Pie Palace

I was going to post about the street social in support of Ottawa’s Gay Village, but Picasa ate the photo of the poster that I wanted to use. Why did it eat them? Because I saved them to C:\Documents and Settings\Erigami\My Documents\My Pictures\temp which happens to be the directory Picasa uses to temporarily store stuff to the local disk before copying it to the target directory. Doh.

Here are my pics from Lumiere 2008. There are three broad categories: light painting, long exposures, and conventional photos.

Light painting

Let’s get this out of the way straight off: I don’t like using flash outside of a shoot. It’s bright, it’s obnoxious, and I find it hard to control.

A poor man’s flash is a flashlight and a long exposure. My flashlight was a crappy little LED jobby that dangles at the end of my keychain. It isn’t very bright, but over a long exposure, it does the trick:

I set my camera up on a tripod, got out the flashlight, opened the shutter (1/2 sec), and sprayed light all over the robot. Because I could direct the flashlight, I was able to get highlights on its chest and face without drawing attention to the surrounding frame. The picture isn’t fantastic, but I’m pleased that the painting highlighted the areas that I care about.

On a similar vein, there’s a tree with hanging lanterns. Since I knew that the lanterns were going to be blown out in any image I took, I left the shutter open long enough to paint the tree trunk, base, and foreground leaves with the flashlight. I was hoping that there would be enough light thrown out by my fellow festival goers that some interesting patterns would be thrown onto the sensor. I was in luck: the streak on the foreground and the flash on the mid left add two interesting features. I also lucked out with the lady in the blue sweater – the vivid light blue adds a splash of colour to the pic, and her pink baby sling is almost the same colour is the extinguished lantern beside her. Not intentional elements, but they add to the quality of the pic.

Long exposures

I took the long exposures of the paper baggy labyrinth. There were dozens of people wandering through it, so a short exposure would have caught too many people. Since I’m not a fan of photography without consent, I went for long (15s+) exposures so they’d disappear into the background. The labyrinth was under a set of bright lights, meaning that I had a chance of picking up detail.

[caption id="attachment_660" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Heftily cropped labyrinth from afar"][/caption]

I cropped these two so tightly because of the angle: most of the frame was filled with grass at the bottom, and orange sky at the top. None too interesting, so those part of the images ended up in the bit bucket.

The first year I went to Lumiere, I took a picture very similar to this. For some reason, the ordered rings of baggies centered in the right catch my eye. I’ll have to bring a ladder next year to get a more aerial view. I like the streaks and ghostly people.

Conventional Photos

And now, dear reader, you witness my idiocy. Something I knew I should have nailed down my ISO, exposure, and exposure adjustment (ie overexpose by 1.3 stops) before the fire dancers started performing. Did I? No. Did I stick on my 50mm lens and leave it on for the whole performance? No – I fiddled around with a much slower telephoto. Did I trim my flash and use it to improve the colour balance between the dancers and the flame? No.

The pictures aren’t bad, they just aren’t as good as they could have been. The ISO was higher than necessary (with the 50mm lens I should have been shooting at 200 instead of 800), but the duration (.6sec) was perfect. I probably could have dropped the duration down to .4 and caught more of the dancer’s face:

[caption id="attachment_664" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Fire Weaver doing poi"][/caption]

The remaining sundries are decent. If anything, these pictures make me question my lens. The 50mm Pentax lens left weird green ghosts opposite some of the flame. On top of that, the damn thing seemed to lose focus and spend forever hunting around. If I was gutsier, I’d try manually focusing (or letting the camera choose its focal point), but I don’t have the cajones to entrust a once-in-a-year event to my crappy eyes or my camera’s choices.

Every year I say “Hey! I’m going to post about Lumiere early!” and I never do. Continuing on with that great tradition, here’s my annual last-minute post about Lumiere:

OMG! Lumiere! Fire dancers! A local event organized by people who live in Ottawa! (And a chance to take pictures of awesome fire dancers)

Follow this link to take a gander at my fire dancer pictures from 2006 and 2007.

(Forgive the crappy quality of my 2006 photos: My SLR ran out of film and I went to town with a recently purchased Canon point-n-shoot. The pictures looked reasonable on the camera’s screen, but there wasn’t enough light)

Anywho: Lumiere is on Saturday, August 9, 2008. I think it’s in Strathcona Park, but the link on the Lumiere website is broken.

Here are a few pictures of the demolition of the south side stands at Landsdowne Park. The City has a short video from the north side stands.

Photographic observation de jour:

1. Make sure your batteries are fully (and freshly) charged before heading out to an event. I was using batteries that were at 50% (according to my camera) and dicked around trying to replace them just before the stands went boom. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
2. For fast events that are happening at a known location, use a tripod. If I’d been six inches lower that branch obstructing the top of the stands wouldn’t have been in the way. I knew that when I was setting up, but I was too rushed (due to battery idiocy) to scootch. A tripod would have ensured that my photographs were set up properly. Hell, even a monopod would have done the trick.

I was taking a photos at the Icebreaker soccer tournament this weekend. A few things worth noting

• 1/100 of a second isn’t nearly as fast as I thought it was. With a telephoto at around 100mm, there was still significant motion blur from the movement of my camera. I’d consciously turned off shake reduction (WHY? WHY? WHY?). If I’d had SR on, maybe I would have been able to use a few more of the shots.
• I was shooting at low shutter speeds to try and create a feeling of depth. At 100mm, f12-f16, with a subject ~40 feet away, I had a depth of field of about 35 feet. In my books that’s too much. If I’d forced my camera to stay around f8, I’d have had a much more dramatic DoF: 10 feet; but that would have started interfering with my motion blur. I’m starting to wonder if a monopod would have helped. ¹
• Shots from behind the net were the most dramatic. A few of the games I was watching went to shoot outs, so I had a nicely choreographed play to track. I opened my focal length up to 50mm, which was probably a mistake, as it didn’t compress the kicker to look close to the goalie, nor did it give me enough of an angle to catch the ball hitting the corners of the net, although stepping back 5 or 10 feet probably would have helped.
• I didn’t have a chance to take many “vertical” shots (ie, the camera 90° to horizontal), mostly because the action was moving too quickly.

1. Numbers from DOFMaster. (back)

I’m taking a photojournalism course at SPAO. Last class our instructor told us to get used to shooting in a few different modes. His suggestions: for indoor, use a default of F4, for 1/60 of a second; for outdoor use F8 for 1/250 of a second.

A nice article listing (presumed) photographer’s rights in Ontario. Of course, it’s been collated by a non-lawyer, so your kilometerage may vary. Via TWIP comments.

If you want to use Canon’s PhotoStitch, but you’ve lost your installation disks, follow the instructions on PinWire. Of course, if your pictures are on an Ubuntu box, you can just use Hugin.