08-25-10 – The Book of Armaments

Ha! Good to know there’s a formal name for it. Around here, it’s colloquially known as frustration! 🙂

My plan is to keep on learning till the day I fall over dead.

So loki‘s statement there got me to thinking. That’s why I’m here, and I suspect it’s the reason for a lot of y’all, too – to try to learn from others, “steal” some ideas, and generally improve our own photography, right?

With that in mind, how does everyone feel about asking the winner of the week’s contest to do a short writeup about his/her winning entry? What thought process led to that pic, what equipment did you use, any special techniques, what did you learn from it – those kinda topics. If the #1 entry that week doesn’t do the forums, maybe skip to the highest forum poster’s entry?

Since I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I wasn’t willing to do, I’ll start it off. I hope no one looks at this as AW’ing (that’s really not my style at all). I’d sincerely like to see this from others and I’m just trying to get the ball rolling. Besides, I don’t anticipate having to do this very often at all. 😉

So, for “peace bullets” the idea just popped into my head, I took a couple of shots, and 15 minutes later I had my entry. NOT! I mentioned earlier that this was my first non-archival entry, but my original idea was to photograph my pistols (something like pic #2 from my alts) with a “Goldilocks”-themed caption (“but this one’s juuust right”).

First, I tried using a solid-color bedsheet as a pseudo-lightbox backdrop, but soon found out that the wrinkles showed up really well and since I wasn’t in an ironing mood, I moved on to other backdrops. Granite countertop was absolutely horrible, way too busy and the guns got lost in the background clutter. Next, I tried the wood table that’s the background of the #2 shot.

While I still didn’t really care for that pic (I thought it needed much better lighting), I DID really like the way the brass of the bullets reflected on the polished wood. So I tried various other “poses” to try to emphasize that and eventually just said, “what kind of design could I make with just bullets” and bingo – a peace sign. I know, how 60’s and ironic, right? I was worried that it might be too cliched, but I just really liked the gold of the brass against the deep red of the wood.

The equipment I used was a Canon EOS 30D with a 24-70mm lens zoomed to about 54mm and a 430EX flash on manual, ISO-100, f/11 to make sure it was all in focus, I/250 sec. Flash was mounted on the camera, camera on a tripod facing about 1.5 feet from the table. After focusing, I turned off the lights in the room so that the scene would only be lit by the flash.

I didn’t care for the results of the E-TTL automatic flash settings, so I put it in manual mode. I can’t seem to find the exact flash settings in EXIF, but I think I had the flash set to 1/2 power at 35mm zoom. I learned how playing with different zoom levels of the flash affected the picture – higher values (e.g. 100mm) resulted in more evenly distributed lighting across the whole picture, while smaller values (e.g. 35mm) focused the flash tighter and allowed the scene to “fade to black”, which is the effect I liked.

Edited note: U-Man believes (and I think it’s highly probable that he’s right) that I have the effects of the flash zoom settings reversed in the paragraphs above & below.

But the smaller zoom values also resulted in less light and a dimmer picture. So I kept the smaller zoom and bumped the flash power up a notch, which resulted in a slightly overexposed pic and then darkened the darks in post-processing, which resulted in the fade-to-black background and the brass seemingly “glowing.”

In all, I took about 50-60 shots at different angles and exposures over two nights before arriving at the one I entered (thank goodness for digital).

Things I learned:

1) A shallow angle leads to deeper reflections but then you couldn’t really tell it was a peace sign, so I had to find a good compromise.

2) Putting the flash on manual and tweaking the zoom level gives greater control over lighting (but does take a good bit of trial and error).

3) You may not end up liking the results of your first idea, but actually executing it might spark other possibly better ideas.

I wouldn’t mind reading other peoples writeups but I have a hard time just making myself not look like a moron when I write even this sentence. I have never been good with words, written or even spoken. And i think half the time I am not even sure I know what I want out of my camera if there isn’t a theme in mind from the start. Probably why I have never actually won one of these contests. A lot of the time I just see something and feel this urge to capture what I saw. I have not had good luck with planned shots. My best ever finish (the light painting for all night long) in a farktography contest looks planned but I had no idea what I was gonna do until I started running around in front of the camera.

Thanks for the feedback and congrats, U-Man.

So, unless the next few turn out pompous or something
That was my biggest fear about that post – both that I might come off sounding that way or that it might open the door for that. Definitely not my intention to make it an avenue for bragging.

Granite counter top
Interesting. Looking back at the couple I took there, I think I might’ve dismissed it too soon. I had too severe of an angle and not enough of a contrasting foreground. I really like that first shot – it’s very creamy, both literally and figuratively.

strobist
Oh man, that site’s been on my to-read list for a couple of years now. Proper use of flash is probably one of my weakest areas and I really need to invest some time there.

off-camera cable
Yep, been thinking about that for a while. I think I’d like to get some kind of remote radio-frequency trigger.

flash zoom thing backwards
When I was testing this, I assumed it would be recorded in EXIF and so didn’t pay attention to it as much as I otherwise would’ve. If it is in EXIF, I don’t have an app that will display it. So, given that you’re suggesting it might be reversed, I’d tend to side with you. 😉

square crop
You know, I was just so pleased with the pic that I didn’t consider cropping. I just went and tried it. I don’t really care for the true square, because the circle itself is at an angle and so is really more of an ellipse. However, if I do what I think you intended and crop it so that there are equal borders/margins, then I think you’re right – it emphasizes more of the circle and does look better.

It’s a neat idea but I don’t know that I would always have much to say.

Oh, I agree that not every week would be worthy of an essay, especially if it’s one from the archives. The write-up for most of my archive shots would consist of “so I was at this beautiful place and took a picture…”

But I guess even then, in some cases you could say why you chose a particular angle or what you were trying to highlight. But again, if there was no conscious thought to it, that’s OK too.

Keep getting bored, Orionid, it does wonders for your photographs.

I can see it now…. “So I got bored one day and tied my camera to a kite string…..” “So I got bored one day and stuffed my camera into a carboard tube filled with half a pound of potassium nitrate….” “So I got bored one day and bolted my camera to a shotgun…” “So I got bored one day and put the wrong film in the wrong camera…” “So I got bored one day and cut up a soda can…” etc, etc.

See, I’d like to hear a bit of the story behind some of those kind of shots. Surely your first one didn’t turn out and you had to make revisions. What worked/didn’t? How did your end result differ from your original vision?

If nothing else, my first question on some shots is “what were you on and where can I get some?” that allowed you to come up with that idea! 😆

yeah, but watching a camera catch a high altitude wind while snapping photos from 1300 feet on a 24 inch parachute and drift into the sunset does the opposite of wonders for my wallet and that warm-fuzzy feeling of success.

😆 Sorry, I’m not laughing at your misfortune, but I can vividly picture that scene and imagine the sinking feeling you must’ve had watching it fade into a dot on the horizon.

Well, I don’t know who originally said it, but I think “with great risk comes great rewards” might have to apply here. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that.

It’s okay, I laughed, too, once I got over it. As we say in model rocketry, if you can’t bear the sight of it shredding, smashing, bursting into flame, or dangling from a tree, don’t fly it. I got back into rocketry about 16 months ago after a 10 year sabbatical and have been pushing new ground the whole time with bigger, better, more powerful, etc. and have started to feel like Lockheed Martin in the 90’s, losing about 50% to either a launch/landing casualty or “too big of a parachute” syndrome.