Rolling

I had a friend forward me a copy of the Victoria Camera Club's summer newsletter, which had winning images from a year-end contest. The "BMX Racers" image on page 13 interested me because its subjects are blurred, giving a sense of motion. I've seen this before, but never really tried to do it myself.

My first attempt was our Christmas tree. My thought was that a photo of a "dancing" Christmas tree might be amusing, so I set up in the living room and did some experimenting. My basic method was to set the timer on the camera for 10 seconds, giving me enough time to jump behind the tree and start shaking as soon as the shutter opened. I think I tried just about everything. Living room curtains open, closed; front flash, rear flash, no flash; different amounts and speeds of tree shaking; unplugging the tree lights half way through... Fortunately no ornaments were broken in the process, but I never really ended up with an image that satisfied me. Thinking back, this may be because my exposures were too long (20 to 30 seconds) which made the tree look just plain blurry. If I had gone with a shorter exposure (say, 2 seconds), I could have caught a single movement of the tree, rather than just a bunch of random convulsions. Looking back at the BMX racers photo, it is clear that each rider is moving on a fairly regular path.

My second attempt was of my girlfriend riding her rollers in the kitchen. Although slightly better than the Christmas Tree photo, I think it still suffers a bit from too long of an exposure (which in this case, was 1/2 second). Although this time I was constrained by the amount of light indoors. A few more criticisms are that I would like for there to be more static content in the photo, something fixed to contrast with the motion (other than the damn stove). I would also change the lighting a bit. We have a grid of 6 overhead lights in the kitchen, and I think slightly less uniformity to the lighting would give stronger shadows, adding depth and texture.



P.S. This post breaks me out of my 1 photo deficit.

The Brimacombe Building

I commute to UBC campus once or twice per week. Since I live out of the city and a long way from campus, I usually try to leave the house at 5:45 to avoid traffic. For this reason I get to see the sun rise over the Brimacombe Building, which houses some sort of advanced chemical engineering laboratory. The show has been usually pretty good, particularly when it's slightly overcast or clear skies. Yesterday (when this picture was taken) was overcast, but in the South-East where the sun was rising, the sky was partially clear and a beautiful red. The result was a nice red glow on the south face of the building and its ventilation, contrasting beautifully with the blue-gray sky.



Another nice feature of this time of morning (just after 8AM, I think), is that the sun has not risen enough to overpower the lights coming from inside the building, so there are a few splashes of yellowish light in the windows (which, regrettably I wish I had taken greater advantage of.)

I've got a few different exposures facing the sunrise as well, which I wanted to put together into a high dynamic range image. After taking another look at them, I don't really think the composition is good enough to make it worth my while. The view in that direction from my lab is much less interesting.

Bluenose Copy

I've been slacking off a bit lately. After this post I still have a 1 photo debt. I did take some more landscape photos from my balcony, and some of them aren't too bad, but nothing I want to post here. One observation I made was that a most of these photos had a significant amount of colour noise. As I understand it, bit depth, gamut, ISO setting, and tone/exposure all affect colour clarity. I did notice that the highlights are less noisy (although still noticably noisy) than the lows. I thought that exposure time might have an effect on colour clarity (under the theory that a larger "sample" should result in less noise), although a few experiments didn't really verify that.

I also picked up a few library books a few weeks ago. "Natural Light: Visions of British Columbia" (by David Nunuk) was very inspiring (both to explore BC and to take great landscape photos). My favourite shot from that book is of a beach on the Juan de Fuca trail. The rising sun shines through the top of a cedar tree, creating some nice looking light patterns through the morning mist and projected onto the sand. However, the book that resulted in this week's photo is a textbook on lighting, called: "Light Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting" by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua. It's got all kinds of great information in it.

This week's photo attempts to copy a peice of framed art that I have hanging on my wall, using some of the advice from chapter 4 of the book. My lighting setup used a 60W desk lamp on the left, and a 60W soft white bulb on the right. Both near the photo. The photo was also placed so that the afternoon light shining through the living room window would not be directly reflected from the art. Due to the walls and various other light and dark items in my living room, I wasn't able to completely control the lighting, but I did my best. Here's the result.



Not too bad, although the right and top edges of the frame look substantially better than the left and bottom. I think this is the result of the sunlight coming through the window (which is above and to the right of the art). Due to the angle of the frame, a lot of the sunlight hitting it is directly reflected from the left and bottom edges, losing detail. I think the reason this is not happening on the top and right is because the desk lamp on the left is not powerful enough to cause this to happen.

Blended Tower

Today I wanted to try out the digital blending technique I read about last week. I didn't really want to drive around looking for the perfect scene, so I just took a few shots from my balcony of the tower down the street, using the BBQ as a tripod.

Here's the first shot, exposed for the tower (f10 @ 1/60 sec).And here's the second shot, exposed for the sky (f10 @ 1/800 sec). I *think* this means they're roughly 3.7 stops apart. (60*2^3.7 is roughly 800).
And here's what it looks like when you put the two together.
Rather than selecting the tower and deleting it as suggested by Jesse Speer, I created a new layer by cutting the tower from the dark image (on top), and reducing its opacity. Simply deleting the tower from the dark image resulted in an ugly blend between the two.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the result, even though it looks unnatural. As it is, I adjusted both the sky and the tower to fall in the midtones. Perhaps the sky should be at the highlight end.

Landscape Miss

This week I had skimmed a few articles (here and here) on digital blending. After having browsed through some thoroughly inspiring photos in David Nunuk's "Natural Light: Visions of British Columbia," I had some strong motivation to attempt a landscape photo.

Things didn't quite go as planned. After waiting out a typical featureless gray sky day here in Vancouver, I had come out of a North Van pub to witness a bright orange band of light horizontally splitting the dark clouds over downtown Vancouver, just before dusk. I rushed uphill to find a good vantage point, and after having climbed a flagpole in order to gain access to a municipal schoolboard rooftop, managed to get only one shot before my batteries choked.

At least one image short of the number required to do any sort of blending, I headed home empty handed, taunted by another spectacular view of the Vancouver skyline as I crossed the Ironworkers' Memorial Bridge on the way into Burnaby.

Chester

After last week's post I went out and did some reading. I didn't answer any of my follow-up questions from last week, but I learned some interesting things about the basics of light, colour, and colour spaces (here and here), exposure and histograms (here, here, and here).

(As an aside, after reading about exposure and histograms, I was sure that the reason last week's photo was lacking was due to poor exposure. After reviewing its histogram, this seems not to be the case, and it remains a mystery as to why excatly I'm not happy with it.)

I then went out and tried to put these to practice by shooting some more photos on the Annapolis. In all of the shots I got, I was unhappy because either: 1) I couldn't capture the entire tonal range of the scene without losing detail at one end or the other or, 2) In shots where (1) wasn't a problem, I didn't get enough breadth of tones to make me happy.

So I'm going with a shot that, ironically, I took before I had gained any of this new knowledge. Some time last week, I was invited to a join a Facebook group by a friend (whom I can't seem to remember ever meeting) dedicated to her photography. She seems to like animal shots, and she seems to like close-up portrait animal shots. They all look pretty sharp, so I thought I'd try it on my cat Chester. Here he is in all of his glory.

I shot this at a 200mm focal length at f5.6. It was a bright day with the sun high in the sky, so the majority of the lighting was the reflection from our bright carpet. I didn't use any flash and I think the lights were off in the condo at the time.

I DID do the processing after having done the reading, so I was all excited about looking at how adjusting the raw image affected the histogram. The original was a little underexposed, so I brought it up 3/4 of a stop. The contrast was increased, distributing his face to cover a broader tonal range. The blacks were also brought up a bit, to get rid of the background detail and bring the focus to his face. I tried to do a bit of sharpening too, but couldn't really figure out the controls. This led me to the product help for Adobe Camera Raw, which looks like it might be able to answer some of my questions from last week.

Annapolis Bridge

Before getting to the photo, a bit of background.

The Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia (ARSBC) has been buying and sinking decommissioned naval vessels to create sea critter habitats for about 17 years. Each of these projects requires a monstrous amount of effort to remove materials from the ship which are hazardous to both divers and marine ecology. Their current project is the HMCS Annapolis (soon to be the AR Annapolis), which is currently moored somewhere near the shore of Gambier Island in Howe Sound, BC, Canada. On my second trip volunteering on the Annapolis, I snapped this photo from a ladder running past the exterior of the bridge.



This isn't my favourite photo from the Annapolis that day: there's another which I prefer which features some pipes from deep down inside the engine room which houses some twin steam turbines. However, I figured this one presents a greater learning opportunity and so I chose it instead.

My intention was to use the window glazing to provide a barrier of isolation between the viewer and the bridge interior, giving it a sort of eery, abandoned feeling. While composing the shot, I was focusing so much on the two doors inside that I completely missed the reflection of the bow, me, and the landscape. This was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately, I also missed the window wiper (the rusty slanted bar dominating the lower left corner), which was much less pleasant to discover.

Using Adobe Camera Raw, I made a few adjustments to the raw image file before converting to an srgb jpg. The white balance temperature was raised, since the door interior paint has a slight yellow tint in reality. The tint was adjusted away from magenta and towards green, since green paint dominates the photo. To emphasize the old, abandoned feeling of the bridge, the exposure, brightness, vibrance and saturation was decreased. The blacks were also decreased to soften up the shadows, and contrast raised to emphasize the darkness of the bridge against the bright sky. Here's the final result.



After comparing the two, I'm not sure if the processed version is really all that better. In isolation, each parameter that I adjust in the raw toolkit appears to improve the look of the photo, but after comparing final result to the original, it seems as if I've come full circle and not really achieved anything.

A few follow up tasks for next week:

• Figure out, technically, the meaning of each parameter in the raw toolkit, and their general usage. (For example, what is the difference between exposure and brightness?)
  
• Investigate digital negative format (meaning and purpose)
• Of course, take another photo.
  

About

I like taking nice photos. Both the challenge of capturing and processing a photo as well as the pride that comes with having produced a creative work is enjoyable to me. I especially like sharing them, because when you give someone a nice photo of a place, event, or person that of importance, it brings a great amount of joy preserves that memory. For example, when you show an athlete a great photo of them in competition or training, it reminds them where their passion for sport comes from.

It is a goal of mine to become a better photographer. The purpose of this blog is to provide me with a public forum for practicing and developing photographic knowledge. Each week (roughly) I will post a photo. I will discuss what I had hoped to achieve with the photo, and what I did to try and achieve this, through composure, capture and editing. I will discuss what I like and do not like about the photo, as well as follow up activities ("homework") for the following week. There may be other postings, for example notes or summaries of references I have investigated.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome. Hope you like what you see.