Light painting, night photography

Following last weeks attempts at light-painting I browsed around a bit more on the subject. Apart from forgetting the vital connector-thingy to my tripod, the main trouble I had was actually focusing on the subject. See... its dark... so I upped f-stops and made a wild guess. Apparently the simple way of doing night-time focusing is simply to buy a cheap laser and highlight the subject. Since autofocus works on some sort of light-phasing principle it can use this small beam to automagically focus - no need for flashlights.

Stumbling along I also found the group Light Painted Tunnels at Flickr, looks neat! Heres the Flickriver link

Video and encoding

This weekend I tried to shoot video for the first time and the results are both interesting and mixed. As an example I tried to do some narrow depth-of-field effects as shown in the video below... (mute the audio!!)

...however the result is a bit mucky. The parts that are out of focus are severly "blocky" and generally poorly displayed. I'm now trying to understand where and when this happens or if maybe this type of composition is not 'possible' technically.

My next attempt at this will be to use a different color profile to capture more detail in shadows. As shown before - the color profiles affect the algorithm for the video codec. Recently a new profile was released after one year of development, the Cinestyle by Technicolor.

The effect of this profile is clearly shown in the video below - just look at the immense difference in detail in the shaded areas between the different profiles:


Anyway - back to experimenting!

Photography weekend

Had a great weekend of photography with friends, a lot of gear in one place! Shot mixed videos/photos, will see if I can create something with it over the coming days/weeks. Below one of our nightshots - had some real fun with flashes and mobile cameras


ISO 200, 18 mm, f/7.1, 20 seconds, light: iPhone 4 flash

Even more video

Having fun exploring what my camera (EOS 550D) is capable of in the right hands and with the right complementary tools. This guy uses a combination of stuff to take this BMX-ride in the park to a different level.

Gear
Shooting mode: 60fps on camera
Shutter speed: 1/1000 to 1/2000 for freezing the action
24-105 L lens: responsible for those narrow DOF shots

Applications
Twixtor: From my understanding this is an application/plugin that is able to intelligently slow video down way lower than usual without artifacts
After Effects: Video editing suite to add the graphical elements to the video

Anyway, here it is!

David duChemin

One of the first books on photography I picked up was Within the Frame by David duChemin and I have not been able to let that one go. It is part photography, part philosophy and simply shock-full of photos that make an impact. After testing out a few different forms of taking photos this is the direction I would like to pursue for the time being. Set your sights high and all that. I just ordered his Vision and Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom book and will try to use the information there on some of my existing shots to get the full workflow going.

David also has an extensive blog and portfolio. The shots below are from his Flickr account.