Maxwell Kruger Photography

Last week, I had the pleasure of going up on top of Harborview Condominiums at 5:30am to catch the sunrise. The view was beautiful from up there and you could see all of Baltimore unobstructed and even the sun rising over the horizon.

Still working on some big photos, but since each panoramic takes several hours to stitch and I have to stitch three for each HDR photo and then run an HDR process on them, it’s gonna be a while (and probably a new computer) before I have a finished product.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/125, f/8, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 28mm, f/4, ISO 100)

After over a year (!), the film from the european delivery of my 2008 BMW Montego Blue 135i has been edited and posted online. It’s 23 mins and absolutely hilarious.

Thanks to Ian for finally editing the 7 hours of footage. Great job.

Here is the video, embedded. Click through to watch it in HD as it’s much higher quality and looks a lot better.

http://vimeo.com/5028367

I originally wrote about the trip here. There are plenty of great pictures from the trip.

As I previously said, I had the opportunity to once again climb atop a highrise building in downtown Baltimore City. This time, the building was across the harbor, providing a different view than I’ve shot before.

I got up bright and early to head down to the building around 6am. It was the earliest we could get up, but just late enough to miss the sunrise. That’s okay because the building wasn’t pointed in alignment with the sun and downtown Baltimore and the light was beautiful and warm anyway.

To get to the roof, we had to ride the elevator up 20 some floors and then climb a few flights of stairs. Definitely not the hardest roof I’ve had to access. Once up on top, I had to crawl under a fence-type thing to get to the outer edge of the roof. Early morning dew and repeated crawls to get to different sides of the building caused my khaki pants for work to get dirty quickly. Boss was wondering which gutter I had slept in the night before coming into work.

Below is the finished shot that I captured. Thinking about getting this blown up to poster size. Click below to view it in all of it’s 51 megapixel glory.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/500, f/5, ISO 160)

I took a few shots of my dad, hiding the sun with his head and hitting his face with a speedlight from camera left. I stood in and asked him to take the same shot of me. I probably edited it a little too much, but I like it.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/200, f/16, ISO 160)

One of his employees getting ready to drop off the side of the building.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/125, f/8, ISO 160)

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; things will be slower over the summer. I’ve been back from school for about a month now, though I’ve gone back and forth a few times since. I’ve been traveling a bit and working a lot. Trying to fly-fish as much as possible. Just came back from Ocean City, MD with a couple of friends from school. I made this photo of my friend, Erin, in our condo as we were heading out the door. I really liked the white background and the big light coming in from the sliding glass doors.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/160, f/2.8, ISO 800)

This kid was having a blast on the boardwalk with his toy gun. His younger brother had a toy sword, which they were fighting with.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/500, f/4, ISO 100)

We stopped to walk around and have dinner at the Inner Harbor on the way back.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/3200, f/4, ISO 400)

Traffic has been pretty bad on the way to work, lately. Yesterday (left), it took me over twice as long as normal to get into work and today (right) wasn’t much better and I left 30 minutes earlier. In case you’re wondering, I have to travel south on 695 and the blue dot indicates my location in each of these screenshots from my cellphone.

I have some cool photos coming soon. Last Friday, I went up on top of a building overlooking the Baltimore Inner Harbor with my dad (he owns a window cleaning business) at 5:30am to take some high-up photos of the city in the great early-morning light. It was pretty fun overall, but we just missed sunrise and I left my tripod at the door at home.

I did a similar shoot last year which produced this image. The buildings that I’m shooting from this year are on the other side of the harbor so should get a better view of all of downtown Baltimore. Click on the image to see the full 36 megapixel panorama.

I’m going to another building this Friday which supposedly has an even better view, and we’re going earlier to catch the sunrise. Be on the lookout for some stunning photos.

For Mother’s Day, we each got $1 bus tickets to New York and rode up in the morning. We were going to go have a day in the city and then my brother was going to meet us there on his drive back from school in Indiana. Turns out his car’s transmission broke and we had to limp the car back in the middle of the night. I only had my 300mm lens with me so I ended up getting some different shots.

We went to the Brooklyn Bridge and walked over it to have lunch in Brooklyn.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/3200, f/5.6, ISO 200)

On the way back over, about two dozen police cars flew down the bridge. I don’t know what was happening. It generated a lot of interest from bridge walkers.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/2000, f/5.6, ISO 200)

You can see people poking their heads over to see what was happening.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/2000, f/5.6, ISO 200)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/2500, f/5.6, ISO 200)

Visited a park on the NYC side of the bridge. New York City never fails to supply unique people.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/250, f/4, ISO 200)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/500, f/4, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/640, f/4, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/640, f/4, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/500, f/4, ISO 400)

In the subway.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/200, f/4, ISO 4000)

Outside of B&H Photo. Got to test out the 400 2.8. Love it.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/400, f/4, ISO 1250)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/1250, f/4, ISO 200)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/800, f/4, ISO 800)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/250, f/4, ISO 400)

This weekend is the Big Ten Men’s golf championship. I photographed the first round yesterday. The Nittany Lions started on hole 10 at 9am (which I wasn’t happy about when I woke up early to get there at 8). I borrowed my friend’s Nikon 200-400 f/4 lens to use so that I could get some more length than my 300mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter. With a 1.4x, you the lens gets a max 550mm. That’s sweet and it definitely helps a great deal because it blurs the background more and lets you get further away from the golfers so as not to disturb them. I can’t wait to pick up my own 400 2.8.

I was also able to get really close by using the silent shooting mode on my 5D.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 40mm, 1/320, f/4, ISO 400)

It rained on and off throughout the morning which was moderately unpleasant.

Golf is an incredibly fun sport to shoot for me because it is so beautiful. I love standing at a corner of 2 or three holes and bouncing back and forth between them, all the while getting all totally different shots. If I could, I’d shoot golf every weekend but there are only big tournaments once or twice a semester at the Penn State courses. It really helps having 400 and 600mm lenses and it’s such a pleasure to use a long lens. You really can fill the frame and the backgrounds become so clean.

(Nikon D300, 550mm, 1/400, f/5.6, ISO 800)

While waiting for a pair to finish up a hole so the next could tee off, I spotted a family of ducks crossing the the 1st hole green.

(Nikon D300, 550mm, 1/400, f/5.6, ISO 400)

Hole 14 is beautiful with a small pond behind it. I hung around there for a while. I could shoot the end of 13, all of 14, and teeing off at 15.

(Nikon D300, 370mm, 1/640, f/5.6, ISO 500)

(Nikon D300, 550mm, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 500)

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Asher Roth performed on the Hub lawn last night. While not a fan of his music, it was a fun concert. I didn’t feel like getting a press pass so I went with some friends. Here are some shots from the crowd.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/400, f/2, ISO 3200)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/1250, f/2, ISO 3200)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/1250, f/2, ISO 3200)

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(Canon 5D Mark II & NIKON D300 stitched together) – click on the image to see a higher res version.

As promised, here is a writeup of the remote cameras that I did this weekend for the Blue White game. I went on top of the BJC several times last week to scout locations for cameras. Some of the ideal spots required bigger clamps than I own (which are all superclamps), so I will have to get new ones for the upcoming year. I decided to do two cameras of similar focal lengths pointing in opposite directions. I borrowed my friend’s D300 and used that in conjunction with my Canon 5D Mark II. 10mm on the D300 (the 1.5x sensor crop factor makes it a 15) and the 17mm on the Canon full frame sensor were roughly equivalent.

Each camera was set up using intervalometers to take pictures at 1 minute intervals. The Canon was using a TC-80N3 intervalometer. The Nikon used its own built in intervalometer. It’s a cool feature but tricky to use – they should have made it easier. Pocketwizards wouldn’t work at that distance from inside of Beaver Stadium. I’m thinking of rigging it next time so that one camera is triggered by an intervalometer which in turn triggers the other camera with a Pocketwizard – that would make it so that the images were taken at exactly the same time.

Each camera took a photo every minute and I chose 2 good ones to stitch together. Check out the image above. Make sure to click on it to view it bigger.

I also took all of the photos from the 5D and compiled them into a movie. Here it is below.

As this was just a test, there are some things to be improved upon. I will pre-set the exposure next time. I had the cameras on Aperture Priority thinking it was a good idea because the clouds would mess with the exposure. Bad idea. The exposures were less consistent, causing some flickering in the video, which I did my best to eliminate. Also, this made it a bit trickier to stitch the two camera’s photos together since Canon and Nikon aparently have totally different ideas of what a correct exposure is. Also, I’m going to try to secure the clamps more. It’s incredibly windy on the roof and even the super sturdy magic arms moved a little in the wind, causing some shaking in the video.

Next year, for football season, I’m going to do a lot of these types of shots and going to do some timelapse videos of in and around the stadium for the whole day.

This is from one of the walls around the air handlers on top of the BJC. We had to pull this ladder up the 3 various ladders and hatches up onto the roof.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/1600, f/4, ISO 200)

Here are the two magic arms overlooking the stadium and tailgating grounds. Quite a view from up there.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/1000, f/4, ISO 200)

Here are the cameras shot from the ground with my 1D before the game. You can see how they were pointed in different directions to make it possible to stitch the images together for a panoramic.

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/6400, f/4, ISO 400)