Reinforcing my general dislike of the population at large...

My camera backpack was just stolen. Right off the luggage trolley as I stood in line to check in. I must've had it out of my sight for just a couple of minutes as I was chatting with Jayita, and we suddenly noticed the conspicuous absence. It had (reading from top to bottom), my E-330 DSLR body, two Zuiko lenses (including the beautiful 50mm f/2.0 macro), a Nikon SB-800 flash, and an Acratech V2 ball-head.

Filed a report with the SFPD desk at the airport, and hopefully next week we might be able to get at the security tapes to see if anything useful pops up. Probably no chance at getting the equipment back, but if there's any hope of catching the blasted worm who did this, that's something.

So while I'm not gushing with warmth towards the human race at large, I take consolation in the fact that it could've been much, much worse. If they'd taken the laptop bag instead, that would've been goodbye to a bunch of visa documents that would be really difficult to replace, and would've effectively cancelled my trip to India.


The other silver lining? Now I have a good reason to upgrade to the E-3 :)

Light Painting

Someone on the Google photography mailing list sent out a link to lightmark.de, a simply phenomenal example of the technique of light painting.

Reverse-engineering some of these pictures is immense fun. For example, how would you accomplish this one without getting footprints in the snow?

First of all, figure out where the light sources are. Clearly there's some light coming in from camera-right and illuminating the foreground of the scene. There's also the ambient light that's giving some tonality to the background trees. And then there's the little painted squiggle. How would we create this? Let's say your exposure is 2 minutes, and we're doing this in near-darkness (with perhaps just starlight or faint moonlight). Open up the shutter. Fire the foreground flashes. These light up the foreground (with no footprints) and create the exposure. Wait until you've got about 15 seconds left on the exposure, and then walk over and create the squiggle. By then the background light has burnt in, and the just-created footprints won't have time to register before the shutter closes.

Gotta try this stuff :)

Like Hot Cakes

They're sold out!

Just as I thought when he mentioned that he had only 1000 copies ready to push out, David Hobby's much anticipated Strobist Lighting Seminar DVD set is all gone. He's busily printing new copies, and backlogged orders get priority so you might as well reserve yours now.

I watched my copy over Memorial Day Weekend, and I'm already on my 3rd review of the location shoots :)

Joe McNally @ Google

The awesome Joe McNally spoke at Google last week. Of course, I missed it since I was in NYC, but we do have the video up on YouTube:

B&H Store, NYC

Those near and (even mildly) dear would have heard me wax eloquent about how Fry's Electronics is the ultimate geek's paradise, and how entering the place is like an instant lobotomy of all restraint.

Well, I now stand corrected.

I've been in NYC all this week. I'd mentioned the fact to David a few weeks ago, and he quite innocuously said "You should stop by the B&H store". I trusted the man. Thought he was a friend and all that sort of rot.

The place is in-effing-sane. Besides the (slightly surreal) fact that you couldn't swing a TTL-cord without hitting someone sporting a yarmulke and payess, clattering overhead was an assortment of rails on which large green crates were being flung about. This apparantly is their distribution system that gets the actual items from the bowels of the store to the pickup counter where you pay for them when you leave. This also means that you don't have to schlepp stuff around in shopping carts; you simply wander around the store and point at things, and the staff keep adding it to a list that's shoved into your hand. Walk out to the checkout counter, and with the magic of the clattering roller-coasters above, all will be waiting for your plastic.

Only the insistent buzzing of my phone (Google Calendar sends these helpful text-messages reminding me of meetings I'm supposed to attend) prompted me to finally leave. That, and the fact that they wouldn't accept my right testi arm as collateral when the plastic ran out.

Another side-effect: Given the way reinforcement learning works, I now slosh to the gills with the milk of human kindness for anyone wearing a yarmulke.

Your Rights Offline

With the number of violations of photographers' rights making the news these days, this little jewel is worth laminating and stowing away in the wallet.

There and Back Again

I was back in Bombay for the holidays which, don't you know, is always a smashing time to visit. Firstly, it's the coolest weather one can expect (clocking in at a marrow-curdling 85F), and secondly, it's the one time of the year when the snappy "Jingle Bells" ditty belted out by the building elevator (to signal that you've neglected to close collapsible grate), is actually appropriate.

Primary purpose of the trip of course was to hang out with the old hive over Christmas-break, but as a side-benefit, I got to celebrate a dear old friend's (Michael's) decision to feed for life out of the same bucket with the lovely Fiona.

While the wedding itself was awesome, the part I enjoyed most was chewing the fat with all the old school friends that I hadn't seen in almost a decade (sometimes more!). What's interesting about a large part of that crowd is that they have practically no internet presence to speak of, and I've had no easy way of getting in touch with them.

Except, apparantly, for Facebook.

While I've heard rumors that Orkut is all the rage in India, everywhere I met up with old cronies, I was presented with the question: "Are you on Facebook?" So there, suddenly, was the "one good reason" I'd been holding out on signing up with Facebook for. And I have to admit, it's pretty scary how many denizens of the old haunts I've been able to find on there.

I still think the site is not all it's cracked up to be, and most of the "applications" are an utter waste of time (send me another stupid "gift" and by Apollo's bronze behind, I'll un-friend you, I swear). But the potential for connection discovery is awesome. Somewhat similar to LinkedIn, but for the non-professional side of your network.

But that brings up the question of social context. I'm part of something like a social network on Flickr/Blogger because the sites are particularly suited towards sharing of ideas within the social context of the photographic community. It'd be hard for Facebook to be the generic social platform for every social context: photography, basket-weaving and physics? That's why I think 2008 will be the year that the industry realizes this and sprouts an eczema of social aggregator companies that claim to unify the experience across properties. This will be an interesting circus to watch...

Playing Hookie

I'm going to be on a solo trip to India next week, and consequently will be separated from Her Radiantness on our anniversary.

So as a substitute, we decided to take last Friday off to loaf about in San Francisco, and paint the town a frivolous shade of 0xff0000. After mangling a spot of dim-sum, and wandering about Chinatown during the afternoon, we caught some nice late light up at Coit Tower, on Telegraph Hill.

Dinner was at this little Senegalese restaurant that we've been dying to try out for the longest time. And since we'd planned to spend the night in SF, it provided the perfect opportunity to grab tickets on Saturday morning for SFJazz's 2008 Spring Season. Here's what's on the agenda:

• March 8: Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, & Jack DeJohnette
• March 14: "Tyner & Taps"; McCoy Tyner Trio with Savion Glover
• March 15: SFJazz Collective
  
• April 11: Wayne Shorter Quartet with Imani Winds
• April 13: Ana Moura
• April 17: Bobby McFerrin, Chick Corea, & Jack DeJohnette
• May 31: Miles from India
• June 8: Fiesta Venezuela
  

We've even got Coeman coming up for Tyner and the Collective, which means I've inadvertently contributed to The Grand Procrastination...

Zion: Evening Light

For those of you in the know, I'm spending 3.5 days in Zion National Park as part of a workshop on landscape photography. Today's assignment was to capture the "golden light" of sunset, while playing with interesting compositions. Here therefore, are the results of scrambling up 600 feet over 40-degree inclines, getting stuck like a pincushion by some fine-thorned cactus, and grazing a much-loved elbow.

While technically correct, this one is actually not a very good picture since the composition is dead boring (Uh-huh. It's a mountain. We get it.) Still, it was pretty for a cliche, and a good example of the quality of the last rays of sunset causing the top of the mountain to glow. I also had a polarizer on which shifted the sky behind to a slightly deeper blue.

I'm happier with this image. It's a stretch for me to be composing landscape pictures with a narrow lens, so I was pushing myself into somewhat uncomfortable territory at this 300mm (35-mm film equiv.) setting. The idea here was to have the setting sun cast a glowing warm rimlight on the tree and the rock ledge, while the background rock face contrasts with a cooler in-shadow look. Personally, I also like the lines of the background rock striations and the foreground ledge that lead your eyes over to the tree.

Other lessons learned:

• This takes time. It's not about cranking out 30 different compositions. It's about looking around and carefully picking a composition (or three). And then it's just a matter of waiting till the light looks right. Sometimes that means coming back another day to get that one shot that looks really evocative.
  
• Timing is everything. The light changes quickly. You need to have your filters in place, and the camera in position on the ball-head so that you're ready to crank off those 3-4 pictures that you'll have time for in the few seconds that the light peaks. If you're fumbling around trying to screw on that polarizer at the last minute, you might as well come back tomorrow.
• Don't pack up as soon as the light's gone. Sometimes your best picture is the one you see over your shoulder when you're putting your gear back in the car.
  

3d Lenses & Focus Correction

This post has been making rounds recently. It's in French, but if you scroll down you'll see a video by a guy from Adobe (speaking English) showing off a prototype compound (as in, insect compound versus human simple) lens which allows one to do some pretty amazing stuff:

• Selectively change the focal plane
• Move the camera viewpoint by a few degrees
  

All from a single image capture. It's probably several years before the big hardware manufacturers start to take notice, and he says that the compute time to render that image was of the order of a week.

If you could throw a couple of thousand machines at it though...

SearchLight

I mucked around with Custom Search Engines today, and created SearchLight, a mini search-engine restricted to retrieving results from websites about off-camera photographic lighting.

Give it a whirl, and let me know if there are sites you'd like me to add.

Warning: More of Yours Truly in the Offing

One of the drawbacks of being an amateur photographer is that there never is enough opportunity to hone the old skillz. Now I freely admit that I'm married to a woman whose unbridled joy at being at the business end of a Zuiko 50mm f/2.0 is second only to the pleasure she takes in her 8-hours-of-the-dreamless each night. But even so, having to stand for hours on end while her photog. spouse makes ever-so-slight adjustments wears somewhat thin.

I've often considered practicing portrait lighting on myself of course, but the drill is awful: Press, run, get in position, <click!>, run, gawk at botched picture to figure out what to adjust, press, run... well, you get the idea.

First, the good news...

A fellow strobist reminded me of this little feature that I remember glossing over in the camera's user manual (yes I did RTFM --- just not that carefully): Video-out. Simply put, God's greatest gift to narcissistic photographers.

Most recent LCD monitors have a composite-video input jack, and my E-330's USB output doubles as a video-out line. They've even provided a handy cable for the purpose. Combine that with the its live-view feature (which Olympus was something of a pioneer at with DSLRs) and you've got heaven. Now I can simply connect up the monitor, point the camera at the finely chiseled, and I make composition adjustments right where I sit while viewing them on the 20-incher. This assumes that I've got the lighting parameters (shutter, aperture, flash-power) nailed down of course, but that's getting easier all the time.

All that's lacking now, is to get one of those little IR remotes that I can use to trigger the camera remotely.

Now the bad news... Given my new found freedom, you can probably expect more pictures of yours truly. I know I'm not as easy on the eyes as the beautiful ball-and-c., but hey, you can always volunteer as a guinea-pig, even if it is just to keep me from myself :)

My Prodigal Ogg Player

Last week I begrudgingly had to send back my shiny new ogg-player for a replacement (you can read more about that story here). To add to the agony, I was out sick yesterday, so when the replacement arrived at the office, I had to sit and pine feverishly (I did have a fever) for it for an extra 24 hours before I could get my grubby hands on the device.

Arriving home with it today however, rather than immediately commence with the music upload, I thought I'd experiment with trying to take one of those fancy product-type shots you see in magazines and such. No time like the present, I convinced myself, before fingerprint-smudges mar the visage. Here's the result:

I knew I wanted a cool blue background, and in lieu of a second flash to slap a blue gel onto, I simply used a blue sheet of card-paper as the base and backdrop. After posing the device appropriately, these are the bits I had to consider regarding how to light it:

• The bottom half of the face needs a specular highlight to emphasize the surface indentations where the buttons are.
• This should transition to no specular highlight in the top half so that the graphics on the display can shine through.
• I need some light as a fill on the right and to emphasize the metallic buttons on the side.
• All this, with just one flash.

Here's the ghetto-setup shot, metered for the flash:


And here it is again, metered for ambient (I opened up the windows to get more light in -- hence the splotchy sunlight).


The guts of it is essentially hooking on that piece of cardboard to the top of the flash as a gobo to produce that light-to-dark transition on the paper which is then reflected in the face of the device. That, and making sure that there's enough shiny stuff at the top and at the right to reflect what little available light makes it through back onto the device for a fill.

Another detail: I was working at a fairly tight aperture, so in order to get the display and button lights to register, I had to use a tripod and keep the shutter open for about a half-second.

Stuff I could've done better?

• Move the specular highlight producing paper further away so the grain of the paper doesn't show up in the reflection. This would've made the fill reflection on the left dimmer though, so it's tough without that second flash.
  

Scoop of the Day

So David Hobby over at Strobist had an assignment last week, where he asked people to elevate an ordinary piece of kitchen equipment to the level of art.

Imagine my surprise, when my humble submission below got called out in his blog post as one of the "standout" pictures!

It feels like back in grad-school, getting that first publication accepted ;)

Second Light

I've always been a fan of those cool wine/martini glass shots, like this one over at Liquid Air Photography. Now that's all fine and dandy, but I just have one flash, and the setup clearly requires two broad sources of light (one on each side of the glass).

Now although I plan to get a second flash sometime in the near future, I'm putting it off for a couple of reasons: Firstly, I need to actually do other stuff with all that money like um, pay rent. And secondly, having just one light source forces me to think a little more creatively than I otherwise would.

Now before I tell you how it all came together, goggle at the result for a second or two:

See what I mean about the two light panels? So the problem for me, is to figure out how to illuminate two panels on either side of the glass with my lonesome FL-50. It's something of a tricky problem since I can't allow any extra light to contaminate the scene, but I still need to get those two panels lit up bright enough.

So here's a top-view schematic of how we could possibly achieve this:

The key realization here is that unlike the Liquid Air setup, we don't need both panels illuminated via reflection, but instead one of the panels can be constructed out of material that transmits light via diffusion. This allows us to use a single flash on one side of the setup, lighting one panel via diffusion, and the other panel via bare reflection. With a little bit of placement trickery, we can make sure that bare light from the flash doesn't contaminate the subject itself.

The nice thing about this setup is that we can control the relative illumination of the panels by adjusting the flash distance, as well as the horizontal placement of the glass. The final ghetto setup cobbled together with all the garbage that was within reach on the table, is shown below:

One point that's not obvious from the top-views of the setup, is that the flash is kept just a smidge below the table level. This prevents the light from contaminating the surface that the glass sits on.

A couple of things that make me really happy about the result: As a proof-of-concept, I'm thrilled that it works, and I've learned a lot just by restricting myself to using just one flash. I could certainly improve on it too --- the DOF could've been increased (the base of the glass is a little out of focus), and now that I know this works, I need to build a little DIY studio to replace that ghetto setup.

Depth of Illumination

It's been a busy month, but more about all of that in another post.

It's refreshing to be exposed to a piece of information that radically changes my way of thinking about something. Especially when that something is as mundane as the distance of a source of light from a subject.

We're familiar with the notion of depth-of-field when it comes to focus, but now think about exactly this concept, but applied to illumination instead. We know that light falls off in intensity as we get further from the source. In fact, elementary physics tells us that the amount of light falling on the subject will be inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the light source. Fine. That's easy-peasy. So if we want to double the intensity (1-stop up), we need to reduce the distance to the light source by a factor of 0.7071 (1/sqrt(2)). Conversely, if we want to halve the intensity (1-stop down), we need to increase the distance by a factor of 1.4142 (sqrt(2)). That's trivial. Now here's where it gets interesting:

We're normally illuminating more than just one plane. Typically the scene consists of a bunch of objects scattered about at varying distances from the light source, so if we expose correctly for the middle-distance objects, the ones closest to (furthest from) the light source will be over(under)exposed. But by how much? If we define +-1-stop of light as an acceptable exposure deviation, then from our calculations above we know that objects within the 0.707x to 1.414x (where x is the distance of the correctly exposed object from the light source) box are "acceptably" exposed.


The cool thing is that this gives us a useful creative knob to tweak. The diagram above shows that by moving the light source further away (and cranking up the light power to compensate), we can increase this box of "acceptable" exposure. Similarly, if we want the zone of acceptable exposure to fall off quickly, we just have to move the flash in really close (and decrease its power). The object in the middle-zone gets exactly the same illumination each time, but the gradient of illumination can be as smooth or as sharp as you like.



A practical application of this is when doing portrait shots against a background. By controlling the depth of illumination, we can easily control the relative illumination of the subject versus the background simply by changing the distance of the light source from the scene.

In a nutshell, the following 2 rules should help:

1. Given a correctly metered subject, you'll know that 30% inside and 40% outside its distance from the light source, all objects are within a 1-stop illumination deviation.
2. Conversely, if you've got a scene of depth x, then to illuminate it all within a 1-stop deviation of the central part, the light source has to be at distance at least x from the near edge of the scene.
   

Making Lemonade

Face it: At some point in life you're going to be asked to take a picture of a singularly boring object, so learning how a bit of creative lighting can make an image pop can be helpful.

Subject: Blue vase, white flowers. Couldn't be duller.

Arranging the main light was easy. I hooked up my FL-36 at camera left, and fired it into a silvered umbrella about 3 feet away from the vase. To add a bit of light on the right, I added a sheet of aluminum foil to the right (you'll see the ghetto setup in a minute).

The first question was the choice of backdrop. Since I was using the flash, I could turn up the power such that it overwhelmed any ambient light, and I'd be left with an effectively black background. Nice, but still boring. The windows with the vertical blinds in the background provided a nice regularity against the chaos of the flowers themselves, so I decided to keep that in the picture.

To get a good balance between main and ambient, I switched the flash off, and adjusted the shutter speed till I got the ambient light to be about 2 stops underexposed. Now that that's done, all I need to do is crank up the flash to light the flowers up to the brightness I want.

Now keep in mind that the ambient light filtering through those blinds would be pretty close to neutral white, so at 2 stops underexposed those blinds look something of a crypt-like sickly grey. Time for a mood adjustment.

I strapped on a CTO gel to the front of the flash. What this does is make the main light that illuminates the flowers orange (or warmer).

Now, I adjust the camera's white balance to compensate, which gets the main (flash) light on the flowers back to white, but also has the side-effect of shifting the ambient background light from the blinds to blue. Voila, we have mood.

Could I have done better? Absolutely. For one, I would've closed the blinds a smidge, so I wouldn't get the distracting view through the glass. And secondly, I would've used a longer piece of foil on the right, so that fill would extend down to the bottom right flowers too. But that's why I'm an amateur.

Non-Industrial Light & Magic

I splurged a little this week.

Since about the beginning of the year, I've been running into a wall when it comes to getting more creative with the photographs I take. The two most common problems being:

1. I need more light. Either that, or I'm stuck with using really wide apertures and leaving only a thin sliver of the image in focus.
2. I need to control available light. Either there's too much spill from the available light source which clutters up the image, or it's simply coming in from the wrong direction.
   

So many hours of online research and several trips to Keeble and Shuchat later, I'm now the proud owner of:

• 1 Olympus FL-36 flash
• 2 PocketWizard Plus IIs transceivers (to remotely trigger said FL-36)
  
• 1 Westcott 43" silver umbrella
• 1 Manfrotto light stand (over 6', but collapses to 19")

Add to this an assortment of DIY snoots and gridspots (created out of the boxes that all of the above loot arrived in) and one trigger-happy amateur photographer, and you've got the makings of a joyous long weekend.

First experiment: Creating soft light for a headshot. The difference between soft and hard light is all in the shadow. Actually, it's all in the transition from light to shadow. And that's all about "apparant light-source size", which is just a fancy name for the size of the light source relative to the size of the object being illuminated. Take a gander at the following diagram, where the white bars on the left represent light sources that are illuminating the circular object on the right:



In each case, imagine you're an ant moving along the surface of the object (see arrow), you first hit a point at which the far edge of the light source starts to go out of view. From now on the amount of light hitting the surface gets progressively less until the near edge also goes out of view leaving the object completely dark. What the top and bottom diagrams show is the difference in the distance between the first and second point when the size of the light source is changed relative to the object. The smoother the transition, the softer the light. Here are a couple of examples which demonstrate the quality of soft light.

The first two are using the flash shot into the umbrella from about 3 feet away, while the third uses the flash bounced off the ceiling to create an even bigger apparent source.

Second experiment: Controlling light spread. This is where the snoot comes in handy. Using it to restrict the spread of the beam of light, you can get it to illuminate exactly what you want without scattering photons willy-nilly and contaminating the scene. I've always wanted to create those funky smoke photographs you see once in a while, and having a nice tight beam of light coming in from the side allowed me to capture these beauties:

Happiness :)

Cheap Shot

One of the reasons I like Flickr over Picasaweb is that it has succeeded in getting the "community" aspect of the site to work. As an amateur with a lot to learn, being able to discuss photography and techniques with others helps enormously.

For example, I've long been a fan of the Strobist group which talks about using relatively inexpensive household garbage to achieve professional quality lighting. Today I decided to try out one of the cheap tricks mentioned for achieving nice omnidirectional soft light for macro shooting, when all you're stuck with is hard sunlight. Jayita had picked up a gorgeous basket of strawberries at the farmers' market this morning, so that was my subject du jour. Before I show you what the setup was, here's the result:

Now here's the setup in all its glory:

2 sheets of paper and 3 pieces of tape. Total cost about 1.7 cents, so I can save up for all those lenses on my list.

More Wildflowers

We have a friend visiting from London, so as part of the normal touristy garbage that we inflict on her, we also took her for a short walk around Shoreline Lake. More wildflowers are coming up, and overcast skies provided the perfect lighting for some more photographs:

If anybody can identify the last two, leave a comment! :)