east and back

We got back from out jaunt to Maine.  It was a much needed break for both of us.

The Cliff Notes…  Drove out to Chamberlain, Maine (also near New Harbor and Pemaquid).  Spent most time there. Spent a day in Rockland.  Spend half day in Freeport – I didn’t buy a thing.  Got to spend time with Mom, Wayne, Carrie, Rick, Noah, Charlotte, and Baxter (the new nephew).  Stopped off in Cleveland on the way home to see a Gehry building and hit the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.

I’ll be posting pimctures soon on Flickr.  So far, the only good ones are family and the Gehry building.  I’ll definately be posting about the Rock ‘n Roll  HOF.  We talked about it a lot on our way home.  Anyway, work time…

a great saturday

So last saturday was a big day.  We got up and motored up to West Lafayette for a Mid-Century Home Tour before heading back to hit the NIN/JA concert back here in Indy.

But first, there’s the first image.  Don’t mean to rub it into one of my more loyal readers, but it was good.  It’s only something that happens every few years, but a drive-up root beer stand is such a nice piece of Americana…  This is a newer one that has popped up since my time in West Lafayette at Purdue.  And this would have been pretty close to where I lived.  Too bad…

The Mid-Century Architecture tour was put on by two Indiana organizations centering around Historic Preservation – an issue near and dear to our hearts.  That and we’ve been fostering a love for Mid-Century Modern for the past many years.  It was a pretty good tour, but it’s transportation system was not well done, and photography policy should have been part of the literature leading up to it.  I may or may not blog about this specific tour.  I’m leaning towards not because none of the photos really came out as I hoped.

We made a few stops on the way back to Indy, and the NIN/JA show was very great that I’ll dedicate a full blog to soon.  A few quick things:

• Trent is even more awesome than usual for allowing cameras
• Street Sweeper Social Club is really, really good live (the recordings I’ve heard don’t really do them justice)
• The NIN set was great, but I’m increasingly sad that he’s claiming it’s going to be the last tour
• Jane’s Addiction was a little disappointing…  But not completely…

I do have a set of photos on Flickr for the images I took just that day (here’s a link to the set)…  I have something like 7-8 gb of images from that day…  Mostly in RAW format, so it’s not like I have thousands of images…  just hundreds.  At first pass, I think I have at least 20 images I’ll post over time.

Three Variables Creating Depth of Field

This is kind of an informative piece about the photographic principle of Depth of Field that has a lot of implications in how your image turns out.  This is not a definitive guide, and there are probably better ones out there…  But I got to thinking about trying to describe it in this forum after shooting with my wife last weekend.

In my opinion, the biggest thing setting apart Point-and-Shoot cameras and DSLR / SLR cameras is Depth of field.  To be clear, depth of field is referring to the portion of an image that is in focus.  Shallow depth of field images have very narrow areas of focus. Infinite or unlimited depth of field refers to images where everything is in focus.

Here are two images, one showing a narrow depth of field and one showing an infinite Depth of Field.  Click on them for much larger representations without text on them…

The main purpose of creating a Depth of Field in a photograph is to create images with very specific elements in focus.  Or if you’re being all artsy about it, it’s also about what’s out of focus.

Depth of Field is most effected by many things depending on the complexity you want to read into it…  But it’s easiest to concentrate on the three main variables:

1. Aperture
2. Distances
3. Focal Length

Aperture
This is the amount of light being let onto the sensor / film that is designated by the “F Stop” of the lens.  In terms of depth of field, the more light being let onto the sensor, the shallower the depth of field.  Unfortunately it’s a little confusing in that if you want to let more light in with your lens, you need to set your aperture lower…  An aperture setting of f/1.8 lets more light in than f/5.6…  The images above were taken at the same lighting conditions, with the same lens, on the same camera – but with different aperture settings…

The image on the right of the lens with the cap off shows the aperture blades set at around f/1.8 on my 50mm lens.  When cranked up to f/22, you can’t even tell there’s anything there…  If you have a DSLR with a kit lens, there’s a higher probability that you have no aperture ring to adjust these things manually to see how they work.  The picture below of my 20mm lens shows the aperture ring (it has the aperture values along the part of the lens that would be closest to the body).

Distances
This element is simple in that it only concerns with the distances between objects and the camera.  This variable is very much tied to the other variables, but it’s important to recognize.

Here’s a simple example.  Let’s say you’re taking a picture of inline objects.  With a shallow depth of field you’ll see that the items get more blurry as they get further away from the focal plane.

Focal Length
This is the distance between the lens and the sensor / film.  Generally speaking, the longer the focal length – the shallower the depth of field.  Conversely, the smaller the focal length – the more likely that the area of focus will be very large (and infinite in many cases).

Ever notice that as you focus that the lens actually changes its length?  This directly impacts the whole notion of depth of field, and some lenses illustrate this precisely.  Take a look at the picture of my 20mm lens below.  It shows a little window that points to values that change when you dial in your focus.  This value is the distance to which you can expect the object to be in focus.  Unfortunately this is only a feature of higher end lenses.

Wrapping it Up
Now to bring those three together…  Any one of these three elements can produce whichever depth of field you’re going for.  Combining all three in your shot composition is even more powerful.

Other things to keep in mind
Since depth of field is a result of multiple factors, you must also realize that what you see in the viewfinder is not always what you get.  Changing the aperture does not affect what you see through the eyepiece in a DSLR / SLR – but it makes a world of difference what is captured on the sensor / film.

Can you produce depth of field from point-and-shoot cameras? Yes. But the limiting factor is the aperture range and focal length because most point-and-shoot cameras are made to be smaller and more cost effective than DSLR / SLR.  I’ve personally had the best results of getting depth of field out of point-and-shoot cameras when using the macro mode and taking pictures up close (mostly taking advantage of a disparity of distance between what I’m focusing on and the background).

The easiest way to achieve this is to set your camera to aperture priority (this is mostly a DSLR thing, but some point-and-shoot cameras can do it).  If you’re looking for a shallower focal area, then set your priority to the lowest setting your lens / camera will allow (somewhere in the F/1.4 to 5.6 range).  If you want everything to be in focus, then set your aperture as high as it will go (somewhere in the F/18 and up area – but beware of this producing blurry images from slow shutter speeds – tripods are handy).

But I can’t say how nice it is to have everything digital so you can take a picture and see full-sized results in seconds.  You can learn this so much more quickly than before.  The best advice by far is to set aside some time with what you want to do and just play around.

If you want to go further, look into the alternate, but related, topics of bokeh and tilt-shift…

Wrath

Just an image posted on Flickr by 9 0 0 0 that made me laugh…

I’m a fan of mixing vintage graphics with different imagery for fun or as a paradigm shift.

While philosophy is necessary, I love making fun of it because it’s often way to serious as are most who invoke the names of philosophers…

Metrics Ton

Everywhere I turn, there’s metrics.  I’m a metric of sorts, as you are.  Everyone and everything has the possibility of being a metric.  So without beating around the metaphorical bush anymore, metric is a construct for a unit of measure.  The use I’m referring to is the application of metrics to study habit online.

Looking at online metrics wasn’t anything I learned in my fancy school, but it’s just coming up more and more so I began digging around in my tiny online tide pool.

It’s completely fascinating!

First you have to realize the limited scope that I’m talking about.  I currently look at metrics for my site and for my Flickr account.  Since I started looking at it very recently, my blog has ranged from around 5 to 50+ hits in a day.  The typical count is somewhere in the 10-20 hits a day range…  This depends heavily on the blog topic du jour or the happenings elsewhere producing a spike in a search term that leads to my site.  My Flickr stream has spiked upwards of 350 hits a day, but it typically gets something like 50-60 hits a day.  Hits on Flickr can also depend on many things.

Given my limited scope of visitors, the statistics aren’t really able to be generalized widely.  Why?  Because the sample is too small which has made outliers more prevalent…  Proof? The search term leading people to my blog the title of THIS POST because people misspell what they’re looking for.  I find that to be very funny.  On Flickr, my most popular image [shown] has over 4,200 views right now mostly because it was utilized by a search engine as a result when the search term is “tattoo”.

So it’s not meaningful data at all…  But that doesn’t mean that digging into the stuff isn’t really interesting…

Looking at how people view your images on Flickr based on the content, your tags, or submission to groups.  Sometimes I’ll take an image I love, and it’ll do nothing.  Sometimes I’ll post an image I don’t really care much about and it’ll get a ton of views for who knows what reasons.

On the blog, there are three interesting things.

1. The spike in activity if I mention particular brands.  This happened especially when blogged about two things: my distaste for the Gatorade re-brand, and our experience at Carmax.  I know that because I got hits from watchdog groups, and individuals at the corporate level for those companies.
2. The second is the application of AdSense that I’ve previously blogged about.
3. The third is the seemingly random visitors from odd places.  I’ve got a map of unique locations of the visitors.  Here’s a link to a google map [click] with markers in unique locations that have visited my site.

I can go a lot farther into the metrics, but not without spending too much time on inconsequential stuff and/or paying for the right to do so.  It’s really interesting to think about the implications – but it’s equally scary and sad.  You know the whole Minority Report scenario.  Metrics are usually taken way to far in trying to pidgeonhole as many people as possible to increase the income of a corporation.

For better or worse, it seems to be here to stay.

5×5

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time. It’s a collection of shots intentionally blurred that may or may not be interesting individually, but take on a different shape when added together in a larger composition.

I personally love the gradations and color relationships that blurred out or bokeh images make. But that’s just me being a visual geek…

But this was a bit of a labor of love. I had a pool of images that I chose 25 of them to compose this.  I used the full resolutions of each as well in the original file…  So it’s 10,000 x 10,000, or 100 mega-pixels…  and 623 megabytes in its PSD format…  Ouch.

clicking on the image will take you to a larger representation on Flickr.

sunday, pre-midland

So last Sunday, we had some spare time and wanted to get out of the house on the cheap.  After some pondering, we turned to a tried and true method of wasting a few hours…  Rummaging through stuff at Midland – an antique mall in Indianapolis.

We got there just after 11, and they didn’t open until 12, so we drive around the surrounding area with cameras.  Right around there is Arsenal Tech, Cottage Home, and a lot of commercial buildings.  In driving around, we caught a glimpse of the old Coke factory that neither of us had really seen.  So we drove around to the only part of the complex on a public right of way and took a few pictures.  this was the best one I got that gives a little context.  I’d love to get permission to shoot inside the gates sometime…

It’s no longer a bottling facility, but now it’s a depot for Indianapolis Public School Buses.  There’s a desire from IPS to trade land and possible redevelop the site.  It’s got a prime location, and I just hope that if it is redeveloped that the buildings are preserved.  If not, I’ll be sad and quite pissed.

My Top Five Photos I’ve Posted on Flickr

My first memory of photography is somewhere around the 3-4 year old range when my mother was heavily into photography. She took me with her into the darkroom and let me do photograms, and she’d let me slowly get into taking pictures with a wide array of cameras.  I hit the darkroom throughout elementary school, high school, and a little bit in college before turning to digital.

So I’ve taken thousands of images over the years (boy that makes me sound old). No where near all of them have been digitized, and very few are posted… But nevertheless here’s a list of my five favorite images that I have posted on Flickr.  Most of my Flickr images are relegated to the landscape and inanimate object variety, but that’s only because in this day and age I don’t like posting images of people without their 100% permission.

So the photos here may be my favorite for composition reasons, or because of the memories associated with the image.  Regardless here’s the list as it sits now and could very well change with the weather.

5. untitled – 2007. That is the top of a willow tree up at my grandparents place in Angola Indiana. This is an infrared image, but the thing that makes me love this is light clouds in the sky. There’s nothing technically hard about this if you know basic infrared, but it just makes me happy for a reason that I can’t quite say now that I’m trying to.

4. Defender 110 and Neil on Pearl Pass – 1999. I love this image for what it shows and the time it takes be back to. The storm in the distance is a bit looming, but the sparse landscape shows you that there’s something different about where this image was taken. This was actually taken with my first digital camera. A Sony Mavica that only got up to 1024×768… That’s right, less than a single megapixel.

3. Smear over Silver Lake – 2008. This image was something I had to work for.  This was the culmination of a few years of trying to learn High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.  It’s not that I hadn’t produced HDR photos that I’d liked in that time, but this was the first one that came out in the way I really wanted to when I set out to learn HDR.  Then again, it is one of those easy to take scenes, but the processing hoops I went through were pretty complicated.  This image probably stopped what was my increasing frustration in getting what I wanted out of HDR.

2. Millennium Park – 2007. This is here mostly because it’s such a cool subject, and I was pretty happy with this being my first serious attempt at HDR. I’ve reprocessed it since and gotten a few things better, but not the intense blue gradients with no other people around. I actually shouldn’t have had time to take this because I was waiting for a group of people to get into Chicago, and they should have been there hours beforehand. While I was pissed that they were so late (completely within their control), I’m pretty happy I was able to go and get this and a few other images.

1. War Memorial – 2007. I just really dig the backlit thing going on in this. I was actually in the middle of doing a time lapse with my D200, but I had the D100 on hand to take quick one-offs like this.  I’m glad I did. This was the best thing I got all night.

Honorable Mention:

holiday weekend gone by

So it was another thanksgiving gone by where a four day weekend didn’t really feel like there was any weekend in there at all. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time on the day and going up to see other family over the weekend, it’s just tiring and draining – and I don’t think it’s supposed to be.

But it’s all good. I did get to take a few images while up at my grandparent’s place. This is the first one I’ve posted. I’m really digging HDR (high dynamic range) photography. My wife thinks that they look more like paintings than photos. I just think they look cool. And if you have any desire to get into doing it yourself, don’t use the photoshop automation for HDR… Get the standalone Photomatix.

But I hope everyone had a great weekend and holiday fun.

Poladroid

Thanks to Epic-Fu, I was just turned onto a cool piece of freeware titled Poladroid.

You can get it HERE.  It basically takes an image you give it, and process it’s color and tone while cropping and inserting to output something that looks pretty close to a Polaroid image. It’s behavior even does it’s best to mimic what it’s like to use a Polaroid.

Be warned though… You’ll waste time and Mac only right now…

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