Abstract photography

Bed and Lamp

So when I moved in with my current flatmate several things happened. One of these things was that i got more cable channels and DVR. DVR is awesome just inc ase you didn't know. One day I was flicking channels and I came across a tv show called The Genius of Photography. It was on the OvationTV channel. I recorded it and set it to record the entire series. I eventualy found out that it was a BBC program to begin with. ( No wonder I liked it so much!)

Inside a Brazil Nut husk

Episode 2 (Documents for Artists) covered several influential photographers. One was Man Ray. An eary work of Man Ray was L'Elevage de Poussière (Dust Breeding) (1920). His instructor, Marcel Duchamp had left a glass plate covered with lead lines to gather dust. Man Ray's job was to take a picture of it. This abstract image causes you to loose perspective and allows the mind to wonder.Some may consider that at this point the image starts to show relation to the Dada and Surrealist movements.

Beer

In this vein I have tried on occation to take photos that lack perspective and allow the mind to wander.

My Arm, Static Electricity, TV

Ice on window

OSU School of Architecture

My God! It's full of stars!

Firstly 2010 was a good movie in my opinion. I thought about going with the Moby song about stars but settled on a fairly obscure film reference. Previously I had talked about taking pictures of stars and night time photography and I will like to come back to this now.


Since I got my D40 I have driven my fiancee stir crazy while Im out at odd hours of the night hanging around a camera. It started while on holiday in South Carolina. Somehow the A.C. fan had been turned off.


Everyone else was fine. I was far too hot. Sitting in a stuffy house I tried to sleep but ended up getting up, taking my D40 with me and scurrying outside. Luckily (?) it was 4am and most of the lights were off. Walking through the pitch black path, not thinking about all the aligators that may be lurking around I found a car park (parking lot). It took me a while to figure out that my camera will not take a picture on Autofocus if it cant focus. Unfortunately stars are too dim to focus on. Even with my 4am tired eyes I did manage to get 1 photo in focus.


As you can see I had no clue where the north star (polaris) was. The next few nights I moved my photography down to the beach where at least half the sky was dark. A lengthy time was spent searching for the plough (ursa major), finding that I used it to find draco and then eventually ursa minor which contains polaris at its tail. Here is the best photo I got. 18mm, f-4.5, 1190 sec ISO 400.


Unfortunately you can see the light polution bleeding through over 20min

July 4th fireworks

In 2005 my brother got married. It just so happened that there were fireworks that night and many of the guests went out to look at the fireworks. holding by hand my olympus point and shoot I started to try and snap away a few photos with Cardiff Castle keep in the foreground. Eventually I got one, however with a poor shutter lag and no tripod, oh how I love a good tripod, it was near impossible to get a good one.


Almost every july 4th is spent in South Carolina for me. In 2006 I had my olympus with a tripod and tried to take a few snaps of the fireworks. However still, the shutter lag was not great and physically pressing the camera added shake to the photos in the low light conditions.


This year I was a man on a mission to get some good photos. DSLR, tripod, remote. All added up to this.

Beaches

This past week I have been in South Carolina on holiday. For the past 4 years my finacee and I have gone down to the beach with her family. The sole purpose of this holiday for her is to read books. As many books as she can. Growing up I remembered my brother during the summer holidays reading books, not playing with me.




Did I mention that I dont like reading books.



The first few years I went stir crazy. Every member of her family sits down and reads all day with the exception of a few who read half the time and play Batchi Ball the other half.



I play as much Batchi Ball as I can. Its still not enough. I make Sand Castles, even though it seems that the only other people doing that are 15 years younger than me. This year more than the last few I took my camera. Now to me a beach can be very boring. Its very flat and featureless. After a while I ventured out clutching my D40 with care and snapped a few pictures. This is what I came up with.

What is this Jellyfish?

Online Buying and Reviews

While I was researching into buying my Nikon D40 I searched the internet looking for good deals and reviews. There were several pages that compared prices such as shopcartusa.com these would show you the internet sites that would sell you what you want at their prices allowing an easy comparison. I was looking for a Nikon D40 with a 18-55mm lens. For comparison I will tell you that at the moment Circuit City normally retails at $499.99 plus tax. Other local retailers such as Ritz Camera and Cord Camera sold them for similar prices. Online retailers were showing prices at $330 and up. I was flabbergasted.That was CHEAP! So cheap it made me feel a bit dirty.

During an idle conversation with Jeremy about cameras in which I asked him why I feel so dirty for it being such a cheap price, he pointed me towards the midwest photo and camera exchange. Having ducked out of work early I went to show them the prices of cameras to see if they could match the price. What I was told by them and other high street stores (it's a British phrase meaning well known. They dont all have to be on High Street!) was that there are some websites out there thatseem to good to be true.

I was told a story of a online company that would sell you a camera and then put it on back-order until either you cancelled it or coughed up alot more money for batteries and chargers.

I was also told of a person who bought their camera off a website and sent it to Nikon to get fixed only to find that it was stolen and Nikon kept it.

These stories are vey helpful, but sometimes I have to wonder whether these stores have a bias against online retailers. Either way the infomation was helpful. My view on the matter is that unless you know of someone who has already shopped using a particular online retailer it will always be a bit of a gamble. The retailer who I eventually purchased my camera from was B&H photo which are located in New York. I have only heard good things about them from everyone I talked to.

Looking at magasine and customer reviews. They all gave the D40 good to great reviews. Except one. I think. I'm not too sure when it comes down to it. There is a website called digitalcamerainfo.com who review like I have never seen in my life before. They take it seriously. If you dont believe me look at the technical review of the Nikon D40. That is a boat, nay an ocean liner full of effot. Basically it got me a bit down because if you read the conclusions of the D40 it said that it wasn't nearly as great as other makes and was poorly made. Except that if you read the reviews of the cameras that they list as better, they rip into them as well. If you weight the overall scores from the D40 (~600) against the Fujifilm S5200 (~330). I guess it means that the D40 is twice the camera! We will just have to see...

Night time photography

This has been a driving force for getting a digital SLR camera for a while now. One of the first photos I took with my Finepix was of the plough (ursa major) over my home village in England.


I tramped out my house at about 9pm with my camera in one hand, tripod in the other. I got up to the top of the hill above my house and set up the picture. It took me a while but eventually got the stars to start to appear on my pictures. The trouble came when I got home to look at the photos on the computer. The gainyness of the photo was just so terrible.

As with low light shots you have to make an effot to capture the stars.

Using the manual setting, set the aperture of the camera as wide as you can. Aperature is measured in a value called an f-stop. You want to make the number as small as possible.

Secondly you have to increase the shutter speed to as long a time as you can. If you are lucky enough, you can increase it to maybe 15-30 seconds long.

Now try the photo. How does it look? If you cant see stars this is when you want to increase the ISO number. My opinion on the ISO number is this. Keep it as low as possible. By increasing the ISO number what you are doing is effectively bunching light receptors together. If the light is too weak to trigger a response from one receptor it can group local receptors together and in doing so increase the response but also increase the grainyness of the photo. The above photo was taken such.

f-3.2, 15sec, ISO 1600.

By getting a DSLR I will now have a bulb function open to me. Blub refers back to the old days when the photographer will squeeze a rubber bulb to open and release it to close it. Effectively it means it will be a manual shutter release. By doing this I hope to increase my shutter time on the order of minutes allowing me to decrease my ISO number and getting a crisper nicer photo in the process. We will just have to see won't we?

My personal inspiration for this type of photograpgh is a man by the name of Art Wolfe (American of course). This photo has been a constant insipration to me.

It was done on a single piece of film. Firstly he took a photo for 1/60sec or so during sunset. A filter was used to keep the sky black. He then waited til night to take a 8hr photo of the stars getting what I can only call a magical image. Unfortunately I can only keep my shutter open for a maximum of 30min. I still think this is much longer than I should need for anything I may want to take.