amateur photography

Yes, but is it ART?

Well no, not if it's one of my photographs.  

There are photography purists who eschew the Phaustian Phrivolity of Photoshop.  It must all be done 'in-camera' they shout.  Or rather, intone, in hoarse sibilant whispers...   

Interesting thing about purists.  There are usually some sort of unspoken parameters around the purity that they espouse.  So the vegan accepts that their transport to work is probably powered by an engine using oil, diesel or gasoline, all of which have come from the sacrifice, albeit billions of years ago, of millions of tiny animals and plants.  All those millions of tiny screams....  Aha - I use a bike I hear you cry - yes, it has bearings that are greased, a chain that you need to oil.  But I walk! - yes on tarmac'd pavements, billions of tiny animals, PRESSED into roadways.  Now that's not awfully nice, is it? 

I'm not really being serious, I don't really have it in for vegans, and life is tough enough for them without us giving them a hard time I think.  All that cardboardy stuff they have to eat for starters...  Stop Stop STOP.

Apply the same argument to musicians - Maxim Vengerov, astonishingly talented violinist, imagine hearing him warm up in the green room before going on stage to play the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and saying to him "You shouldn't really need to DO that you know, if you were a real violinist you wouldn't need to practice at all.  You should have been able to do it from birth.  And by the way, are those GUT strings you're playing on ???"

So back to camera purists - the argument is that you should just get it all right 'in camera' because that's pure art, everything else is fakery and devilment.  

So we find the same parameters around the concept - first, you need a camera - well, that's not natural, is it, I mean, were you born with one?  if so, my commiserations to your mother that must have been extraordinarily painful for her.  

But seriously, modern cameras do tons of stuff for you, set the tone, focus the lens, visualise the world through fluorine coatings to reduce flare, balance the aperture settings, exposure, shutter speed, and compensate for the hand tremors you acquired when you were drinking 7 pints last night.  

Landscape photographers often use Neutral Density filters in front of the lens to bring the brightness of the sky down, so the picture is evenly exposed.  I would ask, have you ever picked a bunch of Neutral Density filters from the side of the road?  Or grown a peck of flash units in your shrubbery?  Or perhaps you've hand drawn a condenser microphone on fine parchment paper and clipped it to your camera?

The thing is, back in the day of film cameras, a true photographer was a rare thing, struggling with a technological beast that couldn't even focus on its own, let alone get the lighting and exposure right, and most of us (me included) would use up reams of rolls of film and hardly get a decent shot out of them.

Personally, I'm a bit of a tart, and that is because my Art needs Work.  I have shown some of my 'before' pictures here, in previous blogs:  Nobody want to look at that stuff, do they?

I'll admit, I've toyed with the fakery of posting something like a close up of a bug, with an accompanying caption saying "I set up this shot to take advantage of the moonlight striking the carapace as the beetle opens its wings for the first time", implying this magic was somehow all planned, when in actual fact the real caption should have read "I took about a million of these, hand held, in my back garden, using high speed continuous shooting with my eyes shut, and blow me, ONE of them came out OK".

I particularly like it, by the way, when someone posts a picture of something with an obvious flaw in it, and then pretends that was part of the composition.   "The out of focus grandmother scowling in the background gives a sense of history..." etc etc etc

From my perspective, photoshop is just a continuation of the magic you can make with modern cameras,  

Without special astrophotography software like Autostakkert2! (it really is called that) you wouldn't get decent pictures of nebula and constellations at all because the light is so faint - and the technology allows you to stack photos on top of each other and use them to strip away the blurry bits and anomalies - here for example, we have two images of the moon, taken with the same camera and lens combination.   

One of the original photos.  Canon 5DSr, 100-400mm lens, teleconverter, 1/250, f14, ISO 640

The final image.  Stacked from over 300 of the original shots

Pretty unbelievable, isn't it?  Genuinely is taken from the same photo.  So there's definitely some good reasons for a little bit of experimentation, I think.

I can understand that photographers sometimes go a little overboard and you get those horrible over saturated photos that remind you of early postcards of Torquay.

And who among us hasn't used photoshop for the odd visual gag.... 

I have two dogs.  I also don't have hordes of swarming wildebeest outside my back door.  Usually.

This particular photo was sent out at Christmas and had several relatives asking me pointedly "How many dogs do you have NOW????"  The Wildebeest, not a comment.  Well, it is Leeds - as my bank manager in London once said "Leeds.... they have sheep all over the road up there, don't they?" to which I responded - "Not so much, not since we got the wheel..." 

So to finish with, two more photos, both of these were taken using a macro lens, and compiled of about 30 photos, with different focus points on the flowers, stacked and merged shamelessly in Photoshop.  

Oh the scandal!

Until the next time!

Canon 5DSr, Sigma 150mm macro lens, 1/160, f3.5, ISO 100

Canon 5DSr, Sigma 150mm 1/15, f4, ISO 200 (same flower, indoor lighting)

Making Money!

OK, so not really making money, but I've found another thing that doesn't mind being photographed.  Coinage.   In fact I've found money to be something totally devoid of feelings or morality or ethics, which I'm quite grateful for given how much I have abused it over the years.

However this is a little post to demonstrate progress, or better still How Not To Learn To Do Something.  Take me into a shop, where I can't find what I want, supermarket, clothes shop, camera shop selling millions of tiny and very specific accessories, do I ask for help?  No, absolutely not.  I am unable to do this.  I will quite happily, or unhappily, wander round the shop constructing a complex catalogue of everything irrelevant they sell, in the hope that I will chance across what I'm looking for.  Don't ask me why, some childhood traumatic experience relating to abandonment maybe.

So it is with my progress in learning how to use new computer software like Photoshop.   Do I book myself on a course? No.  I skulk around Youtube watching various small and perfectly formed videos and attempt to piece it all together in my own head.

So it was with learning how to produce photos that were entirely in focus from the front to the back.  This is something that can be difficult in everything but the most wide-angle shot, where you can sometimes set the focus point to near infinity and pretty much the whole picture is in focus.  Mostly with everything else, part of the photo will be out of focus.  It also comes up in macro photography where the bit of the picture that is in focus (depth of field)  is so narrow, it literally doesn't even cover the width of an insect.

Excellent example of a narrow depth of field - fly eyes bang in focus, rest of fly not - and you can see a 'stripe' of leaf in focus that also demonstrates it

There are photographic ways around this of course, there is a sort of triangular relationship between the shutter speed (slower speed lets in more light), the aperture (smaller apertures give better depth of field but let in less light) and the ISO (film speed, how sensitive it is to light), and you can mess about with these three - or alternatively you can just flood it with arc lights, but macro photographers tend to frown at this because you're supposed to be photographing the insect, not frying it.

However, one way to do it, is the ubiquitous 'stacking' technique - used for different reasons in astrophotography, but in macro photography, you can simply take lots of pictures, with slightly different focus points and blend them together.  It's got to be the same broad image to be able to stack them, so it is impossible to do in the field, and that brings us to the other no-no in macro photography;  it's not considered the done thing to photograph dead bugs, put simply.  

You could glue one on a stick and take hours photographing every micromillimetre of it, but it wouldn't be accepted among your photographic peers.  I have done it once with a dead butterfly I found, and I have to say, I felt spiritually soiled afterwards and I never shared it...

So we come to the bit about Learning How To Do Stuff.   I found a youtube video which talked about some basic photostacking techniques you could use for landscape photography.  You load all the pictures up, put masks on them (no I don't know why either) and then paint out the bits that aren't in focus.

So this first picture, is an example of a penny.  Or rather it's 11p.  It is 11 photographs of a penny, photographed with different focus points, and painstakingly blended together by hand, using a mouse, and leaving me with a slightly more frozen shoulder and slightly worse eyesight, as well as several unproductive hours older.  However it looks quite good, I think.

 

So, I have done many photos this way.  And quite by chance, the other week, I discovered that you can load the lot into Photoshop, and press the 'AutoBlend' button, and it does it all for you. 

Second attempt, using More Money is below.

Both photographs taken with Sigma 150mm macro, first shot taken with Canon 70D, second with Canon 5DSr.  Tiny dents in the £1 coin on the left probably due to Sookie, my dog, trying to eat it.

First photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 2 hours editing it.

Second photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 5 minutes editing it.  To be fair, 4 of those minutes were spent with my computer going 'AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH what the hell are you expecting me to do with this lot????'  The working file size was 254Mb, or, put it another way, 8,000 times larger than the memory held by the Apollo Command Module used in the first moon landing. 

Progress.  Very slow progress.  But at least I didn't bother anyone...

Descent into Astrophotography

Even an Annoying Man With A Camera can't annoy stars.  

Having lived in UK cities all my life, with all their inevitable light pollution, I didn't really know stars existed, until I visited New Zealand and the Coromandel Peninsula, and I looked up and saw the Milky Way for the first time.  WOW - where have I BEEN all my life????

Cameras are not very good at managing extremes of contrast, so where your eye can cope quite happily with a sunlit sky and a landscape, your camera will quite often over expose one or under expose the other.     But in astrophotography, they really come into their own.  You can look up into a night sky and see maybe 10 stars, but take a photograph of it with even the most rudimentary DSLR and you'll be amazed at what the sensor has picked up.  

So we start with this - 

And the camera sees this...

This is the same image.  To be fair I've faked the effect slightly because obvs I can't demonstrate to you how your eyes work, you are looking at this with them, so I've simulated the effect with the original picture, and the same picture, that has been worked on in Photoshop to enhance the contrast a bit.

I thought this was absolutely mind blowing, and I was pretty impressed with my own handiwork, but a quick search on the internet will show you that these are beginner pictures compared to some images that the big boys (and girls) post on the net.  Some of them are actually boys, too - one of the most spectacular shots I've ever seen was posted by a 17 year old who has obviously spent far too much time on his own, and who is headed for a successful career in astrophotography, just as surely as his genetic line will die out with him.  

The camera will pick up the faintest points of light, so faint that it will actually pick up stray photons that hit the sensor - and register that as a 'star'.  So although this is pretty, it's not that accurate.  Some of the stars you're seeing, are not there. 

Of course in reality quite a few of the stars you are seeing are not there - they burnt out billions of years ago, but their light just hasn't finished getting to us yet. 

There is a whole realm of utter geekdom in astrophotography, not just in the equipment, where surprisingly the actual camera is the cheap bit, but also in the post processing where you truly descend into Astronerdia - however I'll try to chip away at that massive topic in another post.  

For this post, I'd like to concentrate on what I had to do to get this shot.  

So picture Sutton Bank, a 'dark sky' site about 40 minutes drive away.  I had to wait for a clear night, of which there have been, let me see, in 2016, three of them...

In the UK we're blessed with three different weather systems, one coming from the arctic, one from Europe and one from the Atlantic, and they all fight with each other, giving us mostly, well, clouds really.  Which is partly why British people are so obsessed with the weather.  So actually getting a night that is clear, and REMAINS clear while you drive for 40 minutes to Sutton Bank, is a challenge.  

These shots were taken in Summer so, with the long summer days, that means waiting until about 2.00 in the morning to take the shot.  It's getting less attractive, isn't it?

So, waiting up until 1.00am, then bundling the tripod, camera, two layers of thermals (yes, I know, in JULY) and a hefty wrench, into my car.  The wrench is not actually essential photographic equipment, but a safety precaution which will become obvious shortly.  

Finally I arrive at the car park of the Sutton Bank Visitor Centre.  I pay my £1.50 car parking charge, even though nobody will ever know I was there, because I had an honest chip embedded at birth.

Interesting thing, waiting in my car in pitch darkness for the sky to clear, is a whole lot creepier than standing outside it.    If you have the interior car lights on, all you see outside is a wall of black, harbouring axe murderers, chainsaw wielders, venomous snakes, crocodiles (I have a fertile imagination).  

There are strange noises.  Some startling - sitting in your car with all the lights off and the doors locked, when you haven't fully read the car manual can, for instance lead to your car alarm going off.  More unsettling are these strange dull thump noises coming out the dark woods.  Days later I was told these were conkers, dropping off the trees.  It was that quiet they sounded like poachers taking pot shots in the dark.

Sutton Bank has an atmosphere all it's own at 2.00am.  I'd like to say quiet and peaceful, but peaceful isn't quite the right word.  Menacing, threatening, intimidating, 'they found his body in some woodland, drained of blood' those are better words.   Now you understand the need for the wrench.

I had driven around up there once in the early hours, trying to make myself feel more comfortable.  There are occasional farmsteads up there, usually with a yard lit with one solitary light, and a lot of dark corners and the vague feeling that these premises have witnessed a lot of inbreeding over the centuries, producing a lot of closely related cousins who have an unhealthy interest in chainsaws.

So that didn't make me feel any better.   

I set the camera up on the tripod, with a manual wide-angle lens (Samyang, really good optics, completely manual so no autofocus - but autofocus is useless for astrophotography anyway).  I used something called the '600 rule' to decide what the exposure should be - it's a calculation based on the focal length of the lens, that will allow you to expose the sensor for the maximum amount of time without getting 'star trails' as the stars move across the sky.  

It means that with a wide angle lens you can expose the sensor for about 20 seconds for each picture.   It actually takes 40 seconds to take a shot like that because after you've taken it, the camera takes another picture, with exactly the same settings, but without exposing the sensor.  This is because the rays of light are so dim that tiny fluctuations in the sensor can appear like photons - so having taken two shots, the camera compares the image shot with the dark shot, and if there are 'stars' on both, it knows the one on the image shot is a fault, and cancels it out.

To take really good astrophotos, photographers use the same technique by shooting sometimes hundreds of photos of the same image, and software can compare all the photos, delete out the anomalies that come from stray photons, atmospheric waves, passing jets, and produce one, much sharper, picture.  

This picture is compiled from about 30 photos and has been stacked into one image.  Posterity will judge whether it's better than the ones above, but theoretically at least, it SHOULD be a more accurate picture because there shouldn't be any stray photons or faults masquerading as stars.

Canon 70D, Samyang 14mm manual lens, F2.8, ISO 1600, 25 second exposure (30 images)

Of course, while you're up there in the dark, taking these multiple 40 second photos, time passes, you get colder.  Random people drive past in their cars and you wonder idly what you would do if one of them stopped, and say, 4 burly guys with a chainsaw got out...

You keep thinking it was such a trek to get out here, I'm going to stick it out as long as I can.  And you don't know until you got home whether you got anything that's any good or not.

One time I went to Sutton Bank, it was winter, so I could take advantage of the shorter days. 

Cold, shorter days.

I stayed out too long, and the reason I called it a day was because it was getting increasingly difficult to stop my breath fogging up the lens, and I was vaguely conscious that my fingers were not working as well. On this occasion, I wasn't in the car park, but deep in the woods, where, paradoxically, I felt safer.

I looked down at my tripod, and saw this. 

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Ice, on a tripod leg

Time to go.

I was having to take my glasses off to look at the back of my camera and so around this point I put them down and decided I should call it a day and pack up. 

Put them down.  

Where?  

I'd just put them down somewhere in the grass.  No idea where.  No matter, I thought, I'll just use the torch and get the reflection off the glass.  But by this point all the grass was covered in ice too, so everything was glittering and reflecting, and I gradually realised that a) I wasn't going to be able to find my way back to the car, and b) I wouldn't be able to drive home anyway...

Oops.  Obviously it wasn't just my hands that had been affected.   Incredibly stupid thing to do, meaning I was going to have to ring my partner and ask if he'd drive 40 minutes, then hike into the darkness somewhere to come and get me, because I'd mislaid my glasses.  Otherwise there was a pretty good chance I was going to die out here of exposure.

About 15 minutes of frantic searching later, I found them, so I'm pleased to say that the outcome of this story is I still have my glasses, and a relationship.  

So ended one of my last forays to Sutton Bank.  I dare say there will be more.  One moonless night, the stars will call to me, and I will away.

It's still easier than street photography.

In The Beginning...

Every so often on a photography website, you'll come across an article about how to fulfil your interest in cameras, and still keep your family and friends.  How to go on holiday without being an utter pariah for the people you travel with, and the people who cross your path.  How not to turn every family occasion into one where you are hunting among the guests pointing a bottomless circle of black glass at them and asking them to 'just be natural'.

One day, I hope to find that balance;  but not today.  

Life's a continuum, isn't it? and so it is with photography.  When I first got a camera, I was far, far over one end of the spectrum, and thus I have very few photographs from that time.   I used to find people's reaction to my camera so un-nerving that I hardly ever got it out.    

As I have got older I have learned to confront the world more, and to care less what it thinks. Nevertheless, you will not find street photography one of my strong points, or portraiture.  You will never see a picture on my website of an aged Yak-herder looking suspicious.  My photos currently have a common theme, peace, tranquility, very few people.    

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Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

See, in some subliminal way, even this building is NOT LOOKING AT ME.

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Grand Canal, Venice

And these ones, are quite clearly asleep...

 

Nevertheless I'm getting better at this.  When my partner says 'Oh god you're not bringing your camera, are you?', I don't put it away, I still bring it.  

And as the continuum develops, I hope one day, not only to bring it, but to take some photos as well.  

All things happen in time.

This does, however, stand in the way of good photography.   So, in the interests of becoming a better photographer, I'm learning to push the boundaries a bit.  This blog will be about that journey.  And who knows, by the time I reach the end of it, maybe I will have reached the far side of that continuum, the wedding photographer, the one that makes you do star jumps in your wedding dress and marches around barking orders at your mother in law.

Every cloud has a silver lining, eh?

This isn't a blog that will teach anybody about being a good photographer, at best, sharing my experience may make other budding photographers feel they have a companion along the way, but hopefully as time passes, the photos will improve, so if you don't like the blog, you can just look at the pictures! 

To end on a positive note, the thing I really like about the photography world is the good nature with which so many people approach it.  In spite of having the capacity to be a massively tekkie, 'boys' toys' type of world, there doesn't appear to be a gender bias, men and women get equally enthusiastic about it, and there's absolutely tons of stuff to learn.  There isn't a great deal of negativity either, the camera market is dominated by two big players, Canon and Nikon (with some other players who are trying AWFULLY HARD) and people are generally very nice about whatever equipment you use.  There is an abundance of spectacularly good photographers out there, and they generally seem to be a very tolerant bunch. 

Apart from the annoying ones, of course...

Distant view of Leeds.  No people...