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.