Two light trails

This is one of the really fun things about shooting at night. The camera sees the world very differently than our eyes do. Our brain tells us that what's going by is a discrete object, and we see it that way. The sensor just picks up reflected light. No vehicles were harmed in these reflections.

I'd just finished an HDR sequence when I heard the fire truck coming. Since I was already set up I just pressed the button again, and the truck came into view just at the end of the exposure. I like how it looks like it's going into the pub, rather than past it. I didn't actually see the fire truck with my eyes.

The sharp-eyed of you may have noticed that the three buildings look ever so slightly different. That's because I made different choices in how the perspective is treated. In the top one, the vertical lines recede and meet somewhere way above the photo. That's ok when there's nothing vertical near the sides of the frame. In the bottom one, the vertical lines are parrallel. That makes the buildings look fatter at the top and appear to be leaning out a bit.

If I had made the camera level I wouldn't have those problems, but then I'd chop off the top of the buildings and we'd be looking at acres of boring pavement in the foreground.

It's all artistic choices. I'd love it if you were to come along on a walk with your camera, and I can see the choices you make. A buddy sent me a map of all the Beltline murals. (hint hint)

Three cats

We start with the familiar two.

Then this mural in the belt line during a ramble with Cam after beers and camera. Both of us stopped as soon as we saw this, and worked to figure out how to capture it.

That was a bit of an adventure, trying to get the building and the moon in the same shot, with an acceptable perspective. It started quite skewed because of the wide lens and the angle I was shooting. It's still not quite right, but it's as good as it's going to get. Plus there was a power line I didn't notice while shooting, that had to be removed. Made the kitty look like it was on a leash, and we can't have that.

There are a bunch more murals in the Beltline, maybe I should go out and look for them.

Two of a park at night

Last night was a beers and camera meet up. I don't often attend these, but it's one way of getting out in the evening, with a chance of running into some existing buddies, and making some new ones. Both happened, which is nice.

Normally the plan is to meet up for beer and food at one place, walk and take photos on the way to the next place, then have more beer. It all started well. However the second place was a complete gong show. It was full, and loud, and other than our group, everyone in there could have been my grandchild. It's essentially a video game arcade that serves booze. Did I mention it was really really loud?

Cam and I bailed out and strolled west towards the light sculpture on 13th Ave. I'd never seen it at night. It's kind of cool, but it doesn't photograph well up close (for me, at least), and the graffiti doesn't help. A bit of a distance is fine though. Look carefully at the bottom photo, just between the tall buildings.

One of the fun things about shooting at night is that the camera can see things that our eyes can't. So for us, the sky looks dark. But taking long exposure shots lets you see what the sky looks like. I like it when the clouds emphasize something.

Here's another view of the park. Last I was in it, I was having a picnic lunch with a friend. It was much warmer and not as colourful.

There's other photos of the ramble on the way.

A bench by day and night

You never know what you'll find when you go out for a walk with your camera. This bench, for example, was a prop for Linda in Image of the month, a year and a half ago.

Here's the image itself, in case you don't want to click on the link to go see a bee, an ant, and a rose.

Yes, the view from that bench has changed a lot. What was green is now almost a road. A major highway, actually. Walking along the top of the berm is not as nice as an experience as it used to be unless you've got a thing about construction equipment. It doesn't look any better at night than by day.

But the interesting thing was capturing the bench, using it to block out some of the ugly yellow from the current road, and see if I could capture at least some stars. Yay me!

The time since then has passed in a blur. It seems like there's always something on the go, some next thing to do, or prepare to do. We're gradually finding the pace of life in retirement. Getting up and going to work is a slog for most people. In the latter part of my so-called career I didn't mind much because I was doing work I enjoyed.

But it's a routine, and to some extent while you're doing the routine, the routine is doing you. A certain amount of regularity is enforced by day to day work life. Now I can sleep or work on projects whenever I want. But I've been cautious about staying up late for astro photos, mainly because of my screwed up sleep patterns from shift work. I don't want to get all messed up again.

So even though night is a really interesting time to go looking for photos, I haven't done it all that much. In the summer the sky doesn't get all that dark here. In the winter it's easy to get night shots without staying up late, which is good. The trick is staying warm, and for me, keeping my hands warm and still be able to operate the camera.

The other of my evening projects is watching some movies or shows and figuring out some of the writing details. Why these scenes in this order? Why cut there? How to pace the story for commercials (most TV shows on DVD you can tell where the commercials have been chopped out). How to blend the overall story arc with the monster of the week? How to make character actions plausible, and help the watchers understand that character?

In one sense, watchers have it easier than readers, if everyone has done their job right. The scene that takes a couple seconds of screen time might take several paragraphs of actual description, and since most readers don't like big expository lumps, the words have to be spaced out. How, exactly, so it's interesting to the reader is why writers make the big bucks. (That noise you hear off screen is all the writers who are not Rowling, or King, or a very few others, gnashing their teeth.)

Lately I've been on a Coen kick. Watching the story twist and turn as people are impaled by fate or bad decisions is an education for a story teller. They have found ways to take an established film idea, and twist it into something interesting. Plus it's not just the story, it's the people in the story. How to make them interesting is the key to the whole thing working.

Yesterday I was helping a buddy do some studio work. Mainly this involved helping to set up and take down, and moving things around as necessary while he was doing camera things. During lunch afterward we were talking about out our photographic interests. I'm still coming to grips with mine, after several years of working at it, but part of it is to make the ordinary interesting.

By that I mean finding a way to make a compelling photograph from everyday elements. It's nice to find a new angle to shoot from, but for many things that's not possible. It's finding interesting light to shoot in, or a reflection, or much more detail, or something happening that adds to that element.

I don't think you have to travel to the ends of the earth to get interesting photos. Right now I'm about finding the interesting photos near home. And really, the journey is more interesting than the destination.

Not just 2x as good, 10X!

During the recent night workshop by the famous Neil Zeller, he said that reflection shots don't make things twice as good, they make it ten times as good. And he's right. Here's proof. Actually proof of two things. One is that reflections make things better, and sometimes the second attempt at something isn't just better, it's way better.

Most of my readers have seen a photo of our house from this direction, though the camera is usually at eye height. A perfectly ordinary corner lot bungalow in Calgary. It's such a boring shot I won't bore you with it.

This first one was done the other day while I was out for a walk. It's nice enough, and better than a straightforward shot, but I wasn't entirely happy with it.

Fortunately I got a second chance at it today. I'm much happier with this shot! Moving the camera back about 3 inches and an inch to the left makes all the difference. Some nice light and a bit of cloud helps too.

Two camera lessons

Last night was another astro night, as you may have gathered from the photo. I learned a new thing. Two things, actually, and I'm going to write about them to help me remember them. Whether it's new, or interesting, or useful to you is another thing entirely. YMMV and all.

My camera, like many others, lets you get all set up, press a button, then it will click away till it runs out of battery or memory card. So far so good.

It also has a function where you can set a specific number of shots, and that's what I tried last night. Except it didn't. See that space in the arc of the stars? That's the camera stopping a whole lot sooner than expected, and me figuring out what happened. Eventually I got it going the same way I did a few nights ago.

Turns out that 'interval time' is not the time from the end of one shot to the beginning of the next. No, it's the time from the beginning of one shot to the beginning of the next. I was trying an 8 second exposure, with 3 seconds between shots, or so I thought.

What actually happens is the camera starts the first shot, counts to 3 seconds, and can't take a shot because it's already taking a shot, so it counts another 3 seconds, still shooting, another 3, and it's finally able to take another shot. It does so, and the little counter thinks it's taken 4 shots. Your nicely planned sequence of shots isn't happening.

If you want a nice star trail, you want the minimum time between shots. Just long enough to write the data to the card, in fact. So what I'll do next time is figure out my exposure time (probably between 5 and 15 seconds) depending on circumstances. Then I'll add a second or two, and make that my interval time. Easy peasy, once you know.

The other thing. Back button focus. I'd read about this a while ago, but it didn't really sink in, and the instructions to set it up sounded a little arcane. What the people that write the manual call various functions hurts my brain. But after my night shoots where I'm playing with focus and exposure and composition, all while not dropping the camera into a puddle, I understand why you'd want to do this. It separates the focus function from taking the shot.

An example. The camera is mounted on a tripod. It's -10C so you're wearing gloves. Twiddling the tripod head while peering through your viewfinder to set up your composition is mostly ok. But things are probably out of focus. So you touch the shutter button to give that half press so you can see exactly where the edge of the building is in relation to the edge of the frame and if the image is level.

Except, oops, click, and the camera is recording the scene. If it's night, it might be a fairly long wait till the exposure is done. If you're bracketing it might be 10 seconds for the first shot, 5 for the second, and 20 for the third. That's a really long time when it's cold and you're impatient to get on with it. Normally I just swear to myself and wait, but you might remember I did one where I played with it, here.

But now there's a separate button for focus. Twiddle with the tripod head for composition, and press the focus button. Refine things and check focus again if required. Then take your shot(s) knowing that the camera autofocus isn't going to mess you up. Even better, as long as you're shooting something the same distance away, plus or minus your depth of field, you don't need to do anything but press the shutter button. No fancy pants camera refocussing happening.

Even better, imagine you are a high paid sports photographer. Your subject moves more than your depth of field so one focus setting doesn't work. If you hold the focus button down it tracks your moving subject, while you fire as many shots as your camera will let you. I tried it this morning with a bus at 50KPH, shooting through trees. The shots are banal, so I won't bore you with them. I took 16 shots in 3 seconds, at a slow 1/60, (this was between sunrise shots) with the camera ignoring the closer trees. The bus isn't perfectly in focus due to the combination of it's speed and the slow shutter speed, but the trees are blurred much more, so it's working.

One last thing. I've missed many shots because it was dark and the autofocus didn't work. This way it takes the shot without checking focus, which might be a good or bad thing. But if you've set up properly, you can shoot nearly in the dark, say at a kids halloween party, and get shots that can be brightened up in post production.

At first it seems a little weird, but after a few dozen photos this morning it's becoming more natural.

That photo, since you asked. No I'm not out in the boonies. I'm in the green space across the road, trying to capture the various aircraft heading to and from the airport. I've got some ideas I want to explore on that topic. Settings are 103 shots in StarStax, f1.8, 6 seconds, ISO 100, (yes, 100, not 1,000) and yes, I know you want this lens.

The one non reflection shot

I was disappointed in most of the shots from my Fish Creek ramble on Sunday. Some I goofed on, like when I'm bending over or kneeling down, holding the camera just above the water, and trying to get the shot right when the primary thing is to keep me and the camera out of the water. Lots turned out to be the camera not seeing what I was seeing, which might or might not be my fault.

In the end, and this is one of the last shots of the walk, I had wonderful stroll through a beautiful park. This is bridge 3.

I've come back a number of times to the pattern of rocks or snow just on the other side of the bridge, and somehow, I haven't quite been able to capture the photo I think is there. That's beginning to happen to me more often as I see the same places in different light.

This is more than not having the right lens on hand for a shot. It could be as simple as the wrong light. Sometimes the problem is an inability to get the camera to the exact spot it needs to be. Maybe there is something between where the camera has to be and the subject, and you aren't able or allowed to remove that something. Or the background sucks.

Or, I could just be wrong about there being a photo there.