Category: Arts & Crafts

This is more just a call for you all to go look at a page: Abandoned Places In The World. It’s something I come back to, time and again, simply because it’s so evocative.

Would I go to any of these places? Well, no, probably not (although that abandoned island off the coast of Japan seems way cool, and as if people ought to have moved in). But … these places are evocative, somehow, in a way that the pretty places are not.

Why take pictures of just “the beautiful?” Why ignore what is all around us: the gritty, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten?

True, I’m guilty of it: I have taken 860 pictures of flowers, alone! Yet, I’ve also taken 95 pictures of “abandoned furniture,” and 302 pictures of “what in the world?”

The flowers, though, and the castles, and whatever else, seem to overwhelm things, giving an imbalanced picture of the world.

Thoughts?

-D

Sometimes I take pictures of things which appear … well, not interesting. It’s not immediately clear why I took this picture, for instance. Have a look, and see if you can see why it was interesting to me.

Do you notice how the light-pole lines up exactly with the corner of the building, giving the illusion that it’s actually attached to the building, but that the shadow it casts upon the building tells you otherwise? And how the car obscures the base of the light-pole, so you can’t verify whether it’s attached or not?

Fun with perspective, light and shadow, and exposure.

-D

Every few weeks, my coworker A. gets his hair cut. I’ve told him that he could do just as well by buying a set of clippers, but he doesn’t listen. No matter, though, as I usually take the opportunity to go with him, and to wander around downtown Glasgow while he’s wasting his money. It costs me £1.50 or so, and I get a good half-hour of photography in.

Yesterday was a fabulous day for it, as it was quite sunny (in between showers), and the clouds were phenomenal. Taking pictures in high contrast situations, though, is a special kind of thing. To demonstrate the challenge, look at the two images below.

The image to the left is “what the camera saw” … but it’s unfortunate, because it washes the sky out, and doesn’t show the beauty of the building at all. The one on the right, though, is a composite image: I took three photos, one overexposed (to show the building), one properly exposed (to get most of the content), and one underexposed (to get the sky). These three images were then blended together to give you the image to the right.

This photography technique (High Dynamic Range) tries to mimic the way the eye actually sees the world: when your eye focuses on something, your pupil dilates or contracts, to “meter” the area in focus. So, you’re constantly making the world more balanced, in terms of contrast. Doing this photographically, though, is rather a challenge. Some of the attempts I’ve made have been really eerie, and some have been absolutely stunning (or, at least I think so). Take a look at my photoset, and let me know what you think.

-D

While working away at the writing yesterday I put the camera onto a tripod, plugged it into the computer, and told the computer to take a picture every 5 seconds. This went on for 868 shots (I’d forgotten to change the batteries out for fresh ones). So, the video below represents 72.5 minutes, compressed down to just under 90 seconds. Combined into a video using JPGVideo, at 10 frames per second, it’s a marvel.

We love our park, but we truly love the clouds, and the sunshine. It gives an overwhelming sense of peace to watch the clouds roll on by. Just today we got some sleet, bouncing off of the windows … and now it’s sunny again.

Don’t know what this hook is for, in all of its ornateness, but it cast a lovely shadow on the side of the church.

This guy seems to have found a precarious hold upon the corner of the church. Is he a dog?

Nose to the grindstone for another few weeks. Back to regular blogging some day soon.

Of all the things which consume my photography, magpies rank somewhere up near the top. That’s not to say that they’re numerically more significant, by any means: just that, whenever I run into them, I find that I really really want to capture what they actually look like! And they move!

The thing about magpies is that they’re black, white, and … iridescent. This just doesn’t come through in most photos, possibly because the birds only have their colored plumage certain times of the year; probably because most pictures operate within a fairly narrow dynamic range: either your white is dull, or your black is really a dark gray. The iridescence of the magpie is on the tail feathers, and it’s very subtle. In order to show it, most of the time you’d have to overexpose the picture such that the black of the feathers would appear washed out, over-exposed. Not the case any more!

The new camera (Canon 7D) has a feature which they’ve called Highlight Tone Priority. Their explanation is rather different from what I’m interested in, which is that I can balance my bright tones and the shadowy tones differently for an individual shot, giving me something like the magpie shown here: the white is white, while the black … really shows the color of the tail-feathers. To me, it’s sort of like a single-shot version of High Dynamic Range photography (where multiple shots are exposed and re-mixed into a single shot, with every area of the shot exposed properly – as if your eyes were looking at a scene, not fixing their pupils at one opening and then looking around.

In any event, yes, I’m loving the new camera, and what it does for my photography!