Fire! More fun with shutter speeds

I had the camera in the car today, on the way home from the office, when I came across the fairly common sight of a local farmer burning a junk pile near his horse corral. Inspiration struck and I pulled over and asked permission to take pictures of the fire. It didn't strike him as anything worth taking pictures of, but he humored me.

Again I set the camera to Tv, shutter speed priority, which has to be my favorite camera mode because I use it so often when feeling creative. I hadn't really explored the upper reaches of the camera's shutter speed and here I was in bright daylight-- I thought, lets see if I can make the fire stand still!

First, I started very slowly. With the apeture closed all the way to F36 (which the camera's computer simulates--the lens itself physically only goes to F3.5), the image still overexposed greatly with a shutter speed of 1/4th of a second. I had to bring the gamma down with the computer afterwards to create this image, which is kind of a creepy one if you ask me:


In the corners you can see that this shutter speed actually captured quite a bit of blue flame. Oooooooh...

I started to creep the shutter speed up. 1/15th of a second:


At 1/400th of a second the fire looked pretty realistic. The mirage effect of the large amount of heat being generated was also being captured realistically:


I continued to take photos with progressively faster shutter speeds. 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/3200, etc., until I finally reached the insane shutter speed of 1/8000th of one second. The result detail captured by the camera is pretty neat:



1/8000th of one second shutter speed. Did I mention this camera is cool?

Lets Play Ball!

In order to cement our status as true blue fans of the Kansas City Royals, Morgan, Greg and I went to the "open house" sneak preview at the newly rennovated Kaufmann Stadium on Sunday afternoon.

The Curse of the Royals Spring Promotion struck, as usual, and the weather was miserable-- light flurries, temps in the high twenties, and wind blowing at about 40mph. Thousands of true blue fans showed up anyway.

The stadium's rennovations are very nice, but the weather was so ghastly that its depressing to even look at most of the photos I took. Freezing cold people huddled together against the wind, in a grayscape of cloud and freezing rain. It just didn't look like baseball season, either at the event or in the photos I took there. Frustrating, but I will have other opportunities to take photos of Kaufmann in better conditions.

I did enjoy setting the 40d to shutter speed priority and taking some pics of the children's carousel they've installed past left field. I'm still having a blast with the Av and Tv modes the camera offers. I know these pics are fairly standard in composition but I really like them. I'm getting better at conveying motion while still creating a coherent image.





Outside, we located one of the best presents I've ever recieved-- a brick installed in front of Gate C as a gift to my wife and I from our friend Greg. Even the weather couldn't dampen Morgan's smile as she stood behind it.




I bought some basic materials and turned my bedroom into an ad hoc studio. I don't have room or funding for a proper studio, but I hung some white linen shower curtains from the bedroom wall, put some white sheets on the bed, and bought a couple of large shop lights for additional lighting. I can set it all up and take it back down in 5 minutes if I wish, and I convinced Morgan to pose for a bit of formal portraiture, since I have been doing candids exclusively since I bought the 40d. My primary concern was generating enough lighting and making that lighting flexible, and my secondary concern was creating a background that wouldn't distract. Of course I set my apeture wide open so the resultant field of view would be as narrow as possible, hopefully making the background blur into an uninteresting white field behind the subject. This being our first formal photo session, it took a minute for Morgan to get comfortable in front of the camera, but I was pleased with the results:




I'm still struggling mightily with flash photography, but its getting a bit better. I like my concept here, but would rather re-do it later on with better lighting, perhaps even outdoors in daylight, so I can avoid using the flash. Again with the distracting shadows, white balance issues, and loss of color depth, all so I could up the shutter speed enough to catch the ball in the air.



Even though its not remotely baseball related, I want to share one more. Of course I'm biased, but I really love my wife's eyes. The amount of detail captured by the 40d, even with ad hoc lighting is pretty cool. Morgan did a great job of holding still and putting up with having the lens constantly floating around her face. I'm a lucky man.

Action mode, uh, in action...

I went shooting with my business partners a couple of weeks ago and brought along the camera. It was overcast and very windy so there wasn't alot of available light, but on the other hand there weren't alot of harsh shadows either. Sport mode racked up nearly 500 images in just an hour or so of running drills. The good news is that at 6.5 frames per second you have a decent chance of catching spent casings in the air, muzzle flash, and other visually cool imagery.

We started with pistols, Kerry has good form here. A box-stock Glock 17, everything you need and nothing you don't:


Josh takes a turn with his Para Ordinance. Good recoil control here, notice that even with two spent casings in the air you can draw a line from his eyes right through the sights. This is how its supposed to be done:


The table in the background was set up as a barricade. Putting accurate fire on target while keeping as much of your body as possible behind cover is more difficult than it sounds, and not something easily practiced without physical objects to hide behind.

We moved on to rifles. I took a turn behind my old warhorse M4:


We test fired a customer's pre-89 Polytech as well. If you need proof that guns are good investments here it is-- these guns sold for $175 to $250 before they were banned from importation in 1989. In its current configuration, with underfolding spike bayonet, you could sell this Polytech for $1500 without much difficulty.



Erik brought an FN Tactical Police Shotgun which we all naturally just HAD to try. For a pump it didn't recoil very much, due to the barrel porting, recoil-assisted pump action, and its significant weight. I dutifully snapped away as paper targets downrage were pulverized.

Here you can see the barrel porting at work, venting expanding gas from the fired round upwards, thereby pushing the barrel down and cutting down on recoil:


As Josh pumps the action the spent hulls are still smoking:



We spent the rest of the session doing a couple of unorthodox prone positions, urban prone and reverse prone, which are handy to know but difficult to practice. Here, a cardboard box takes the place of a street curb for purposes of the drill. Laying on your back and shooting from behind a street curb is uncomfortable, but not nearly as much as standing straight up and being ventilated by the bad guys!



After seeing me run drills with the Microtech STG556, Kerry had to have a try. Though based on the Steyr AUG which has been in service since 1977, this is the carbine of the future as far as I'm concerned, and made in the USA to boot!


Kerry still prefers his trusty M4. Old habits die hard.


The last drill we did was the infamous "under the car" drill. You have to get extremely low, turn the rifle sideways and struggle with your sight picture as best you can. Since I wear glasses I always find it very difficult to get everything lined up and put accurate fire downrange from this position. Nevertheless, the technique stopped the infamous "Hollywood Shootout" of February 1997, and is worth drilling. Robber Emil Matasareanu had taken several hits to his upper body which had all been absorbed by his kevlar armor, and was in the process of hosing down squad cars with an illegally modified AR15, when an enterprising SWAT officer used this firing position from underneath his squad car and cut Matasareanu's legs out from under him. It was game over for the bad guy, and once he went down the acute lead deficiency in his diet was quickly remedied by several helpful officers of the law.

With a table and the "curb" box providing a firing port, Erik tries the "under the car" position with a full-length AR:



I think its just a little easier with a pistol, as you can hold the firearm more properly:



Good fun and good practice, but our time was over far too soon. With the post-November-election panic buying and the attendant skyrocketing of ammo prices, the round count was much lower than it would have been a year ago. With the entire country buying guns and ammo at a rate never before seen in the history of our nation, (60% more volume than this time last year and still not slackening although the election was nearly five months ago!) we would all do well to remember that a firearm is nothing but a liability and a source of false confidence if its owner fails to train to proficiency with it. It will not magically save your life all by itself with no effort on your behalf to master it, anymore than it will leap to life and kill you in your sleep out of some mechanical malevolence. Without proper training, our firearms are no more useful to us than they would be to sheep, who only know to run and inevitably be shorn when they cannot run any longer.

We, the masters of our tools, are the true weapons. It is that mastery which allows us to confront evil men and defeat them, and thereby earn the right to call ourselves good men.

She Lives in Yesteryear

Got a chance to take a day off work this week and visit my grandmother, who is in a rest home close to my extended family. We had lunch and spent a few hours in conversation with the matriarch. I enjoyed every minute of it. She has been diagnosed with alzheimers, and for her the memories of the past have a stronger grip on her mind than present reality.

Getting a few high quality photos of her was one of the main reasons for my purchase of the 40d. I'm still learning the technical aspects of the camera, and lighting conditions in the interior of a rest home were less than ideal, so I shot alot, did some exposure bracketing, fiddled with settings, and shot more. Almost 200 raw images in all. I'm getting better all the time.

I still hate flash photography. I greatly prefer just taking a pile of natural light photos and ignoring ones with blurs and other defects, and cleaning up the better ones with the image processing program. Flash is just useless to me, it flattens everything out, washes out colors, creates obnoxious shadows, and generally bothers the crap out of the people I'm trying to take photos of, resulting in posture and facial expressions that are less "real". Its hard to help people forget you are taking pictures of them while blinding them every few seconds.

So, screw the flash, here's what I came up with in the soft, orange light of the rest home....




I saw this expression many times and it is heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. She was always the anchor of the family, and now when one of her children talks to her she tends to look at them in the way that a small child looks at their mother or father. Sixty years ago, her children must have looked up at her in the same way, with the same dependence in their eyes, but now the roles have been finally, irrevocably, reversed.


Walden, a frail old friend, was brought by his son for the visit.


We had a few good laughs and I managed to catch a couple of them with the camera. I love photos of people laughing, because people aren't being self conscious about being photographed as they let loose with a good laugh. Its a very natural thing to do and a beautiful thing to be able to record.




The lighting inside was so dark that I was forced to put the lens aperture wide open, giving me a very short field of view. My father and my aunt were sitting right next to each other and yet I couldn't get them both in focus at the same time without resorting to flash photography. Nevertheless, the following two images make for an interesting comparison with each other I think.



I took alot of photos of Grandma's hands. I've been fascinated by them for years. Ravaged by arthritis, gnarled like the roots of an ancient oak tree, they speak a language all their own. She came by these hands honestly, and her finger still bears rings given to her in 1942.



Twin daughters and an only son. I did get a couple of decent, posed "mug shots" outside in better light, but I don't get the same joy out of posed photos that I do from candids.


Bless you Grandma. I know living like this hurts, but we don't want to part ways with you for awhile yet.

Bikes

I've been really busy the past couple of weeks. A ton of court during the days and even at night. Night court isn't as funny in real life as the TV show was, mostly its boring standing in lines waiting to see tired-eyed prosecutors with rubber stamps in their hands. Hey, its a living, right?

The other day a couple of motorcycles pulled up right in front of my law office. Had the camera lying around so I hopped out for a minute and took some pics, first of the bikes and then of the riders. The images turned out so-so, kind of bland really, I didn't feel like I really captured the essence I was looking for, so I started messing around with some image manipulation software to see if I could make something noteworthy from them.

This man's bike was wonderfuly old school. "Ape hangar" handlebars, a wire spoke front wheel with a single disk brake, and a matte finish to the fuel tank all make the bike very 1960s, which I really like. I was trying to be dramatic with the angle but I got it wrong, the handlebars don't look as tall as they really are for some reason. Even though I was lying on my back to take the pics (not in my suit, I didn't have court that day) the angle just isn't as dramatic as I thought it would be.



So I took the raw image and started playing with Gimp 2 image manipulation software. Using the "threshold" tool I came up with this version of the image, which I think is more dramatic. The rooftop in the background, which you probably didn't notice before, now becomes a dividing line cutting diagonally across the image. The rider's face is a stark contrast to the black background, his sunglasses and pouting mouth taking on a new attitude. I also love how the front wheel looks. When I think "Harley", I'm thinking something more like this:



The woman rider had a more dressy bike with lots of chrome and a very practical full windscreen. I loved the "Deluxe" emblem on her front mudguard. A little playing around with contrast and saturation levels netted this image, which is full of interesting colors and shapes (for an item which, on the face of it, has no colors but black and silver).



I also did this one by messing with contrast settings and the like. The cooling fins on the twin cylinder engine look like the ribs to a Terminator or something. I just like the stark mechanicality of it (now I'm making up words, look out folks).



As the bikes started up and rode past me I set the camera to shutter speed priority and set my shutter speed very low. If you do this right, you can get a pretty focused image of a moving vehicle with a blurred background, conveying the sense of speed. I've tried it before with some luck, for example on this pickup truck.



Unfortunately I think I overstepped myself a bit and set the shutter speed to a full second of exposure. The resulting images convey motion and a bit of the "wild horses" excitement of riding a motorcycle, but the vehicles themselves aren't very sharp. Props to the woman rider for flashing me a peace sign as she went by--thanks for providing my image with a focal point! I love it!

Playing with toys

A couple doors down from my law office is one of those multipurpose comic book/figurines/warhammer/magic-the-gathering type shops. I casually call it the nerd store, and happily walk in occasionally to check in and see what's going on in there, because I too am a nerd. I like to gander at the comic books, buy some back issues of The Punisher occasionally, and I especially like their extensive collection of carefully painted tiny figurines.

They have, uh, alot of figurines. This image has not been cropped or altered in any way, its simply a test to see if Blogspot can digest a raw 10.1 megapixel image and how it will display that image.



Did I mention this is a large image?

Phil, the proprietor of the nerd store, said he wouldn't mind if I played with the figurines for awhile. The nerds use the figurines for some kind of roleplaying game, and each one rests on a disk roughly the size of a quarter, displaying various attributes such as speed, power, magic, or the ability to order more pizza late at night. Again experimenting with apeture settings, manual focus vs. autofocus, and just trying to learn the camera, I started snapping away.

There wasn't an abundance of light in the store so with the camera set to auto, the flash popped up and started fill-flashing everything to death. At first my play was pretty uninspired. This photo does show a bit of the scale of things, these figurines are very small.



I soon put the camera on manual flash override and tried my best to hold it as still as possible while taking my shots. I also tried to get as close as I could while still maintaining focus. Again I found that for this sort of thing the manual focus beat the autofocus, not for precision but for control. The autofocus on this camera always chooses the closest object which is nearest the center as its focus point, and that's not always what I want depending on the composition.

I'm very pleased that I got the focus on this shot right. Look how short the field of view is, Iron Man's face is in focus but his feet are not. We are talking about a distance of well under an inch.



In this shot Batman needs to be in focus, not the dusty plastic railing in front of him. Manual focus was the only way to go here.



I took the same image and manipulated it a bit with the software that came with the camera. I cropped it tighter, increased the contrast, and removed some of the color saturation, as well as sharpening it up. I was going for a "Dark Knight Returns" aesthetic, how do you think I did?



That's enough for now. Next time, Harley Davidsons!