Photoblog 2.0

Iris and Motion, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I like to work with my photography setups, equipment, and Photoshop in a what-if state of mind.

When I’m in a what-if state of mind, I don’t care what the documentation says, or what some Photoshop guru says to do. I want to see what happens if…I try this, or that, or something totally new. Wild and crazy is, of course, my hope.

Some of my best images have come when I’m in a what-if state of mind.

A fringe benefit: experimenting with “what if” develops the muscles I need to problem-solve when a client asks me to make specific images, often based on something I’ve already created, but a bit different. It’s important if you hope to use “what if” experimentation for this purpose to keep good records of what you’ve done so you can reproduce it.

This image started with a “what if”: What if I put a bunch of Iris flowers in a totally dark room, open the shutter long enough to get full depth of field at ISO 100, and “paint” the buds of the flowers in with a flash light?

I ran into all kinds of problems with this scheme. It was hard to accurately track the duration of the light painting, so therefore hard to be consistent with exposures. I ended up shooting 15 minute exposures, painting for about a minute, in some of them climbing up Nicky’s bunk bed and clamping the camera on to get a nice bird’s eye view down on the flowers.

The kicker is that I could tell even from the LCD that these photos just didn’t work. So I opened the room-darkening blinds. With the camera still on the tripod, and the flowers sitting on a black background, I zoomed and panned for some mid-length exposures to see what effects I could get.

This technique was partly inspired by some lovely panned images of trees by Robert Eckhardt, who attended my recent night photography workshop. I’ve also been looking at Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Shutter Speed, which is a great idea book for images along these lines (but please don’t rely on the Peterson book for accurate general information about digital photography concepts such as noise and ISO).

A technical note: If you look at the exposure information for this photo, you’ll see I used a circular polarizer. The point of the polarizer was primarily to make my exposure longer (so I had more time to play with the pan and zoom), and also to help saturate the colors.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens at focal lengths ranging from 200mm to 70mm (300mm to 105mm in 35mm terms), circular polarizer, 10 seconds at f/32 (comprised of 2 seconds at 200mm, 5 seconds zooming from 200mm to 70mm, and 3 seconds panning up and down on tripod at 70mm) and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Pink Papaver, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On a bright, but overcast, spring morning I saw this pink Papaver rhoeas in the morning dew. I photographed it head-on at f/16 for depth of field on the center, but a little less sharpness in the petals. Then I processed the photo to enhance the diaphanous feeling of the petals.

Sometimes simple works.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 1/6 of a second at f/16 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Iris on Black, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is an Iris ensata ‘Azuma-kagami’, from the same planting as my photo of last spring. I used the same technique as Falling in Love and Gaillardia x grandiflora, combining three exposures and painting them together using layers and masks.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures with shutter speeds from 1/4 of a second to 2 seconds, all exposures at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Gaillardia x grandiflora, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This flower is a Gaillardia x grandiflora ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Gaillardias are native to North America, and are sometimes called Blanket Flowers because of their coloration.

I’m using an eight foot long raised bed in my protected side yard to grow flowers for photography, and this Gaillardia is the first subject. As models go, I think my flowers will prove to be very pretty and cooperative. Another benefit: they don’t seek modeling fees.

I photographed this flower on a black velvet background using diffuse natural sunlight. A previous experiment had convinced me that a single point of focus wouldn’t create an image that was sharp all over the flower. So I made twelve varying exposures at three focus points, and hand layered them together for an HDR and HFR image.

Some related stores: Falling in Love, Red Flowering Dogwood Blossom, Gaillardia, Digital Photograms.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 12 captures at shutter speeds from 1/2 of a second to 8 seconds, all at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Falling in Love on White, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is the Papaver rhoeas ‘Falling in Love’ that I photographed on a black background. The version here gives me the advantage of a “twofer”: I created the white-background version of the photo in Photoshop by inverting the Luminosity channel (in LAB color mode), then copying the orginal flower back on top of itself, and masking out the black. A few tweaks followed, but that is the general idea, and it is pretty simple to do. Which version do you like better?

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures with at 1/2 of a second, one second, and 2 1/2 seconds, all exposures at f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Falling in Love, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a photo of a Papaver rhoeas ‘Falling in Love,’ a double variety of Papaver rhoeas I got from Annie’s Annuals.

I cut a flower off the profusion of these poppies in our garden, and photographed this flower indoors. I put the flower in a glass flute to keep it upright, and placed the flute on a black velvet background. The background rested on a board and rod placed between two chairs. I positioned the flower so sunlight was striking it from behind and to one side. Then I used a large piece of soft gauze to soften the sunlight.

In Photoshop, I combined three exposures at times from 1/2 a second to 2.5 seconds to capture the full dynmaic range of the light falling on the delicate pink petals.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures one at 1/2 of a second, one second, and 2 1/2 seconds, all exposures at f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related story: Here are some shots of the Dawn Chorus variety of Papaver rhoeas.

Red Flowering Dogwood, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Phyllis and I celebrated our wedding anniversary last week. Sixteen years, three kids and one more on the way, it all seems like forever and no time at all. I’m so lucky to have a real life partner.

My parents sent flowers as did Phyllis’s mom. This red flowering dogwood blossom is from a branch in one of these bouquets.

I photographed the blossom in the morning like of our breakfast nook using a macro lens and extension tube setup. The water drops are judiciously applied, and come from my professional high output sprayer.

This final version combines different exposures and three different stacked focus points, for an image that is (depending upon the definition of the term) HDR as well as High Focal Range (HFR).

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, three exposures with different focal points, exposure times ranging between 1/6 of a second and 4/5 of a second, all exposures at f/40, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Daffodil, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

If you’ve ever looked closely at a daffodil like this beautiful specimen, you’ll know that within the outer yellow petals is an orange “trumpet”. The trumpet itself contains the reproductive parts of the flower: ovaries, pistil, and the stigma, style, and anthers shown in this photo. You’ll know, from having observed the daffodil, that these reproductive parts are really, really tiny.

So tiny that when I photographed this flower indoors (to control wind) backlit with the bright light of the morning sun in our breakfast nook, I found I could not get both the style (which sticks out a bit) and the anthers (the things covered with pollen) in focus.

The solution is to extend the field of focus by taking multiple photographs, each with a different point of focus. Provided you use the same aperture in each exposure, it can be possible to combine the two images as layers in Photoshop, thus extending the field of focus. In this case, I took two captures, one focused on the style and one focused on the anthers.

This process is sometimes called focus “stacking”. But I figure, why not give it a high-fallutin descriptive term and acronym? Extending the dynamic, or exposure, range of an photo using multiple captures creates a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. So why shouldn’t extending a photo’s focal range by stacking several captures create a High Focal Range (HFR) image? You heard it here first…

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, +4 diopter close up filter, two exposures with different focal points, both at 1.6 seconds and f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Clivia, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Clivia, a lily-like flower originally from southern Africa, grow on the shaded side of our house with very little intervention from me. These are slow growers, but spectacular, and unstoppable once established. I love them, but they’re tough to photograph in the deep shade, with their tendency to move in the slightest wind.

So the obvious move was to cut a nice stem of clivia, put it in a vase, and photograph indoors.

The clivia is shown here stopped down to f/32 for a high depth-of-field image. I put the stem in the vase on a black background using sun light for illumination. Like the anemone I photographed the other day, the final image represents several initial exposures at different shutter speeds (see the technical data below).

So, I assembled the flowers on the clivia stem from two exposures, one lighter and one darker. Looking at the results, I saw I needed more construction. I was looking at a horizontal, and the image needed to be vertical. This switch was a matter of cropping in on the flower, extending the canvas downward using a black background color, and adding a layer to extend a cloned version of the stem.

[Nikon D300, Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms), 1/5 of a second and 4/5 of a second at f32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related images: Asiatic Lily Bouquet, Sunflower.

Anemone, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a close-up of an anemone, a flower in the buttercup (Ranunculus) family named after the Greek word for wind.

Technically, there’s a good comparison to be made with my extreme wide angle Lupine along the Trail, because both photos are composites of two exposures. So I was going with a story title like “an anemone is to a wide angle as a fish is to a bicycle” until I realized the whole title was too complicated, wouldn’t fit in the space I have for titles, and conveyed the wrong thought. So please consider “Anemones and Bicycles” a compaction of all that, even though there are no bicycles evident.

I exposed the anemone at 1.3 seconds for the background of the flower, and then layered on top a 4 second exposure of the flower core.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), two exposures (one at 1.3 seconds, one at 4 seconds), both f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Other anemone images: Anemone, Core of the Anemone, Anemone Japonica.

Pear Blossom Special, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Obviously, I have a fondness for small aperture, fully stopped-down flower macros that use high depth of field to convey sharpness. (I explain the relationship of aperture to depth of field in Chapter 2 of Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers.) For example, take a look at Echinacea Harvest Moon, Rose Study 11, and Lily in a Green Vase.

But sometimes the high-depth-of-field approach won’t work, either for technical reasons or because having the entire photo sharp doesn’t give the desired visual and aesthetic impact. In fact, selective focus can be so attractive that there are special tools you can use, like the Lensbaby, intended for just this purpose.

The apple and pear blossoms in this pair of photos are espaliered along a fence with our western neighbor. These trees have multiple varieties (five in the case of the apple, three for the pear) grafted onto a single trunk, with the varietal branches spread across the fence. It’s an interesting tangent that any apple you are ever likely to eat will have come from grafted stock rather than seed. Apples seeds simply don’t reliably reproduce, so once you get a good eating apple what you do is reproduce it over and over again by grafting, which essentially means genetic cloning.

I do generally believe that a tripod is the photographer’s best friend. But in this case, the blossoms were high up the fence, so I wasn’t going to able to bring a tripod to bear. Besides, there was a steady breeze. So I made the best of it, and hand held these photos using image stabilization at a fast enough shutter speed so that the subject motion wasn’t much of an issue.

The trick here is to get the plane of the camera as parallel as possible to the area of the subject that you care about. Also, you need to press the shutter release at exactly the right instant, because even slight subject (or camera) movement can spoil the focus. But if all the stars line up, selective focus can make for very nice images.

View this image larger.

[Both photos: Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR zoom lens, 36mm extension tube, +2 diopter close-up filter, ISO 100, hand held with image stabilization enagaged; Apple: 1/250 of a second at f/8, 95mm (142.5mm in 35mm terms); Pear: 1/160 of a second at f/6.3, 82mm (123mm in 35mm terms)]

Related stories: Cherry Blossom Special; Botany of Desire.

Lupine along the Trail, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Coming back from Alamere Falls, I photographed this lupine bush with two exposures, one for the sunset in the background, and one for the foreground which was already deep in twilight darkness. Within the curve of the sky, you can see the far end of the Point Reyes peninsula, silhouetted against the sunset.

Related story: Hike to Alamere Falls.

[Nikon D300, 10.5mm digital fisheye, 1/5 of a second (sunset background) and 3/5 of a second (foreground) at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Asiatic Lily Bouquet, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I photographed this interesting mixed Lily bouquet on black velvet, with natural daylight and a tungsten spot. As always in these situations, it pays to “under expose” the photo for a proper “creative” exposure—so the flowers become more saturated and the black background goes truly black. Creative exposures are explained in Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers, pages 118-121.

Related images: Lily in a Green Vase, Bouquet of Roses.

[Nikon D300, Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms), 1/2 second at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Close Encounters with Calypso 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In Greek mythology, Calypso was a water nymph. In ancient Greek, calypso (Καλυψώ) was a form of the verb “to conceal” (or “to hide”) meaning “I will conceal.” Calypso kept Odysseus imprisoned for seven years on an ocean island; it’s easy to read Homer to take this as a kind of sexual slavery, and according to some accounts (e.g., Hesiod) they had two children together. Odysseus, of course, eventually returned to his Penelope.

The elusive and tiny flower that bears a name with all this mythological freight, and takes me back to my high school classical studies, is of course the Calypso orchid, Calypso bulbosa, commonly called a Fairy Slipper. It’s found on the forest floor on the upper slopes of Mount Tamalpais this time of year (the two shown in this story were photographed along the Cataract Trail). The flower is hard to see, most often growing among detritus of the forest floor. It’s not until you examine it carefully and up very close that you see the wonderful colors, transparency, and shapes.

Up close and personal, the Calypso orchid looks to me more like an ocean critter than something found near the earth. Perhaps that’s the reason for the Calypso name.

Whatever the reason for the name, it was wonderful for me to take off to the mountain slopes after dropping the kids off at school yesterday. With a heavy pack and two tripods (the Low Pod was great for working with these close-to-the-ground flowers), I hiked down to Cataract Falls and back under a day of variable but wonderful skies. I enjoyed spending an hour on my belly in the dirt during a close encounter with a patch of Calypso orchids, with some of the results shown here, then packed up my gear and headed to pick up the kids.

View this image larger.

[Both photos: Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 36mm extension tube, +4 diopter close-up filter, 1 second at f/40 and ISO 400, tripod mounted using a Kirk Low Pod.]

Related story: Calypso Orchid.

Study in Camellia, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Sometimes simple is best. This is a straightforward, unmanipulated shot. I used basic lighting and a black background to photograph this heirloom pink camellia blossom from above. No tricks here, just a beautiful flower.

[All images: Nikon D300, 85mm PC macro (roughly, 127.5mm in 35mm terms), one second at f/51 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]