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Blog 26th July 2009: Waterdrops and strawberries
It's the same idea as the pretty coloured lights on a West End stage show - they are also created by putting a piece of coloured plastic - or gels as they are known as - in front of the spotlights. I had read about how various theatrical outfits would happily give away sample "books" (as in a small batch) of these gels, but after emailing several suppliers and receiving polite "sorry, but we don't do that anymore" replies, I eventually decided on buying a set. I guess the free samples are meant for people in the industry who might eventually place a large order. So I had to cough up a fiver for a box full of small pieces of coloured plastic. Now I only needed to figure out what to do with them. What subject could I snap a picture of with colourful flash-light added? After much deliberation, I decided on throwing a strawberry into a martini glass filled with water (what? Am I the only person who regularly throws berries in water instead of eating them?) and use the gels to add a colourful background. The trick to photographing water splashes is to use a flash to "freeze" the water drops in mid air. A typical flash duration is between 1/2,000 sec and 1/16,000 sec. So if shutter/aperture is set so that the ambient light in the room (such as electric light and/or sunlight coming in through the windows) doesn't register on the picture at all, then the only exposure will be caused by the ultra quick flash light. The initial setup was quite simple. A piece of white paper taped to the bathroom wall, a chair standing in the bath to support the glass and a flash with a fancy new piece of blue plastic aimed at the background. I picked an aperture of f/16 and shutter of 1/200 sec which served two purposes: It ensured water drops in front of or behind the glass would still be sharp, and it ensured that the ambient light didn't contribute at all to the picture. The first test shot showed a nice blue background, and a murky dark strawberry. With the flash being aimed at the background and being reflected from here, the side of the strawberry facing away from the camera was (I'm guessing here) nicely illuminated by the reflected blue light. But the side of the berry facing the camera did not receive any direct light and hence showed up almost as a silhouette.
There was maybe 10" from glass to background. Even a small strawberry dropped in shallow water makes quite a splash, so it didn't take long until my backdrop had water running down over it. To avoid that, I moved the chair with the glass out into the middle of the bathroom. Taking it out of the bath also lowered it, so I had to put our largest saucepan upside-down on the chair and the glass on top of that to get the glass back up so it was higher than the bath. I'm sure people who do this kind of thing on a regular basis must have invented a proper martini-glass-and-water-drop-support system, but this ghetto-setup worked fine for me. To spice things up a little, I added my last flash with a green gel aimed at the background but from camera right. This gave a nice blue/green gradient tone to the background.
When I got tired of the cool blue/green background, it was a 30 seconds job to swap the gels for a red and yellow one and get a nice, warm background. The last refinement was to take a piece of black foam core, put it on the sauce pan and put an old glass shelf on top of it and then stand the glass on this. A sheet of glass with black underneath makes an excellent mirror.
As an added bonus, there was water all over the bathroom floor once I had finished snapping these photos. So not only did I get to play with my camera, I also got to wash the bathroom!
19th July 2009: Lavender and bees
Maybe it's the hunter/gatherer in me, or maybe it's just the joy of doing something I find difficult. Whatever the reason, I like to take pictures of bees. My father recently asked what the purpose was, once I already had one good picture of a bee on a flower. It's a bit like asking what the purpose is of taking portraits once you have one well lit, carefully composed picture of an interesting or aesthetically pleasing person. Over time, I have added more and more requirements to my critter-photos. I started being happy with having a bee in the picture. Once I had achieved that, I decided that it would be nice if the bee was also in focus. Next came a requirement to isolate the bee from the background. Then a desire to make the picture "interesting". It seems that whenever I have achieved one objective, my inner critic adds additional requirements. So far, and roughly in order of priority, the list looks like this:
So all in all, photographing bees is actually not that different from photographing people, flowers, motorcycles or architecture. With the exception that you can't ask a bee to hold a pose. Since a bee collecting nectar is on the job, you also cannot get too much in its way - like all diligent workers, the bee is likely to get upset if disturbed unnecessarily. Bees often move from flower to flower quite quickly. I can't make aesthetic decisions about the composition quickly enough to capture the photo before the bee has moved on. So I tend to instead use the machine gun approach: Shoot as many pictures as possible in the hope that some of them will be okay. So although I have an idea about what would make a pleasing picture of a bee, it's not until I get home and sort through the pictures that I start to apply these requirements.
While f/11 is good for getting a decent DoF, it resulted in unpleasantly slow shutter times. Even though my macro lens is of the magic type that counteracts hand shake (Nikon calls it Vibration Reduction, Canon calls it Image Stabilisation), it can't counteract the wind moving the flowers or the bees getting impatient and leaving the scene. So I switched to shutter priority and tried photographing at 1/250, 1/320/ 1/400 and 1/500. The last variable is the "film speed". So for the last set of images, I switched to manual and picked a couple of "ideal" shutter/aperture combinations while letting the camera determine the ISO up to 800 (experience has taught me that anything faster than 800 gives way too much noise from my camera).
Auto focus is obviously convenient, but I'm not always certain what the camera chooses to focus on. If it focuses on a petal a couple of mm in front or behind the bee, the bee won't be in focus. So throughout the session, I tried to switch to manual focus a couple of times. A quick review of the keepers from the session shows that each and every one of them were taken with auto focus. It may not be perfect, but it beats my focusing skills when chasing lively bees! So what did I learn from these experiments?
And maybe most importantly
28th June 2009: Hanging picturesI should start by apologising for the length of this set of ramblings. As Mark Twain observed (although I've also seen the quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin), "If I had more time, I would have written less". 
The great thing about photographs is that you can look at them. It sounds like a naïve observation, and it probably is. However, that is the reason I take photographs. With digital images, it has never been easier to capture, catalogue, store, retrieve, share and look at your photographs. There are so many ways of making your images accessible. I tend to publish my keepers here on my web site as well as on Flickr. Some I email to friends and family. I even have a screen saver that displays a randomly chosen photo every 10 seconds whenever I'm not using the computer. It's so much easier than the bad old days where you got your batch of 36 6x4s from the photo shop a week after coming home from holiday, hurried to put them in an album and then never saw them again. But thinking about it, there was actually something nice about holding the pictures in your hands and maybe writing a funny comment on the back of it. A photo was a physical thing. As opposed to a selection of illuminated pixels on a screen which cease to exist the moment you switch the computer off. Conventional wisdom has it, that exactly the same pixels can be made to light up the next time you switch the computer on, and so far that seems to be true. But can we trust that it will always be that way, or is it just by pure luck that it has worked until now? Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent here. The point I wanted to get to is that the local hardware shop had decent looking frames on sale, while at the same time my favourite online photo printing outfit was offering 2-for-1 on all their enlargements. The wife wanted some decoration on the walls, and I wanted a chance to see some of my images as good, old-fashioned photos on a piece of paper. It was the right time to turn the living room into gallery Sunny! ;-) Going through the old photos, looking for the 6 that somehow deserved to be turned into 12x16 prints and hung on the wall was an interesting exercise. They had to look nice. They had to have some kind of personal meaning to make them more interesting than any old poster. They had to be large enough to print at this size, a requirement that sadly made me discard a number of old favourites which just didn't have enough pixels. And finally, they had to have the right shape! No, it's not that many of my photos are round or triangular, but I tend to crop them to suit the subject. However, seeing that I was doing this on the cheap rather than having bespoke frames made, the photos needed to have an aspect ratio that would fit 12x16 while at the same time still having a pleasing composition. 
The compositional guideline called the rule of thirds is a simplification of a few thousand years of practical experience which can be digested into a few golden rules. The old Greeks had figured these things out. The "rule" suggests that someone looking at a picture will pay more attention to whatever is 1/3 from the top of the picture or 1/3 from the bottom or 1/3 in from either side. This is not a coincidence. Think of a human face. The eyes are 1/3 from the top of the face, and each eye is 1/3 from the edge of the face. Looking someone in the eye is a deep, deep instinct. It is what tells us whether we can trust the other person or whether we should prepare to be attacked. It doesn't mean we should always place the most important parts of a picture on those lines - but it does mean that those are the places the viewer will see first and we can use that knowledge to our advantage when composing a picture. The importance of the rule of thirds in this context is that once you put a picture behind a mount and frame, you change the position of those 1/3-lines. Because we see the framed picture as a single entity, our eyes goes to 1/3 from the top of the frame, 1/3 from the bottom of the frame or 1/3 from either side of the frame rather than to the corresponding fractions of the "naked" picture. So by framing the picture, we change the viewer's first impression of it. Sometimes I think too much about these things. That makes preparing 6 pictures for printing take a lot longer! Putting the picture in the frame is straight forward, but there are a few things worth bearing in mind. I follow this simple set of steps: 
In the past when I have had to put something up on the wall, I have always just eyeballed it. Does it look okay here? No? Okay, how about here? Or maybe a little higher? It doesn't take very long, and normally things end up hanging roughly where they ought to. But I reckoned that if I wanted a set of similar sized pictures in matching frames to look okay, I had to be a little more structured. How do you group a set of pictures? I chose 3 of them in landscape format for one of the walls, and applied my mathematical sense of what felt "neat". 3 pictures on one wall, that means there are two gaps between pictures and 2 gaps between picture and wall, so a total of 4 gaps. Measure the length of the wall, measure the width of the picture, subtract, divide difference by 4. On my 3 meter wall, I ended up with 30 cm air, a 60cm frame, 30 cm air, a 60 cm frame, 30 cm air, the last 60 cm frame and finally 30 cm air again. It looks neat and evenly spaced, but it also looks very static. On another wall, we had a beautiful big painting that we still were going to keep up. The painting is in landscape format, and for this wall I picked two of my portrait-oriented frames. I put the painting on the middle of the wall with a smaller photo on either side, aligned the centre of the painting with the centre of the photos and made the distance between painting and photos smaller than the distance between photos and wall, if you see what I mean. It looks neat and dynamic. I found that by following a few simple steps, the actual process of hanging the pictures became very easy: 
It sounds like a lot of measuring and calculating, but the benefit was that once I had drawn my sketch on paper, it was very easy to find the right location for each screw on the wall - and I didn't have to bother the wife by having her judge the location of each picture as I offered it up to the wall. And, more importantly perhaps, each picture ended up exactly where it was meant to go. If one of the pictures had ended up a little low, or a little high, it would have been easy to adjust the wire rather than having to drill again. I'm going to look at the walls for a while now, but I suspect I might change the first wall. I'm considering replacing the picture in the middle with 4 tightly spaced smaller images. That might give a bit more visual interest and introduce some movement. And it will be a good excuse for getting some more images turned into real paper photos! 7th July 2009: Aliens and Dragons
Yesterday I photographed aliens and dragons. It was a fun way to pass a few of hours on a rainy day, and I really like the way something as simple as smoke can turn into weird and wonderful figures. It triggered my imagination the same way as laying on a field on a summer day and looking up at the clouds can do - come to think of it, the two phenomena are closely related.
The core of the process is dead simple: Take loads of pictures of smoke. Chose the ones that contains figures or patterns which speak to you. Add colour and spice to taste. Smoke is hard to control precisely. It moves in a seemingly random fashion in all three dimensions. Without clever laboratory equipment, the best way to influence it is to blow gently at it. Or create a draft in the room which will "pull" the smoke along with it. This randomness is one of the things that fascinates me, but it's also causing one problem: How do you focus on it? And believe me, left to its own, the camera's auto focus system will either chose to focus on the background or it will hunt for focus and eventually give up. My first idea was to use my 105mm macro lens, so I could fill the frame with smoke. It didn't work. All the pictures were out of focus. A quick check with an online DOF calculator explained the reason: With the camera at half a metre's distance, the area that is in focus extends 3mm in front and behind the focus point (at f/8. Stopping down to f/11 extends this to a whopping 4mm in each direction). The smoke, moving randomly, was blowing in and out of this thin focus plane. So instead I ended up with a 50mm lens one meter away from my insence stick which gave me a more managable 6 cm on either side at f/8. The downside to this is that the smoke did not fill the frames, so I ended up having to crop the pictures. 
This is one of the situations where a decent DSLR doesn't help. Had I instead used a small point and shoot camera, the tiny size of the sensor would have helped by giving me almost indefinite focus regardless of how closely I had zoomed in. Oh well. I paid good money for that DSLR, so I want to use it! The next thing to consider is the lighting. Ideally you want the smoke to appear nice, crisp and white in front of a black background. That means an on-camera flash that iluminated the smoke and also illuminates the background is almost as bad as it can get. Fortunately for me, my camera allows me to take the flash off camera and place it wherever I want. So I placed it at a 90 degree angle to the axis formed by camera and insence stick, trying to avoid the light hitting the camera or the background. Had I had a large enough living room to make the distance between the insence stick and the background large enough, then there would not have been any need to use off-camera flash. If, say, the distance from the camera to the stick is 1 m and the distance from the stick to wall behind it is 7 m, then the wall will only receive 1/256th (or a half percent) of the light that the smoke receives. This would make any wall, regardless of colour, appear nice and jet black. If I had neither had off-camera flash, nor a large room, I might have been able to get by using a very strong electric light shining at the smoke but blocked so it couldn't reach the background. Or maybe shooting the whole thing outside at night where the nearest background might be hundreds of meters away (but trying to avoid wind which would wreck havoc with the smoke). 
Soon the camera, flash and a piece of black cardboard for background was set up and the insence stick was making nicely fragrant smoke. Vanilla. I don't think it matters to the photos, but I'm just sayin'. After a bit of experimentation, I ended up with my camera set to manual at 1/200 sec, f/10, iso 100 and with the flash set to 1/2 power. The shutter time doesn't matter at all, I just wanted it to be fast enough to be certain that the ambient light in the room didn't contribute to the exposure at all (to get the background is as dark as possile). The aperture is a compromise between DOF (you want a tiny aperture to get a huge focus plane) and flash power (you want a wide aperture so the flash doesn't have to work too hard). I found it too hard to peer through the viewfinder and assess when the smoke was doing something photogenic, so I just kept hitting the shutter until the insence had burned out (thank you, Nikon, for making a £3.95 remote control). That gave me a total of around 150 pictures. Good thing that digital is free! Sorting the pictures into instant rejects (out of focus, smoke is just going straight up, not enough light, too much light, etc) and potentials was quick. The second sorting, where I tried to imagine figures, shapes, movements, dragons and aliens in the smoke was the really fun part. Maybe also the most time consuming part, as I found myself staring at the smoke while my imagination was making up little stories.
My small living room has reflective, bright, white walls and low ceilings. Nice for living. Also good for throwing lightbursts from a flash all over the place, regardless of how much the photographer tries to avoid it. And to be honest I hadn't put a lot of effort into controlling the light. So the background on the images had come out in a dark, murky grey rather than black. 
In Photoshop I picked the "burn" tool and set it to work on shadows. I traced the outline of the figures I wanted to preserve. Since the tool was only darkening shadows (i.e., where there was no smoke), it didn't matter too much if I wasn't 100% precise and accidently moved the tool over some of the smoke. Adding a levels adjustment layer temporarily and exaggerating the exposure makes it a lot easier to see what you're doing. Having created the dark outline, it was easiest to then paint pure black over all the background that wasn't meant to show at all. Adding a new layer and setting the blend mode to "color" makes it easy to colour in the figures. Pick a wide brush and just start to paint. Or add a gradient between two colours. Because of the blend mode, the colour only shows where the white smoke is, so there's no need to be very careful. So this is why it's important to get the background pure black - if it isn't black, it will appear in a dark shade of whatever colour you paint the figures with. I found that where my imagination had seen a single figure in the smoke trails, I ended up just adding a gradient between two bright colours to the color layer. Where I wanted to emphasize two different figures, such as the lady in red and the green servant, I manually coloured each figure to get control over where one figure ends and another starts. To get a bit of diversity, I inverted some of the pictures (image, adjustment, inverse) so they appear as coloured shapes on a white background rather than black. After inverting, cleaning up of the background can be done by the dodge tool set to work on the highlights (because now the smoke is dark and the murky background is off-white). 
The images are hyperlinks. Click on them to see the detail page for them. The Aliens and Dragons section also has a few more traditional coloured-smoke-on-white-background images. As always, my images are copyrighted but released under a Creative Commons license. Not that I have any ambitions of grandeur; I'm just stating it to make my views on copyright clear. So there it is. There are dragons and aliens walking amongst us. We can even photograph them. It's just a matter of being able to see them by finding some of that childhood imagination again. 13th July 2008: Beware of overly vigilant ad blockersYesterday I got an email from a friend telling me there was something wrong with my website. Several of the thumbnail pictures were missing. He even attached screen shots showing the screen rendered by Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. And true enough, several thumbnails were missing. When I checked the site from my own machine, everything looked the way it should. All thumbnails were in place. I checked the site using my wife's machine, and it seemed that her machine, just like my friend's, didn't want to show all the thumbnails. I have recently implemented several changes, so obviously I must have made some mistake when doing so. 10 hours of scrutiny of the code later, I was convinced that there was no mistake in the recent changes. At least nothing that could cause thumbnails to disappear. But no matter what I did, they didn't show up on Denise's machine while they appeared as expected on mine. I'll spare you from the long description of all the investigations and just present the solution: It was Norton Internet Security 2004 on Denise's machine which was convinced that the thumbnails were pop-up adds. So it did what it was supposed to do, namely remove them before the could even get close to her browser. On my machine, there's a newer version of Norton, and this never version isn't quite so vigilant. That's the reason she could see the problem but I couldn't. In order to whitelist a web site and explain to Mr. Norton that you trust it's not serving adds, these are the steps to go through:
Monday 26th May 2008: Day 1 for SunnyWorld.orgToday is day 1 for the new Sunnyworld.org site. After reading various tests, I decided on 4Images to power it and found the cool looking template Iceberg. It is still very much a work in progress, but at least there is a photo album and basic navigation between the images. On the to do list are
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