Lighting Day 3

Here I was playing with essentially the same set up as yesterday's image, but instead I had the light on red.

Believe it or not, the light was perfectly still here. This is not an example of writing with light. I'm not sure if it actually qualifies as caustics, but it does quality as really neat - at least to me!

Auto white balance, 0 exposure bias, ISO 200, aperture 3.2, 0.8 second exposure length, and no flash.

More lighting

So I have really been slacking off on the blog posts lately. The simple fact is, it's winter, it's hard to get outside, and I am just not all that fond of shooting indoors. Part of that is due to the fact I have lousy lighting, and with such short amounts of daylight at this time of year, it's hard to get any chance to work with natural light. And part of it is just that I'm not feeling inspired in my own house. However, I have recently acquired a pair of small LED lights on foldy tripod legs, a lot like a Joby Gorillapod. It also has the option of both white and red lights (meant, I believe, as emergency roadside lighting). So perhaps that will at least help with the lighting issue!

What prompted the acquisition of the new lights was my attempt, and mostly failure, to capture some images of caustics. (Here is a description, fancy method, and beautiful images of caustics.) This image wasn't a raging success, but it's not bad, either. I am certainly much more pleased with this than I was with my earlier attempts using a regular desk lamp with a bulb that apparently shines yellow. My set up was a fairly simple one. I was using a sundae glass (tallish, flares out at the top) filled with plain tap water. I played with the angle of the light until I liked what I saw. I considered cropping it closely, but I like the bits of light arcing out at the top and bottom right.

Auto white balance, 0 Exposure Bias, ISO 80, aperture 6.3 and 0.8 seconds exposure length. Clearly, no flash.

Have you ever played with caustics?

In Motion, Part 3

The third part of the motion assignment was "Freeze the Action". There's a little more blurriness than I would like around the feet of #49, but all in all, it hits the mark. Not bad for being at maximum zoom. And I like that neither of his feet are touching the ground.

(Eskimos beat the Blue Bombers, 24-10.)

In Motion, Part 2

Holy crap! I did it! The reverse of yesterday's picture is to get the vehicle (or other moving object) to be in focus, while the scene is blurry. It's not perfect, but I think it's quite a good attempt. Then add in the fact I shot this through the window of a moving bus.

Very pleased with this.

This is part of the assignments related to motion. This was #3, Show the action by blurring the background.

In motion

For being a handheld shot, this actually turned out reasonably well. The goal was to show the car's motion, but not let everything else get blurry. Because it was so bright out, I couldn't have the shutter open too long, or the whole picture would have been whited out. The shutter was 1/13 of a second, while other photos that day were in the neighbourhood of 1/200th.

If I had a do-over, I would put the car in the bottom third instead of the top third. I think the building being in focus would show off the car's motion more than the pavement does. It would also be just plain more interesting to look at.

I found the syllabus for a photography course, and while I'm not formally taking the course, I do want to work through some of the assignments. So the next few days will tackle the assignments related to motion. This was actually #2, Show the action by blurring the foreground.