|
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Screwed
I'm sorry to be so blunt about it. Web.com has put up a long-awaited upgrade to the site builder
and it appears to contain a fatal flaw for the way I use it. It's about pictures. I don't think it has fully
set in, but the reality is that I may be forced to move the entire site somewhere else in a real hurry.
OK, so
take a look at this wonderful diptych:
I've been long in writing, I know, but I had an interesting one here and some other stuff lined up behind
it. This was a photo experiment in perspective with the same shot from two different, but close, shooting locations. But the
problem with the new site builder is that when you insert an image, it shows up by default as a tiny little box (not to mention
taking noticeably longer for the upload) about the size of four squares of text, you know, like this:
Oh, except that it's just white, not the actual image squished (as is the image above).
And it has drag-handles on the outside corners so you can just click and hold one and resize the image. That might seem OK,
but there are two huge problems.
First, there is no way to lock the aspect ratio. When you drag
a corner out you change the shape of the image unless you happen to drag the mouse exactly on a perfect angle. This introduces quadrilateral
skew in the resulting photograph. But that doesn't make it a skew quadrilateral (couldn't resist
a little one-liner for geometry wonks, now, could I?). Oh, it's a mess. Look at where I've gotten to here?
And you know, I tried every double-key combination I could think of. Click and drag but press the shift key. Click and drag
but press the Alt key. There wasn't any combination I could find that locked the ratio to preserve the shape of the photo.
And secondly, the image starts out as this tiny, maybe 16x16 box and then you drag it out to the size you want.
That probably means that even if you ended up selecting exactly, say, 600x400 when you released the drag-handle the image
would be transformed from what was uploaded.
To demonstrate this point, this is the best I can get resizing the
stretched photograph above by hand to about the original size.
Oh, why not, since I'm writing. The photo on the right was taken from 10 feet behind, 15 feet to the right
and 4 feet up from the photo on the left. I took these shots in Dugger Park in Medford, so the four feet was a bright red
and blue kindof three year old play structure. Anything for my devoted audience. Anyway, when I was up there I realized that
without the opposing bank the sign was more isolated and I wanted to look at the perspective change side-by-side. My summary:
sign in isolation has no message, just means junk next to water. Sign with opposing bank leaves open to broad interpretation
why the sign is disused, what it warned of, etc. I don't particularly care what the sign means in the right hand shot.
Oh, I also like the framing of the sign better on the left, but your opinion may vary.
Back to Web.com, though.
There is a really nice new rich text editor, so I can cut and paste this image, go to full screen mode, drag the handles around
and stuff. That part is cool and I abused it severely in this posting to make a point: I don't want to mess with my photos,
folks. This one in particular. I assembled this one in Photoshop to specific dimensions. A 10 pixel boundary with two 400
x 600 photos. Everything exact. And now, not.
This really might be a fatal issue for me. There is a workaround,
I suppose, that is going into the page HTML and seeing if I can fix the image reference there, but I just can't bear that
kind of repetitive thing for every photo I want to post, even if it is infrequent as of late.
9:29 pm est
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Meowww
Ah, my luck has clearly changed for the better. As I was strolling through some part of Arlington this morning on my
way to work, I ran into the MEOWWW car. The last time I saw
this car was in Harvard Square a few years back and although I got a few pictures, I don't recall them being anything but
documentary in nature. Recently I did manage to get a Halloween car. But hopefully your curiousity is really up, so let me just lay it all out there and show you the beauty that is the MEOWWW car.
I had a few minutes to spare and not knowing when I would ever get the chance, I took a walk over and spent
a little time working the subject, as they say. The sun was coming down at quite an angle, but I still like this shot that
says car and very strange detailing at the same time.
As I was working the front of the car, I noticed some figures on the front fender, so I took a closer look.
Is this a trip, or what? Now, in keeping with all that is Dave, I did, of course, meet the owner of this car
whilst I was photographing it. I'll keep the details of that conversation private except to say that I did thank her for the
opportunity to photograph the car and complimented her on how much I liked it. If the situation had been different, I would
have totally asked her to pose for a photo with the car, but I can only say that today was not the day for that.
Instead, I leave you with this - a classic MEOWWW
car scene - this from the front hood, left-side.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Bay Area Photo Blog
I recently spent a bit short of a week in northern California - the Bay area, although mostly San Jose. Although I was
working hard during this time, I did get a few chances to take pictures...
Of course, the first thing I have to tell you is that I met Frans Lanting. He was a guest lecturer at a presentation series I attended in San Jose. His latest work is LIFE - A Journey Through Time. In this (which has a great online presentation, by the way) he portays the journey of life from the Big Bang to the present
day, all through photographs. I won't tell you much more than that, but there are some great images in there.
Oddly enough, I was quite embarrased to get up and take a picture of Frans. It was a very surreal thing for me. The auditorium
was fairly full and many of the attendees were fellow photographers. And for some reason, I just felt that it would be too
audacious to get up and take pictures. I wasn't using a flash or anything, so I don't know what my problem was. Towards the
end, I realized that I wouldn't get a shot at all if I didn't get off my butt and just take it, so I did. And it ended after
the third frame. Whew.
On April Fool's day, there was a snarky company newsletter. One of the things it talked about was a new supply
of bottled water from the Guadalupe river. This is what they were talking about.
This section of the river is in downtown San Jose, near McEnery Park. If you can call it a river. Hey, at least there is still water flowing. There are a lot of dry months ahead for the Guadalupe.
Still, with flowing water, there were a lot of birds around and these ducks seemed pretty acclimated to humans.
Now, the left bank of the river looks really odd because it is covered with mud and other precipitate from the receding
river. When I look at these in Lightroom, I realize that this condition is deceptively helpful. I took this photo after lunch
(early afternoon). The sun was bright and high in the sky. Clear. Normally these conditions would produce too broad a dynamic
range to capture on a digital camera without losing either the highlights or the shadows. But in this case, the mud acts as
a big absorbsion/diffusion device. Think about it - normally, this would be concrete and that is full of tiny shiny things
that look really bright. To catch detail in the highlights and also in the dark background was a very pleasant surprise.
As was this next pictures, because there are very, very few places, especially in the United States, where you can take
a picture like this.
Thankfully, my bosses bosses office is just such a place. And with a green light to hang there, well, I brought a tripod
in. I took this through the glass leading to some undesirable impacts in the photo. Still, it's really not something you get
a chance to do very often and it turns out there are some things to be careful of, particularly in this case. Most importantly,
always, is to turn off all the lights you can and then find a place where your camera doesn't reflect back through the windows.
If you have a polarizer, slap it on - it may solve your problems. There are also two active runways here. It's easy to focus
on the plane that is landing and miss another one taxiing out to the runway and such. You also want to avoid leaving rubber
marks or scratches on the desktop from the legs of the tripod. Not that that happened, because it didn't, OK? Besides,
my bosses boss is a photographer too, so I'm sure he's already put a tripod on his desk.
Anyway, I took the CalTrain from San Jose to the city (San Francisco) a number of times and that gave me the opportunity to take some nice train pictures.
I actually take a lot of train pictures anyway, I just don't post them very often. Since Alex loves trains, I often wind up
at a train station between Katherine's drop-off and Alex's. I have some really nice shots of the Downeaster and other local trains and that prepared me well for shooting CalTrain. Specifically, in this the first shot, I had taken
a number of photographs from the platform on the left, but I decided to try the other side to see if it would frame better.
It did.
It's maybe a bit deceiving about how large this train is. You have to notice the double rows of windows on the side -
it's a double-decker train. More on that later, but first, a classic California scene.
As my regular readers know, I rarely post a license plate number. Alas, in this case, the number has to be there. I think
it's safe to say that California still has a significant car culture. This is a beauty.
Just to describe the setup. I was walking along a street somewhere when I noticed the car in this setting. It's one of
those things where you are watching the perspective change as you approach the subject thinking, "that's not all going to
line up plumb, is it?"
And it does. And that's when you find me crawling around in the street trying to find the centerpoint of the shot so
I can compose a head-on perspective.
Which brings us back to CalTrain. I knew, sooner or later, a train would approach from the other direction and I'd be
able to snap a good shot of it approaching. I honed this skill in Boston shooting commuter trains. The idea is that you follow
the incoming train with fairly wide aperture (at least ƒ5.6) focusing on the front of the train. The foreground will go out
of focus (I'm using a mid-range telephoto here, 70-200mm) as will the background. If you are shooting really wide, you can
sometimes introduce the perspective and feeling of miniaturization. It works in the same way as a view camera or Lensbaby,
just with a parallel plane of focus. But anyway.
What a nice touch that some passengers happened to be sitting in the front so we can get an idea of the size of this
beast.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Arlington Photo Essay: The Cellophane Bandit
I was watching for a certain location as I rode the bus south down Mass Ave. earlier this week. I had seen a bizarre
thing on the ride up to the mechanic and I was willing to hop off a few stops early and take some photos if it was still there.
Me being me and having a spare ten minutes or so, I decided to take the opportunity at hand to really work the scene
a bit. The last time I ran into a cellophane-wrapped car I wasn't able to take pictures, so I was itching for another chance.
OK, I totally made that last part up. The point is, it's not the sort of thing that either:
- happens near me
- happens at all
Although I did google 'cellophane wrapped car' just to be sure. The only relevant hit on the first page of results was
MIT. It was the first listing. It was the top hit because, of course, they have actually wrapped a car in cellophane. Those guys think of everything!
And I wouldn't want to stage this because it ruins the effect. You have to happen upon this sort of thing and go for
it. Much the same could be said for the act of wrapping a car in cellophane, as is evident here.
One of the things I get excited about when stumbling across this kind of thing is the chance to compose photos that lose
context or become abstract or whatnot. Case in point. It doesn't take too much to figure out what this is, but I bet you've
never seen one arranged in quite this way before.
I decided to nickname the wrapper-of-cars The Cellophane Bandit (TCB). There's a whole backstory
there, but I don't have time to make it up right now. It would be a whole lot easier if the real TCB would just send me feedback.
Then I could do a double-secret hidden interview type thing. That would be cool. But it probably won't happen, so let me now
finally reveal the mark of the bandit:
Before we get to the end of the story, I would be remiss if I didn't show you the whole scene so you can drink in the
beauty of a cellophane-tree-branch-twine-paper-tube-wrapped car. But I scrambled the plate number for privacy
reasons.
And where would such an event take place? Well, turn around and see:
(the end)
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Rock Pigeon Surprise
These turn out not to be pictures of birds, really. I mean, of course they are photographs that have birds in them, but
I uncovered all kinds of interesting details when I got them into Lightroom.
Specifically, they have Rock Pigeons in them. Yes, these are your garden (well, city park, anyway) variety pigeons. There
is a dropping of pigeons that live near my new office in West Newton. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they fly around in circles here too. Except
it's pretty wierd to see when there's nothing around under them for reference. It looks a bit daft. These pigeons are also
not very graceful flyers. Their wings are really high up on the body and they tend to look like they are going to just drop
at any moment.
But anyway.
This loft of pigeons was hanging out on top of the garage across from the office. Now this is at least five stories up,
say, 20 meters and across the access road from where I am standing with the equivalent of a 320mm
lens (about 6.5x magnification). That makes for some tough shooting. And why would you bother with a passel of pigeons anyway?
For this.
This was not an easy photograph to get. It's one of the rare situations where I really should have been using an image
stabilizer. This is exactly the situation where they come in really handy. As it was, I kept the aperture fairly open and
took advantage of the bright conditions to get a reasonably fast shutter speed. I probably needed at least one stop faster,
though - this photo is softer than I'd like and freezing the motion a bit more would help.
But those are technical details. I'm not sure I've figured out all the artistic and metaphorical meanings in this picture
yet. It's kind of strange to take a picture, and then look at it, and not know what it means.
I got this photograph (a whole series, actually, but only maybe four keepers) because I had the camera trained on the
pigeons the whole time hoping they would fly off. When they did, I followed them with the camera. So it's back to hard work
and patience. Yes, I had to stand there with a very heavy camera and lens pointed at the sky for a few minutes.
The most surprising detail in the photograph, if you haven't picked up on it yet, is a very striking perspective effect.
With the birds as a reference, you are clearly looking at an edifice or balustrade on an outside corner. However, if you focus
more on the bright triangle in the lower center of the picture, it also looks like an inside corner. I don't think it flips
the meaning of the photograph, I just think all these things add up to present a very rich set of ways of looking at the birds.
You can look at them from a head-on perspective, or from a slant via the shadows (the shadows of all four flying birds appear
in the picture). They can be flying over the edge of a building or flying over the opening to a structure.
Then you've got the two other pigeons. One is light and one is dark. They are either looking over at whatever the birds
are flying towards, but then again, they could be on a down escalator.
So a lot of things are very strange. I don't think this is the final cut, though. Now that I more fully understand this
perspective (I've shot it once before and seen the impact) I am able to visualize some images that exploit it. So I'm excited
about the possibility of using this experience to visualize and take pictures that use it as an artistic device in a more
deliberate manner.
The engineer in me, however, says that I need to look at this photograph more. The most interesting experiments are often
the ones that don't go as planned. So I think I need to look at this one a bit more to see what else shakes loose.
Then, later, I took this one. I didn't post it to talk about the pigeons, although a little visible motion can have a
huge impact with creatures like birds. It's the two UFOs in the picture. I got this picture the same way I got the previous
one, by waiting with the camera on the spot. I took multiple shots on full-auto. The small white object at the top and the
other roughly circular object below the left-hand pigeon were not in the previous frame. But they are in this and at least
two other frames. The pigeons seemed unaffected. They flew off over my head, actually. Well above it, but over it. I think
the lower object is an insect of some kind and the upper one is perhaps a fluffy seed pod or something. I figure the top one
was on a wing and got shaken off (perhaps the same for the other, who knows).
I'm always interested when things like this show up unexpectedly. If you take a lot of pictures outdoors,
particularly if there is a lot of sky in the background, you are going to get some pictures with bugs in them. Expecially
if you are zooming in a bit. Whatever these two tidbits were, they were in or close enough to the plane of focus to render
well.
If you flip from photo to photo in Lightroom, you can see an animation sequence. This is the first frame they
appear in. Neither moves as if gravity is the dominant force. The lower spot stays in a similar position, i.e., it hovers.
The upper spot has a range of position visible in the photo series, but ultimately doesn't really fall.
Legs.
There's this gas station in Arlington, on Broadway, near but before the Warren Street split. And for some
reason they like to stick a fake torso into the wheel well of vans and trucks when they are in the shop being worked on. So
if you are just driving along Broadway and happen to glance over, you see this seemingly innocent scene.
What on earth is up with that? Let's take a closer look.
I have to admit, the coffee puts it over the top for me. I find it fascinating and wildly amusing that they
do this. It shows a lot of spirit for a corner gas station.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
A Most Unfortunate Photograph
This is satire. Humor. Funny. Don't take it seriously. I just can't resist.
Voter registration: $0
Cost of the Arlington Register: $1
Seeing John Worden in the paper with a parrot on his shoulder: priceless.
I heard the Onion editors talking about picking headlines and they made a very funny and relevant point. Some things
are just funny. Like, a guy walking into a pub is not funny. But a guy walking into a pub with a penguin, that's
funny. I'm just sayin'
OK, since I really can't resist, here's a Top-10 list:
Top Ten Reasons Not To Wear A Parrot When You Are Running For Political Office
10) Makes a real mess of the campaign bus
9) The pirate look doesn't go over well with the kids
8) The parrot's incessant "Vote For Worden. Rrrraaaaak. Vote for Worden." gets old pretty quick
7) Parrots are terrible at keeping secrets
6) Parrots don't poll well amongst voters 18 and older
5) You'll lose the all-important PETA voting block
4) It's hard to find freeze-dried bugs at three in the morning after a long, hard day on the campaign trail
3) People start performing Monty Python. This parrot is deceased. It has ceased to be. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch
it'd be pushing up the daisies right now. See.
2) It's hard to be hawkish with a parrot
1) Some people just won't vote for a green candidate
John, hopefully you are a good sport -- you certainly brightened up my day. Good luck to all three of you.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Snowy Tension
I'm going to share a couple of photographs that normally wouldn't make it onto the site to illustrate an epiphany I had
the other day. The epiphany occurred in part because I spent some time staring at this photograph rather uncomfortably:
The epiphany comes at the end, though. First, the uncomfortable part. I had no idea this photograph was so
full of tension until I got in into Lightroom. I just didn't see it when I was taking the photo. I saw it when I cropped it
to straighten the fence. It was then I realized how terribly wrong this picture is. I don't know that I can actually
explain it. There's some obvious things: the severe contrast, the jaggedness of the fence, the leaning of the snow cap, the
rumpled snow and so forth. Ultimately, if the snow cap is going to fall, it's going to fall on what looks like unbroken snow.
That seems peaceful except it signals the end of the snow cap. I don't know, it just bothers me. So I like it.
Then I realized that in the same session, I had taken a picture of the imprint of a wing on a neighbor's rooftop.
It suddenly seemed interesting to take that photograph and crop it to create the most tension possible. It's not anywhere
near the same impact, but still an interesting experiment.
Now that you've sat through all that, here's the epiphany: I realized that when I am actually taking the photograph,
I am not able to concentrate on the emotive content - I'm too preoccupied with light, exposure and composition. Said a much
nicer way, I'm comfortable seeing in light and composition, but I'm still working on the emotive part.
Monday, February 25, 2008
A Very Snowy Truck
This truck is the subject of my post this evening - and the snow on top of it. But before I get there, isn't the advertising
on the back of this truck really cool? This is a good angle for it - it doesn't work nearly as well if you are to the right
of the truck.
OK, so here's the deal. If you don't live in an area that is snowy and cold from time to time, you might not
have experienced the exploding snow-roof. I can't show you that today, but I can show you its little cousin: the big snowpile
on truck falls off. There's also the front slide-off, but I'll get to that later.
So here's the setup. It's winter. It has snowed recently. A lot of people don't like to clean all
the snow from their cars. The most lazy just clear a hole in the front windshield, turn the heat up as high as it will
go and drive off to experience time-delayed vision enhancement. At the start, vision is, well, pretty unenhanced. Of
course, there's no peripheral vision until you use the power windows to lower and raise the driver and passenger-side windows
- just to clear the snow off. It doesn't work very well. Then there's this: the ambient light inside a car that is covered
in snow is creepy.
But anyway, the more industrious pursue the 'mohawk' technique. This is where you take your snow brush and
walk along each long side of the car removing snow within arms reach. You are left with a snow mohawk.
But I really don't know what the story is with this truck. It looked like one of two things happened:
-
Someone tried to back it under an object to push the snow off and then realized what a terrible idea that
was and stopped
-
Someone climbed up the back and tried to push the snow around with a shovel and then realized what a terrible
idea that was and stopped
At any rate, the truck has a normal snowfall along the top until you get close to the back, then it has this
hump of disorganized snow sticking up. Now there are a couple of ways that this snow can come off the truck. In this case,
with a lump of snow near the back, it's going to come off when the truck bounces.
The wind will help a little too, but I think there is a pretty significant slip-stream on one of these things
coming up over the hood, so I don't really know how much it helps. But look, here's the deal. The snow is going to come off.
It always comes off. There's a very simple reason: your vehicle gets warm as you drive it. The roof heats up. A layer of water
forms between the snow and the rooftop. You hit the brakes and the next thing you know the entire contents of your roof are
lying across the hood and windshield. Boy is that dangerous, especially since it's heavy enough that your wipers might not
clear it. That's a front slide-off, by the way.
Equally concerning is the exploding snow-roof. This occurs in your typical passenger vehicle when you have a
snow covered roof and several conditions occur. The first is that you have driven long enough to get the water wedge between
the snow and the car. The second is that you get enough wind from the car's motion and nature that it starts to catch the
underside of the snow in the front of the vehicle. I kid you not about what happens next. The snow on the roof turns into
a wing. The wind gets under it and since there is nothing but water there, the wind wedges all the way through and lifts the
snow as a single unit up into the air. Once that happens, if you are at highway speed, the snow-unit will shoot upwards, spinning
and then crash down on the road behind the vehicle.
But that didn't happen today. Today was a standard snow-lump drop-off kind of event.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
The February, 2008 Lunar Eclipse
As you may recall, last fall I got skunked on a total lunar eclipse when it got cloudy and I went to sleep.
This week's eclipse was a totally different story. I got it. So turn on the black-light, play some Dark Side of the Moon and check this out.
When I'm preparing for this kind of shooting, I invariably am trying to think about what I am shooting for.
When there's a really good moon about, I usually want to find a landscape, cityscape or other feature that I can also place
in the frame with the moon. I'm thinking about things like church towers, city-hall domes, bridges, etc. But as I studied
the characteristics of the eclipse, I realized it was going to be a real stretch, both figuratively and literally.
Over eastern Massachusetts during the time of the eclipse, the moon is quite high in the sky - more than 45°. And
wouldn't you know, that's also the angle the camera has to be at (with respect to the plane of the ground). But from
there it gets even trickier, because this other object or feature cannot be really close to you. It is much better if it is
relatively distant. The reason for this is that the moon will then appear much larger in relation to whatever this feature
is and both can be in sharp focus. It goes without saying that it's pretty difficult to find a subject, say, a mile away,
that you can still see with the camera at a 45° angle.
So I just decided to take pictures of the moon and stars only. Keeping it real, man, old school. Whatever.
The moon itself during an event like this is pretty spectacular by itself. Here it is at something like ten minutes before
totality.
Now, as we wait for totality, let me tell you a little about the setup here. I had two cameras running. These photos are all from the Canon 10D. I was
using my 70-200mm lens, mostly at 200mm. With the smaller sensor size, that gives me the equivalent of 320mm. The other camera
was my trusty old Canon FX loaded up with Fuju Velvia slide film. I had a 200mm lens with a 2x tele-extender for a total focal
length of 400mm (minus two stops for the 2x extender, though). Both were mounted on tripods with remote shutter triggers.
I did all this from my backyard. While it would have been nice to go somewhere with darker skies, the moon
is actually pretty bright, so I just walked into the middle of my yard and set everything up. I kept tripping the neighbors
security light, but other than that it was great. Close to a bathroom too.
So now we are getting very close to totality. It's a bit hard to see on the web version here, but there is
just a sliver of direct light on one side of the moon now.
As I've obsessed about before, taking photos of the moon is hard enough under normal circumstances. Let me
tell you a bit about what I was up against for these pictures as we reach totality. First of all, the moon moves pretty quickly.
That means that there is a limit to how slow a shutter speed you can use. I tried to keep mine under a half second, but during
totality things got pretty dark. I did end up both bumping up the ISO to 200 and opening the aperture. I was trying to keep
the aperture closed up a bit, say, ƒ4.5, but I ended up taking many photos at different combinations of aperture and shutter
speed. I still haven't figured out which was best. It's further complicated by the need for stillness. At ¼ of a second, the
motion of the mirror flipping is enough to ruin the photo - cause it to be less sharp, I mean.
And the film camera, well, it struggled to keep things in an exposable range. I had few choices there. The
lens was an ƒ4.5 to begin with and I threw a 2x tele-extender on it, essentially losing another two stops. I couldn't
open up this lens, or just change the ISO. However, I have decided to have it push processed, since most of the photos can
stand it (I think). I'll probably take it to Dorian and have them either push it or do a clip test, depending on what they think of the subject matter.
The last thing about the exposure it the massive difference in light output between the sunlit crescent of
the moon and the rest of its' surface. There are very few ways to accurately capture all of those ranges, so you have to either
expose for the sunlight and have the moon go dark, or expose for the moon and have the sunlight wash out. I don't think I
took any pictures of the former, because I was there for the eclipse. Anyway, here's what totality looked like.
The eclipse occurs because the earth slips between the sun and the moon and its' shadow is projected across
the moon's surface. The shadow itself is much larger than the moon. In this eclipse, which was total, the moon passed through
the earth's shadow near one of the edges. So even during totality, there was a range of brightness from the washover of light.
Very nice. I'll bet astrophotographers with good telescopes did great on this eclipse.
And finally, there's this. You could spend your whole time taking pictures with the lens zoomed out as far
as it will go. But when you back off just a bit and pick up a few stars, it makes for a hell of a photograph. This one was
taken several minutes after the end of totality.
|
