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.