A photography technique that frequently catches my eye is the use of silhouette – placing a subject directly between a primary light source and the camera. The effect can be painterly or haunting or evocative. It can break a subject down to basic ideas conveyed only by line and shape, where an individual might appear iconic. Collected here are a handful of recent photographs from around the world, where we can only see the outlines of the subject, our minds (and the captions) are left to fill in any details in the darkness.
On my recent vacation we were back at our old digs, where I had gotten the previous shots on my DLSR, and set up to use my Exilim high-speed camera (EX-FH20 model). We got a visitor within a day, and some more action over the course of the week. Mostly females, though it’s tough to say if it was just one repeatedly visiting or not, and I did spot a male, with its prominent red patch on his throat, on one or two occasions. After discovering that reaching for the camera and turning it on usually scared them away, I went for the option of mounting the camera on my Gorillapod and placing it on the table in front of me, requiring only a click to turn the camera on (it tended to shut off during the wait for a visit to the feeder). I also left it running while I stepped away, and then scanned the footage for evidence of a visit. The drawback of that option is that 5 minutes of elapsed time is more than an hour of footage at 420 fps, and almost three hours at 1000 fps. That’s a lot of data to sort through. The fixed targeting of a tripod caused some missed shots when the bird would hover about a foot away from the feeder, but the alternative was more missed shots. The difference between this and shots “in the wild” is that you know where the subject is going to be — at the feeder — and don’t have to track it as it flies. And you know it will be flying, unlike the many potential subjects who just sit there until you run out of patience and stop filming. That’s when they decide to jump or fly.
I got shots at both of the faster frame rates, along with some stills using the burst mode, which captures 40 frames in a second.
Here’s a sequence of stills from the burst mode, turned into a movie
Now we go to 420 fps
and finally, on to 1000 fps. This last movie is even better at showing the distinct change in the pitch of the wings as the bird moves away from the feeder, hovers, and then flies away. Which is pretty cool.
Note that all three movies should represent between a second or two or so of elapsed time. 420 fps = 14:1 and was 37 seconds long with some dead time at the end, and 1000 fps is 33.3:1, with a playback of 40 seconds. I slowed the frame rate of the stills down to 15 fps when I converted the sequence to a movie, to make it last longer than one second. Even so, the flap rate seems very slow for that sequence — I suppose it’s possible there’s aliasing going on, and/or my settings are different from what I thought they were. Other still sequences show more flapping. The sound they typically make jibes with what I get from the internets, that the beating is somewhere in the range of 20-200 Hz; it was this low-pitched fluttering that was my first indication that a visitor was nearby.
I did get many more shots, but uploading them to youtube is a bit of a pain — the upload generally craps out at least once, which makes me reluctant to try too many large files. I have had limited success with the java option which supposedly lets you restart a stalled upload (finally got the 420 fps movie shown here to upload; I had originally uploaded a shorter clip).
If you want to see how the pros do it, go here. Better shots, but they put in a whole lot more time and have better equipment at their disposal.
Time-lapse sunset at Lake Chautauqua, though it loses something with the youtube compression. The lake is not slanted — that was user error in setting up on a bit of a hill and not noticing that the camera wasn’t level. 12 second pause between shots, and the twilight is extended because the camera was on autoexposure, so it compensated for low light by taking longer exposures. Also used a polarizing filter to cut some of the glare, since we know that light reflected off of the lake will have a component that is linearly polarized, parallel to the water.
Here’s how bad it has gotten: Not long ago, an Amtrak representative did an interview with local TV station Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to explain that you don’t need a permit to take pictures there–only to be approached by a security guard who ordered them to stop filming without a permit.
Legally, it’s pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you’re not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, “The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you’re entitled to photograph it.” What’s more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that “the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act.” But this doesn’t stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don’t seem much like national-security zones.
Polar-to-cartesian unwrapping of flower photographs is the new flattening flowers between the pages of books. The Processing source code is available. NotCot applied the effect to chandeliers. I dorked around in Photoshop a little and you can get similar results using the “Polar Coordinates” filter…you just have to stretch out the image first.
Using geotagging to determine what tourists photograph vs what the locals photograph.
Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).
Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.
In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work into three minutes, 52 seconds
As any regular reader knows, I purchased a movie camera last year, which allows me to film movies in slow motion, covering actions with frequencies out to perhaps several hundred hertz — normally film at 420 fps, but can go to 1000 fps. This year, I went in the other direction. I bought an attachment for my DSLR that allows me to take time-lapse sequences, which I can then stitch together.
Here’s an example from last night. The weather forecast was for late-afternoon thunderstorms, but unfortunately for this demonstration they passed to the west of me on their way into Pennsylvania. We did get some rain just after dark, and this is the development of that storm system, shot at 30-second intervals over the course of about three hours.
The attachment is called an intervalometer, which a pedant (who, me?) will note is incorrect. It’s not a meter of any sort — it’s not measuring anything. It merely sends a trigger signal to the camera at a programmable interval.
