Jason the Over-Dressed Ghost

I stumbled over a box a pictures in the basement, and I found a little mini-album of more old photo-experiments. I kind of forgot these!

Remember that double-me shot I shared a month or so ago? I forgot that I did another one at the same sitting.

This variety of shot is much easier to pull off. Basically, I set up the photo to require a certain number of seconds for a proper exposure, say 8. After exposing the film for 4 seconds with me there, my assistant (Dad again) turned off the light.

After slipping out of the shot, the light got flipped on for the final 4 seconds to complete the exposure. The overall effect is a see-through, ghostly image.

Anyone care to name this wonderful piece of 80's art??

Say Hello to My Little Friend

I've always believed that the quiet anchor to The Clarity of Night is photography. I'm only an amateur (as if I had to tell you that, LOL!) A wannabe. But I did go through a pretty big photography stage as a teenager, and I have to admit, that it's become another treasured creative outlet for me. Anyway, you get the picture. (Pun intended.)

So back to blogging.... My theory has been that to effectively write in this internet/blog, you really have to adopt a more multimedia approach to build interest and harness its full power. Photography, videos, music...it's all good. All the photos you see here are mine, except on rare occasion. I use photos to inspire me and use stories to inspire photos. Once in a great while, I even post a little bit on photography itself. (Ahem.)

If you've been with me a while, you know I often love to explore close, small subjects. Like the post just below this one. Buds, insects, frogs, flowers, etc. I like get right in there. However, I've lacked an essential tool to do it relatively well. And that's a macro lens.

For those non-photographers out there, macro lenses are specialty lenses that can achieve a subject ratio of 1:1. Basically, that means that the subject will appear to be actual size on the camera sensor. However, since photos are viewed much larger than the size of the sensor, finished photos have a magnified effect.

Why am I blathering about this? Well, without further ado, let me introduce the Nikkor AF-S Micro 105mm ED VR lens (pictured above). I treated myself for my birthday (thanks Aine!!), and snagged this baby. It's my first professional-grade lens. CAN YOU TELL I'M EXCITED?!

Another cool thing about this lens is that the focal length (105mm) makes it a good portrait and general subject lens. I'm thinking I'll get lots of use from it, although my previous workhorse lens will still be important in my landscape photography, especially when I do shots from a moving car.

Here one extra tidbit. The picture in the last post features an impossible range of focus. Macro lenses have notoriously thin fields of view. For example, here is the same shot, but with only the back of the twig in focus.

For last post's picture, I've used a technique called stacking. It's a composite picture formed from 5 different shots, each having a different part of the subject in focus. The stacking program then integrates all 5 shots by choosing only those portions in focus. The end result is a single picture with everything in focus. Pretty cool, eh?

Anyway, I don't talk photography much, so thank you for indulging me. Now and again, I get the itch.

City from the Hip

Walking the streets of Philadelphia. Camera at the hip. Taking blind shots no one notices.

I set the lens. Cock my wrist. Then, *click*.



Come along to the organic city.



Walk the lunch-crowded streets.



Philadephia.



From the hip.

Depth of Field and Stacking Close Photography

This is my first real post on photography. I'll try not to bore the crap out of you. (Oh, the pressure, the pressure.) Before I get rolling, though, I need to give you a splash of photography 101.

The two most basic functions of the camera are shutter speed and aperture (i.e., how big the lens opening is). Both control how much light gets into the camera, so in a way, they work against each other. For example, the faster the shutter speed, the larger the aperture must be to let in enough light. The slower the shutter speed, the smaller the aperture must be to keep too much light out.

The biggest factor in shutter speed is motion. If you are taking a picture of a racecar, you need a fast shutter speed to avoid blur. On the other hand, you might want a slow shutter speed to paint the movement of a waterfall. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that most people cannot hold a camera still below a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second. Therefore, unless you have a tripod, you can't realistically go much slower than that.

So, what about aperture? What the heck does that do? Well, the most important effect of aperture is depth of field, which in English means how much of the shot will appear to be in focus. According to some impressive formulas with funky mathematic symbols, the physics of light causes more of the picture to be focused when the lens opening is very small. Let me demonstrate.

These three pictures were taken with increasingly smaller apertures.

Here, only the middle blossom appears to be in focus and the background is very blurred. Large aperture.

With a smaller aperture, the depth of focus deepens and the background comes more into focus (actually, not a desirable thing if the background is distracting).

With even smaller of an aperture, most of the branch comes into focus, but the background is kind of busy.

As you can see, in close (macro) photography, the depth of field is very small. Who wants a gorgeous close-up of a flower where only a few specks of pollen are clear? Blech! So what do you do? Well, you could decrease the aperture like I did above to widen the field.

Well, not so fast. Unless your subject is very brightly lit, by the time you make the aperture very small, you will have to make the shutter speed too slow to handhold the camera. Add in some wind or entirely too much coffee, and you're screwed. Now what?

Well, you could add a flash to solve the light problem. However, the artful use of flash is whole other can of worms. I hate nothing more than a shot with heavy and harsh flash. It looks like the subject is a millisecond away from getting vaporized by an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Here is where stacking comes in. By keeping the aperture large (wide), you can isolate the subject from the background while creating an impossibly large depth of field. Using a tripod (sorry, you're stuck with one now), you inch the focus forward through the subject bit by bit in a series of photos. A stacking program then creates a composite image using only the clear portions.

Here is the process in action.

Note how the first photo is clear on the left, but blurry on the right. By the time you reach the 6th photo, the right is the clear side and the left blurry.

Now comes the fun part. Take these 6 otherwise pitiful pictures, and stack them with a program far smarter than I am. Voilà! You've done the impossible.

Okay, now you have some crazy mad tools. Go get stacked.

Ellipse

Close
I drink your gravity
Then we spin away and turn
Hungry to collide
Again

(Experimenting with a new photography technique here. Close pictures suffer from a narrow field of focus. By taking multiple shots, each with a slightly different focus, a program can "stack" them into a single, sharper image. Here, the distance between the tip of the leaves and the end of the branch is much too far to both be in focus in a normal shot. It's not perfect, but not bad for the first try.)