Orchid petals

The apartment I got when moving down to München had this orchid plant standing in the window. After giving it a minimum of water, it rewarded me with the most interesting flowers, of which I of course had to take pictures.

The mouth of the flower, while the most colorful, turned out to be hard to make a good composition from. Instead I looked to the petals, which have a veined-ness that is frequently overlooked. I took this with an on-camera flash bounced off a hand-held small bounce (the walls in that apartment had a color cast). Took me some tries to get one where the veins were really accentuated.

Part of the reason for bouncing was to make sure the shadows from the other petals were nice and soft, as it was more or less impossible to not include them. The black background is intentionally made by placing a black office chair there.

Notes from online videos

I watched a couple of videos while eating lunch, and took some things away from them that I need to remember - and in particular that I want to remember for this afternoon's photo walk.

From this video, I got some tricks on natural light portraits:

• Have the subject look towards open sky, to get the reflection in the eyes.
• Be in the shade
• Have a natural reflector (typically a big building) nearby.

I want to find some places that are good for this, fortunately we have a lot of massive buildings in München with open space around them.  I want to find out if I can get a strong studio-like side light by being close to a reflector, and if working in full sunlight works if right next to a reflector. I also want to find a couple of readily accessible places that are good for this, and note at which time of day they are best. I didn't care too much for the flatness of his light, though, so I'll have to see if being a bit more extreme in the lighting is better.

From this one, I learned mainly to watch out for light coming up from the ground, but also that columns are useful for portraits - and we have a few of those around here. I like how he has a little cloth-covered set -- not for an 8x10 camera, but for his laptop. It would be fun to make a set-up that looks like a classical camera, but is actually a laptop used as a "viewfinder", something like on the right, but preferably a little more steam-punk as well.

This one told me that I need more reflectors - especially adding the last one made a huge difference. But also the little things like straightening the elbow, adjusting the hair and clothes, and turning the fingers -- these are the kinds of things I never think of looking for.

Pictures from planes

Every time I travel by plane, I want to take pictures of the landscape passing gently but quickly underneath. I have only very occasionally managed to get anything useful out of my attempts, though. It's a tough environment, after all: Constant shaking, limited viewport, thick crappy slabs of transparent plastic, lots of UV light, extra haze, and typically bright light. Our eyes adjust, but the camera struggles.

Here's an example of a picture that works out, though more in an abstract manner than a direct depiction. It took some drastic manipulation to make it useful, so I'll go a bit more into details:


The first version is how it came out of the camera; had I been the type to delete on the camera, it would have gone.


The second one is with auto white balance and auto toning. Not much better, but you can start to see things.


The third and final one is with manual adjustments up the wazoo. For the Lightroom users: Exposure -1.2, Blacks +100, Brightness +58, Contrast +100, Clarity +77, Vibrance +45, Strong contrast tone curve with Highlights +49, Lights -11, Darks -100, Shadows -15, and finally a graduated filter over most of it with Brightness -21, Contrast 13, Saturation -8, Clarity 51.

This is a massive adjustment that would normally ruin a photo, but for these pictures, it's the only way to save them. And it's only because it's shot in raw that there is so much to save. To determine which of the shots I'd taken were any good, I applied the more extreme of these settings to all the shots, and got surprisingly many I liked.

Fleeting light

Photography has rightfully been called "painting with light". In most cases, the light plays the role of oils on a canvas, but sometimes it comes center stage (to mix a metaphor) and really make everything else the frame. Those instances, alas, are few and fleeting, partly because of the differences between how the eyes and the camera sees the world.

"Bush at Sunset" ©2010 Lars Clausen
Buy this photo at Redbubble.com

I remember when taking this picture outside Odense, Denmark that I felt like I'd missed the good sunset and was just taking photos because, well, I had little else to do out there. Only when I came back and saw it on the screen did I realize how the light had played out beautifully. I guess if I went out much more often and looked at the pictures immediately after, I would eventually get to recognize what light actually makes for good pictures.

Rocket of flowers

Flowers are so obvious a photographic target that they are difficult to make interesting photos of. These flowers stood at the corner of a building, with the sun just barely peeking around the corner. I had to twist into a very specific position to ensure I got the translucency without having the sun itself hitting the lens and destroying the contrast. It turned out nicely.

Unintentional blurring

Blurring is probably the main new idea that photography brought to the art world. Both blurring to show motion (in several ways) and blurring to show depth of field are very common photographic techniques, and all photographers should know how to use them effectively.

What's less common is taking a completely static scene and intentionally moving the camera while shooting. I've seen a couple of attempts at making intentionally blurred images this way, with some amount of success by Alain Briot, less so with most others. Mostly, I find it pretensious, a sort of anti-art breaking the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules, and I have shied away from doing it intentionally. However, I can't avoid getting shaken pictures with some frequency (especially when using a long lens), and ever so occasionally one of them gets a special expression of its own that's actually better than what a sharp picture of the same scene would have been. Here are two that I particularly like.


The first one is from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, taken while driving past some scattered houses in a bus. Between the clouds, the dirt on the window, and the shake, this image has a desolate quality and a dreaminess, as of half-forgotten places on the outskirts on reality. It works mainly because the blur is parallel with the houses, where it's most obvious, and isn't really noticable on the forest.



The second one is from Englischer Garten, and in this case my shake is very random and even across the photo, though with areas where it is not noticable. It gives an impressionistic style that removes the image from the mundane and adds some mystery, a sense of ages past and idyllic French villages.

Which is of course a total lie, but that's photography for you.

Telling a story

One of the main things art can do is tell a story. Traditionally, this has not been the forte of photography, being more the domain of songs, books, motion pictures and comics. But when a photo manages to do more than portray a place, a thing or a person, it gains power and interest.

I don't normally try for the story-telling approach, finding it easier to bring interest through shape, composition and color, but when I find a story told through one of my pictures, I find that it is elevated to something more than its plain technical and compositional contents. It comes alive, and becomes funny or sad or encouraging or puzzling.

When I took this picture, I just looked at the pattern of the ski tracks. Only at home did I notice the one track leaving the rest and ending badly. That, in all its simplicity, is a story.

Tree trunks

Like many photographers before me, I gravitate towards the strange shapes and textures found in tree trunks everywhere. From the straight and stately beech to the knotted, twisted old oak tree to the jumble of intertwined branches found in bushes, they fascinate me. Especially when shown out of context to stand on their own, they are familiar items displayed in unfamiliar ways, drawing attention to parts you normally pass by. Here are two examples from opposite sides of the Puddle, worlds apart in tree style, shape and artistic treatment, yet drawing on the same love of the twisted and knotty yet sturdy wonders of nature.

Carry a *really* long lens

This photo may seem mundane, but the fun thing about it is that it's taken with a silly, silly setup: The EF-S 60mm macro lens plus an 8x CrystalVue teleextender. The thing to note isn't the incredible quality, but the fact that it's of quality at all. There's quite a bit of blue/red fringing around the camera, but the hand actually has quite a bit of detail. I borrowed it from my brother, who kept getting bad vignetting with it on the compact camera in the picture. Not sure why I didn't get any, but we're swapping this for the smaller 8x CrystalVue teleextender I had lying around.

Yes, I know it's really small aperture, cheap glass, etc etc, but it's fun to play around with, and I definitely want to try it out on my 55-250, which it would turn into a 440-2000 (!) mm lens. Dunno if it'll work, but it'll be fun to find out. I'm a fan of the idea of front-mounted tele extenders. They allow for having a larger entry pupil, so they don't necessarily cut the aperture as badly as a rear-mounted one. Unfortunately, they are mostly made for compacts and video cameras, so generally not of the best quality and with small rear pupils. I was amazed that there was no vignetting to speak of in this case.

The image is so small because I'm using a limited version of the LR/Blog plugin

Moving time

If you take a careful look at my blog profile info and the posts in this blog, you'll notice some posts that are older than the profile. How's that? Elementary, my dear Watson, this blog has moved from its old home on LiveJournal (where the ads finally got to be too annoying). And, it got a new name in the process: Walk Softly and Carry a Long Lens.

This name came about as I looked over shots from my various outings. I tend to take many shots at many focal lengths, but was finding that the most striking and interesting images were taken at longer lengths. For instance, the photo on the right was taken in a crowd of costumed people at 250mm. While I have other nice photos from the Fasching party at Viktualienmarkt, this is the only one that really "speaks".

So while I used to have my "walkaround" 18-125 lens on my camera by default, now it's the 55-250 that lives there. It has a nice zoom range for getting details and still getting some context when needed. At the same time, I would like to get an ultra-wide like the Sigma 8-16, but that would call for a different and much more deliberate style of photography.

When normal isn't normal

One of the first things one learns when starting to look at lenses is the concept of a "normal" lens; in 35mm terms, this is usually taken to be the 50mm lens. The reasoning behind this is that at that focal length, the perspective looks similar to what we see with our eyes. Use a wider lens on the same subject (i.e. going closer), and the closer parts of the image will look larger than normal (which is sometimes what you want, e.g. in landscapes). Use a longer lens, and the foremost things will look smaller - which turns out to be useful in portrait photography and can also give a striking effect in other cases. But many photographers like the "naturalness" of a normal lens.

But try looking into how the 50mm definition was arrived at, and things get a little blurry. First of, the "true" normal focal length for 35mm cameras is 43.3mm, since the standard definition of normal is to be equivalent to the image diagonal. 50mm was picked by Leica because it's easier to make a slightly longer lens. Choosing a 45 or 40 mm (equivalent) would be more normal, but only a little bit.

But where did the standard definition of normal as equivalent to the image diagonal come from? This is where it gets interesting. It's picked based on the idea that images are typically viewed at about the same distance as the diagonal, and *at that distance*, the perspective appears natural. View it from further away, and your eyes expect a longer "normal focal length". Stick your nose right up next to the picture, and a wide angle suddenly appears normal. But in a "free" viewing situation, people will supposedly tend to look at things at approximately the right distance, stepping back to take in all of a big picture, and leaning in to see a small one. It would be interesting in a gallery or museum to do a study of what people actually do.

However, these days most pictures are not viewed in a gallery or even on your wall at home. They're viewed on a computer screen, which gives a quite different situation. Let's take a closer look at what that means.

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp roughly half of their users - which tend having towards newer and larger machines than the internet average - use a resolution of at most 1280x1024. However, panoguide - probably a better sampling place for photographers - say that 25% of their users (in 2009) used 1024x768 monitors, probably translating to roughly 20" or laptops of about 13". 

The suggested viewing distance for monitors is between 30" and 40", though for laptop screens one is more or less forced to go down to about 20". Thus the viewing distance is roughly (very roughly) 150% of the diagonal, giving a "normal lens" length of 75mm.

But how often do you actually fill your entire screen with an image? Not too often. In the typical viewing environment - a browser - there is space taken by the window system and desktop, space taken by the browser, space taken by headers and footers and side information and whatnot. For horizontal pictures, there's usually not that much loss, maybe 30% of the width. Since the picture is scaled down proportionally, that means the diagonal is now down to 15", or 10" for laptops. "Normal" focal length is now 100mm equivalent. Whip out those macro lenses!

It gets even worse if we consider vertical pictures. Since most of the lost screen real estate is vertical, and the screen typically is placed horizontally, we can easily get down to 10" or less. How's a 150mm lens for normal? 200mm?

You'll notice a lot of "typical" and "average" and other assumptions in the above. Which only goes to show that there's so much variability that when it comes to viewing images online, there really is no such thing as a normal lens.

What I want to do when I win a bazillion dollars is open a gallery with plenty of viewing space, put up some sort of face recognition system that can determine where people are actually viewing various size images from, and get some solid data on the gallery situation at least.

In the meanwhile, all I can do (or hope others will do) is get some statistics from the browser and ask the user about viewing distance. That at least could give some clue as to just how normal normal is.