Premises: 1) If a bear is on fire and it catches you, you catch fire. 2) Bears can't catch you if you're on fire. Conclusion: If a bear is on fire and it catches you, it can't catch you.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000 hour rule. Put in that kind of time and effort and all kinds of things are possible. That said, some people aim for more marketable skills and don't become world class stone balancers.
Again, posted on my blog, but I might as well post it here too:
Today I went out with my new camera, a Canon 500D to replace the 400D I've used for the past two years. Not a lot to report, to be honest, but the larger screen is nice. And my nose doesn't press the buttons as much when I turn the camera sideways. Actually, the rearranging of the buttons caught me out a few times, but the refinements do make sense.
Oh, there's a HD movie recording function on the camera too, but I didn't try it out yet.
What I did try is the new wide angle lens:
Yup, a shot in a mirror. The wide angle makes a HUGE difference. 10mm vs 18mm, my previous widest angle, doesn't sound like much, but it really is.
So, I went to the park to see if I could work the whole "big sky" look I like so much:
Not the most interesting shot, I must admit, but it's a start. I think I'm going to have to read some "how to" guides on getting the most out of the lens.
On the way I met some friends who were with a friend who had, quite possibly, the cutest dog ever. It's a crossbreed puppy of some variety. I tried out the "hold out the camera without looking, click, and hope the wide angle means you catch everything you want in the frame" technique. It almost worked:
If the tail hadn't been cropped off by the edge of the frame, this would have been a real nice photo. A minute later a group of small girls walked past. They couldn't resist the puppy, and the puppy couldn't resist them. I tried the same technique again, and got an interesting (if not very clean) image:
Like I said, I need to work with this lens a whole lot more to find out what I can do, what looks good, and when I need to swap to a mid-range lens instead. But for a first day out, I'm quite happy.
Unfortunately, this dog would never stay in a good position and look interesting. IÂ’ve got a lot of great shots with the fountain and cathedral, but only with the dog kind of just hanging out. The only one where the dog was interesting, the framing was way off:
I took these back in 2006, and finally found them a few months ago. I took them with my old Kodak EasyShare (utterly terrible camera, by the way) in Arkansas. I had visited my great uncle and he happened to have a pond on his farm. What do you all think?
As for the duck photos above, unless the environment is really exciting, you have to get REALLY close to animals for wildlife photography to work. You can do this by crawling on your belly (or sticking your lens up to the bars of the cage at a zoo), working with very cooperative animals, or getting a zoom lens. Also, looking DOWN onto a subject is almost always the route to very boring wildlife photos, especially with small animals.
Looking up (not even zoomed in too much, but the sky really contrasts with the goose):
Zoo (camera up against the bars):
Helpful animal (here I was zoomed out as much as possible with the zoom lens, which is about a zoom most cameras can get):
I was a away for two weeks this month, on this trip.
The trip mixed business and leisure, but even the business was quite fun. First up, I spent a week at the Sundance Nature Park for the Turkish Juggling Festival. I posted loads of photos on my blog, and daily diary too, but I I uploaded some of the more interesting photos to the sosauce.com gallery. Like these ones:
The domes at the festival site.
View from the top of Tahtali.
Awesome parrot.
Mount Chimaera
Following the festival I joined the HAL Prinsendam, a cruise ship I've worked on four times now. I'll be back on the ship for another 19 days in November too!
The front of the ship looks great, but why a photo of the rear of the ship? Well, you see the two windows on the very back corner? Those are the two windows for my cabin. The view is great, as I can look back along the wake of the ship. However, awesomeness of cabins is not just down to the view. No, there's also the issue of noise. Modern ships use pod propulsion propellers, and these create very little noise and almost no vibrations. Unfortunately the Prinsendam is not particularly modern (though only 20 years old, cruise ship design has come a long way in that time) and the whole back of the ship vibrates when the screws turn. Even worse, when the ship is moving and they throw it into reverse gear, it REALLY starts to vibrate.
But that's not all... look closer at the images. What is below my cabin? Yes, ropes emerging from holes. As the ship approaches a port, the deck crew prepare the ropes and cables, then wind them in and... well, there are about thousand things that can make noise in the space directly under my bed, and between 5am and 7am is the usual time for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM to be used extensively.
So, I visited Albania, but didn't do anything that exciting. I have a blog post I want to write about Saranda, but I need to sort the photos first.
Next the ship called at Dubrovnik, Croatia. I've been here before, so this time I re-visited some touristy sights I've seen before. This time I took a walk around the city walls, which was actually a lot of fun.
At one point I came across a man taking photographs of a woman. It was obviously some kind of official photo session, but they hadn't organised it very well. Of course, it's a busy day; not one but four cruise ships were visiting the city. The assistants kept asking people to not walk through the shot, but they were really up against it.
As I walked past I snapped a few shots of the photographer and model, and one of the assistants (or maybe the director, I don't know) said to me "Go find your own model!" Not in a joking way either, she actually wanted to get rid of me. The thing is, I wasn't trying to take the same photo of the model, I was taking a photo of the photographer+model pair, a much more interesting subject than the model herself. And what do they expect people to do? If you want privacy, hire a studio, or come back when the city is a little less crowded.
Thankfully I have a zoom lens, so took this photo from a distance. Yes, contrary to what it may seem like from this blog, I do use other lenses apart from my 10mm wide angle.
I found a huge flock of pigeons in the market. Someone had thrown down corn, and they were pecking at it like made. I wanted to get a shot of blurry pigeons in flight, with some interesting market scene behind. However, the pigeons were so focused on the food on the ground that I could walk right through them and they wouldn't move.
In the end I had to stamp my feet to get them to fly up into the air. I did this five of six times, then the market traders asked me to stop. In this case I understood their objections completely, and stopped right away. I like this photo best:
Saturday was a sea day. In the afternoon I was sitting in my cabin and suddenly "BRRBRBRBBRBRNNGNGG..." the propeller kicked into reverse. The ship was stopping. Why? Turns out we had a scenic cruising stop at Stromboli volcano, which is located just north of Sicily.
Science fiction fans out there will know this as the exit point if one was ever to go on A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Like I did at Mount Chimaera, I took some triple expose photo sets, with a view to making some HDR images. Maybe one day I'll actually get round it.
That's the thing with my photography at the moment: I never do any post processing. Every single one of the photos on this blog are presented exactly as taken. I don't particularly care about getting stuff perfect in photoshop, it's the pointing and clicking that I really enjoy. Once I get to the limits of what I can do in camera, I'll move on to balancing things out afterward. But, you know, I'm still almost completely incapable of holding the camera horizontally, and my horizons are always tilted one way or the other. When I learn how to do that I'll buy a copy of photoshop.
Over the past few weeks I've mentioned [on my blog] the idea of HDR photography, which stands for High Dynamic Range photography. Here's my first try, with an image I took this evening from my hotel balcony in Kusadasi, Turkey.
The basic idea is that you lock your camera on a tripod, and take three photos in a row, very quickly, with three different exposures. Then you get special software that combines the photos into a single image, taking the optimally exposed layer for each part of the photo. Then you tweak the image in Photoshop, and spit it out the end.
I decided to give it a go, but instead of using the special programs (which I may have on my laptop somewhere, as I think some kind of utility for this came with my camera) I did the below images entirely using the Gimp, the open source Photoshop project.
In other words, please don't examine these closely! I'm just messing about with the technique, and if I like this "look" I might purchase or find the real software to make things easier and better quality in the future.
Second, here's a photo from the burning mountain in I visited a few weeks ago:
And a single exposure of the same scene for comparison:
The effect is really noticeable in the first image, making everything look plastic and unreal compared to normal photographs. The second image is far more subtle, probably too subtle for anyone to notice. I like the second a lot better, but it's a lot of work to put into a single image.
The first image looks like it's out of a really fucking awesome video game - god do I want to play that game. The burning mountain is much darker, so obviously the dynamic range effect is reduced, but it makes a pretty huge difference with the foreground, some of the people, and that tree.
The first image looks like it's out of a really fucking awesome video game - god do I want to play that game.
This is my thought! Check out this blog, which has some really good examples of both subtle and garish HRD photography. Quite a few of them remind me of video game screenshots. I think the shot I posted above looks so much like a game level because of the wide angle and high position of the camera. I'm expecting it to zoom in, and then swing round to show James Bond, gun in hand, in new Golden Eye level. Not just the Lafayette, but five cruise ships to clear of henchmen!
Comments
1) If a bear is on fire and it catches you, you catch fire.
2) Bears can't catch you if you're on fire.
Conclusion:
If a bear is on fire and it catches you, it can't catch you.
The first album, mainly holiday photos of Pola and I, can be found here: http://www.sosauce.com/album/9204/spain-andorra-france-july-2009/
The second album is more travel and wildlife oriented, and can be found here: http://www.sosauce.com/album/9205/arctic-trip-july-2009/
No bears this time! The closest I came was the warning sign in Longyearbyen:
But I did go reindeer hunting:
Check the albums for more of similar and even some very different.
Edit: Those balanced stones pics are awesome.
Today I went out with my new camera, a Canon 500D to replace the 400D I've used for the past two years. Not a lot to report, to be honest, but the larger screen is nice. And my nose doesn't press the buttons as much when I turn the camera sideways. Actually, the rearranging of the buttons caught me out a few times, but the refinements do make sense.
Oh, there's a HD movie recording function on the camera too, but I didn't try it out yet.
What I did try is the new wide angle lens:
Yup, a shot in a mirror. The wide angle makes a HUGE difference. 10mm vs 18mm, my previous widest angle, doesn't sound like much, but it really is.
So, I went to the park to see if I could work the whole "big sky" look I like so much:
Not the most interesting shot, I must admit, but it's a start. I think I'm going to have to read some "how to" guides on getting the most out of the lens.
On the way I met some friends who were with a friend who had, quite possibly, the cutest dog ever. It's a crossbreed puppy of some variety. I tried out the "hold out the camera without looking, click, and hope the wide angle means you catch everything you want in the frame" technique. It almost worked:
If the tail hadn't been cropped off by the edge of the frame, this would have been a real nice photo. A minute later a group of small girls walked past. They couldn't resist the puppy, and the puppy couldn't resist them. I tried the same technique again, and got an interesting (if not very clean) image:
Like I said, I need to work with this lens a whole lot more to find out what I can do, what looks good, and when I need to swap to a mid-range lens instead. But for a first day out, I'm quite happy.
The full album at Sosauce.com.
As for the duck photos above, unless the environment is really exciting, you have to get REALLY close to animals for wildlife photography to work. You can do this by crawling on your belly (or sticking your lens up to the bars of the cage at a zoo), working with very cooperative animals, or getting a zoom lens. Also, looking DOWN onto a subject is almost always the route to very boring wildlife photos, especially with small animals.
Looking up (not even zoomed in too much, but the sky really contrasts with the goose):
Zoo (camera up against the bars):
Helpful animal (here I was zoomed out as much as possible with the zoom lens, which is about a zoom most cameras can get):
Sorry, I am amped.
I was a away for two weeks this month, on this trip.
The trip mixed business and leisure, but even the business was quite fun. First up, I spent a week at the Sundance Nature Park for the Turkish Juggling Festival. I posted loads of photos on my blog, and daily diary too, but I I uploaded some of the more interesting photos to the sosauce.com gallery. Like these ones:
The domes at the festival site.
View from the top of Tahtali.
Awesome parrot.
Mount Chimaera
Following the festival I joined the HAL Prinsendam, a cruise ship I've worked on four times now. I'll be back on the ship for another 19 days in November too!
The front of the ship looks great, but why a photo of the rear of the ship? Well, you see the two windows on the very back corner? Those are the two windows for my cabin. The view is great, as I can look back along the wake of the ship. However, awesomeness of cabins is not just down to the view. No, there's also the issue of noise. Modern ships use pod propulsion propellers, and these create very little noise and almost no vibrations. Unfortunately the Prinsendam is not particularly modern (though only 20 years old, cruise ship design has come a long way in that time) and the whole back of the ship vibrates when the screws turn. Even worse, when the ship is moving and they throw it into reverse gear, it REALLY starts to vibrate.
But that's not all... look closer at the images. What is below my cabin? Yes, ropes emerging from holes. As the ship approaches a port, the deck crew prepare the ropes and cables, then wind them in and... well, there are about thousand things that can make noise in the space directly under my bed, and between 5am and 7am is the usual time for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM to be used extensively.
So, I visited Albania, but didn't do anything that exciting. I have a blog post I want to write about Saranda, but I need to sort the photos first.
Next the ship called at Dubrovnik, Croatia. I've been here before, so this time I re-visited some touristy sights I've seen before. This time I took a walk around the city walls, which was actually a lot of fun.
At one point I came across a man taking photographs of a woman. It was obviously some kind of official photo session, but they hadn't organised it very well. Of course, it's a busy day; not one but four cruise ships were visiting the city. The assistants kept asking people to not walk through the shot, but they were really up against it.
As I walked past I snapped a few shots of the photographer and model, and one of the assistants (or maybe the director, I don't know) said to me "Go find your own model!" Not in a joking way either, she actually wanted to get rid of me. The thing is, I wasn't trying to take the same photo of the model, I was taking a photo of the photographer+model pair, a much more interesting subject than the model herself. And what do they expect people to do? If you want privacy, hire a studio, or come back when the city is a little less crowded.
Thankfully I have a zoom lens, so took this photo from a distance. Yes, contrary to what it may seem like from this blog, I do use other lenses apart from my 10mm wide angle.
I found a huge flock of pigeons in the market. Someone had thrown down corn, and they were pecking at it like made. I wanted to get a shot of blurry pigeons in flight, with some interesting market scene behind. However, the pigeons were so focused on the food on the ground that I could walk right through them and they wouldn't move.
In the end I had to stamp my feet to get them to fly up into the air. I did this five of six times, then the market traders asked me to stop. In this case I understood their objections completely, and stopped right away. I like this photo best:
Saturday was a sea day. In the afternoon I was sitting in my cabin and suddenly "BRRBRBRBBRBRNNGNGG..." the propeller kicked into reverse. The ship was stopping. Why? Turns out we had a scenic cruising stop at Stromboli volcano, which is located just north of Sicily.
Science fiction fans out there will know this as the exit point if one was ever to go on A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Like I did at Mount Chimaera, I took some triple expose photo sets, with a view to making some HDR images. Maybe one day I'll actually get round it.
That's the thing with my photography at the moment: I never do any post processing. Every single one of the photos on this blog are presented exactly as taken. I don't particularly care about getting stuff perfect in photoshop, it's the pointing and clicking that I really enjoy. Once I get to the limits of what I can do in camera, I'll move on to balancing things out afterward. But, you know, I'm still almost completely incapable of holding the camera horizontally, and my horizons are always tilted one way or the other. When I learn how to do that I'll buy a copy of photoshop.
The full album is over at Sosauce.com.
Here are a few of 'em.
Here is my page. Enjoy.
The basic idea is that you lock your camera on a tripod, and take three photos in a row, very quickly, with three different exposures. Then you get special software that combines the photos into a single image, taking the optimally exposed layer for each part of the photo. Then you tweak the image in Photoshop, and spit it out the end.
I decided to give it a go, but instead of using the special programs (which I may have on my laptop somewhere, as I think some kind of utility for this came with my camera) I did the below images entirely using the Gimp, the open source Photoshop project.
In other words, please don't examine these closely! I'm just messing about with the technique, and if I like this "look" I might purchase or find the real software to make things easier and better quality in the future.
Second, here's a photo from the burning mountain in I visited a few weeks ago:
And a single exposure of the same scene for comparison:
The effect is really noticeable in the first image, making everything look plastic and unreal compared to normal photographs. The second image is far more subtle, probably too subtle for anyone to notice. I like the second a lot better, but it's a lot of work to put into a single image.
I'll see how it goes.
The burning mountain is much darker, so obviously the dynamic range effect is reduced, but it makes a pretty huge difference with the foreground, some of the people, and that tree.