Eye-eye, Cap’n

Just a quick post, inspired by Bean’s post on February third about the I ♥ Faces contest themed, “the Eyes Have It.”   It is also a lesson about Seeing when you are looking through a viewfinder. And making spare copies of prints you like.

I had a particular photograph in mind to enter into that contest.  It was one I took when my sister’s silver-tipped Persian was alive. He had just been bathed, and being a small kitty under all that fur, was peering over the rim of the tub with such a look of hurt and utter betrayal;  I took his picture from bathtub-rim height and it turned out quite well.  I didn’t find out that the only print was no longer here until after the contest’s closing date. (Lesson: make extra copies to file, ya never know). I’ll need a negative scanner, a real one, soon.

While looking for that picture I brought out more slides to scan, (please forgive the dreadful resolution in these scans, it’s as good as I can get out of this scanner)  as I’m trying to digitize my photo files, and came across a series of Dare, sitting in his carrier.  He loved his carrier, an ordinary particle board, wood and hardware cloth cat carrier, to go outside and remain in, lying  on its side with the door open on a small hill overlooking the humans in the vegetable garden, supervising double-digging, hexagonal layout interplanting and so forth.  Anyway, he was in the carrier in the front hall, at night, with the carrier door swung wide open and I thought it would make a good close-up; Dare looking out through the wires.

I turned off the room light, got down on the floor, put a flash well off the camera to my right and took great pains trying to see well enough, without any modeling light, to judge if his eyes and facial fur were sharp…really concentrating on the subject.  The first shot was taken with the door mostly closed

and was rather dark, even for the “abandoned kitty in a cage” look.  I liked the possibilities and decided to use a little more film on the idea.

To reflect a little bit more light into the carrier, I opened the door widely enough to position it to bounce flash in to Dare. With the room light still off, in the dark but for ambient light from way around a corner in another room, I got back down below the rim of the carrier and carefully strained my vision, to focus on eyes and fur again (with the lens closed down to get good depth of field it was VERY dark in the viewfinder), and took the shot.

At this point I’d like to emphasize something for all the photographers out there who fall in love with the subject in the viewfinder: always…always, always check everywhere in your viewfinder when you compose a scene,  especially if you’re in darkness.  I know it’s a beginner’s concept but it bears repeating, or, in my case, tattooing inside my eyelids. I know I’m not the only one with unicorns made of a subject plus a stick, a sign, or a lamppost unnoticed in the background.  I, for example, had never paid much attention to anything but the function of the cat carrier and in the dark, thought nothing of bouncing light off the inside of the door, which I’d never really examined…it’s just particle board, after all.

Well, with this bounced-flash shot, I discovered the manufacturer’s mark for the first time. Sigh.

Check those viewfinders!  *Grin*

Is it possible that this is the first post of the Out-take blog? *laughing*

What have you found in your viewfinder, lately?

Cheers,

pete

Don’t Let it Get your Goad

I take some delight in dreaming up different shapes or sounds of things, art or artifact, that I think  could be brought into the world, based upon that quiet goading from whatever muse is lurking today.  Plenty of others do too,  just look at all the marvelous art, writings,  and handcrafted items on blogs around here! The fact that folks *have* something to put up brings me back, somewhat ashamedly, to the little pokes and prods from the imagination that I allow to just fall away, usually feeling inadequate in skills to the vision, or else too  busy to get beyond putting aside materials for later.

I’ve been more focused on this since the other day, when I read a question on the blog “Over Coffee…” that hit a little close to home. In her blog post, Does our Imagination Inspire Us to Act? Barb Hartsook pondered, “If I don’t act on the imagined, what have I achieved?”

Ulp.  I’d have to say, in my case,  not much more than stored raw materials.

While trying to come up with a post a couple of weeks ago, I had half an ear cocked to an argument on television between financial analysts on what needs to be done to bring the banking system back to health. The phrase that caught my attention was “taking away the toxic assets from Wall Street…” 

Photographs, fractographs?

Hi, fellow bloggic nomads!
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the similarities I see in how I approach the workflows of photography and fractal art.  Exploring fractals does have a different challenge for me: I keep finding weird stuff in the fractals.  While other folks are stumbling across structures that they then build into the breath-taking pieces that lead to audible “wow”s, I stumble upon the odd, weird and not-particularly-pretty with some regularity. Maybe  it’s a quantum-level “the observer affects the outcome” thing, but I suppose it could be called “not understanding the math and trying outrageous numbers,” too. *grin*
Or, I could be projecting, finding what is floating around half-submerged in my thoughts.

For example, at one point in the late 80s, we rescued and gave away more than thirty-five rabbits born of two does and a buck rabbit that some one had dumped nearby. We kept and raised 14 that were medically challenged. As a result, I had rabbits in my thoughts for roughly a decade by the time the last one passed away.  A couple years later,  I downloaded Fractint and that’s when odd things started showing up, from the fractals.   [Inserting tongue in cheek and putting on record of the Twilight Zone theme]   I submit here, for your approval,  a few pairs of cross-dimensional similarities.

Hershey, a fourth generation from our original dump-ee’s, sitting on the neighbors’ woodpile.  Next to Hershey is a fractal spiral that, explored with much zooming in, changing parameters and altering how it was colored, gave me a rabbit on a rock ledge to the side of the opening of a rocky warren.

Thinking about changing rides…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m finding that writing a weblog as a WordPress-hosted column is great; I can afford it for one thing *smile*. I get to do a bit of show-and-tell not otherwise possible, and this is rewarding, until I run into things that fall down, site-style-wise and could be made better by going off the WordPress reservation. My beef today is that when the small version of an image in the main text of my blog is clicked it takes the viewer to a larger version, which is good, displayed left-justified on a blinding white page which ruins the ability to see the image due to its glaring contrast; which is *not* good. Apparently, this is how Things Will Be, unless at some point I can find an affordable host site on which to load the WordPress software and my weblog. I see other folks customizing things with which I’d like to fiddle and it makes me think about how to make a transfer. Happily, a good list to work with is right on the LVS blogging blog in the Hall of Fame Student listings here, at Learn to Do It Right. Planning ahead for a swap makes a bunch of sense to me and this blog entry by Viki Nygaard goes along step by step towards the goal of easing into a new host without dropping off of the blogosphere radar to do so.  Makes me a little impatient to try to spruce up my efforts, at least where I can remember the xhtml and css codings I haven’t used in a hamster’s years; alas, it will have to wait for a $erendipitou$ moment.

I *can,* however, Be Prepared by keeping the rss feed in my Live Bookmarks and learn from all of the posts on Learn to do it Right.  Thanks, Viki!

Cheers!
pete
Hm. This is supposed to be an image presentation blog. Recent events have me looking about for pictures of former furry family members. Here’s Dare, with his own tiny pumpkin, lit within by a military surplus “grain of wheat” lamp, taken under incandescent room light (color balanced a bit in Paint Shop Pro 9+); he was not impressed with the pumpkin smell, lol.

Fractal post: Iterative Images

Hi Everyone, in today’s entry, fractal images take the stage. To oversimplify, fractals are the patterns formed by solution sets of certain types of equations. The solution sets have distinct properties, such as self-similarity and infinite detail; no matter how you may magnify or shrink the values you will find stucture that looks similar to every other scale, and there is always more detail to be had.  The equations’ parameters alter as one or more variables are incremented in some fashion as thousands, millions, or greater multiples of solution coordinates are generated.

A coloring variation of a Julia fractal

(Using Fractint)

When I started exploring fractals, making an image was a process where similarities to photography were more obvious. I bought a little program that was advertised in the back of a science magazine. It came on a single floppy disk and used the state of the art EGA monitor we had. The IBM  AT’s massive 2  (two) *grin* megabytes of RAM was plenty of memory. The images that resulted were 16-color banded snapshots.  You’d alter the parameters of an equation,  assign your 16-color palette using a coloring algorithm and save the file. It was a lot of fun, but soon business took precedence, and I had no time to mess with it in any concentrated way. In a couple of years, the AT had died and we had no computer access for a number of years. The next time we did, it was *capable of going online* and I found the Fractint and fractal-art mailing lists. *Big Smile, happy me*.

Driven Bug-gy

Hi everyone,  I’ve been driven buggy, by illness, software incompatibilities and balky hardware adventures,  recently. So, I’m posting some bugs!  I finally have a scanner working for tranparencies.  It is not a dedicated film/slide scanner, and requires fairly significant software meddling, so please excuse some differences from “fresh-squeezed” pictures. *smile*

Insects were probably my earliest fascination, beginning before I was in kindergarten; learning about the well-formed conical pits, at the bottom of which the ant lions lay in wait,  or watching the little wrinkly round dirt-and-web door flip up to allow the trapdoor spider to drag its next hapless victim down into its home in the hard dirt.  Butterflies ranging in size  from the tiny blues, with wingspans of less than a half-inch, to the big local swallowtails wobbled from the scrubby desert weeds to the small vegetable garden and the passion flower vine on our back fence. Now, with many of those local creatures endangered or extinct, I sure wish I’d been camera-equipped at age 4!

The first I’d like to share is from a day of “bee practice”, and depicts a honeybee flying in to harvest from a borage flower.  This, like most of the scanned shots, was taken on ISO  64 Kodachrome, using a Nikon FE2 body, a 55 mm micronikkor macro lens and extension tubes or a teleconverter. Lighting was provided by two small Sunpak flashes on a Lepp macrobracket, set up for a 2:1 light ratio to shoot at f11-32, by altering power output settings. Later two more powerful flashes provided TTL flash metering; same set-up, just heavier *grin*.

A shield beetle, rummages for damaging insects in our front garden. The black background is from the drop off of the flashes’ light; no attempt was made to balance the flash with daylight. Sometimes, I prefer the background to drop out like this, sometimes not…it’s one of the ‘whethers’ of photography.

The same with this little ladybird beetle; fill the frame as much as possible and let the flashes enable as much depth of field and stopped motion as possible.  It can make a closeup more dramatic . In this one my left (main light) did not fire, resulting in a stark contrast of light and dark.

The alternative, where only daylight is used for lighting macro, is a dificult dance with your subject and its setting to try to get the parts that count in human perception into your thin depth of field.  This hoverfly is swamped by the framing. until the image is enlarged. This is where I stand with my digital; I have no way to mount a grip with a macrobracket for lighting, yet, and it’s considerably heavier.

Sometimes, experimentally, it can be interesting to go to extremes. Using the set of three extension tubes for the Nikon FE2 body as a base, I added the full extension set from a Celestron C-90 telescope and to the end of that inverted the lens from an army surplus gun-strike camera, the type used to record the use of the aircraft’s weapons. I stuck it on with electrician’s tape. You can see the nice clarity of the lens, the great magnification and get an idea of its depth of field from this picture of a small spider’s leg hairs (nice spider, didn’t run away with all that lens coming at it and the flash going off).  Notice that the depth of field only allows for one upper segment of the three legs of a small spider to focus;  I wish I had a head shot!   I set this lens combination aside; the electricians tape wasn’t holding well. I hope to resurrect it for digital once I find some extension tubes and Canon T-adapter I can buy.

Lastly today, anyone know the genus and species of this critter I took a picture of in Ecuador?  Or even a common name?  The scanner does this slide an injustice; the slide is quite sharp. With something as magnificently camouflaged and as weird (check out the antennae)  as this I made sure I got the whole critter sharp and fit into the frame as large as possible, verticality of porch post be hanged!

What kind of critters do you like to photograph?

Cheers,

pete

Patterns

I guess I’m  easily distracted.  Things catch my  eye, whether I’m looking for photographic possibilities in the yard or just walking from the front yard, after filling the feeder with thistle seed,  to the backyard to spread food on the designated areas in the back.  Since we live between the Hayward and Calaveras faults, taking precautionary inventory pictures of the small things that are around the place  also puts me in the position of having my attention caught by some angle or other, some confluence of lines or texture.   The pattern shots here, with one exception, were taken for a part of one of the LVS classes on how to use a digital camera.  It’s a bit more challenging to find shots that will work with the one medium telephoto prime/macro lens I have for the digital body, but it works well for small to macro size patterns and reasonably well for patterns that are tight enough that a small detail shot of the larger pattern will work.

This red popcorn ear from the garden is fully two and  three-quarters inches in length so it fit the parameters well and I just liked the sort of visual counterpoint going on with the darker kernels; your smileage may vary. *smile*.

I think  of pattern shots as extractions from a larger subject and, as mentioned in my post, “A Change in the Whether,” when I do something right, to me pattern shots and abstractions seem to have a sort of rhythm and tempo to them.

These flower pots caught my eye as I walked the area around the house looking for shots for class.  This shot could have benefitted from some of that lovely late afternoon light, but it was not “kicking up” that day. Alas for light.

Pattern shots are a lot of fun to put up, large, as wallpaper on a computer display, if it’s not too hard to read any shortcut icons you may have on the surface.  The pots work okay but the following photograph of a rock from the Stewart Lithia mine in Pala, San Diego is a tad busy. Colloquially called, “graphic granite,”  it has a peculiar growth habit that gives it a pattern all its own, something like  cuneiform, if written by a third-level apprentice  scribe who was  clearly  unable to color within the lines.

The mineral macro shots here were taken with the tripod head removed from the tripod and mounted on the post of a copy stand by means of a Bogen superclamp. Another superclamp holds an extra wide Lepp macrobracket to support two flashes that can be positioned to cover most styles of lighting-very handy to give full form to crystals (or whatever other macro subject is being recorded).  For purposes of passing some light through things from below there’s a plexiglas box in which can be set a flash below the subject, sitting on the copy stand base. This set-up allows things like this macro shot of patterns of magnetite crystals included in the hexagonal growth of this muscovite (mica) “book”.  I may be biased because it’s a mineral, *grin* but I enjoy this monochromatic abstract when the shot rolls around on my screensaver.

A pattern you want to explore and capture can catch you up unexpectedly anytime you are functioning with your photographer’s eyes alert.  This basket handle and weave caught my attention on a shelf above and behind the lighting  stand with a model skull on it that was wearing my coat to be a model in an assigned shot using bounce flash for a class. After seeing it up there I had to bring it down and explore the surface from all around to see what distillation of elements of it’s appearance was drawing my attention.  Once I found that, it was added to the patterns/abstract collection.

I’ve collected patterns from lava flows, machine parts, oil sheens on water,  the rolling swells of a nearly exhausted boat wake, detail extracted from tufa towers, flattened tin cans affixed to the side of a building for protection, geyser muds, cooled cracked obsidian, dried cracked mud…all manner of subjects…I’ve had a ball stumbling across elements of a greater scene that can stand on their own. Take your camera out for a walk, you may too!

Happy Pixel Wrangling!

cheers,

pete