Yesterday, several zombies arose in Brighton and done a walk all the way from somewhere to somewhere else. According to an official count from the main organiser there were around 4,000 of the blighters! 3,500 started out, with around another 500 latecomers (well, they are zombies after all) joining in as they went, and I done a photo of quite a few of them.

Most Of Them Had Red On Them

Click any one of the 15 photos below to go to the full version on Flickr. There’s 178 photos in total in my Flickr gallery. Sounds like a lot, but most of them aren’t rubbish, so it’s worth a look. You can click this to start at the first one, and just keep clicking “next” at the top, or you could click this for a thumbnail view of the lot. Aren’t I good to you, eh?

A: When You Give A Shit About Sharpness

I’d heard from people before that lenses were not always sharpest at their widest aperture settings, but never really sat down and checked it out. Reading an “e-book” about street photography just now and seeing the topic brought up again however, made me decide to check it out.

Well Gee That Sounds Exciting

Shut up!

Sorry. You Were Saying?

My 50mm f/1.8 prime seemed a perfect candidate to experiment with, so I stuck my Xbox360 pad in my light tent, both my 100W bulbs on it, and snapped four shots from my tripod, at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/4 and just for the shit of it f/8. At f/8 it was down to 1/40 shutter timing, even under dual 100W brightness, so it’s unlikely that’d ever get used, but I wanted a reasonably high end point.

Yawn

Well it turns out that, yes, the thing is rather pants when at its widest. See here, a nice four way 50% crop of the thing I was focussed on (the text of the “space” bar, set manually, at 10x zoom on the LCD, to make sure it was proper tight) essentially SOOC:

That’s Pretty Shit At f/1.8 Then

Yes, yes it is. I was quite surprised by exactly how shit it was. I think the shitness is exaggerated by the extreme bright light, mind, which is why it’s never been so clear before, but it’s always looked mildly pants when wide open, and I’ve always shot with it wide open because I bought it thinking it was an f/1.8. Now I know better, I’ll stick to f/2.8, or maybe even f/4, or above. Husss.

Oh and here’s the full shot of the pad at f/4 because why not.

When you desaturate it a little bit in Lightroom. What? This:

Amy Hughes from 365project posted up a new challenge earlier today, for a bunch of us to take a shot of a common object, and see how varied the results would be. I had a bit of a crazy idea and ended up with this:

The smoke looking like condensation as if it’d been in the freezer or something. Well, I’ve tried sticking stuff in the freezer to get nice billowy condensation shots before, and it didn’t work at all, so I got a bit creative this time…

1. Boiling water into steamer, light hob under steamer; generate smoke steam.
2. Place can above vented steamer pan; smoke steam eventually wafts around can.
3. Panic! Wall tiles too light, camera can’t see smoke steam!
4. Get chopping board, balance precariously on steamer handle; steam visible to camera.
5. Panic! Can looks dim and indistinct!
6. Grab conically-surrounded light bulb from light tent setup, angle upwards to illuminate can + smoke steam; can looks rad.
7. Et voila.

To finish, some desaturation in Lightroom to enhance the frosty look of the can, and lots of luminance noise reduction to combat the ISO1600 necessary to get the shutter quick enough to capture the smoke steam. Ended up using 1/400, as anything lower than this the fast moving smoke steam was just an invisible blur.

Fun!

Had an idea today – how about shining a torch onto the back of my finger, and actually painting with my finger? Light shining through, maybe I’d be able to paint with fingerprints being visible!?

Well, my mini maglite torches weren’t bright enough to shine through my fingers strongly enough for that. So I just did these instead:

I did cheat though – sitting in front of the camera I wrote these the right way as I was looking, so had to flip them horizontally. Derp. Let’s get literal:

Talking of derp:

Also: shining a light into your own eyeball and trying to light paint with it by moving your head slowly in front of the camera: actually stupid. That shot didn’t work at all, and left me unable to see (exaggeration: fairly strong) out of my right eye for several minutes. Oh man!

Also! This is my 200th post. Yay, or something.

Bokeh. Pronounced “bow-key” (ish) it’s a word I find enormously phonetically annoying which means “stuff in a photograph what ain’t in focus, like”; technically speaking, of course.

Well, specifically, points of light/colour which aren’t in focus, oft-times looking similar to this:

Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s rather boring. Luckily, due to some stupendously complex trickery of the photons, it’s possible to liven things up and shape this “bokeh” yourself, whilst leaving the contents of your focal plane perfectly intact. There’s a fine tutorial on how to do it that there’s no point me re-writing, but the basics are:

1. get a lens with suitably low f-number
2. get a bit of card (or paper)
3. cut out the shape you want your “bokeh” to be in from your card (the linked tutorial explains how big to make it, which is important to get right)
4. align this now be-holed card in front of your lens (as close as possible)
5. ????
6. profit

Mostly, as in that tutorial, people tend to create little heart- or star-shaped pseudo-lenses and thus create heart- or star-shaped “bokeh”, which is improving on the vanilla… but pretty played out.

I decided to go one step dumber better, and made the below. Now in this example I don’t have anything in my focal plane so you’ll just have to take my word for it for that stuff in focus wouldn’t be in the shape of STEVE, but, it wouldn’t.

Much better!

How? This:

Two 100W bulbs shining through holes poked in a black cardboard box, with the two parts of my little custom bokeh-pseudo-lens-holder(tm, naturally) shown there too. On the left, my painstakingly carved out “STEVE lens”, with the holder to insert it in to (which then fits snugly over my 60mm f/2.8 prime) on the right. In this way I can easily carve out other shit custom bokeh lenses and slot them in to the same holder. Bingo!

The size of your STEVEs (or hearts, or stars) depends entirely on how far out of focus the points of light are, so you can achieve varying effects with this:

Neat-oh!

P.S. I was hooked up to this tutorial by This Guy Named Jonti who does video production stuff in Brighton and is all round a bit of a camera dude. Happy now?!

Went for a wander around, as I hadn’t been out the house in a wee while. There’s nothing particularly spectacular but still, the shots are located hither.

This, in case your name’s Steve Love and you’re wondering where it is, is on the way up to Devil’s Dyke.

Fresh from my second failure at taking photos of liquids splashing, I decided to try my hand at something, while still experimental, definitely a little easier: strapping my camera to something in my car and doing long exposure night-driving shots!

I figured the passenger seat headrest would be a good bet, and bolted the 10-20 lens in place for wide angle loveliness. A length of CAT-5, wound suitably tight and wedged about the place, “secured” the SLR, and looked roughly as professional as this:

The remote trigger made up the final piece of the puzzle, and, whaddya know, it worked a bloody treat. Of the 105 photos I took, quite literally quite a few actually literally looked pretty awesome. There were a few duffers of course, but, overall, a resounding success.

Pretty much all of them are in le gallery.

So I went down to the pier and took some shots of it with a real long exposure, to see what’d happen. If you’d like to see what happened too, click the image.

So yesterday was the occasion of the first 365project.org meet up in sunny London, Holland Park to be precise. Organised by this guy Weng, I’d no idea who, or even how many people, would turn up, but went along anyway to see what’d happen. Blasted my way up there in pretty decent time, then got caught out by undocumented closures on t’underground and ended up over an hour late. Derp.

Turns out there were only four of us; Ross (the creator of the site), Weng and Alex. We wandered around the park for a bit, took a bunch of photos, Alex left the three of us to walk the streets where further wandering and photographing took place, then we went to le pub and shot the breeze for a while.

Altogether a grand day out, the results of which are somewhere around here.

This time to photograph a splash formed from a water droplet dropping into a thing with water in it. Has some complications…

• Shutter speed fast enough to catch the water in motion and not leave a blur
• Aperture f-num high enough to get the whole depth of the splash in focus

To satisfy these you need a lot of light and/or a high ISO rating, and I ended up using both, alongside some more white card to reflect a bit more light about.

Lack of secondary tripods meaning use of a PC case box to support the crazy lights from the light tent rig.

Using the chopstick to drip drops into the glass, hastily retract it and press the remote shutter release… about a hundred times, and we get this, which is almost mildly worth the effort.

Couldn’t really get enough of it in focus, and no more light sources to help boost it, and had other things to do, so that was that.