Reach for the Moon

And to dispel any ideas I had completely gone....



I caught this quite by accident when walking from the KFC to my Liverpool place. My NEW Liverpool place, courtesy of my stalker, DPH.

It was about 5 pm , GMT, on the last visit but one, about 100 yards from my front door.

I don't JUST take portraits!

See you in the Partial Differentials!

Deliverance

Photography has a lot of science in it. I have a Nikon F3, with real film. I recently took this of my cousin Yuko. I am very proud of the way it has turned out, and she loves it.




Reasons why this photo is good: 1. It is black and white (Ilford FP4). Her skin is brown Asian skin, and B/W always shows up that sheen best. 2. I used a centre focus filter (a piece of frosted glass with a clear hole). This I oriented to concentrate on the top left of the photo to focus her hair and eyes. Notice how her lips are not quite in focus, and her hands out of focus. 3. I used a 200 mm lens to throw the background completely out of focus.

The imagery is to portray the innocence of her face, rather than the desperation of the pose, but to suggest both. Also, I asked her to tilt her head further back to expose the vulnerability of her delicate neck, serving a double purpose, as if she is looking to Heaven for deliverance from that same vulnerability.

The exposure was f5.4, at 1/60 second, 100 ASA film, 200 mm lens, Nikon F3, Benbow tripod. Only three attempts needed. Centre focus filter, hand-held in front of the lens (the holder would not allow the selective "top-left" view).

I am very proud of this, as it is as incongruous with Yuko's personality as is a rose among thorns.

Twigs

This little park and lake is 5 minutes away from my Liverpool place. I squeezed off about 15 shots, but this one turned out to be a stormer.

The composition was perfect, the sky exactly the right color (no polarizing filter) and water as calm as a millpond.

When we got up on Wednesday, I instinctively knew conditions were perfect, so I dragged Yuko out of bed at 10 am and we walked the short distance.

It was well worth it.

One is all You Need

This image shows just what anyone can do with a camera if they know how.....




Location, back of the Manhattan Inn, Tacloban City, Philippines, in the laundry room, overlooking the market and the decrepit wharf.

Only in this case, it looked beautiful. This was taken at dusk, at about 6 pm.

I noticed the water vapour from the rainforest forming clouds in the mountains. The shack on the left was perfect, as was the tree on the mountain to the right. So I used natural light, no filters, and waited for the fisherman in the foreground, who started off at extreme left.

17 minutes later, he was where I wanted him, and his presence made the perfect counterpoint to the perspective, as I applied the 2/3 rule to the water/mountains. The film was normal ASA 100 and i steadied the camera on the rail because the shutter speed was less than 1/60. Lens was a normal 50mm, on an aperture of f1.8, so as to get everything in focus.

The result was, as can be seen, quite stunning.

I only took the one. Sometimes you only need the one.


However....this is what the left hand side looks like in the daylight...








To myself...it is just as beautiful.


Smelly, squalid, wretched, decrepit, rancid, and quite simply POOR.


However, I love it anyway.

A Snapshot of Photography - 2

As promised, here is the second part of the Photography Bit.

So now the basics have been outlined, we can now go on to creativity. One of the problems of early cameras was that the lens the camera had was not really much good for landscapes. Many a time, the photographer wanted a shot of a beautiful Vista (TM) along with the trees in the foreground, just a few meters away.

He found that if he focussed on the hills, the trees would be out of focus, and vice-versa. His problem became known as "depth of field". That is, his focussing range was too small and not big enough to include both trees and hills.

Over the years, it was discovered there were two ways to make it bigger. The depth of field always became bigger if a shorter focal length was used, OR a larger aperture in the same lens.

There are drawbacks to each. In the first, if a shorter focal length is used, more of the landscape was included, and, sometimes, distorted. In the second, if a larger aperture was used, more light got in and a less sensitive film was needed.

In sports photography today, the problem becomes really acute, with closeups often desirable of a player dunking in basketball, for instance. For a close up to be done, a long focal length was needed, and subsequently, the depth of field became very small, so focussing on the subject was difficult. Here's an illustration:




For this shot I used depth of field to make your eye focus on the side of my face toward the camera. Notice how my left eye is out of focus.

Those of you who are smart will notice the candies on the table are ALL out of focus. This is because I used a frosted glass filter in front of the lens, that had a clear hole in the center. You can tell i used this because the candies on the far side of my face are much more out of focus than my left eye, because the two effects added together.

The lens I used was a 200mm lens with medium speed film.







Here's another example, a sports shot:

My team, Liverpool, had just won a soccer match 8-0. Peter Crouch is the tall guy, and the handsome guy on the left is the captain Steven Gerrard.

Notice how the crowd is out of focus. That's depth of field on a long lens. The lens looks like a 300mm, possibly 400mm.




So what are lens flares? Very often on TV, you see a car approaching in the dark with headlights switched on, but you see another exact copy of the headlights on the other side of the screen.

Other common lens flares come from sunlight and street lighting, the latter of which are often mistaken for UFOs

Here's a lens flare from the sunlight:

The diagonal array of lights you see from top left to bottom right are the lens flares.

But what are they?

Simply put, in this instance, they are miniature images of the sun pictured top left.

How do they get there?

It has to do with the way a camera lens is built up. The first lenses were made up of a single element, much like the magnifying glass schoolboys use to burn holes in paper. However, modern lenses look a lot more like this:



As you can see, there's more than one 'magnifying glass' there. There are eight.

Quite simply put, each glass bit produces at least one flare, and they are caused by unwanted reflections from the surfaces of the elements, when the light should be going straight through.

It's the same effect when you look into shop windows, when you have to shield the glass with your hands to see inside. The reason for this is that the glass does not want to let all the light through, and some gets reflected back into your eyes from the street. Lens flares happen for exactly the same reason.

So why does it happen? It's wave theory.

The best illustration I can think of is a washing line attached end-to-end to a piece of string. Grab the end of the string and move it up and down to make a wiggle. This travels to the place where it has been tied to the thicker washing line. The washing line wiggles a bit, but most of the initial wiggle is reflected back to you. It happens because the washing line is 'denser' than the string, just like glass is 'denser' then the air.

As you can imagine, if you have eight pieces of washing line connected to nine pieces of string, the potential for reflections is much larger.

In wave theory, they are called reflections, in photography, they are lens flares.

'Pushing' film and exposure compensation are related, and are just two different ways to allow more light into the camera. The first is an adjustment to make the camera 'think' it is exposing a less sensitive film, a useful technique in low light, but the downside is that photos are less clear (more grainy). Exposure compensation is used in situations where there is a lot of contrast. It happens a lot on TV when there is sunlight on only part of the playing field. The film cannot cope with bright light and darkness in the same image, so the cameraman adjusts the camera accordingly using Exposure Compensation, so that shadows look normal, and that daylight looks normal, but never the two in the same shot.

Take this shot:


In this shot, to use normal camera settings would have resulted in my image being very dark, as the trees in the (out of focus) distant background are normally lit. I had two choices: 1. use the light level from my shirt (thus bleaching out the background trees) or 2. use the light level from the background trees (thus darkening me into shadow).

I decided to do neither. I exposed for the background trees but used a small flash to light my image.

This technique is called 'fill-in flash'.

In some situations, especially like these, it is the only solution.

Finally, reciprocity failure. This only happens at extremes of light levels, and mostly in the dark.
Normally, light levels are linearly related, that is, you open the aperture to double, you have to double the shutter speed to let in the same amount of light, or halve the film speed.

At low light levels, this rule fails. Instead of opening the shutter for double the time, sometimes you have to open it four times longer than is usually needed, and even then there is no rule. It is almost always guesswork, because there is no known rule. The 'double one thing - halve another' rule fails, hence "Reciprocity Failure". A dramatic upshot of this is that if untreated, moonlit scenes which should be blue, actually appear green.

Once again, this is just textbook stuff off the top of my head. There is far more in the real world to deal with. Here I have given only a smattering of examples. This is why Photography is FUN!

A Snapshot of Photography - 1

Just what is the difference between your tiny 7 Megapixel sureshot camera, a large sports camera, a huge portrait camera, and all the plethora of high-resolution movie cameras available today, and all in-between?

The answer is: Not much.

There are always a few basic attributes they all have - it is just a matter of degree.

However, there are a few terms they all use which have the same function.

1. Aperture

2. Shutter speed

3. Focal length

4. Film speed

5. Negative size

That's it! Here's the explanation of each:

Aperture is the hole that allows light onto the film. The bigger the hole, the more light is let in.

Shutter speed is the time during which you let the light in for. You can see that if you have a small aperture, you need a slow shutter speed, and for a large aperture, you need a fast shutter speed, to let the same amount of light onto the film.

Film speed is how quickly the film reacts to light. In the examples above, the conditions in both cases will let roughly the same amount of light onto the film. BUT, if you use a 'fast' film, both images will be brighter.

Focal length is simply how far into the distance you can see, exactly like a telescope. However, because you are looking at a smaller area, there is less light coming in than normal, and so you must use a slow shutter speed.

Negative size governs the quality of the image developed from the negative.

A few examples may suffice. In sports, you often see close-ups of the action as a basketball shot is made. The photgrapher uses a telephoto lens for this, typically six times more powerful than normal. Therefore he must let six times more light in. he can't use a slow shutter speed as this is action and the image will be blurred. He uses a combination of a big aperture (this is why you see these lenses looking like megaphones) and fast films. The lenses use much glass, which makes them very expensive (about $3000 each), and he has to decide what film to use.

In a panorama shot, you have to go the opposite way, using an 'anti-telephoto' lens, commonly known as a wide-angle lens, or sometimes a 'fish-eye' lens. You would think that seeing more gives you more light, but it does not! So again , you have to use a long shutter speed (not really a problem as nothing is moving). You solve this by putting the camera on a tripod to steady it.

Then there are the zoom lenses, used in the movies. This allows the image to be 'zoomed' in on and makes the action better looking.

A normal camera you buy in the stores tries to mimic the action of the eye, as in aperture and exactly how much you see. This is the angle of vision, and normally, when focussed ahead, the eye can acually 'see' out of the 'corner' of the eye, up to maybe 120 degrees. The camera lens is quite at about 60 degrees, and most everyday lenses use this. The ratio of focal length to film size has to be between 1.3 and 1.42 for this to work properly (Why? Trial and error 100 years ago!), so for a 35mm camera, you get a 50mm lens. If you call this 'normal' aperture '1', then a 300mm telephoto, (six times magnification) will have an 'aperture' of about 1/6.

Well, that is the simple bit over with. Next time will be about 'pushing film', 'exposure compensation', 'depth of field', 'lens flares' and that bane of the Dark, the Dreaded 'Reciprocity Failure'.