Lightman Takes a Leak

I received a copy of Digital Photographer magazine for Christmas, which contains an article on painting with light. I had heard of painting with light where an object is "painted" with a non-strobe light during a long exposure (see here). The article in this magazine however, discusses directly exposing the light source to the camera, so that the photographer can draw with it. After reading the article, I crudely wrote "Hi!" in my mom's living room, not revisiting the technique until today.

Witness lightman taking a leak in my bathroom.


Although admittedly only slightly less crude than my initial "Hi!", and by no means a work of art, this photo helped me understand some of the basics of light graffiti. It's really a matter of planning. I found it best to draw each line using only one stroke, and plan the order of the lines to minimize misalignment. For Lightman, I found the following order to work the best: head, arms (down), wee wee, torso (up), legs (down), pee, pee splashes. Initially I had done the arms near the end and had trouble aligning them with the head and torso (which were done first). Expect a future post on light graffiti when I can spend a bit more effort on creating an image which is pleasing as a whole.

New York

Whew, it's been a while. Shortly after my last post, I traveled to New York. Then to Seattle for Christmas, then to Victoria. Now that I'm settling back into my routine it's time to think about some photos.

I decided to pick a few of my favourite photos from the New York trip. While traveling to NY I had blazed through a lot of the National Geographic Photography Field Guide, and probably didn't remember much of it. So the following photos don't necessarily practice anything in particular that I have learned, but in the end turned out nicely (in my opinion).

The first is an entrance to the subway on Trinity Pl. and Rector St. I'm not really excited about the composure, but I'm very happy with how wet and dirty the surfaces look. That is what I was aiming for. I think the reason is that this particular entrance was exposed to very little outside light, and so the scene was mostly lit from the fluorescent lamp. I tried this shot with a few other subway entrances which were exposed to outside light (it was slightly overcast), with a far less interesting result.



The second is of the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum. The structure of the building is interesting, and I think I did a good job of capturing the scale by also including the people near the entrance. This is entirely by accident, as I had to set the camera on the floor and couldn't get my eye up to the viewfinder to see exactly what was in frame. A few other features that I like are the blurring of the people in motion, and the glare from the single spotlight aimed at the camera. Again, entirely by accident. What I don't like about this photo is the slice of ceiling at the top. The ceiling is an interesting structure, and this little piece of it kind of tells you it is there, but doesn't tell you much what it looks like, which I find a bit unsatisfying.



The last photo is not one of my top 3 favourites to look at, but I'm putting it here because it is an example where I set out to get a particular shot, and was successful. I am fascinated with the New York subway system. The thumping, screeching and grinding of the trains, the damp dark stations, and the characters you find there. Although I would have liked to capture more of the surrounding scene in this shot (perhaps with a secondary, static subject like a person), I think I did a good job with the train. It took a while to find the right shutter speed (1/3 seemed to be just right), to wait for the right train (there are 3 tracks, the first being too close and the last 2 being too far), and to get the timing right (using a 10 second shutter release delay, because I didn't have a cable release or remote with me).



The full photo set can be found on Picasa

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.