It Snowed A LOT this Year!

Here's a picture out my front window.  I should have put a black shirt on, instead of my white one, before taking this to cut back on the reflections.

1/320 sec, f/5.6, ISO ~100, hand-held, polarized filter, taken Feb 26, 2011.  This is a composite of five photos stitched together with Hugin.

Musical Punch Bowl

Sorry, things have been slow on the blog lately. I just need a break every now and then.

Here's an example of my playing around with a technique called shaped bokeh. I think I have the technical part down, but I haven't really come up with anything too inspiring yet. There's lots of tutorials out there explaining how to do this so instead of taking the time to write another one, just to make myself look smart, I'll direct you to the one I used: http://www.diyphotography.net/diy_create_your_own_bokeh.

1-20 sec, f/1.8 (well that's what the camera was set to, I guess to find what it really was you'd have to calculate the area of the music note shape and then find what the diameter of a circle with the same area would be, then divide that into the focal-length), ISO 800, 50mm (35mm eqv. 81mm)

Behind the Scenes

Canon PowerShot A510, 1.6 sec, f/2.6, ISO 50, 5.8mm (35mm eqv. 37mm)

You may notice I made a couple adjustments that are not in the tutorial. First, I made it easier to add different shapes without having to make a holder for each one. And second, I didn't have any black paper that would block out all light, so I used aluminum foil with cardboard to hold it in place. I figured that this would also allow me to have cleaner edges than paper would. However, the foil is much more delicate, I think.

New Site Header

Hey there!

I just updated the header for the site so if you normally read this with a feed reader you should drop by the site and check it out.

It was Julie's (my wife) due date yesterday, when this photo was taken. We went for a walk to see if we could get things moving. No luck yet.

This is actually three photos stitched together to make a panoramic. I used Microsoft ICE to do the stitching. I normally try to stay away from Micro$oft as much as I can, let along endorse it, for reasons I won't get into here, but this is a pretty amazing tool, and it's free! Simply open it up and drag in all the photos you want to stitch together. It does the rest. It figures out what order they should be in, lines them up, and corrects some of the lighting/color issues there might be so that they blend together nicely. It takes it's good old time, but still faster then doing it manually. Sometimes it doesn't include all of the photos you selected in the final image, but often if you try again it will work. When taking the photos that you plan to stitch later, try to make sure that they overlap by about a third.

Slacking

Sorry, no photos today. I was out of town this weekend. Normally, I do all the posts for the week on Saturday, hopefully I can do some tonight.

I found an interesting service the other day to share photos. It's completely anonymous and unlimited and free, there's not even ads. I don't know how he can afford to do this, it may not last long, but I thought I'd share anyway. Anyone can upload as many photos as they want and link to them on blogs, in emails, IM's, or whatever. I think Blogger has a limit of 1GB, which is pretty high, but if you ever run out, this could be an option.

imgur.com

Pinhole "Lens"

The Pinhole camera or Camera obscura is the most primitive camera, invented about a thousand years ago. It was a simple device, basically a light-proof box, big enough to sit inside, with a small hole to let light enter and project an image onto the opposite wall. At first, recording of the image was done by manually tracing the projected image. A less manual method of recording was not discovered for another 600 years.

I made a pinhole "lens" for my modern camera. Although it's not really a lens, because it has no glass. I took the lens mount from my extension tubes and cut out a piece of cardboard to fit snugly inside. Then I got a pin and made a hole in the middle and attached it to my camera. The smaller the hole the clearer the picture. My first attempt at a hole was too big, the pictures were quite blurry. The cardboard was too thick to make a good, small, clean-cut hole all the way through, so I removed a larger piece of the cardboard and then covered the space with aluminum foil, since it's very thin and blocks 100% of light. Then, with the cardboard laying flat on a table, stuck the pin in again. This way I got a hole that was only the size of the tip of the pin. The pictures are still a bit blurry, but good enough, I guess. The depth of view seems to be infinite, there's never a need to worry about focus. Objects near and far look the same. Due to the small amount of light, all these pictures needed a 20 - 30 second exposure. Below is the first attempt:

I'm not really sure if there's any point to all this. It makes for an interesting effect, although, you could probably get the same effect by editing the picture afterwards. I just thought it was a cool experiment, it makes you think a little bit about how light and cameras work and how easy it is to take a picture now compared to long ago.

Here's some with the smaller hole. For some reason the dust on my sensor becomes very visible when using the the pinhole lens, not really sure why. I've never cleaned my camera since I got it 3 or 4 months ago. I should learn how to do that sometime.

3D Experiments

I'm trying something new today. By taking two photos of the same scene at slightly different angles, focusing on the same spot in the middle of the frame, It should be possible to end up with a 3 dimensional image. Since our eyes are like two cameras that see the would at slightly different angles.

So I gave it a try. Making the image isn't hard, but trying to see the depth in the pictures without special equipment, like a View-Master, is a different story. It is possible, however, with some practice. The trick is to get one of your eyes to look at one side while the other is looking at the other side. I'm not really sure how to explain how to do this. Try looking between the two images and slowly crossing your eyes. I find that everything goes blurry and then slowly, the two images drift together until it looks like there's three images. Now try to focus your vision on the center image. It takes some time to get use to. It's a similar technique to view Magic Eye images.

This seems to be the largest I can make the images while still being able to see the 3D effect. I think because the distance of an object in one image to the same object in the other image is roughly the same as the distance between my eyes, does that make sense?

Below are animations made from the same photos used above, fading from one to the other:

Macro Photography with Extension Tubes

I bought a set of extension tubes a little while ago. The purpose of an extension tube is to move the lens farther away from the camera. This allows you to focus on objects that are closer to the front of your lens making them great for macro photography. They do have a down side, though. You will lose your ability to focus to infinity. The longer the tube, both your minimum and maximum focus distances decrease, but that normally isn't a problem if you're taking pictures of bugs since you're always quite close. I can't wait until the bugs come out again!

They're quite simple. The set I got are made of metal. There's no glass in them. It came in 5 pieces: a mount for the camera body, a mount for the lens and three different sized rings that can screw into each other and the mounts. By combining different parts you can extend the space between the camera body and lens eight intervals.

This is definitely the cheapest way to get into macro photography. There are macro lenses, but they're quite expensive, of course. I was very surprised at how much the extension tubes varied in price. The set I got was about $11.00 on eBay including shipping from Hong-Kong. I checked out the Canon branded ones at a local camera shop and they were well over $200.00! Now there are some differences. The Canon set had electrical contacts so the auto-focus, aperture control, and Image Stabilization (IS) would still work and each part had a body and lens mount so they were much easier and faster to attach, but in the end they do the exact same thing. There would be absolutely no difference in image quality. Manually focusing isn't that hard and I can use a tripod so the loss of IS isn't a big deal, but the aperture control is a little more annoying since most lenses no longer have a manual aperture control, it can only be done electronically. So I have to mount the lens to the body, set the aperture I want and then remove the lens while pressing the aperture preview button since normally the aperture stays wide open until just before the shutter opens. Then, I mount the tube to the body and the lens to the tube and I'm ready to go. Still, I don't think it's worth $200+.

Often, in my previous post, my macro shots were cropped quite a lot, they would have looked terrible printed. No need for cropping here.

Anyhow, enough talk, how 'bout some pictures? The first one is a demonstration of just how close to your subject you can get, it's my thumb print on the front of the lens! You can't get much closer then that. Of course, this isn't always desirable. Being that close makes it hard to light, since the lens is in the way, like the pencil, which is leaning right up against the lens. Using longer lenses will allow you to get farther away.

Polarized Filter

I got a polarized filter for Christmas. For those who may not know what a polarized filter is or what it does, here are some examples.

There are many uses for polarized filters. Here are two:

1. Bring out the contrast between the sky and clouds
The first picture was taken without the filter. The second and third were taken with the filter, but with it rotated 90 degrees.




2. Reduce reflections or glare on glass, water, or anything wet or shiny. This is the reason many sunglasses are polarized. Note the reflections in the window. Both of the following pictures are with the filter, but with it rotated 90 degrees.



The only editing I did on these ones was scaling so they fit in this space. No colour adjustments.

Weeds and bolts

A blurry background can to make anything look good!

Texture / Detail

Another easy way to get interesting photos is to look for textures in ordinary, every-day things.  Everything has some sort of texture, you just need to find right spot.  It doesn't matter if the viewer is even able to identify the object in the photo.  In fact, not being able to identify it could make it more interesting as they try to fugure out what it could be.

Angles

The angle or prospective at which a subject is shot can make a huge difference on the outcome of the photo and can make common things more interesting.

Water

You can always find interesting shapes in water. Perhaps more thought could have gone into the background. Maybe a black piece of... well anything would work, I guess. As long as it isn't shiny. I'm just starting out, so hopefully the pictures will get better as I go.