Flash Forward

I consider myself to be an available light photographer. I typically take landscape (natural or urban) and wildlife (flora or fauna) photos, which implies that I make use of natural light to illuminate my subject. For the most part, it's a very WYSIWYG experience.

As such, I don't often find myself creating light for the scene. I rarely use my on-camera flash (it really sucks any sense of dimension out of a photo), but I have used an old Canon flash for off-camera macro photography. I bought an optical flash trigger so I can activate the remote flash using my on-camera flash. Unfortunately, the setup is awkward enough - and the results not satisfying enough - that I haven't gained any competency using a flash. And I have been OK with that deficiency.

Until now.

Carolyn got me a very nice flash for Christmas so I have become forced to become competent. I have tried playing with it on a few occasions in order to familiarize myself with the gamut of functions that I never realized a flash could have. It's quite frustrating to step out of one's comfort zone. I feel completely at ease with my camera in my hands, but with the addition of this inarguably helpful tool I have become a novice again.

Now, I have accepted (begrudgingly) the fact that I won't understand all the fancy features of the flash overnight; I don't even know what they are all for, let alone how to active them. What is most frustrating for me is not being able to create the lighting effect I desire. I am not able to correctly visualize how the scene will appear when I place the flash in a certain way using a certain setting. I mean, I understand the fundamental concepts of lighting, but I can't seem to consistently apply them.

On top of that, flash photography requires a much different mindset than available-light photography. Consider that when taking a photograph using available light, you take what you can get, and then you move on. If the sun has set then you can't get those cozy, warm colours any more. For me, this is great because I am under the pressure of the clock to get the shot; if I don't get it within that window then there's nothing more I can do.

That concept doesn't apply when you use flash. If you aren't getting the result you want then it's because you're not doing something right, and it's up to you to fix it. And there's no clock. No clock means there is no end. No end to getting the shot that's just a little bit better than the last one. For a perfectionist, this isn't healthy.

I suppose half the problem is that I don't know when I've nailed the shot; when I'm using natural light I have a sense of this, but not as much when using the flash. I expect this will come with time and practice, but knowing this fact doesn't make it easier.

So, practicing is what I have started to do. After a trip to the dollar store I acquired some coloured bristol board for backdrops, a foam board to keep them straight, and some clips to keep them attached. I managed to keep the foam board upright using some tape and a bookend, but I may invest in some better equipment after squishing my subject a few times. Below is a selection of my recent attempts. Note that they are all against a black backdrop; I was unable to illuminate the white backdrop enough, and the blue background just wasn't cutting it.

I have signed up for a day seminar for flash photography with Richard and Ryan in April, so I have high hopes for what I will learn. In the mean time I'll keep flashing.

Another brand new year

This year my resolution is to try and keep my resolution from last year.

NOTE: this post is probably very boring for non-photographers

That being said, I've given up on trying to organize my photos in exactly the structure I originally wanted to. I had originally written a program to gather up my giant pile of photos, weed out the duplicates, and move around the remaining photos into a sensible folder structure (like year\month\day). (It also did other things, like add metadata for copyright, etc.) The original program was meant for a one-time use to clean out the attic, so to speak.

The program I use to view and fix up my photos, Lightroom, also imports into somewhat sensible folder structures, but unfortunately not the structure I liked. So I spent most of last year avoiding importing my photos because of this incongruence. When I was forced to import photos, I would (mis)use my program to do what I wanted, then re-import into Lightroom. This was quite a hassle, and on top of it, I couldn't use this technique for Carolyn because she has a Mac and my program was written for Windows. So I generally didn't touch my photos much.

I've decided to stop being so particular (Carolyn has a different word for it), and just let Lightroom import the way it wants. I've converted all my existing photos into the new structure, and I will do the same for Carolyn.

Furthermore, I finally gave up on building my own back-up server and just bought a NAS, so I can schedule daily backups of our photos (instead of manually backing up to external hard drives). It's all about stream-lining the process so that you don't even know it's there. Hopefully these changes will make the developing part of photography more enjoyable again.

PS For those of you who are interested in my folder structure hangup, this what I wanted:

< year >/< month# >-< month >/< day# >

where month is the name of the month, month# and day# are the ordinal values (like 01 for January).

For example, a given folder would look like:

2007/03-March/17

The months are sorted in the correct order, but you can still see the name for quick access. (Maybe it's just me, but my brain is slightly faster at recognizing 'March' as opposed to '03').

Unfortunately, Lightroom only provides something like the following:

< year >/< month# >/< day# >

or

< year >/< month >/< day# >

The former of which doesn't show the name, and the latter of which isn't nicely sorted. And for some reason, Lightroom does not allow customization of the folder structure, even though they provide customization of file names. I don't think that this would be very difficult to provide, but I expect they just don't have time.

This is what I eventually chose to use in Lightroom:

< year >/< year >-< month# >/< year >-< month# >-< day# >

It's not pretty, but it's organized.

Everyone is super awesome!

I just want to thank everyone who celebrated my birthday with me last weekend, or who sent me birthday wishes. I've gotten to the point in my life where I don't get excited about my birthday anymore, but I truly had a fantastic time partying with everyone. Thank you for coming, and thank you for all the wonderful and unexpected gifts. I got a few bottles of sumptuous wine, several more thirst-quenching beers, some home-made jam, a "manly" satchel, a cd, booze tickets (which will be turned into more wine), some creme liqueur, ice wine (wow, you think I've got a reputation or something!?!), a circular saw, gift cards to Henry's (enough that I have a new lens!), and last, but certainly not least, a new-ish foosball table! Phew! I'm not going to name everyone individually (you know who you are... most of you don't read my blog anyway), but Carolyn gets the grand prize for the foosball table, which was totally unexpected. And bonus points for getting a great deal on it!



Here's a photo of my foosball table taken with my new nearly favourite lens, a 50mm 1.8f prime. This one is auto-focus, so I have half a chance of decent photos now. Although clearly I don't have the hang of yet, as evidenced by the photo above. But I love the shallow depth-of-field... it opens up many creative avenues.

That's all I wanted to say. Life is good right now.

Happy Valentine's Day!

And, for the second year in a row, I'll be alone for the proclaimed 'most romantic' day of the year. Yes, again, Girl Guides has abducted my wife for the weekend. But I didn't mope. I did what any single manly man would do in these circumstances... I went antiquing with my good friend Richard! I had heard about antiquing before, but I only found out today that it's a professional sport (just watch for it in Vancouver 2010!). But let me back up a bit.

Richard and I had been discussing tilt-shift lenses. These are specialty lenses that allow you to - get ready for this - tilt and shift the lens with respect to the camera body, thereby changing the focal plane. These lenses are most commonly used in architecture photography to ensure the focal plane is parallel to the film/sensor, in order to prevent the keystone effect. But, you can also use these lenses for selective focus, and creating some neat effects.

Unfortunately these lenses typically cost over $1000.

Now, there is a special lens called a Lensbaby that is a low-quality tilt-shift lens, but it still runs $100+.

So, Richard and I decided it would be fun to try and build a tilt-shift lens for ourselves. There are many other frugal (cheap) photographers out there, so we found out how to do it. The first and most difficult step would be to find a lens for a medium-format camera. To buy a new medium format lens could cost $500+. And thus, the antiquing.

I'm not sure how long we spent in that 30,000 sq. foot warehouse, but I've never seen so many small tins, gaudy light fixtures, and nearly matching tea sets. Having said that, there were lots of cool things too, like old wooden radios. There was a small selection of antique cameras too, but no medium format ones. However, I did find a new (well, actually quite old) tripod, for $14.50! It's nice and sturdy (meaning heavy).

So, dejected but not defeated, we ate lunch (fancy mac & cheese!), grabbed our cameras, and took a stroll along the Grand River in the Galty part of Cambridge.


Majestic.


Richard admiring the Central Presbyterian Church.


Now that's a real photographer!


There are a lot of churches in Galt.


A lovely couple getting their photo taken.


It was cold.


Happy Valentine's Day! Amazingly enough, there was a heart-shaped depression in the rock beside the Grand River, and some water had frozen in it.


Richard tells me that this character is from the Space Invaders arcade game. I've seen similar icons all over the globe. (I recall seeing the slime character from Dragon Warrior in Spain). Is this a global movement, or random acts of nostalgic graffiti?


Apparently Richard's wife was good enough to stay in town for this special day, so I had to drop him off in the afternoon. Unable to find any used medium format lenses at Henry's in Waterloo, I went home and decided to play with my infrared filter instead. My awesome wife bought some tulips before she left, so I took the liberty of taking some photos (using my new tripod). It's an interesting effect, and I'm curious to see what kind of results I'll get in the spring when there is foliage everywhere.

Brand new year

So it is a brand new year (2009 for those not paying attention), and this time of year is often used as an opportunity for people to reinvent themselves... or at least wholeheartedly make plans to nix those bad habits and get back on the track to being a happy and successful human being. Now of course there are naysayers that claim that people who really want to change could do it anytime of the year, if they really put their mind to it. And to be honest, they're probably right.

But I say nuts to them.

I'm the type of guy that only likes cooking when the counter-top is clean. The transition from one year to the next, as arbitrary as our calendar system may be in the universal scheme of things, lifts the cloud of problems, tasks, and details that was last year and shines a light on all the possibilities ahead. Tabula rasa.

Having said all that, I'm also a pragmatist, so I don't plan on achieving unreasonable goals, or even trying to set goals with rigid timelines. Life is too unpredictable to adhere to tight schedules. But, I do believe in the importance of goals, and that keeping track of progress towards a goal can help you stay on track.

To that end, I'm going to try to use this blog to help achieve some of my goals this year. Hopefully it will keep me honest. [And if not, it's my blog so I can lie and nobody will be the wiser ;)]

If it's not obvious by now, organization of my photos has been a gargantuan monkey (would that be a gorilla?) on my back. I would love to have all my photos tagged and archived by the end of this year. But there are over 18,000 photos right now (with more coming), so that's not exactly realistic. I will be happy if I can come up with a system that lets me chip away at the pile faster than it grows. My plan is to tackle one month at a time, starting with my 2005 photos (when I got my D70!). After I've tagged and archived (meaning, backed up on DVD, and maybe stored at Ryan's house?) that month, I'll upload the best to flickr. I'm hoping that will give me incentive to continue. I have also added a progress bar to my sidebar; I suspect it may become discouraging at some point, but right now it's pretty.

Do I have other goals for this year? Sure, but I'll keep them to myself for now until I'm successful enough to admit them.

Good luck to everyone with their own goals, private or otherwise.

George the Flasher

Perhaps I should qualify the title. We're talking about flash photography here, not what you're probably thinking. Sicko.

I've been in a number of situations lately that required the use of flash (and specifically, off-camera flash) to get the desired photograph. I've long since learned that the pop-up flash on your camera does little more than blanket a subject in harsh light. Sure it lets you capture the subject in low-light levels, but usually at the expense of any vibrancy the scene once had. But flash itself is not evil as I once thought. Properly applied it can open up a whole realm of possibilities.

But simply knowing about photographic techniques and actually applying them are two totally different beasts. It takes a lot of repetition to understand the variables, and even more to be able to control them effectively. Unfortunately, for most people this repetition can turn a tolerable experience into a painful one. Obviously I could practice on inanimate objects (or less grumpy people), but I feel that portraiture is a whole other world than still-life photography. Sure they are very similar, but the human element adds a dimension of emotion and unpredictability. And it's the type of photography that I'm least comfortable with, so I want to improve.

So what else is a man to do when his wife has gone off for the evening? Why, take pictures of himself, of course! I think being in control of the flash makes it seem less harsh. More importantly, having the time to make mistakes is critical to the learning process. So I spent an hour or two fiddling with tripods, flash, and camera, making serious faces (or seriously goofy faces?), and hoping that this time I was actually in the picture. I have to admit that being on the other side of the lens is a very odd experience... but I wasn't about to let that stop me!

The results? Mostly crappy photos that I won't be sharing. But I did learn a bit more about diffusing light, and also a bit more about how to control my own flash (it's an old Vivitar flash that's actually made for a Canon *hiss*). I am fairly pleased with one of the photos though. I've given it a bit of a scrub in Lightroom and Photoshop Elements. Let me know what you think.

Good article

http://www.43folders.com/2008/12/01/courageous-sucking