks for Reading,

Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios