Camera's in the shop

Currently, A1 Camera Repair in downtown Louisville has my camera in order to do a full-on cleaning of the lens, mirror, and sensor. $45 and 3-5 day turnaround. I'm sure that's fairly typical for someone to do it right (after my previous attempts at cleaning it myself, I discovered that was not what I was doing), but it seems a little steep after Peace Camera in Raleigh offered to do it for free.

Still, "free" and "have to drive 10 hours to get there" put together actually is not free in the strictest of senses.

I meant to actually show you an image of the dust and particles all over the corner of a photograph, in order to illustrate just how bad things were getting. However, since I was fighting with the lens and taking some rather particular shots in order to avoid getting any residuals, I managed not to capture any that clearly showed the problem. I confess, I was not thinking about the blog when I was taking the shots, or I would have taken a photo of some blank white wall or something. As it was, I succeeded in avoiding having dust obviously speckling the photographs I took, and failed in acquiring any examples for you.

"This was a triumph."

At any rate, some of my current experiments with the automated features of PhotoshopCS4 involve panoramas. Rather than take a really large photograph, I am able to take multiple shots of a scene and then stitch them together in post. I am learning what to do and what not to do, in order to get the results I like. Things to remember: turn off auto focus, don't use a wide-angle lens, definitely do not zoom in and out. These things together will cause the stitching to mis-match and make it very obvious that there were multiple images.

Hopefully the formatting of this post will make sense. I apologize to two groups of people for this: the ones that have me on their RSS feed readers and can't see the image, and the people on dial-up. Because I think it's a rather large image (or was when I uploaded it. I'm still not entirely sure what Blogger/Google/Picassa do to images when I upload them) and will take a while for you to load it.

Click the image to see the photograph bigger and clearer. The dusky lines crossing it at different points are the result of an artistic shutter speed in light that was getting too dark for it. It makes for an appealing vignette in individual images. When stitched together, you get this.

Addendum:
Speaking of RSS Feeds, keep up with me on Twitter for a slightly more up-to-date update on what I'm doing around town. I will sometimes announce trips to various places, and if you'd like a moment in the spotlight you may wind up as the subject of an impromptu photoshoot. I'll also be announcing next month's sale for my website. Just go to Twitter and look up tlamkinjr .

End of Summer

It's been another few months of radio silence, but a lot has changed in the meantime. While one of our party is now gainfully employed, the other has taken a career change and even moved. Though looking for new work, and limited to a laptop after burning up the work-horse desktop computer, I haven't slowed down my graphical pursuits at all. The paint on this palette hasn't dried yet. Speaking of which...

I haven't forgotten about the camera cleaning experiment. In fact, I've come back to you with some results!

Blowing on the lens yourself is always a bad idea, but I have found that many shops will suggest you try gently hitting the lens surface with a shot from the canned air they sell in many shops like Staples and even Wal-Mart. Stores specifically catering to the tech-savvy demographic will have more variety for you to choose from, and probably higher quality compressed air. Something to keep mindful of, no matter which brand you choose, is the law of thermodynamics. No, I'm not going to quote them, but just realize that this is compressed air that is suddenly being un-compressed as it comes out of the can. The can will get cold as you continue holding down the release, and there is the potential that the air will remain liquid if you spray for too long or at an odd angle. Now you may have gotten rid of the dust, but there is spots of chemical spray on your lens.

Those same shops will offer you a chamois ("shammy" for the uninitiated) cloth to brush off the larger dust particles. Be very careful to keep this cloth clean, because any dust or grit on the cloth could mean scratches on your lens the next time you brush it. Better to use a long-bristled (very SOFT) brush. This is still a potential hazard, as anything could be between the bristles just waiting to alight on the lens.

The kits - I confess, I never did trust the kits enough to try them on my camera or lenses.

This should amuse, though, to make up for it. After trying out these different methods to remove a couple of dust spots, I am now going to go with the final, fool-proof solution. I am going to look for a camera repair shop, tomorrow, that offers professional cleaning to both the mirrors and the lens.

How do you think I know the negative sides of those other methods? Yeah, woops. Learn from my mistakes!

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In other news, the photography bug has really grabbed me and I hope to make a career of it. If I cannot, I will do what I can to assist another photographer while I soak up all the knowledge and experience I can possibly garner. This new city is gorgeous and lends itself to countless possibilities for me to experiment and practice various techniques.

Feel free to see some of the pieces I've finished recently on my new gallery.

Long time no see!

No, the government hasn't bought us out in the middle of this economic crisis. Being a free service and a purely academic blog, we don't have anything that our new administration would want. No bailout money for this Palette of Pixels!

The other half of the staff has been wrapped up in new employment responsibilities, keeping her from making her debut post, so my attempt to entice her into saying something to you by going silent for months has failed miserably.

The weather has turned wonderful, and if the thunderstorms would stop bypassing my ridge, I would love to share some of the beautiful images of clouds that are possible. First, though, I'll need to explore how to properly clean a dSLR camera when pine, oak, and maple pollen finally work their way onto one of the lenses. It may be on the mirror, too, which would be even more annoying.

Unlike a regular mirror, I can't just take Windex to it. I'll need to investigate just how dangerous that Canned Air stuff might be to the delicate lenses. The propellent may be fine for cleaning the insides of electronic equipment, but that chemical may leave a residue on my lenses which would be worse than a spot of dust. I can photoshop that single blot out - but a big smear across the screen would be catastrophic. There are lens cleaning kits, too, but I'm dubious. The advertising for them always comes across as though it were written by the same people currently trying to sell you bucketloads of the new acai berries to make you lose weight like magic. Plus, the kits look really cheap like someone just repackaged a makeup kit. I will have to see, and I will let you know.

Since this is the first post in a while, I'll open the floor to any readers that may browse through the area. Do you guys have any questions, or have you discovered anything new from your respective palettes?

Pictures of Food (pt1)

Photographing food is difficult.

It isn't that the food won't hold still, or that you suddenly contract palsy, or that it doesn't smile when you tell it to - though I suppose those would also cause food to be difficult to photograph, I won't be covering those situations. You're on your own.

Food is difficult to capture on (digital) film mostly because everyone knows what it should look like. Thanks to modern advertising, many times this preconceived ideal isn't even physically possible. The images of cereal with milk splashing perfectly around the flakes are often created using various types of glue. Hamburgers in photographs are front-loaded with plastic and other artificial additives that would make it the most disgusting fast food meal you've ever experienced, and likely toxic. Even fruit, something you would think would be difficult to fake, is splashed with varnish and then spritzed with alcohol in order to make sure it has that perfect sheen and crisp, fresh look we all want.

Until you are prepared to go through the effort of making these sorts of 'larger than life' adjustments, and ruining a lot of food, I'll point out some ways to share with friends and family how good your food really looks.

In this part, being part one, we'll mention the zombie-effect that flash can have on anything. You know the photographs of people, where the flash went off a bit stronger than necessary, and right in their face. This is where you see the expression 'the camera adds five pounds' come true. It's because the flash has caused artificial shadows, and obliterated the shadows we're accustomed to seeing. The sudden shift in color, too, gives skin a pallid and washed out appearance. You've effectively turned your subject into an overweight cadaver. You can also abuse food in this way, using a strong flash that often comes on a digital camera.

Here is the camera I used to demonstrate the effect. You may recall it from previous comparisons with the d60.


The handy-dandy CW330 digicam from Kodak. Please note where the flash is. It's right above the lens.

Originally, I had intended to set a digicam on a small stand, place a blind or block of some sort over the flash, and take a picture of a bowl of apples. By blocking the flash, I can reduce the glare and washout effect caused by all that sudden, direct light. Seeing the dilemma, I decided to take the shot with the full flash and just see what the result would be. After all, digicams are very smart, these days, and I had all the lights on in the kitchen. Maybe the CW330 would register that there was enough available light and wouldn't overcompensate with -

Zombie fruit.

Hm. Thankfully, the dark table and attractive decorations mean that the picture is not a complete wash. It is feasable that this is a satisfactory image for what you're wanting to do. Just a bowl of apples, a digicam, and the kitchen table.

But if you look closely, you may notice some things that you don't like in the image. The shadows cast by the apples are now directly behind them. There is no visible shadow actually inside the bowl, which makes it look flat, and gives the illusion that the apples are floating above it. The reflective glare on the apples is on the forefront, as it is on the jar in the back, making it obvious that you're flashing your fruit. Not to mention, the warm colors of the antique table, the soft cool blue of the placemats, and the hand-painted house holding the napkins are all lost to the artificial fluorescent look of a bright, direct, beam of light.

The logical next step is to block the flash. Turning off the flash altogether isn't an option, because the camera would try to compensate for the lack of bright light and may keep the shutter open longer. That would cause blur, because I was standing without support and would inevitably move slightly during that time. So, I took my index finger and placed it over the flash, above the extended lens, and took another shot from the same position. Remember, all the lights in the kitchen are on, so it shouldn't be -


Don't cover your flash. Your kitchen lights are designed to give you a nice, homey atmosphere and plenty of light to see. They do not give you the clinically bright lights of a hospital, or a photography studio, unless you do your cooking with a live studio audience and a couple oversized television cameras. Your kitchen is dark. Chalk this up to another example of how amazing your eyes are. They adjust quickly and easily to 'comfortably dim' lighting. Your digicam does not. If you are wondering why the image has a red hue, I will give you a hint - cover the bulb of a flashlight with your palm. That is effectively what I did, but with a much brighter flashlight.

So what could be the solution? The flash is too bright, and too direct, but covering it entirely means the photograph is too dark. You can't go out and purchase a professional photographer's softbox flash, or one of those giant umbrella diffusers. However, we need to accomplish the same thing. I needed to soften, and redirect my flash. Preferrably, I wanted the light to come from above so that the shadows were where they should be, and the reflections were more to the top of the apples and the jar.


Much better. The reflection is still a bit in the wrong place, and the shadows in the bowl are weak, but the colors come through more strongly in the set pieces and the whole image seems softer and more like a kitchen should feel. Progress! And not too bad for folding a napkin and holding it above my lens.

The napkin was still too thin to truly keep most of the flash from going through, so I probably should have used an envelope or thin book (a music book from the organ, perhaps) to keep the flash from shining through. However the ridged surface, slight though it is, helped diffuse the light to a more ambient direction. Being white, it was able to reflect a bit in the direction I wanted - up. Now, were we outside, this would have done nothing but shoot my flash uselessly into space. However, I have a white ceiling in my kitchen. Bouncing the flash like this recreates the effect of the umbrella diffuser in a professional studio, and can be used on any surface to give you an indirect off-light. I have seen creative photographers have a friend in a light-colored shirt stand to the side, then they tilted their camera and redirected their flash towards their friend. The flash is bright enough, and the angles were right, that it allowed a nice side-glow to their subject, aided by direct light from overhead.

When photographing food, the last thing you want is something like zombie brownies. Redirecting your flash using common household elements and a bit of forethought in terms of where you're bouncing your protons, will give you some softer, but effective, alternative lighting options.

Long Exposure Photography

Long exposure photography can lend itself to a lot of fun effects. Images of traffic zooming by, leaving neon trails from headlights and brakelights, as well as those neat images of people drawing on the wall with a laser pointer, are all made possible by forcing the camera to keep its shutter open for an extended period.

As with any style, long exposure photography requires you to know what you're doing, and have an image in your mind of what kind of photograph you are looking to create. Photography rarely allows for the free-form style of artwork that sketching or doodling can create. The medium has a tendency to be unforgiving. In the days of film, you can imagine that experimentation was difficult and expensive. Using today's technology, being the digital camera and the computer, not only do you have unlimited 'film', but you can immediately preview your work. If your computer is nearby, you can even see the full image, and then get back to shooting, in very little time. With such quick turnaround, many photographers find they are able to see what they like or dislike about a shoot, and still have time to get another shot or two of the subject before the shot is lost: either the subject has moved, left, or the sun has set.

Images like this are possible with experimenting through long exposure photography. At first glance, it may not seem interesting, and the size constraints of this page may make the details hard to see. Using a 5-second shutter speed, this sunset shot of a forest makes the day seem brighter and the light more ambient than it truly was. Another effect is that, while the tree trunks and the groundcover remain crisp and sharp, many of the leaves visible, especially those in the foreground, are blurred because of motion. The wind was blowing the leaves, moving them slightly, but obviously not affecting the trees themselves. This gives the picture a sense of motion, with a few solid, vertical lines.

By taking advantage of the long exposure, I was able to get this very dramatic shot. All I did was zoom in as the shutter was open. Woosh!

And this is what happens when you are standing on the same plank of wood that the tripod is standing on, and decide to move during a 10second shot.

While the shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. The evening was dim, but not dim enough for a 10-second shot of some clouds passing over. What you can see are the shadowy portions of the trees. Everything else is blown out by overexposure.

This is one of my favorites. It is subtle, but I like the effect. The focus is on the two trees in the distance, through the leaves of the tree in the foreground. I wanted the trees in the back to really stand out, and to make the foreground fade a bit, so I put the exposure to 10 seconds. Not only do I get a soft-focus effect from the foreground being simply out of focus range, but the movement of the smaller limbs and leaves makes the focal point stand out all the more for being so clear. You can almost imagine someone peeking out from behind that – wait, did you see that?

Exposure done Wrong

It's often easy to talk about different styles of photography, or methods of taking a picture, when you're using the one-out-of-a-dozen images that turned out exactly the way you wanted.

To really show what is happening when you snap that shot, I wanted to share a couple images that did not quite 'work'.



This is from the same series of photographs as the waterfall image from last time. Like I said then, a long exposure shot requires low level light in order to keep from washing out the image. This is what happens when the sun comes out from between the clouds just as you take the photograph. The shutter stayed open for nearly a full second, soaking up sunshine and causing this blowout glare. Those places that are pure white are lost - there is nothing you can do in post production to rescue those parts of the image unless you want to start redrawing pixels and trying to create texture where there no longer is any. At that point, you may as well have started drawing the image from scratch. Much better to simply wait for more clouds, or closer to sundown.


The bee may have been holding still, but this butterfly was not. Unfortunately, rather than just take the shot and wind up with an image of a butterfly blurring away from the flower, I wound up trying to move the camera with the butterfly. I wasn't able to keep up, and my shutter speed wasn't fast enough to freeze things, so the whole image smeared into a worthless 'zoom' picture. It's a problem of having not quite decided what image I wanted before setting up the shot, and not being prepared to adjust to a suddenly moody subject. Butterflies are primadonnas. Now you know.


Another problem with choosing your subjects and lighting is that ever demonized 'red-eye' effect. It happens in people because you're literally flashing light off the back of the eyeball just as you snap the shot. Due to the red blood vessels surrounding the inside of the eye, you get that horrific crimson glare. In things that lack red blood, you get this crazy white-eye effect. It happens with frogs, fish, and certain politicians. If I could have trusted my hand to be steady enough, and the frog to hold still, I would have taken a slightly longer exposure to get a natural-light shot. As it was, it was getting dark and I had no convenient rocks on which to steady the camera.

Now, though, I've acquired a new tripod and a remote, by which I can take shots and never disturb the camera. That should allow some very interesting photos!


Of course, equipment does not guarantee that you'll get the shot you're looking for, if you haven't done your homework...

The Long and the Short of It

Preparations continue for the National Novel Writing Month. If you’re curious to watch my progress or learn more about the event, here is the link to my NaNoWriMo page.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/404901

For this novel project (that was a pun), I plan on using photographs I’ll be taking through the month of October as inspiration and illustrations for different sections. I’ll probably do quite a bit of photomanipulation to them, adding increasingly less subtle adjustments to them in order to express the ‘fantasy’ side of the genre I’ve picked for the novel. I still have no outline, no plans, and barely a setting. That means that I will be discovering this story as I write it.

In the meantime, let me show you some neat effects that can be done with a camera before you need to take the photograph to post-production. As a segue, here is the image I’ve chosen to use as the cover to this upcoming novel.

Obviously there have been some touchups, like the text and the blur around it, and there is even a soft blur and glow to the whole image. We’ll cover how to do that at some other time. The original photograph has its own magical appeal, however, and isn’t something that can easily be done with a typical point-and-shoot camera.

Long-exposure photography is something I would like to get into more, in the future, and so I have invested in a digital remote for my d60. This will allow me to release the shutter without touching the camera, further minimizing the amount of shake that may blur or smear the image. For this waterfall, however, I was lucky enough that a steady rock and holding my breath were sufficient to keep the stones and grasses crisp and clear while the water blurred into a silk sheet.

This style of photography is used a lot for scenic waterfalls, or shots of old houses (to let the moving clouds in the background blur into obscurity), but it takes a lot of work. You have to know the spot, you have to know the time of day, and you have to be able to hold still for multiple seconds while the shutter is open. The reason that the time of day is important is because, while your shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. If it is a nice, sunny day, and you leave your shutter open for up to a second, then you will see nothing but glare. The image will be almost entirely white. The best times for images like this are early morning, late evening, or just before/after/during a rain shower. Obviously the rain can be dangerous to your equipment, and potentially uncomfortable, so the gloaming times of the day are perfect for photographers looking to get the long exposure image like this.

On the other hand, a dark day is very poor if you are trying to take a photograph of something in movement. To freeze the image, and reduce the amount of smearing (the opposite of what we wanted with the waterfall), you need to have a fast shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the less movement you will see. The best examples of this are hummingbirds and bumblebees in flight – but frozen. It looks as though they simply stopped moving in midair. For this image, I believe I may have gotten lucky and the bee actually stopped for the millisecond my shutter was open. Perhaps it was posing for me? Or just too busy eating.

A dark day would have given me a dim, greyed out image. With the shutter only open for a split part of a second, there isn’t much time for light to hit the sensor. If the day is bright, and the sun is direct, then the image will be perfectly fine, and the color will be vibrant and the details sharp. A cloud overhead will destroy the effect. A setting sun will force you to consider taking the image to post production and lightening it up, but you can never fully recover an image that is soaked in shadows.

Next week, I’ll show you some examples of how badly things can go with both a long exposure and a very short exposure. It always seems easy until you see that only one out of two dozen photographs were acceptable.

Thank goodness for an 8gb memory card.