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

Making Light Do

Hi,

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I had a chance to post.  I had to take time off to live in Interesting Times for a little while,  but now I’d like to share a few pictures with you.  I’ll have to make a special effort to be brief, and not ramble overmuch,  for I’m far behind schedule.

This week I’m posting images that are illuminated in somewhat non-standard ways.  Where I live, in a valley of the California Coastal range, across the bay from San Francisco, lightning, for the most part, is something happening somewhere else.  We hear distant thunder and rig for cave-dweller  running (unplugging unprotected processor chip-run devices)  in anticipation of a powerless interlude.   On the rare occasions that the storm is right on top of us, the lightning,  being typically cloud-to-cloud, is only seen as a bright blast.  This storm was different.  When I looked out the window to watch for a flash in the dark,  the crooked traces of the discharge flashed quite visibly.  I  ran for the camera.  Tyrone, my photography sidekick-cat, using  Severe Look With Misgivings #35,  clearly conveyed his opinion that the photographer was having some sort of intelligence malfunction and declined to budge from the recliner.

I set up the tripod and gear on the porch and, as it was quite dark between flashes, closed the camera down and used a locking shutter release cable to open the camera up and wait for the lightning to create its own exposure, which it eventually did,  actually giving me a brighter exposure than I had banked on having on film (below).

Another example of differently achieved lighting comes from a time when I was photographing custom jewelry for a goldsmith and the metaphysically-inspired art pieces created by the goldsmith he had working for him.  One afternoon,  as we were working and chatting about  minerals and gems, he brought out an asteriated (star) quartz, a beautiful clover-honey golden-hued,  slightly flattened ovoid.  It was a puzzle to shoot; the high polish and round shape reflected everything and made the bright curtain of inclusions forming the star hard to see.  So, I took the copy stand into a closet and tried the flash in there, which was better but the reflection/glare off the top of the stone still hid the star’s best effect.  In an effort to mimic the tiny spot of the sun, I built an enclosed, internally reflecting “snout” for the flash, which fed into a 1/8th inch diameter fiber optics bundle.  Measuring the output suggested that I’d need 18 or so flashes with the end of the cable positioned a few inches away, so I started there.   This being film photography, I then increased the light amount to obviate any reciprocity failure.   This last exposure

was taken with 22 flashes per exposure and shows the wispy curtain of the asteriation  going down through the stone nicely.

Here’s one you see happening every year during at least one holiday! I haven’t tried this a lot, but with this house close by I could take a night photo from my front walk .  The picture has been cropped down to get rid of the gross orange sodium vapor street lamp.  I managed to get only two cars going through this exposure, which only messed things up a little. If I can,  next time I’m getting a bit closer,  though my one and only lens is really too long for this kind of thing.  It’s tempting to think about a neutral density filter for the right half so that the large inflatable snowglobe on the left can have time to build into the exposure, as well.

The other holiday that sees, well, at least me, with a camera, is Hallowe’en, to record the years’  carved pumpkins,  if I’ve had time and oomph to do any. I’ve overdone these a bit, to  try to get better light through the skinless flesh areas of the pumpkins, but lost detail doing so, ah well.

Anyway, you get the idea.  It’s a lot of fun to find light to take directly, and a small exercise in remembering to alter the white balance for different sources, though it does seem a little like shooting sunrise/set, where it can be odd which setting works best.  This parlor organ light,  above the voicing stops,  is much more straightforward than the combination lamp and pumpkin ‘lampshades’, above.  Set the White Balance for incandescent light  and you’re off and running!

I hope you’ll try some alternate light source experiments.  Take reverent photos with candlelight, group camaraderie in campfire light, ruins or land features carved from the night with flashes, flashlights, or even lanterns.  Gentlebeings, start your imagine-engines!

Cheers,

pete

A Change in the Whether

Happy New Year! In recognition of the standard images of New Year’s celebrations, here are some bubbles. I’ve always liked watching bubbles, sometimes to the embarrassment of those friends still fearless enough to take lunch with someone bent on close visual examination of the utterly ordinary.

These bubbles, happily, are much easier to work with than the violent effervescence of champagne or a carbonated beverage; these are in a viscous liquid hand-soap that holds bubbles in a sort of stasis until the pumping of the soap disturbs them. They are a fun subject to shoot at about life-size, play with different lighting effects, sort through the possible viewpoints for an interesting abstract composition or an interesting pattern of specular highlights, or the reflections of the other bubbles. I use a small krypton bulb flashlight to see approximately what will happen when the flash(es) lighting the scene fire(s).

I had started experimenting with these a few days before I started another photographic course. As it turned out, part of the coursework was to take a couple of the pictures during your work for the first week and take the same subject again during the last week to apply what you’d absorbed during the lessons; I think of it as seeing how “whether” affects your new image. Whether you would use a different point of view, whether you would use a different depth of field or optically extract a different center of interest by restricting the zone of clear focus…a whole bunch of the standard ‘whether’ questions that crop up in photographic problem-solving.

At roughly the same time that class got underway, both of our cats started behaving “differently”. As the days progressed it became clear that our nearly 24-year old elder cat was in sudden, accelerated decline. Although she had been nearly blind with cataracts for some time, she’d not stopped going outside daily with people to enjoy some fresh-grown mild cat mint (sometimes climbing up into the pot to sit on the plant so that the younger cat wouldn’t get silly ideas about her sharing) and a good stretching roll on the sidewalk. This changed into her becoming frail in her walk and focused on finding an inaccessible, small place to hole up, frequently trying to leave the yard, causing whichever of us had chaperoned her walk to hustle before she managed to get into some cranny where we could not find her or from which we could not retrieve her.

We didn’t know what to make of the 12-yr old. For as long as he had lived with us, he’d followed people. Originally, he was mostly a gardening supervisor, scouting out where you should work next, coming over to inform you and then settling in an advantageous spot from which to carefully scrutinize your work, as if to be certain you weren’t pulling anything that Ought Not Be Pulled. Then I got this digital camera and he became Photographer Sidekick, Esq. Whenever I pulled out the tripod or put the camera strap over my neck and stepped into my Muck boots, Tyrone would appear and sit patiently while I collected gear. He’d precede me to the door and out we’d go. For the first few minutes he’d check the yard for interlopers while I set up a shot. I’d sit on a low brick retaining wall to take pictures of the flowers and grasses and work for a bit, take the camera from my face and there would be Tyrone sitting either upright or Sphinx-like, crowding my right elbow, happy as a clam. If I set up for bee practice, he’d be sitting slightly in front of the tripod legs watching the bees, looking at the lens and back to the bees. He did not, however, approve of me taking *his* picture and, until he was too ill to thwart me, the only decent shot I got of him was when he came out under the redwoods in the backyard with me, settled into the deep shade of the lower redwood branches and debris at the trunk and I sneaked a shot when he looked up to see what I was doing (seen above).

We got both cats into the vet, knowing how poorly Carla was doing and thinking that maybe Tyrone’s teeth were bothering him again, despite brushing, or that his insulin doses needed fine-tuning. We discovered that Carla’s kidneys were about what one would expect in a 23-year old cat, which we had anticipated, and that Tyrone had a shadow on his x-ray, about the size of a golf ball, which at only 12 years of age, we were not prepared for at all. Soon, biopsy and CT scan would show this to be an extremely intrusive and fast-growing lung cancer, which quickly metastasized to several other locations.

Numbly, we gave both of our beloved friends palliative care for as long as they seemed to take comfort. Carla got the right of way, anywhere, and whatever she felt she could eat. Supervised trips outside soon fell away and she dozed where she could hear someone working at a desk. Tyrone, with all that black fur and the sun bakingly hot in the afternoons, spent hours supervised outside, where he started to take on the behavior Carla had been exhibiting, finding a small shaded hidey-hole at the base of dense plants or in long millet stems in under a rose bush to curl up in. Turn your back and he’d have vanished from sight. I would take a lunchbox, a book, a director’s chair, water and my silver reflectent umbrella and sit, keeping both myself and any exposed Tyrone bits from overheating in the direct sun.

In mid-September, Carla left us, sometime in the very early hours of the morning, apparently passing in her sleep. Tyrone seemed as lost by this as we were and started sleeping most of the day away, in under the parlor organ with his head propped on the top note of the bass foot-pedals. Within three weeks it was obvious that palliative care was no longer effective enough and it was time to help him out of pain; we took him “visiting” to the vet’s one final time.

During this melancholy period, the photographic course rolled on. I’d not really considered how hard it would be to take up the tripod or the camera, look up and not see a very large black fuzzball waddling authoritatively in my direction or a petite, superbly-camouflaged elderly tortoiseshell heading for the door. As I went about the final assignments alone, this added a new “whether” to the choices made in re-shooting the subject from the first week for the last assignment of the course: whether to try to inject my mood into the image or shoot it straight. Looking around in the soap bottle for a new composition, I found a domed bubble that was reflecting the bubbles above it and decided to go with that. The teal-blue and silvery bubbles of the original seemed too cheerful to me, mindful of the gaping hole in this room, where my photography companion would normally be, and the empty office chair in the other room where our elder cat used to take comfort in hearing someone working nearby. Opening a desk drawer, I dug out a filter holder, mounting it on the end of the lens. I went to the back room equipment drawers, selected an old Kodak 80A Wratten Gel filter and placed it in the holder. I adjusted my exposure to account for the loss of light due to the deep blue filter and took a few exposures, adjusting depth of field and lighting along the way.

The result captured much of what I wanted, but I would like to have shot this at about 2.5X magnification to pick up the bubble reflections in the domed bubble; they only really show up at the original image size. I also imagine two small moons would look nice in there but that’s a job for image manipulation, and I don’t think I could do it the way I imagine it.

I think of most pattern shots and abstract shots as a form of music, each with its tempo, tone, and rhythm…this is a Nocturne for Carla and Tyrone.

May your New Year be blessed,

pete

In the Spotlight

Taking, and retaking, beginning and intermediate photography courses is a fun way to make sure that you find a time to get out, in my case into the yard, to keep in contact with your ’seeing’ muscles and whatever imagination can be mustered that day. After all, it’s an *assignment*, isn’t it? Unfortunately, Real Life (remember when the internet was young and real life was called the “Meat World”?) has a persistent way of demanding regular chunks of the day which usually leaves me taking images in the hours from the very flat, unattractive, light of noon up to the possibility of the jackpot of ’sweet’ late afternoon light, depending on the current level of suspended particles in the local atmosphere. During the seemingly interminable hours of flat, contrast-y light it can get too hot, in Summer or Fall, to stay out in the open, practicing honeybee/flower action shots, or what have you, and the heat sends me either inside for a drink or in under the cover of the podocarpus and the split-leaf maple in the courtyard, where it is quite dark and generally cool in comparison. And the breaks in the dense shade spark Ideas.

In under the canopy, in a mini-micro-climate held reasonably comfortable by the dense intergrowing branches overhead, is a great place to watch the shafts of sunlight, shifting like white spotlights across the gloom, picking out forms in that saturated-green of the protected leaves of the split-leaf maple. It was just that sort of day when I was out with my sketching mannequin (my patient, hardworking and *only* cooperative photographic model) to get an assigned shot of a portrait in a natural setting (I got a nice shot of a twenty-inch tall mannequin ‘climbing’ in the maple tree…nice except for a small leaf-hopper which hopped aboard the mannequin while I was working with the camera too far away to see it, and made itself at home where there would normally be a nose on the blank wooden face. Sigh.). After getting my class shot, I couldn’t resist the lovely greens up in the “spotlight” and waited a few minutes until the light worked its way around to this grouping of leaves, which I particularly liked, and made a few exposures of the grouping. I like to put it up on the computer as wallpaper, for a calm influence during hectic days.

May your Holidays be only mildly hectic, if hectic they be, and happy, memorable times!

Cheers,
pete

Steady as you go

Seasons  Greetings to everyone!   All the  best wishes for a fine year end, I hope it’s a happy and memorable time.

For this entry, I’m posting an image I made for an LVS online course  assignment.  I started taking courses in digital photography there when I bought a used  Canon EOS 10D  DSLR (digital single lens reflex-big, heavy body;  interchangeable lenses) camera from an old friend, who swore it was driven only on weekends by a few students who needed a digital loaner to use while taking a course at his California central coast photographic institute.  I hadn’t used my old nikons for much more than taking pictures of my Hallowe’en pumpkin carving since the early 1990s and was sorely in need of an interpreter for the digital device.   The digital controls take a lot of getting used to ( I still keep trying to twist the base of the lens where the old lenses had the aperture control, now located on a dial function on the body) and the classes get me outside and looking for compositions in the yard.  The assignment that led to the picture  above was to take a two images of the same thing to compare image sharpness.  For one image, hand-hold the camera and take a slow exposure; hold it as steady as possible.  For the second image, mount the camera on a tripod, if possible lock the mirror up, attach a remote switch to the camera, and with all of these precautions against camera vibration, record the image.  …discuss…

I walked around the house, looking for something to shoot in the same yard that had supplied the images for the previous two or three courses, and an old trowel on an expanded mesh iron patio table caught my eye.  With the two leaves along the handle, it made a composition I liked,  not using the whole trowel but sort of nudging the ‘inner gardener’ to think about a garden lying fallow, absorbing nutrients and resting.  To take the portion of the handle and blade that I wanted, I had to place my left elbow across an old terrarium that was next to the trowel.  This allowed me to hang the camera down from above, while I stood on tiptoe,   and tried not to breathe.   Feeling (over)confident about the support, I set the camera to record enough depth of field, pushing my exposure down to 1/30th of a second, a good deal slower than the 1/160 sec. arrived at by the common rule of thumb for sharp pictures:  use a shutter speed at, or faster than, 1/focal length of the lens.  In the small LCD display on the camera, it looked to me like I had my shot.   It wasn’t until several days later that I would come back with the tripod to take the same subject with the camera on the tripod…and discovered I couldn’t!  The tripod legs spread wide enough that when the camera was at the right height, they hit the side of the table and could not be moved into place.  I had to settle for an unprepossessing image of more of the trowel, the leaves losing their framing effect,  the added attraction  of the very old, very cracked water sealing putty and filthy glass of the bottom of the terrarium. It was very ugly and I have not posted it, but it was undeniably tack-sharp!  On comparing the two in Photoshop at full size the difference became quite apparent. So,  I’ve become  a tripod enthusiast.  I’d be even *more*  enthusiastic with one of the new carbon-fiber lightweight tripods but  maybe if I keep doing “curls” with my old, heavy, tripod I can stay strong enough to use it.

Yes the picture is a bit ‘muzzy’;   I still like the ‘feel’ of the image.

Holiday Cheers!

pete