I think it is because of the lack of anything in the shot that would give away the scale.  There were no sticks or branches or objects that are of a known size. Rocks look like rocks.  Small ones look just like larger ones.

I had trouble at first with making these shots right.  I didn’t have a tripod so I had to set up a little rock platform to set the camera on.  To get this type of shot a long exposure is required so that the water takes on that silky blur.  Without a stable camera everything would have been blurry.

I wanted the low angle so I had to make my little stands precariously close to the water.  (I kept my neck strap on the whole time.)    Because the angle was so low and because I didn’t want to get all wet trying to look through the viewfinder I just guessed the approximate view.   I held the camera up directly above the makeshift camera stand to get my focus (manually) then set it straight down.  I often had to adjust the angle with little bits of rocks under the corners of the camera.  Once I got the camera steady I tripped the shutter which was set using the 2 second delay.  This way any movement caused by my hand would have ceased by the time the shutter went off.

One other issue created by long exposures is over-exposure.  The aperture had to be closed to the smallest hole and I had a polarizer filter with me so I also put that on.

This took my shutter speed (which I let the camera figure out by using AV mode) to times of 5 to 10 seconds long.   This can be done manually also but a little bit if trial and error are needed until you figure out the shutter speed.

After I got home and looked through my shots I found that only about 10 out of the hundred or so were any good.  I liked what I saw in the colors and textures of the rocks and water. The orange tints in the stones, some green with light moss.  The whites of the blurried water really defined the “flow” of the entire image.

These waterfalls will never become tourist attractions and surely will never be found on any map.  Nonetheless I was so impressed with these little falls that I went ahead and named them.   Some advice to any future hikers seeking out these falls, don’t expect to find Pine Falls or Granite Pool, just some small trickles in an ankle-deep Cool Creek.

Anyway, I’m back in the mountains of San Bernardino.  It’s been a while since we’ve lived up here but it sure is nice to be back.  Winter.
We had some snow already in December.  Not exactly a white christmas but I enjoyed the brisk weather.  Lots of rain and a fair amount of snow so far this season. Here’s a picture of the village of Lake Arrowhead taken a short walk from my home.

The village at Lake Arrowhead

For the past 3 years I’ve taken my camera downtown during an evening cruise to capture some of these beauties.  I fell in love with the look I got the first time I tried to capture the cars using the panning technique.  Since then I’ve tried different lenses and cameras to attempt to improve the look.  This year’s images turned out pretty well.  I’ve been wanting to make a calendar with them but so far I have settled with this little video.

Many of the shots I attempt just don’t come out well at all (some would say that none came out well :-) ) because of such a slow shutter speed.  In order to blur out the background I have to use at least 1/2 sec – 1 sec shutters.  In spite of the appearance, the cars are barely moving.  Most of the pedestrians are walking faster.  I use an aperture between f4 and f8 and the lowest iso on the camera.   To me, low noise is key to getting the most pleasant looking blurs.   Camera is set on manual and lens on manual focus as well.  With everything moving so slowly you really don’t need to make many adjustments.  Just play around with the shutter and aperture settings a click up or down until you like the exposure.  I shoot by setting the focus on a car directly in front of me, where I want the car when I make the exposure, then swing over to an approaching car and start to line up the shot.  I get a firm grip with both hands on the camera and pull both my elbows tight against my chest to help steady the camera.  Once I have matched the pace of the car with the camera I start shooting, and try to get at least one shot directly where I preset the focus.

Ok, so this isn’t as smooth as it could be.  I think my table might be lop-sided.  This is a looping .gif of 24 images.  It looks like there might be a frame missing, or maybe two transposed frames in there somewhere…mmm.   I’m ok with it for now.  This is my first one and I’ve learned a few things.  Much of the work is done in photoshop although it did take some time to get the turn-table set up for the first time.

For the turn-table I used some cabinet hardware normally used for a pull-out swiveling tv shelf.  I just mounted a white board to it.  Part of the problem with the shaky horizon is due to the board being too small and therefore not perfectly round.  I marked off the board in 24 15-degree increments and shot an image at each mark.

This next one was done by setting the camera on the platform so that the bulb and camera positions never changed in relation to one another.  I took another 24 shots, one each at the marked positions.  The movement of the platform is reflected from the fluorescent bulbs above.

I shot several more sequences and I’ll work on those here in the next day or so.   Right now all this is just experimentation as I try to figure out the best way to capture a product that can be rotated for a possible online shopper.  For me at least buying online is difficult because I need to see more detail than any one photograph can give.  A sequence of still shots is much better, but this linked sequence of shots really brings it to life.   Hopefully I’ll be able to refine the process to make it cost effective.

The change in the look of the blog is a switch to the theme Simple Organization 1.06 by Viktor Persson. I found it here. This one seems to really suit me and gives me lots of ways to use the site.  I like the way comments are displayed in this theme and how the page links are also at the bottom of the page.

There are a couple of gripes but I think it may be due to my incredible lack of html knowledge.

Between the logo and the blog post area is a field for using however I want, I guess.  Originally there was text there as a samples of what could be done, but I didn’t see an easy way to change the content.  There should be a widget or something.  I had to go into the editor and rewrite these myself.

Another thing I don’t like, or see a point to, is the scroll bar along each post on the home page.  It doesn’t seem to work right.  Regardless how long my post is, the bar is just as long and doesn’t scroll.  :(

I’ll have to keep working these things out.  I’m not much of a web/design/programmer guy at all.  I just want to get this figured out and spend more time shooting.

That was the option with the latest DPChallenge theme.

I wanted to continue working on small studio setups and lighting so this challenge was great practice.  It’s hard to get the lighting right and everything to come together like it is in my mind.  This one came close.   I initially planned to have a bottle and a glass together but I didn’t have a bottle I liked (though I did go out and buy about $15 worth in beer and sodas for this.)

After many, many various arrangements I finally came up with one I liked.  For this final set-up I used a black posterboard on the table, covered with a very clean piece of plexiglass.  I use glass cleaner on everything.  Black posterboard seems to reflect better than white.  About 5-6 feet behind the glass I put a paper screen.  If I put the paper too close sometimes I can see flaws in the paper or even it’s texture.  By holding it back enough it falls beyond the field of focus.

When a flash is fired near something, its color reflects on everything near it.  Many photographers use gels on their flashes, and one day I will probably get some of those, but for now I’ve been using various colored posterboards and clothing.  I set the posterboard or a shirt near the subject and shoot the flash into it (or through it).  The reflection is nice and soft with a smooth gradient.   Here I used a piece of yellow posterboard set up behind my paper screen.  I angled the board so I could shoot directly at it and let it reflect into the paper screen.  As you can see in the background the yellow is lightly visible and in the table it’s reflected darker because of the black posterboard below the plexiglass.

On either side of the beer glass I set white opaque acetate screens (they’re more like frosted clear).  Beyond those I have two 4-foot fluorescent 2-tube shop lights standing on end facing the screens.  I use daylight bulbs in the lights because they match the temperature of my flash best.  This way I don’t have to mess with white balance issues.  I also like these lights because they don’t get hot.

For equipment I’m using a dslr in manual mode, manual focus 50mm lens on a tripod, and a remote flash triggered by a cheap (piece of crap) cactus junk trigger, (someone please buy me some radiopoppers or pocketwizards for my birthday).  I don’t have the slightest idea how to do this in any automatic modes.

Now because I use a combination of a flash (single burst) with the fluorescent lights (which remain on the whole time) I have to play around with the shutter and aperture settings a bit to get the right combination for the best exposure.  I use the aperture to control the light from the flash and the shutter to control the light from the fluorescents.  Since the flash is a single short duration burst I start by deciding the DOF I want for the shot and set the aperture accordingly.  If it seems a bit bright I set the flash setting to low or move the light back some.  I’m using a cheap flash with only two settings; full power or 1/2 power.   Because the flash duration is so short the shutter speed is almost irrelevant, as long as I’m not too fast as I can only sync at about 1/125 sec.

To control the fluorescent lights I use the shutter speed.  The camera is on a tripod as I’m working with rather slow speeds (from 1/10 to 1/50 sec).  If the side lights need to be brighter I just slow down the shutter.  I continue playing with different combinations of shutter/aperture settings until I get the exposures from both the flash and the fluorescents that I like.  Once I find my sweet spot then I check the DOF and if i need to adjust for shallower or deeper, I change the aperture then match the EV change on the shutter speed.  For instance if I wanted shallower DOF then I open the aperture a bit.  This will then affect the light entering from the fluorescents so I compensate by increasing the shutter speed some.

By adjusting the lights nearer or farther from the subject the quality of the light is changed.  While using bare lights, if the light is nearer, the shadows and highlights are softer and by moving the lights back you get sharper or more defined shadows.  If the light source appears smaller from the subject’s point-of-view, the shadows are sharper.  Using the screens or some kind of shoot-through diffusers, though, seems to reverse this rule.  If the light is close to the screen I am only lighting a small portion of the screen and therefore the light seems smaller and therefore, shadows are sharper.  If I move the lights back from the screen I am lighting more of the screen and the lit screen is now a larger light source which gives softer shadows.   This probably sounds confusing but if you play around with this you’ll see what I mean.

With this set-up you can easily change a few things and get completely different looks.   Here I moved the flash to shoot directly into the back screen towards the back of the subject but I put a green shirt over the flash which gave me the green hue.  Threw in a couple ice-cubes for fun.

I was eating lunch at Quizno’s on Saturday and I saw this bottle of Izze that looked pretty cool.  Same set-up as the first shot except when I moved the yellow posterboard around I accidently got the shadows of the clamps in the scene.  They looked great so I rearranged them to look more interesting, almost like window mullions or rays of the sun.

Here’s another, again same basic set-up as the green shot above only this time I used a pink shirt over the flash to match the color of this Jones Soda.

There are lots of little things i did in photoshop of course to enhance the shots, like spot removal, cropping and color tweaking, but this post is long enough.

]]> http://bkwatkins.com/2009/11/08/beer-or-soda/feed/ 2 http://bkwatkins.com/2009/11/01/light-on-white/ http://bkwatkins.com/2009/11/01/light-on-white/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:07:42 +0000 Brian http://bkwatkins.com/?p=600 Continue reading →]]>

Choose three of the following photography techniques and use them in a single image:  Backlighting, Blur, Bokeh, Centered Composition, Deep DOF, High Key, Leading Lines, Light On White, Long Exposure, Low Key, Portrait, Motion Panning, Rule of Thirds, Shallow DOF, Soft Focus, Stop Action, and Tilted Angle.

That was the challenge this weekend.

I’ve taken several darker shots lately so I decided to go a little out of my norm and try the other end of the histogram.   I noticed, after thinking about the various techniques that an image might contain, that many use several quite often.  In the shot above you could actually make a case for:  (of just the list above) backlighting, blur, maybe bokeh, high-key, light on white, long exposure (if you consider 1/13 sec long, which is long, considering the average photograph), rule of thirds, and shallow DOF.

For this shot though, I’m claiming Backlighting, Light on White and Shallow DOF.  Those I feel are the most pronounced techniques and they fit well with my subject.  Before I go any further with describing how I arrived at this composition and subject, I want to say that, “it just kinda happened.”  I’m not that good.

I went into my makeshift studio which is a room painted all white with a white table and one window with white curtains.  (Seems like I had no choice really, huh?  But I did, as I also shoot many of my low-key shots here too.)  But this time I was thinking “lighter”.   I went in also thinking about a photographer on Flickr who does well with this type of thing.   So I had a table and there was plenty of light coming from the window, so ok, I’ll just slide it over here and face the window.  Now I need a subject of some kind.  I noticed that there wasn’t much in the studio so I wandered around the garage next door.  I found a lightbulb.  Ok.  I cleaned it up and set it on the table.  I focused my lens on the bulb and shot in manual mode until I found a setting that gave the bulb a decent exposure.  Shooting into a light window forced the background to go white.  I felt since I couldn’t see the window or curtains well, I decided to go with the shallower DOF.   It would blur out the curtain detail more and give more attention to the lightbulb.   So far it was looking ok but still lacked interest.   I scrounged around a bit more and found a couple oil lamps.  I set them on the table near the bulb.  No, not good.  I moved them to the window sill and them seemed to magically fall into the “secondary subject blown-out bokeh-zone”.  I like it.

After shooting I took it to photoshop to clean up some spots on the table and curtains, did some slight curves adjustment with the green channel.   I also worked on the lights and darks with an adjustment layer.  (Basically i just add a blank layer over the background and paint with black and white in low opacity, soft light mode, then give the layer a gaussian blur to blend it.)

Another magical moment came when I noticed that I had chosen instruments of light for my “light on white” technique photo.   :)

]]> http://bkwatkins.com/2009/11/01/light-on-white/feed/ 0 http://bkwatkins.com/2009/10/30/infinite-bulbs/ http://bkwatkins.com/2009/10/30/infinite-bulbs/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:42:32 +0000 Brian http://bkwatkins.com/?p=633 Continue reading →]]>

Playing around with a light bulb and mirrors.  I took two mirrors and stood them face to face, not quite parallel, about a foot apart.  Above I placed a paper screen as a diffuser and shot a single flash downward through it.  I closed one side with a black card and shot with a low angle from the other side.   I used a dab of plumber’s putty (feels like a sticky clay) on the bottom of the bulb to keep it standing.   The actual bulb is the blurry, partly cut-off one to the left.  The one in focus is the first reflection of it in the facing mirror.  The next bulb back is a reflection of a reflection of the bulb in the reversed mirror.  It goes on  and on reflecting each other forever (well I think it does).   Keeping the mirrors parallel keeps the reflecting bulbs in a straight line.  Skewing a mirror off parallel bends the line of bulbs.

So I shot a portion of a bent line of reflections of a lightbulb standing vertically on a spot of plumbers putty between two mirrors.  How useful is that?

A very interesting challenge over at DPC this week.  Triptych.

I had already decided on doing a special set of images for Doug and Mary this week and when this challenge came up, I decided to combine my projects and do an image for both.  Because Doug and Mary are graphic artists with strengths in typography and logo design I decide to use this theme for my challenge entry also.  Unintentionally I stumbled upon an amazing connection.

From the book “there is no rhyme for silver” by Eve Merriam

I like  cats and kittens and pictures of them.  If you have a great picture of one I’d like to see it.  Put a link to it in the comments section and I’ll come take a peek.

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