Waquoit Photography Studio

10/16/2024

I know for sure you have all seen enough pictures of the Northern Lights from the 10th, but you haven't seen these ones yet, so here you go.

This was one of the most fun I have ever had with a camera in my hands. Well, the camera was on a tripod most of the time, but you know what I meant. It was also very cool to have my little photo-buddy Reggie there to enjoy it too.

For the most part, we could see dim, white light in the distance with our naked eyes. Then, we got to Chappy Beach. It was truly INSANE! We hit the Sandwich Boardwalk and saw Mary Lindberg and her boyfriend and musical partner John. The lights weren't really firing, but I was able to figure out why my camera wasn't catching light. It was dark and my lens is manual, so instead of shooting at f/2.8 like I thought I was, my camera was set at f/22. Glad I figured it out before we got to Chappy.
We ran into Hillarie GC, who had been out chasing lights with us before, only to come home sad. This time she hit a home run! The lights were literally all around us at Chappy and were incredibly bright. You didn't need the assist from the camera to see them. It was great to see so many people out enjoying this cosmic phenomenon.

The last place Reggie and I went was Crane to see one of the most iconic trees in all of the land. It truly is an iconic tree now that it has been captured like this. What a great experience!

Sorry about shoving more pictures of the Northern Lights down your eye-holes, but it had to be done.

10/12/2024

Thursday night was a very special thing. You could actually SEE the Northern Lights with the naked eye. It was a strong enough display to see green, pink, and purple directly overhead at about 7:15, just after sunset.

I didn't have my camera ready to go yet, so I just stood there and enjoyed it. It would have taken me longer to get things ready than the display was likely to last anyway, so it wasn't worth trying. I knocked on a neighbor's door and said, "Shut your lights off and get out here!" She thought I was crazy until she shut off her lights and looked up. It was mind-blowing to see.

Reggie and I spent the next 5 hours chasing color with our cameras. We ended up at the Sandwich Boardwalk with 900 other people but didn't really see much other than clouds. We got some images, but nothing was really visible to the naked eye. From there we ended up at Chappy just in time to see an INSANE display at about 10:30 or so. The colors of green and pink were so vibrant you could almost hear them. We got sick of people and headlights really quickly, but then I remembered that this tree exists....

By the time we had the tree at Crane surrounded, I had probably taken 150 pictures, so I had my settings fairly dialed in. The images posted are a 3 shot panoramic that was stitched together in the land of unicorns and candy canes, also known as Lightroom. The images were processed identically, then the saturation was removed from one of them. Why would I remove all saturation from an image? Well, I guess so I can talk about science and reality. I have seen an endless number of threads where people are saying all these images are "fake" and don't represent the reality of what you can or cannot see. Here's the thing.... The image with the crazy colors is the realistic image. It shows the truest reality of what the Northern Lights actually look like. The image without the saturation is ALSO the truest reality of what your eyes can see while looking at the Northern Lights at 2 in the morning. Wait, what? Yes, BOTH of these images represent a 100% realistic view of the Northern Lights.

How can these both be 100% accurate? It boils down to biology really. Our eyes simply can't see colors in the dark, but cameras can. We have rods and cones in our eyes that receive light in different ways. Cones basically control how we see color, but don't really absorb much light. The rods are the light grabbers, but don't see colors at all. Our brain (this is a very basic description of a complicated thing) forms an image with the light picked up by our rods. Once it has a black and white image, it overlays the light absorbed by the cones to render a full color image. Your brain does this about 26 times a second and turns it into the movie you're watching in your brain. In low light situations, your brain basically ignores the cones because it is working so hard to get information from the rods. Does this mean you're an idiot? Well, not really... Does this mean your brain is inferior? Well, yes.... I've said this before about night photography, but your brain is like a caveman when compared to a camera. It gets so confused that you can either see, or not see the reality in front of you. It doesn't know which is which most of the time.
The first image is the REALITY of how a camera sees the Northern Lights.
The second image is the REALITY of how your human eyes and easily confused brain see them.

Now if we could all stop telling photographers that their images don't represent reality, that would be great. You just have a different view of reality because you're a pea-brained human who can't even see what he's looking at.
Aurora Borealis
Crane Wildlife, Falmouth, Ma
3 shot panoramic stitched in Lightroom
14mm
ISO 800
f/2/8
13sec

08/19/2024

It's that time of year again....

Time for me to share Falmouth Road Race pictures.

This year I chose the 150-600mm Sigma lens because I like making life difficult on myself. If you aren't a photographer, it will be hard to understand what I did here. The Road Race may be the single most difficult thing I shoot every year because of the lens.

This is not an easy lens to shoot with, but I absolutely love the images it can produce so I torture myself trying to hold 6 1/2 pounds up in front of my face for an hour and a half straight.

In the past I have simply put the images up on a Facebook post, but I can't really do that with the volume of images I came up with this year. I had a fairly high success rate, so there are almost 1,000 images, so the easiest thing to do was upload everything to a galley.

These galleries are usually for clients to view family pics and whatnot, but it was the only way I could think of to share 1,000 pictures at once.

As a gift to the people in the pictures, I am including a download code which will allow you to own a FULL printable file of as many of these images as you would like.

With that being said, please DO NOT use these images for commercial use without written permission.

As usual, sharing of this post and tagging people who ran in the race is highly encouraged...... I'll go first....... David Velesig, there is a good one of you in here. Also, Sammy Jo Franco, I got a few folks in the red shirts.....

DOWNLOAD CODE: 3519

Photo collection by Rising Roots Photography

11/23/2022

LIMITED TIME OFFER!!!!

Buy a 36.00 x 24.00 stretched canvas print of Kevin Friel's Quissett's Glow for $225.00. Only 10 prints remaining. Offer expires on 11/27/2022.

06/03/2019

There are plenty of new photographs available for sale at Little Anchor Boutique. Stop by and see what else is in the shop. She has a great selection of Cape Cod type things for you to wear or decorate your home with. How cool would you be if you had a picture of a snowy owl above a bottle opener shaped like an anchor? The coolest....

05/30/2019

A client wanted to do a graduation picture honoring Nipsey Hustle. I’d say we nailed it....

05/21/2019

This video may be worth watching if you are trying to get into bird photography. I can’t even tell you how difficult it is to pick your camera up to your eye and find a bird flying by with a 600mm lens. Your field of view is very small, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Shooting birds every day for the past 5 months has turned my 600mm Sigma into a third eye. When I pick my camera up now, I rarely have to “search” for birds. They are usually somewhere in the viewfinder when I first look through it.

In the words of my swing coach when I played golf,

“This game takes a lot of practice to make it look easy.” - Jane Frost

Stepping up to a telephoto lens can be a jarring experience for bird photography hopefuls. With such a limited field of view while looking through the camera's viewfinder, how are you ever supposed to find anything?

04/01/2019

As some of you may know, When I haven't been shooting people this year, I have been searching out more difficult subjects. Photography is rather simple when you can provide your own light and your subject is willing to pose and follow instructions. Wildlife photography is a whole different game, but it is a game that I absolutely love.

My wildlife images will be available exclusively at Little Anchor Boutique along side many of my landscape and sunset images. Stop by and check the place out at 424 East Falmouth Highway, a few doors down from the liquor store.
Here are a few of my favorites from the past three months set to free facebook music... Enjoy.

02/02/2019

With the Sunset Project behind me, I have moved on to my 2019 project that I'm calling, for obvious reasons, The Wilderness Project. There is quite a stark difference between shooting with 14 and 35mm lenses for sunsets and the 400-600mm focal lengths necessary to shoot wildlife. The compositions are much less rigid, but the editing is more stringent. I am really enjoying my return to the type of photography I fell in love with over 20 years ago in Wyoming. We don't have quite the ease of access to wildlife on Cape Cod that Jackson Hole had to offer, but if you look hard enough, there is a lot to be found around here. I am adhering to the "No signs of man" aspect of shooting wild animals, which is quite a difficult thing to do here on the Cape. There are docks and power lines absolutely everywhere.
I would like to thank all of you have supported my business over the past couple a years and helped my photography grow into what it is today.

11/15/2018

I put together a little time lapse today at Friends of Nobska Light. This was shot in interval shooting and merged into a video. It was extremely windy, so there was some camera shake going on.

550, 2 second exposures stitched into a time lapse of a storm rolling into Cape Cod over Nobska Light in Woods Hole.

07/24/2018

90 minutes left to get this beautiful stretched canvas for the introductory rate. At 5:00pm Boston time, the special will no longer be available. You are more than welcome to wait 2 hours and order one at full price though.

Buy a 36.00 x 24.00 stretched canvas print of Kevin Friel's Blue Hour at the Fan Pier for $175.00. Only 10 prints remaining. Offer expires on 07/24/2018.