Man Behind the Mask

For a long time I hated taking picture of people (unless it was later into the evening). Slowly I've been getting better but with a lot of practice and only once I felt comfortable around the person.
There is a story of a photographer, I cant remember who, was asked to take a photo of Pablo Picasso. He was apparently a notoriously bad subject as he always had his guard up. A mask he wore all day long which had been impervious to previous photographers. The story ends up where the photographer tricked Picasso into letting his guard down by telling him the roll had been ended. He snaped a photo of Picasso which showed him behind the mask.

It may have been Arnold Newman, but I cant be sure.

To me it is all about capturing a moment in time. A brief transitory glimpse of 'the man behind the mask. A lot of people say that a good photographer knows when to be in the right (or wrong) place at a time that will capture a good shot.

Not that long ago I went shooting with the pistol club athe the Ohio state ROTC. It was great. Guns are exceedingly dangerous but also exceedingly fun. After a while you get into the rhythem of the firing. Everyone fires at a different rate. With a slow enough shutter speed to compensate for the poor lighting and slow reflex of the camera, I got 2 great shots. Each showing the fire that momentarily explodes from the firearm. It was very cool. This sort of photography is much easier than say for lightning. There is no rhyme or rhythem there. All you can do is go somewhere where a lot of lighning takes place very frequently. So you can ask now, where are all the photos of lighning then? Well unfortunately I dont like getting wet or standing out in the open during an electrical storm. Hopefully one day I can post a good one. For right now, I'm in no rush

This is no joke!

There was an Englishman, a Canadian and a Hungarian sitting outside of a bar and they were discussing the greatness of A4 paper over US letter paper.

This is no joke, it really happened.

Two years ago, approximately. We really tore into Letter paper (Pun intended). Such complaints as:

"It's too short"

"It's too fat"

and

"It's bad for making paper airoplanes" were heard.

The last one was me. I brought a brilliant book back from England on 20+ designs of varying difficulties. The Split Nose Cone Glider wa always my favourate. I can still make it with my eyes (half) closed. I cant find my favourate, but here is a close one I found on the t'internet. Effectivley what I found was that US letter paper made bad airoplanes!

We had discussed the merits of the 2 paper sizes and came to the opinion that A4 rules. I believe that I said at some point I said that A4 was more aesthetically pleasing. I cannot find a back up for this, but wikipedia does say:

ISO paper sizes are all based on a single aspect ratio of the square root of two, or approximately 1:1.4142. The advantages of basing a paper size upon this ratio were already noted in 1786 by the German scientist Georg Lichtenberg (in a letter to Johann Beckmann): if a sheet with aspect ratio √2 is horizontally divided into two equal halves, then the halves will again have aspect ratio √2.

Which to a geek like me basically says that it is at least very cool!

This did at some point get me thinking about the photographs I take. The 6x4 size most people see is popular I believe because of the aesthetics of the size itself. I as a personal maxim try never to crop the photos I take. There are 2 very simple reasons for this.

1. What I see through the viewfinder or on the LCD screen is what I want im the picture. If I have to crop, it says to me 'Chris you did not frame this picture well. You included only the top half of the naked man' or something along those lines.

2. I'm too lazy to crop photos.

What this post for me is about is this. When you crop a photo, take a look at the image you want to capture or show and take a brief thought and say to yourself this...

... is this an ugly rectangle?

Venn Diagrams

Venn diagrams are something I learnt about at school in maths class. The most common one I can think of is the overlap of the 3 primary colours to form secondary colours. To me all Venn diagrams represent is overlap. A point at which at 2 mutually exclusive groups cross and somewhere in the middle a new subset is created.

Now I went to a school where each age group was less than 40 people. Small classes get much smaller after seeing the same people for 11 years. No one at school cared for photography. At university I met a lot more people (some of them I do not remember their names. It's hard to concentrate when your blood alcohol level is that high - its ok. The legal U.K. drinking age is 18).
Only one of my friends was avidly into photography. The first time we saw the Canon IXUS we fell in love with it. He was lucky enough to buy it. I just got to use it lots.

Now before I was talking about overlap and although at that time most people had some form of camera, not many people took it off AUTO. The overlap was quite small for those interested in photography.

Then I got to Grad School. In my hallway of ~ 30 grad students at least 4 I know of have a SLR of some sort and are INTERESTED in photography. I can only conclude that there is a significant overlap between chemistry grad students and photography. I will, in time, endevour to form some sort of Venn diagram that will graphically show this trend.

Now, most of the people I believe are either quite shy or I just dont know well enough to have seen their photos.

The one person I do know is Jeremy. He takes beautiful photos. Whenever I want to look for inspiration I look to his homepage. Every time I go there I find something amazing. I invite you to go look and be inspired.

Basically this blog entry can be summerised as " Go look at Jeremy's Photos"

Macro lenses

About 8 months ago I bought a macro lens for my Fujifilm camera. For those people who did not realise or know there are a lot of ways to expand the functionality of your camera. A large proportion of the Bridge camera out there have a threaded lense that allows the addition of supplementary lenses. In my opinion the macro lense is so much fun. I enjoy taking pictures of wild flowers abd small insects. Once zoomed in on their level, the photo starts to drag you away from a human sized world and into a much stranger and tinyer place. If you do want to buy anything for your camera, I would advise you to make sure the size fits your camera. For instance; my fujifilm has a 55mm lense and my Nikon has a 52mm lens, so when buying a new camera, you may have to buy new accessories.

Don't underestimate the eye

I noticed a really interesting thing a few weeks ago. I was holding up my macro lense and I noticed that the world through the lense was a magnified upsidedown fisheyed view of the world. I thought to myself that would make a cool photo. I put the lense a foot or so in front of the camera and tried to focus on the lens. For the life of me I could not get it to focus on the scene coming through the lens. After a final bit of finagling I manged to get it focused, abut a metre away from the camera. It seems that I had forgoten how brilliant the human eye is. Without word or command I could focus my eye through the lense at virtually any angle. However the optics of the camera is just not good enough and only a tiny window of focal depth was achievable.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword.

The eye it seems is definately mightier than the camera (at least in this case!)

First time blogging

Ok,

So I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Chris. Whats yours? No seriously, it's quite daunting putting yourself out there in the 'blogosphere' (what an aweful word). Being there at the mercy of all those people who are ready to drop comments on any ideas or opinions you have. I imagine it could be quite soul crushing. There is only one way to find out isn't there!

Being English there are many things that have come apparent since I moved to the US three years ago.

1. My grammer and spelling is aweful. I can't help it. Im going to endevour to be as good as I can but if something annoys you, please let it slide.

2. Without realising, when placed in front of people I do not know or placed in a position of authority, I seems to up my politeness.

There are more observations to come but number 2 is the segway I have chosen to lead me into explaining my title.

A Word on Digital Photography.

It's so polite and non offensive isn't it. So very 'British'.

I was to put it plainly, bad at art. Drawing, painting etc I sucked at. However from a young age I loved photography (and fossils but thats another story). For a long time I had a point and shoot 35mm, followed by those wonderful APS camera that were so much easier to load and you got to pre-crop the photos before taking. Moving on from that about 4 years ago I was bought my first digital camera, an Olympus C460. It was lovely to have a digital camera. The freedom from the LCD screen and cost of film was immense. My love for photography began to bloom like a new growth which begins in spring. After 2 years I bought a Fujifilm Finepix S5200 (bridge camera).

With a full manual setting I explored the relationships between shutter speed and aperture. ISO speed and light levels. It was great. In 2 years I took over 6000 photos. Over 5000 in the last year alone.

However I got restless. When I was back visiting the North Yorkshire Moors with my friends from England. I took my Fujifilm and my friend Pete took his new entry level DSLR. Almost the same photos were taken, however the colour and quality of the DSLR made my photos look dry and blanched.

So here we are, 6 months later and a Nikon D40 is awaiting me. This friday I will make the final leap to the DSLR. As a way of helping me learn to use my camera and to tell others what I have learnt I thought I would post on this blog. Of cousre I'm not aiming to boast or deride other peoples views. That's not very well British is it?