Anatomy of a Shot - Fresh Eggs and Bourbon

The concept. I shot this for Utata's Iron Photographer 107. These little challenges often put together unlikely elements - and I have fun trying to make a picture using them. For IP107, the elements were lens flare, eggs and alcohol. Right. I have a long term project on unorthodox still life images, so I figured, something with these elements will fit right in.
The process. I didn't previsualize this - just started with the lighting. I wanted to get a nice wrap around light for both the egg and the alcohol (found a neat shot glass lying around). So I placed a studio strobe behind a white sheet for some backlighting. A piece of black cardboard in front of that was my background. The subjects were to be placed on a glass top coffee table. I fired a few test shots with the egg, and then with the shot of bourbon. I figured the backlight plus some fill light from the front will be all I need.
 So far so good. The challenge now was to come up with some sort of lens flare that did not ruin the shot, and furthermore, added to it. Direct lens flare was out of the question - since the premise of this shot was a high contrast scene against a black background. So I looked through a set of filters I got wholesale at a garage sale. Among other useless stuff (red and blue filters, 'soft' filters) I also got this cheesy star-burst filter. I figured this can give me just the right amount of flare off the highlights. After firing a few shots - the problem became apparent - I just didn't have enough highlights to get my flare. I needed to get another source of light. The best solution would be a concentrated source of light (so I don't interfere with the existing lighting). Out came an SB-28 with a home made snout / grid combo. I sat it on the floor under the glass table, pointed up straight under the shot glass. Now there's flare, and as a nice bonus, the bottom of the egg sitting on top of the glass got a nice, amber color.
After getting the composition done (tried with one egg, two and then three), I placed my fill light behind me and fired another couple of shots. One additional problem arose: since the eggs were fresh off the fridge, they started to form condensation. While I liked the fresh 'look', I did not like the unsightly reflection from my fill light. To fix this, I moved the fill off the camera left, and put a reflector camera right. Making my best contortionist impression - holding the reflector in place with my left hand on the right hand side and bending to the ensemble's level, holding the camera with my right hand, I took the shot.

Lightwelder.com launched

Over the last few weeks, I've been working at getting my photography site together. I'm still adding representative samples of my work as well as trying to keep up with new assignments and events, so it's still work in progress. However, I'm pretty satisfied with how it looks for now.

Check it out:

http://www.lightwelder.com

Do not record, create

One can contrast conceptual work with recording type of photography - where as long as one records the right moment in a technically proficient way, the common idea of beauty takes care of the rest (well, not quite). Why? Because the underlying subject is beautiful (or aesthetically different), and the photographer's job is to capture that beauty optimally.
In my opinion - conceptual work requires a paradigm shift. You don't record inherent beauty, because there is none. There is no beauty at all. The aesthetic qualities of conceptual images come from them conveying the idea effectively. And you do so by looking at what would shock your audience into thinking rather than emoting (which is the natural response to a two dimensional image). Conceptual images have to be either weird or ugly or visually banal (by conventional, recording photography standards) to make the viewer think. How much 'steering' towards a certain idea the photographer should do is a matter of creative decision. Countless abstract images (not necessarily photographs) will give you no steering. Others will be very heavy handed and border on commercial obviousness. Yet others will be devilishly normal at first, with a delayed penchant for the absurd. Yet others will fake technical or aesthetical ineptitude to get you to look beyond the descriptive or ‘transparent’ qualities of the image.
Is it worth it? I don't know. The creative process is just as rewarding as with 'recording' types of photography, if not more. The recognition part - not so much, because you don't borrow from the beauty of what you're photographing.

Anatomy of a Shot: Soap Bubbles, Pebble and a Square

This is the anatomy of the process of creating an image for Utata's Iron Photographer 91 project. The elements to be included were:
1 - soap
2 - stone(s)
3 - square format
I tried to challenge myself to create something that would be outside the realm of obvious compositions - e.g. using pebbles and round bars of soap in some visually appealing composition with soft light. I first decided to get away with the soap bar entirely - and instead to use soap bubbles. No particular reason other than the fact that I had one of those soap bubble producing gizmos around my house. Still fits the theme and it allows me to do something weightless. From weightless, the concept evolved to suspended - I'm going to suspend a pebble (also laying around my house from a previous trip to the beach)- kind of like a stony fish in an aetherial square of bubbles.
Having the concept nailed, I started thinking about the execution. First - I needed the appropriate background. Black was the obvious choice - I wanted the pebble to stand out. So I set up my black muslin background, lit the suspended pebble from both sides with SB-28s and produced a few test shots. The strobes were snooted to prevent spill on the background and lens flare. The pebble had a nice translucence to it - so I wanted the expose it to make that visible. With my D700 on a tripod and outfitted with a cable release, I started blowing the bubbles. The first few shots revealed a disturbing fact: while the pebble was properly exposed, the bubbles were just not showing very well against the black background. They were just catching the reflections from the two strobes - and they looked like eyes of creatures lurking in the dark.
To solve the bubbles problem - I needed some white to be reflected off their edges for definition. So I needed some white just outside the frame - easily accomplished by changing the background muslin from black to white. I still needed the background for the shot to be black, so I placed a sliver of black fabric on top of the white, just for the portion visible through the viewfinder. With the new background arrangement in place, I also needed to change the lighting scheme. To get even edge illumination - I decided to place one of the strobes behind the background - to create that wraparound effect often used to illuminate wine glasses and the like.
After some fine-tuning, the remaining work was to fire enough frames to get a composition I was happy with. I could not control the flight path of the bubbles - although after enough trials I became quite proficient at shooting most of them in focus and close to the pebble.
The post production involved just minor retouching (sharpening, increasing contrast) and of course, the square crop.

Composition and focal length

This post deals with the use of focal length choice as a compositional tool. I will talk about shooting wide angle (short focal length), normal and shooting in the telephoto range.

The obvious effect of a wide angle lens (short focal length) is that you 'get everything in'. In other words, because the angle of view is wide, more of the environment is going to show up in your image. This helps when framing the element of interest with the surroundings is important. Care should be taken, especially at extreme wide angles, to maintain a satisfactory aspect ratio between your subject of interest and the environment. Often enough, the subject will appear too small as related to the rest of the elements depicted. To correct, get closer to that element of interest. Your perspective is not going to change, but the relative size will be corrected. Another compositional advantage of shooting wide is perspective exaggeration. You want this in a two dimensional depiction of a 3D world (unless of course, depicting is not your goal. I use a telephoto lens for most of my abstract work). At wide angles, near elements will look larger in relation to far objects as compared to 'normal'. This creates the illusion of depth and makes it easier to ompose a complex image, with multiple planes of interest. Another benefit of shooting wide, albeit a subjective one, is that the depth of field is larger (everything else being constant - eg the lens' light gathering abilities and chosen aperture). This is great if your aesthetic allegiance is ligned with the likes of the f64 group. I personally think that out of focus areas are more of an accident or necessary evil rather than something that should be used in composition.

Let's now turn to compositional uses for a 'normal' focal length - that is, 50mm for a 35mm camera or the digital equivalent. At this focal length, perspective is about what the human eye perceives. When would you use a normal angle of view for composition? When you want your viewer to concentrate on something else than perspective or lack thereof. I don't see any distinct advantages, from a composition point of view, for choosing this focal length. The viewer will be easily swayed by other compositional elements There are a lot of technical advantages fo shooting 'normal' - such as the availability of low cost, sharp and fast lenses with no or little distortion.

Moving on to telephoto lenses - the main thing to remember about those is that they have the opposite effect on perspective - they compress it. This comes in handy when your intention is to abstract or subtract. Abstracting means to downplay the representational cues in a scene. Long focal lengths help abstraction by flatening composition and by putting everything in the same plane. Subtracting means excluding spurious elements from the scene. Because the angle of view is so narrow at telephoto focal lengths, subtraction becomes somewhat easier - the clutter goes away. Going back to perspective compression - this is a great compositional tool when the ntention is to 'crowd' the element of interest. Perspective compression is perfect for conceptual portraits where the mood conveyed is negative (pensive, melancholic, entrapped, etc.). It also works great for shooting large but far away objects - such as the moon or sun against smaller (but a lot closer) terrestrial landmarks. Last and for me, least, long focal lengths can be used to isolate the subject of interest through use of selective focus, eg by making your in focus subject stand out against the blurred background. This takes advantage of the shallow depth of field typical for telephoto even when the lens is stopped down.

Part two of this article will present a few examples on how to apply
the information above in practice.

Why go full frame?

As of Summer 2009, if you step up to digital single reflex lens (DSLR) photography, you have two basic choices: cameras with full frame sensors and cameras with 'cropped' sensors. Full frame sensors are roughly the same size as the 35mm film. The cropped sensors (they come in two sizes APS-C and four thirds) are smaller - by a crop 'factor'. The most popular DSLR cameras (at least by volume sold) are the those equipped with an APS-C sensor. The crop factor varies, but it is generally 1.5 to 1.6. What this means is that an APS-C sensor is 1.5 (or 1.6) times smaller than a full size sensor. Both types can use legacy SLR lenses. So which way should one go? Here are the relative advantages:

APS-C (or in Nikon parlance, DX):

- Increased range at the telephoto end. For example, for a 200mm lens on an APS-C sensor, the angle of view and magnification would be similar to a 300mm lens on a full frame sensor. Not bad if you're a wildlife photographer.

- A new breed of DX only lenses. Since these lenses have to cover a smaller sensor, they can be made smaller and lighter (everything else being equal - and by that I mean mostly their light gathering abilities). Smaller and lighter means you need to haul less equipment and attract less attention from your subjects.

- Cheaper lenses. Smaller and lighter usually means cheaper as well. For example the 12-24mm DX Nikon lens is about $700 and 1 pound in weight, whereas the Nikon 14-24mm full frame lens will set you back $1900 and it weighs a whopping 2.2 pounds.

- Increased depth of field at a given focal length. Lens design at wider focal lenghts usually has the advantage of a deeper depth of field (everything else - particularly aperture, being equal). In other words, if you shoot the same scene with a 35mm prime lens on a DX sensor you usually get more in focus at the same aperture than if you shoot that scene with a 50mm prime on a FX (full frame) sensor. This should appeal to some, but not all situations.

- Everything else being equal, less vignetting (a.k.a. light falloff). Because cropped sensors only use the center portion of a lens, they will likely be less affected by light falloff in the corners.

- Slightly better image quality from full frame lenses. This is a gross generalization, but typically, lenses are designed to be at their sharpest and distortion free in the middle.

- Cheaper cameras. Big sensors are expensive to make - as of now, the premium between the most expensive APS-C camera and the cheapest full frame camera is anywhere between $700 to $1000. The chepest FX cameras available today start around $2000 new.

- Smaller, lighter cameras. Bigger sensors need bigger cameras - and that adds weight to the stuff you have to carry. Add the extra weight from bigger lenses and you go from carrying 2-3 pounds (camera and 2 -3 lenses) to 4-8 if you opt for FX.

Full frame (or in Nikon parlance, FX):

- Increased depth of field as compared to images taken with corresponding lenses on DX. This is very desirable for portraiture, as well as for situations where out of focus backgrounds (bokeh) is used in composition.

- Extreme wide angle lenses stay extreme. 12mm on a FX sensor looks ultra wide angle, while on DX it would look only moderately so (12mm x 1.5 = 18mm). Wacky compositions stay wacky and interior spaces look cavernous.

- Bigger viewfinders. When migrating from point and shoot digital cameras to DSLRs, the first thing one notices is how radically different photographic composition becomes. You go from framing your shot on a nice, bright 2.5 inch screen to looking through a dim, small viewfinder. Nasty surprises - picture ruining details that you just didn't see through the viewfinder, are much easier to avoid using a bigger viewfinder.

- Better image quality (IQ). Everything else being equal - namely megapixels and sensor design, a bigger sensor means proportionally more light hitting it. More light means less noise at the same settings. This really becomes apparent at higher ISOs. State of the art full frame sensors allow the photographer to increase the ISO by 1 or 2 stops without sacrificing the image quality (as compared to cropped sensor sensors). Lower noise is just the beginning - more light also positively affects color depth (you get more vibrant colors that accurately reflect what one sees) and dynamic range (hard to explain in a few words - but basically how large the spectrum of light is between the lightest tones and the darkest tones a sensor can capture). This benefit really only kicks in for low light photography and for high dynamic range scenes (anything with strong light). However, this is more important than you think; if one would shoot in perfect light all the time, one would not need a DSLR period. Any cheap point and shoot can produce comparable results with the most expensive full frame DSLR in perfect light. The catch is - perfect light is hard to get.

So which way should you go? It depends on what and how you shoot. If you shoot a lot of distant subjects, have a tight budget and want to travel light, go for a cropped sensor lens. If you can swallow the price premium, don't mind the extra weight of the equipment, and you often find yourself wanting to explore scenes with less than perfect light, go full frame. For me, going full frame made sense, mostly for the IQ and ease of composition aspects. Looking through a horribly small viewfinder was just too frustrating. I also shoot a lot of low light scenes, so getting acceptable results there was important.