Rob at the Velodrome

I went over to the Burnaby Velodrome to practice some more remote flash stuff on moving subjects. Learning from my past trip to the Richmond Oval, I placed the flash ahead of the riders, right at about eye level. I also made sure to give it lots of juice.

This is my favourite shot from the day.



I had the same issues with composure and lack of autofocus points, but seem to be getting more skilled at tracking the subject in my viewfinder.

What I've done with this photo, that I haven't done in the past, is spent a lot of time making adjustments using Adobe Camera Raw. It's frustrating because I'm just wandering aimlessly through the controls, using a very subjective method of figuring out what changes are good and what are bad. I can improve in 2 ways: 1) thinking ahead of what look I want to achieve, and 2) applying a principled workflow. I think this will be something I will constantly need to improve on. For this particular photo, I aimed to desaturate and darken the track surface in order to emphasize the subject, while trying to retain natural skin tones. I made some luminance adjustments; bringing up contrast and recovering highlights, corrected lens vignetting, reduced noise (ISO 800), and did some minor sharpening.

Speed Skating (again)

Made another trip to the Richmond Oval. I had learned how to set my flash by following some formulas in the manual. I found this to be no better than trial and error, since any distance measures are guesses, and the amount of light required also depends on the subject. The number I had calculated turned out to be much too dim for what I was shooting, and the sad part is that I didn't clue in to this very well and ended up with some pretty lame shots. On the bright side, at least I know what the numbers on the my flash's display mean.

During the shooting, and after looking at the pictures on my computer, I picked up a few pointers.

Firstly, I now understand why a larger number of autofocus points is desirable. For example, I wanted to have my shots composed so that the entire skater is in frame, on the right side (with lots of room on the left to "look into"). I also want the focus to be on the face. With my measly 3 autofocus points, the best I could do was keep their bum in focus, and hopefully not cut off too much of their feet.

Secondly, dark lycra is hard to shoot against a dark background. Drawing attention to the subject in this situation is tough. Not surprisingly, all of my favourite shots ended up being of people who were not wearing dark lycra.

Thridly, I figured out that by not closing my other eye, I can simultaneously track the skater in frame while looking ahead to time the shutter release so that they are passing through the flash's range. It works somewhat reliably.

Lastly, position the flash so that the face is well lit. I had ended up placing the camera and flash as shown (experimenting with various elevations for both).



My reasoning was 2 fold: 1) I want the skater to be coming towards or past the camera, and 2) I want the flash to be far off camera because it produces interesting shadows. Unfortunately, what could have been some great shots turned out to be disappointing because of shadowy faces.

All said and done, my favourite shot is not of someone skating hard, it's of Matt being a goof. And I like it because the subject is well lit and sharply focused, standing out against the dim and out of focus background. I also think the low flash (in this case, on the floor) produced some interesting shadows, except for that annoying nose shadow. Notice the lack of dark lycra.



Update (03-03-2009): After learning some more features of Adobe Camera Raw during the processing of Rob at the Velodrome, I went back and did some retouching of this photo. The white balance for the subject was about 250K on the low side. I warmed up his skin, upped the saturation of the green, lowered the saturation of the ice, added some noise reduction and slight vignetting. What a difference!

Speed Skating

I visited the Richmond Olympic Oval yesterday during open speedskating hours. They were nice enough to allow me access to the infield, where I practiced using my wireless flash trigger.

This was my first time really using it in practice, and I took a trial and error method. Being used to TTL flash metering, I was pretty clueless as to how to adjust the power and range of the flash (TODO: learn). One challenge was ensuring that the subject was in the flash's path when the shutter was released. I found the best way to do this was to take a photo of the ice, look at the area lit by the flash, and line that up with something on the far wall.

It was actually tougher than I had anticipated, especially since I was tracking a fast moving target while looking through a telephoto lens. I did manage to get one decent shot of Jen. I had to use ISO 400 in order to use an acceptable shutter speed for my lens (f/5). Remembering a tip from the National Geographic Photography Field Guide, I cropped the photo to leave space into which the subject can look.



I plan to become more proficient with the wireless flash by practicing at the Burnaby Velodrome... after I learn how to do manual flash metering.

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.