More Softball

 I found a new place to try and make a picture from today.  I've been asked a few times where the fence went.  Its pretty easy to make it melt away with a telephoto lens.  You need a lens hood, and a large aperture.  Put the lens directly against the fence trying to center your lens in an opening.  Then use biggest aperture (smallest F-stop number) you have available on your lens.  The fence will go out of focus.  Next time I'll try from the other side of the plate, you know, so we can see a face (hangs head in shame...)

Trying an old idea

I have seen this type of image done many many times.  My favorite ones involve a dozens of photographs of a scene or person assembled into the final image.  Usually, it seems, different focal lengths are used to "weight" the importance of each part of the scene.

I have never tried it before.  So, in the spirit of trying new things this weekend, I gave it a go.  I think it has potential, something I can think about in the future.

Also, in the spirit of trying new things, I got my big model helicopter up in the air.  Nice!

The repair bill doesn't appear to be too immense either.  But I'm not sure when I'll have time to fix it.

Walkthrough

I was inspired by a recent thread I saw over on Fred Miranda forums. The basic message was there are "noobs" appearing that are pretty darn good, and some established photographers are trying to hide their "secrets" and not sharing. The take home bit was sharing is good.


I don't pretend to be a wonderful photographer, but I decided to put up a walkthrough of this photo anyway. Someone out there might be able to learn from it.

Click on the picture before going further, it looks better large, the small version blocks up the blacks a bit more than they really are.

First thing you need to do to make a photo like this is break your foot.

I kid.

Really, the first thing to determine is "why". Was I trying to tell a story? If so what was it? I wasn't really trying to tell a whole story, but to build more on the busted foot endeavor I set out on a a couple months ago. This was the final assistant I got before moving to regular shoe.

When I first saw it I was struck by how it looked like a robot foot. I also noticed its texture. I wanted to emphasize both of those things in the photo.

I let those two things drive my technical decisions.

I felt that the texture could be brought out with hard light, and if I could simply retain a three dimensional appearance the robot-foot nature should shine through.

I set my key light to camera right and above the subject. I placed a secondary light to light up the back wall, and aimed it enough at the boot to edge it out a little bit. You may not realize its doing anything to the boot, but it is. Without it the left side goes black, completely, and utterly -- black, nothingness, blank, nothing blacker.

The ambient light was killed with a shutter speed of 1/200th of second. Aperture was set to F22 or F25. However, don't get caught up on these numbers, they aren't that important. They were set that way to get a proper exposure.

The post work done was pretty standard. I brought it into Nikon ViewNX for conversion to JPG. I changed the white balance from daylight to flash to warm it up a little. Yes, I could do this in the camera, sometimes I even do. But, I generally leave the camera set to daylight by default. Its a habit, but not a horrible one. All my film was daylight balanced!

After the conversion to jpg, I brought it into Gimp for sharpening. First I created a layer that contained a high pass filter applied to the image. I set this layer to the soft-light blend mode and flattened the image. I then used the smart sharpen script I wrote using the steps from the Smart Sharpen Gimp tutorial as a guide.

That is it.


Here is a setup shot to show the flash positions.

Phototip Quickie : Learn to use Manual Mode

Almost every camera I have encountered recently, including my old digital P&S, has a manual mode. Most of the people I know have never used it. Everyone should try at least once! If you have no other reason to use it, remember you paid for it, get your money's worth!

Why is this important? Am I some elitist snob who only uses Manual mode and thinks everyone else is Doing it Wrong? No, far from it!

But, learning how to set ISO, aperture, and shutter speeds independently of one another is helpful. It shows you how the camera meter sees things, shows you the intertwined relationship between those three settings, and will cause you to slow down, and hopefully think about your pictures in a different way.

Since this is suppose to be "quick" I cannot get into details on how to use your camera in manual mode. Instead, here is how I suggest you try it. First go to the library and get a copy of Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure, then go to your camera bag and scrounge out your camera manual. Understanding Exposure will show you the ideas you need for reading your meter and making settings, your camera manual will show you the details specific to your model of camera.

If anyone cares, I typically use aperture priority w/ matrix metering for ambient only shots. However, for flash work, I run full manual and use "guess" (i.e. shoot and look at the LCD) metering.

Automation

We all find ourselves doing the same set of boring tasks to our images over and over again. Fortunately most of the tools we use to work on our images have ways to automate tasks.

In the Photoshop world it is called "Actions". In the Gimp world they are called "Script-fu". If you look at just the names, Script-fu wins hands down. You see the name "Script-fu", and you start to imagine yourself as some martial arts imaging master. Hiii-ya!

However, in practical use I imagine Photoshop wins. I do not have Photoshop, but this tutorial shows me how to creat an Action. It is as simple as "recording" what I do to an image! To get the job done with Gimp, you first roll up your sleeves. Then you learn some basic Scheme. Grab the documentation, some example code, and frustrate the heck out of yourself for hours.

I wanted to automate the smart sharpening technique I have used for most of my images. If I had to create this "Action" under Photoshop I imagine it might take me about 1 hour to learn how to record the tasks, and create Action that I like. However, I don't have Photoshop (yet), so I Script-Fu'd my Gimp. I now have a nice automated utility, but it took me about 3 hours to get there. If any wants my source, let me know I'll try and find a place to post it.

The images here weren't processed through my new script, but are the implied follow-ons to my last post!

Spray and pray?

Frames per second? For me, as far as camera specs are concerned, I rank its importance alongside the color of the camera strap. Most of the time, it simply doesn't matter.


Today, I think I could have used a bit more than the 3 frames per second my camera will muster. My goal was to capture what it feels like to be in a swing. I decided to try that by zooming my lens back and forth to maintain the subjects size in the frame. This also produces the nice hyperspace lines out of the background.

My technique was rather brute-force. I started following the subject with the zoom ring, then held the trigger down for a few seconds while maintaining the zooming. Then I'd re-frame and try again. Out of about 80 frames I nabbed a fewI liked. My film camera will rip 5 fps, but this is the kind of picture I don't think is appropriate to attempt with film!