How time flies! Lo and behold, the babe in a basket has transmogrified into a boy in a box!
I photographed our Mathew Gabriel in the box at ISO 800 using my Canon G9, and then post-processed for noise reduction.
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I like the way this three second time exposure makes the car lights look abstracted but still recognizable. I took this photo early in the evening from the location across the mouth of the Waldo Tunnel described in Alignment. I used a long lens, my 70-200 VR zoom combined with a 2X telextender at the maximum focal length. The 400mm effective focal length translates to 600mm in 35mm terms, considering the Nikon 1.5:1 sensor equivalence. In Photoshop, I cropped further in on the portion of the photo that interested me, namely the bridge roadway, walkways, and car lights. It probably goes without saying, but let me say it: cropping in on an image in post-processing is the logical equivalent of using a so-called “digital” zoom in-camera. [600mm in 35mm terms, 3 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.] View this image larger. |
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The Marin County marsh behind the shopping mall in Corte Madera was filled with water birds. Phyllis took Julian into the mall for a little shopping, with the promise to pick me up when they were done. I wandered round the fringes of the marsh, photographed these pelicans, and lusted for the new 500mm Nikon VR lens.
This happy frog is a mosaic detail from the wonderful “magic stairway” at 16th Ave and Moraga in San Francisco.
[105mm f/2.8 macro lens, 157.5mm in 35mm terms, 1/15 of a second at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
This is a close-up of the shadow of an old ranch fence on the barn at Sea Ranch.
Shadows interest me because a shadow usually displays more contrast than the object creating the shadow. The great dynamic range between a shadow and the background on which the shadow is projected can be used to create interesting compositional effects.
Related images: Bridge Shadow, Papaver and Shadow, Blind Shadow, Shadows on a Wall.
[105mm, 157.5mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 1/4 of a second at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
I played a game with the waves on Stinson Beach. I positioned my tripod below the tide line and tried to capture the movement of the waves. The waves tried to make me grab camera and tripod and run from the spot.
A great way to start thinking about vacation.
It’s not unusual to see wild turkeys in the Berkeley hills. Actually, these turkeys aren’t wild: they are feral, animals that were domesticated and then reverted to a wild state.
This is a capture of a feather we found from one of these feral turkeys taken through a Zeiss microscope I’ve been experimenting and playing with.
We hadn’t been to the Albany Waterfront Trail for a while, so Julian and I went exploring. This area was a landfill and dump until it was made into a park. Artists came along and did their transformative thing. Now the bushes are growing back and the trash as well as the art is partly hidden. Julian and I thought this sculpture looked like she was catching clouds.
I photographed these stanchions on a pier at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Yesterday I set out to make an infinite progression of the stanchions. Somewhat like the endless doorways in World without End or the stair without end in Endless Stair.
But the lines of perspective didn’t really work. So I flipped the image this way and that, and noodled and doodled the afternoon away.
Phyllis made this castle cake for Julian’s tenth birthday party using a mold she got from King Arthur Flour. The cake is in a grand tradition that includes Faulty Towers Cake, Herbie-the-Love-Bug cake, and (unpictured) dragon cakes, dinosaur cakes, fantasy cakes, Thomas cakes, and much more.
Related stories: Blowing out the Candles, Nicky and the Chocolate Sandwich, Peering at the Golden Gate, Flowr Pie.
Matt and Amy and their kids came down from Placerville to go to the Fire Arts Festival at The Crucible in Oakland. After a nice dinner, Julian and I joined them at the festival.
It was great to see so many people being creative and having fun, well, just for the fun of it. I decided to see how well my long exposure digital night techniques would work on the fire creatures.
Julian and my favorite was the Serpent Mother by the Flowering Lotus Girls, shown above before full night and below with a BART train and (far below) in flames with the Serpent Mom’s egg.
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My Dad says he told a group of his friends that he just bought a $25,000 computer. Understand that these friends were a bunch of computer scientists. Everyone thought my father had bought some really macho heavy digital iron. Completing the punch line, my dear father said, describing his Toyota Prius, “and it even came with a steering wheel and four tires.”
Similarly, a digital camera like a dSLR is a special-purpose computer. It happens to come with a lens (most of time) and a scanner (the sensor).
If digital photography is to live up to its full potential as a brave new medium, and not remain stuck as the bastard child of silver-halide photography, then we need to look at capturing differently. Why not start with a scan using a flatbed rather than a scan from a camera?
I created these Iris images (above and below) using an inexpensive desktop scanner.
Related story: Myths, Metaphors, and Digital Photography.
The kids were all dropped off at school. It was Monday morning. Phyllis and I were sitting in our kitchen with pads of legal paper planning our work schedule for the week. I looked up and saw this hummingbird in the camellia trees just outside our kitchen windows.
The hummingbird seemed to be sticking around, so I ran and got my camera with my 70-200mm Nikon VR lens. I added a telextender between the camera and the lens for a focal length of 400mm (600mm in 35mm equivalent terms).
It was a little preposterous to hand hold this enormous affair at 1/80 of a second, but I did (the version here is cropped in even a bit closer). No doubt, the image stabilization baked into the lens helped me out.
To really see the hummingbird tongue, check out the image larger.
After this exposure, Mr. Humminbird flicked his tongue out at me one last time, then flew away.
You may be interested to know that hummingbirds don’t suck nectar as if their tongue were a straw. They lap flower nectar up repeatedly, by flicking their long tongues in and out. This is sort of dog action, and not at all straw like, and falls under the category of things I never would have known without a live hummingbird and a telephoto lens.
My five-year-old son Nicky likes to ask me, “When is a door not a door?” Before I can answer, he tells me, “When it’s a jar,” and cackles wildly. In the same general spirit, I’d like to ask, when is a photograph not a photograph? My answer, and imagine me cackling wildly, is that a photograph is not just a photograph when it is a digital photograph.
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How can this be? Literally, to photograph means to write with light. Off hand, we should be just as able to “write with light” whether the resulting images are saved to digital media or saved using silver halide chemistry.
But wait!
Each of the three images that illustrates this story depicts some kind of spiral. Each was created as a photo composite. The top image places a photo of a nautilus shell inside a photo of a spiral stair. The middle image combines several views of a nautilus shell with each other. The bottom image creates a dream (or nightmare) of one staircase contorted together with itself at different scales in an impossible way.
The general technique for photo compositing in Photoshop is to place the distinct images on separate layers, then use layer masks and blending modes to combine the layers. My own practice of compositing seems to often involve combining rotated or resized versions of the original photo, creating a kind of regression or recursion effect, as I explain in World without End.
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OK, so most people recognize that a Photoshop photo composition is adding the element of composition, or collage, to straight in-camera photography. In fact, some purists don’t like Photoshopped photos for this reason. It can also be pointed out that it was certainly possible, if labor intensive, to create photo compositions using pre-digital technology (as a case in point, the great compositions of Jerry Uelsmann come to mind).
But an important point that seems forgotten is that every digital photograph has been post-processed. This post-processing may involve aggressive Photoshop work (or even as in the illustrations here the creation of entirely new composites). Or it may be the digital camera, that single-purpose computer with a lens and a scanner attached, automatically processes the scanner input into a file made up of pixels that it can save and display.
My own experience is that I spend far more time post-processing a photo than I do taking the photo in the first place. This is true for me even when the image doesn’t involve photo composition. Of course, if you are a production photographer processing (for example) hundreds of wedding photographs, you don’t have the luxury of this time. But I suspect that most serious photographers spend the couple of hours per image that I do in post-processing. In which case, how much of the resulting image is Photoshop and how much is photograph?
In fact, whether the post-process is under the control of the photographer, or whether the photographer is even aware of the post-processing, it does happen for every digital photo. In this sense, digital photography adds a whole new step to photography (I hate to use the overused “paradigm”, but it probably applies). It is no longer just photography, it is digitally post-processed photography. And the greatest transformation of photography since photography was invented.
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Looking at the patterns of water on the great beach at Point Reyes, I was reminded of a Chinese landscape painting of mountains.
Here’s a broader view of the surf and water patterns on the beach (the photo above is a cropped and rotated portion of the photo below):
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Related story: Mountains of the Mind; Point Reyes category on Photoblog 2.0.
