Bounce…

Well, so much had been going on with my camera as I'm trying to use every day of Ramadhan before it is over and I'd be back to work then! Well, I have to say that I can be lazy at times but I think I deserve this! Here, I will be taking off from where I stopped last time, as I was experimenting with High Speed photography. After finishing with dropping a cherry into some colored water, it was time to try out a bouncing ball!

Bounce!

I thought about this idea after applying the "cherry" experiment. I was trying to implement my old trigger (again)  but I ended up shooting all good shots with remote cable alone and changing the method of shooting in between sessions (the experimenting took about one week or more a bit): once using LiveView, and other times without it, and also using the Mirror-Lock option.

Splashing Boom I
Canon EF 100mm Macro, f/20,
8000^-1s, ISO200.

The results were majorly for splashes and droplets hanging in the air instead of the ball at the moment of bouncing, but many interesting shapes resulted with these water droplets. After my experiment with falling cherries, I've decided to increase the shutter speed to its max point (1/8000s) since that does not affect the power of the speedlites in general (the aperture does). I tried to apply another technique with sharpening when processing these images, as in Splashing Boom I and others, where I've applied sharpening to specific portions of the image only to pop out some features and make it look like a 3D image somewhat.

Splashing Boom III
Canon EF 100mm Macro, f/20,
8000^-1s, ISO200

I was lucky, after many, many, many trials, to catch the moment at which the ball was bouncing of the table (which was covered with aluminum foil and sprinkled with water), while running the camera on LiveView. Many successful attempts occurred later as well and they were rotated as is the case in splashing Boom III, but with variant beauty. In fact, even with Splashing Boom III, I noticed some slight blur in water droplets and the ball even though the shutter speed was at its maximum, 1/8000s. This made me search for ways to go around this speed in some way (technical or by technique) but I'll keep that for later. The ball here in Splashing Boom III might be blurred for being slightly out of focus after all, and for this reason I've decided to boost the f-number (to increase the depth of field further) in order to increase my chances of catching the ball relatively sharp. This, of course, forced me to change the speedlites sittings (all three of them) in terms of angle at least (all were working in full power after all).

Mirrored II
Canon EF 50mm, f/22, 8000^-1s, ISO200.

As trials went on, I've changed the lens to 50mm to have more space and increase the chances to catch the ball within the frame (it was a bad choice somewhat though since water splash details are not clear at that zoom level). Anyway, at this point I decided to work with Mirror-Lock option (which requires pressing the shutter button twice to shoot the photo) as I was trying to reduce the time lag. In an email sent to Ubertronix about such lag, they explained to me that such lag is usually due the camera's shutter and it would be better to connect the trigger to the speedlite; but this is not possible in my case:

Hi TJ,

The lag is from the camera not the strike finder device or cable length. If you can set up your shot with the Strike Finder firing a flash instead of your camera, the  lag will be close to 0. Let me know what you are trying to shoot and I might have some specific setup suggestions.

Check out the information concerning shutter lag of the 7d in this link  http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/E7D/E7DA6. The other thing you can do is partially depress the shutter release and hold it before a shot. That will cut your shutter lag from 83 ms to 61 ms based on these specs.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance,

Jane

The Information here were kind of a surprise since working on LiveView does actually longer lagging time than working in normal mode! However, not that, and not even working with Mirror-Lock and a trigger, did time correctly with this bouncing wall, which at the end drove me to work, again, manually and by hand. I noticed that I did capture better results using the Mirror-Lock option and I got the camera within the frame more often, but probably the best of them all was Mirrored II here in which the ball was just taking off with a tiny trail of water underneath it. I will check with possibilities to work with triggering my speedlites instead of the camera later on, but that would require to work in complete darkness (and the camera shutter is kept open for a certain time). When everything failed, though, I've simply punched the table…

Fist
Canon EF 50mm, f/22, 8000^-1s, ISO200.

I tried here again to picture the splashing water, but seems the water wasn't enough, and it is a good thing that I used 50mm lens; Otherwise, my fist won't fit in the frame. And apparently my skin needs some care! Now, all these shots (lot of them not shown here) need to be sorted out again and filled with information for uploading to stock websites.

Sitting for the bouncing ball experiment, with my Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. This was the initial position for speedlites, things changed later on as well as for the lens.

Finale

I could have gone further with this post, but I'll keep it short for now. There are other experiments I'm attending to at the moment, specially with my very old microscope with which I'm trying to shoot better and sharper images (so far images are kind of blurred). Along with the microscope experiments, I've been working on some various images ideas for our group's June project which is themed "Abstract." I might have some material to be posted by the next blog post.
Meanwhile, I couldn't keep my promise to myself for not placing an order right now, but I had to process an order for various items (and books) but I'm not in a hurry. Thus, all items were shipped for free (which takes nearly a week) and still to this very moment some items are being processed because they are not available. Some of these items are essential and I might talk a bit when this package arrives to me (which might be in July!). I consider this to be my own gift to my own self for my birthday, since no one I know around me would appreciate such gifts for me! Hopefully I'll cope with the finance later on.
As the financial situation is shaky; once up and once down, I'm still not sure about my plans to travel (and not sure where to). One thing is for sure: I need it. I need it like water and food. If only…

Colorado…

Well, Ramadan is here and boy ain't I happy to have a leave off work during this month! Despite my usual troublesome sleeping pattern during this month, yet I feel refreshed at some level and I'm eager to work with my camera more often than before (specially with me doing my experiments near my room). With May project with the group, which is about colors, I've started to re-kindle an old passion for high-speed. The work is still going on as I'm typing this, as there are a number of issues I need to fix still and some more ideas in hope I can try later.

Colorado

The May project was a priority, so I spent some time thinking about what can be done in that venue. It is easier said than done, as colors are everywhere but it's hard to get some concrete and unique work of art involving colors. In the beginning, I was trying to follow my typical steps in creating an idea: Find a deep emotion inside myself, and cast that particular feeling on the subject at hand, be it color, shadows, or whatever. However this step seemed hard and technically I was so mentally confused that I couldn't realize my own feelings or how to organize my thoughts! Thus, I had to shoot for mere fun and I started mumbling with my props and gear to find something colorful.

Colorado I
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/29,
250^-1sec, ISO100.

After playing around with some props and accessories, I decided to use the refraction power of water to create some colorful abstracts by using colored Popsicle sticks placed in a separate glass jar behind the glass of water. Later on, however, I've decided to add corn syrup into the water during the shot (putting the camera on timer while pouring already). This was just to add some action to the scene instead of plain silent colors. There was no need to high-speed mode as 1/250 of a second for the shutter speed was enough to kill the ambient light, but the greater hardship was in having a proper framing for the shot since I was working inside my room and could barely have a proper distance to stay away from the set with my 100mm lens, while using 50mm lens would require me to get closer beyond the nearest possible point of focusing.

Colorado II
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/29,
250^-1sec, ISO100

Distributing the light was not so hard to do but it was rather hard to adjust (as I usually work in manual mode). I've used 2 white boards on the sides to reflect off the light and later on I've placed a shade on the top of the set to reflect any astray light from below and reflect it back (and it did a great job!). While shooting, there was always something going off which made the power sometimes excessive or too low without even touching any flash settings. Not sure what is causing this but the first culprit in my mind right now is the fact that I was working in LiveView mode. Some professionals always warn against using LiveView mode for serious shooting. However, with my back problems, I find myself often forced to work that way!

Colorado III
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/32,
250^-1sec, ISO100

After shooting Colorado I I decided to increase the amount of action and pour even more corn syrup to fill the frame (while some were already accumulating at the bottom of the glass) which created such a mess as seen in Colorado II, but oh well, I guess this is much better than having much plain space as in Colorado I. There was one last shot I needed to try, and here, I've replaced the colored sticks with colored pencils and filled the glass with corn syrup instead of water as I loved the looks of the bubbles in the bottle of the syrup. To add something to the scene, I've placed a small cut from a branch of some plant I've found here (no animals were killed to try this!). At this level, I wanted to step further and try the risks of using f/32 with this lens which I've experienced some weird behavior before at this aperture value. However, after several shots I did get something stable as seen in Colorado III, and even created a 3D Anaglyph out of this scene. Now, I'm creating the habit of documenting the set every time I finish one experiment. I guess it is a good practice?

The set used for Colorado I and Colorado II. A reflector was placed on top during the shoot.

The set used to shoot Colorado III.
I used 2 small candles on the sides in hope to excite the fluid and produce more bubbles inside the syrup but that wasn't useful!

Cherry Boom

I thought I was over with the Colorado experiment above, but then I thought why not implement high-speed onto the project, specially that I'm trying to work in a space near my room (even though no proper table for me yet, as you can see from the sets above). Implementing the idea of colors here emerge from the concept of the color circle and complimentary colors. Thus, I simply googled "Cherry Red Color" and I got the code #a61f34, and starting from there I got the complimentary color which is some degree of cyan. I picked cherry specifically because it was available, and because of its distinctive red color and tiny branch which typically stems out of it. I could have gone with grapes but I think grapes do not have a distinctive shape or color (and the red variety would be typically larger than I need them to be). Thus, the choice for cherries seemed legit!

Final look for the set of the project.

Ubertronix Strike Finder Elite.
Source: B&H

I used watercolors here to color the water and later I've added a bit of milk to kill the transparency of the water a bit. As seen in the set above, I've used here only 2 speedlites (580EX II) and didn't want to use my third speedlite (430EX II). I used here also my UV filter over the lens front just to protect the front from water droplets. I should have protected the flash heads as well with plastic bags but I skipped that actually. The big hurdle was to get my old Ubertronix trigger to work, specifically with a laser-gate. Without detailing the troubles, at the end the laser-gate method proved useless to me because of the shutter lag and the cumbersome laser pointer I was using. Thus, for the rest of the experiment, I went on doing a manual job, holding the cable remote in one hand and dropping the cherry with the other.

Cherry Boom I
Canon EF 100mm Macro, f/9, 3200^-1sec, ISO200.

It was apparent from the beginning that I'm having a problem and probably should have used a larger bowl of some sort since the white edge of the plastic dish was hard to remove. Some problems did not show up till later on as I was inspecting the images like Cherry Boom I. Beside the shallow depth at f/9 (which was not enough), it seems that 1/3200 of a second was not enough for the shutter to freeze the water movement! However, during the experiment, I've raised the speed a bit more without really knowing the final outcome that I will be getting later on. Good luck? Maybe!

Cherry Boom II
Canon EF 100mm Macro, f/9, 4000^-1sec, ISO200.

The speed of 1/4000 seemed just enough to freeze such a fall! In total, out of 20+ shots, I got merely 2 useful shots and one or two shots for splashes without the cherry(ies) which I simply liked for their shapes but I don't think they would be useful as stock images or printed and displayed. As for Cherry Boom II, the cherry here fell upside down and my brain being in love with illusions, I've decided to rotate the image 180^o and thus the water came up and the cherry down, but standing up. What annoys me about Cherry Boom II is, like the other shots, the white space from the plastic dish edge which cannot be removed or substituted. I continued the work further in the next day and going manual too with 1/5000 shutter speed, and changing the camera tilt little bit (and pouring some water into the dish) to hide the white edge as much as possible. Again, out of 20+ shots, I've one suitable shot here.

Cherry Boom III
Canon EF 100mm Macro, f/20,
5000^-1sec, ISO320.

Beside enhancing the looks, I went on enhancing the depth of field as well pushing it to f/20 (to have greater chance of having the cherry sharp wherever it falls), but that of course called for an increase in ISO, as I didn't want to use my third speedlite still. Water splashes now are more stable and live! In Cherry Boom III, seeing that the two cherries fell on their side, I've decided to rotate the image 90^o clockwise to add a surreal feel to it.
In all of these shots of high speed, there was always a problem with the noise level when processing the images, despite the ISO being relatively low. With my Canon EOS 7D, I'd say that the ISO is somewhat easier to handle up until ISO 800 or around that, but in these images the processing was cumbersome and I do have my doubts about being accepted for exhibitions with the group (if they pass the aesthetic critique). However, some stock websites did already accept these images without a problem and they are up for sale!
Finishing from this cherry project I did proceed to another one, involving high-speed shooting as well, but I will keep that for a future post, as I'm still trying to work on it further.

Finale

After kindling my passion again for high-speed photography (adding to that the lack of locations and ideas for panoramas), and after the failure of my trigger, I've emailed the company asking about the reasons for such time lag and after some discussion, it seems that the reason is my shutter and not the trigger itself. I was advised to connect the trigger to the flash instead of the camera but in my working conditions this is not possible, as working with triggered flashes means opening the shutter in a dark environment while the flash becomes the only source of light. However, reading about some aspects of my camera, it seems that I do have also to adjust some of my photo-shooting habits to reduce the time lag in shutter release (depending on LiveView being one!).
Though I'm on leave without traveling but seems I do have a busy schedule here (beside taking care of Mom), but I feel some satisfaction that I didn't feel in a long time now since I could work with my camera and really think of something to do with it, without feeling exhausted like everyday after coming back from work through the traffic jam. Meanwhile, the idea of traveling is still ticking and tickling my mind, despite the fear of the hassles that I might have to face outside because of all the madness going in the world today, specially for a guy like me from the Middle East.
In the meantime, August is getting closer, my birthday that is, and I'm preparing to have some big order (well, not so big, but a bit big maybe?) of some gear and maybe some books. I would have to place the order before August I presume since there are some items that are considered "special order" (i.e. need time to be prepared and dispatched). This is to be a gift to myself, since no one around give such gifts except of perfumes! On my mind is a 4^th speedlite (and probably another 580EX II if available still) and maybe some filters. I feel so excited that I want to place the order right away in the coming few days, but my financial situation and the course of Ramadan makes me hold it back and wait. Thus, I might be placing my order by the end of June or so! I need to miss my camera so much to work with it with passion…

Free Fall...

Struggling struggles and fighting fights, all of that to keep coming out with new ideas for photography and other aspects of conlangs, amid the increasing responsibilities concerning the house. Well, I guess I'm glad I'm not married at such moments.
At least in this week, I got to test the trigger partially, and under the light of the new book I'm reading (and almost finished) I've got more insight about my mistakes. More to come below.

Source: Amazon

As I've mentioned in my previous post, I've ordered 3 books, and they are here already. Instead of reading 2 at a time as I usually do, I decided to concentrate better on one book at a time. The first one to pick was the Tabletop Photography book by rockynook. I would classify the book as general (because under tabletop photography, you can enroll product photography or food photography... etc) but it has some nice tips about the lighting and how to do some stuff with emphasis on low costs. It is really an encouraging book despite the lack of some technical data when dealing with the light but, anyway, I think the depth of such topics is out of the scope of this book. I've already almost finished the book!
While reading the fore mentioned book, I was working on my own experiment which is also my first real trial for the new trigger since I got it back in March. I've pointed some of the lacking points in my previous post and some of them (if not all) were very true. From my side, I had my own problem too with my own tools already (other than the trigger that is) and also, I didn't learn quite enough about such type of photography.

The setting I've worked with in my experiment. Sorry about the bad quality but this is what you get when you ask a non-photographer to take a photo with his iPhone. I think my brother never heard of the word "focus" before!

As you can see from the blurry image above, my brother never heard of the word "focus" before as it seems. My setting was simple (and the trigger is placed on camera) while I needed a long cord to connect the sound sensor to the trigger. The sensor was placed on the surface of the black sweep (if you can notice, it is a small tiny black box on the left side of the sweep, which is your right side). Luckily, I had such cord long time ago when I used to record some music for a friend!
I've used my both speedlites here on both sides but I think this is a wrong step. I will explain further below in form of points for easy reading. My target was to freeze the falling moment of some marbles.

Free Fall
Canon EF 50mm, f/7.1, 2500^-1sec, ISO100.

Many trials went on to check for position and light levels as well as the depth and the shutter speed required to freeze the moment. Believe it or not, a 800^-1sec shutter speed was not enough to completely freeze the moment, and some marbles kept on showing motion blur. Yes, I'm a physicist (or so my B.Sc. announces) but I don't have the time to count for the falling acceleration and velocity and check it out with my camera's shutter speed; besides, I really hated mechanical physics! However, let's move on to the points:

• I've used some marbles randomly here and with different sizes. The problem with Free Fall above is that two big marbles dominate the scene in the foreground and this is a bit distracting. It is a trial and error job after all but it might be better to use only one large marble or leave them all at the same size, I think.
• The positioning of the speedlites on two sides (but pointing in different directions) was a mistake I believe. Under the light of my new reading, I think the best method to conceive the feeling of glass in the air is to have a reflector on one side and reflecting the light off it. I think a narrow strip of some white board would do. I think this way would also help me on concentrating the power of the light in one direction to get an intensified effect from both speedlites under the operation of High-Speed mode, which reduces the brightness severely. This is way much better than scattering the power of the two speedlites in different directions.
• The prop or sweep I've used was not completely black, or let's say it reflects bright tones when light strikes it. Besides that, simple cleaning from dust particles was not enough for clearing the view. Anyway, I do recognize the importance of capturing a glimpse of the ground to emphasize the sense of falling, but this ground such as the one in Free Fall is not a favorite.
• With trials, it was evident that there is a time gap between capturing the sound and then sending the signal and triggering the camera - this is natural of course, but with time and trials, it seemed the time gap between these processes is getting bigger (bigger in terms of micro or milliseconds).
• Maybe it is not very clear in this situation, but probably I should start using a black board over my lens when I shoot up close to avoid any reflections from the camera onto the glass.
• The low level of the settings in general is not helpful and I think they better be up a bit. 

These were some of the points that crossed my mind so far and bearing them in my mind, I might work it out again some time later. I'm just glad that I've tried the trigger at least and I'm ready to write a review about it on B&H website. This is like a duty for me. In the mean time I have to think of something to do about the increasing number of tools and how to organize my room!

Linguae Artificiales:

In the course of developing some thoughts about the future of some of these conlangs I've created, I've decided to keep a regular notebook. Probably, a notebook for every conlang I'm trying to work on from now on. I've had this idea since I've been looking at my scattered leaflets on my desk at work with all scribbles for Geltani and figured it is really easy to lose track of ideas made before! For example, I'm still not sure of the possessive articles that I've made already nor I'm sure about the grammatical cases! I have to organize my stuff.
On the other hand I was thinking if it is possible to work on 3 conlangs altogether? Seems huge step but who knows! Geltani, Bulughman and Betenic; and probably Caqobian as well - an artificial language spoken hypothetically by Alexander, and the plan is to make it go along with Greek somehow. Ideas, ideas, ideas. This is all what I can promise of. If only I can get my brain to organize itself as well...

Grace...

Mom is finally back home right now, but that doesn't mean the end of the story. In fact, I think the struggle had just began now to elevate her spirit and make her cope what life throws at her, specially with boring hours of dialysis.
We are hoping now that the dialysis process is a temporary procedure until Creatinine is reduced to some level. All we can do for now is to pray for her and, of course, be on her side as much as possible. The other challenge from our side is to cope with life's schedules and rush with an added responsibility like this. We've been managing for the past 3 weeks by having leaving from work and changing shifts among family members, but at a certain point, I believe Mom has to be alone at home, probably with the maid only to help her out.

One of the greatest challenges for me right now is to try and work on with my camera after being mostly idle in the past weeks. Not completely idle, but I was aiming at various things without thinking just to try out my camera and not stop using it. Mainly I was aiming at geometrical shapes in flowers, specially those sent to Mom in the hospital. I won't bother you with the technical details here, but most of the images here were taken with 50mm lens plus some extension tube(s) beside using one or two speedlites (580EXII and 430EXII).

Blooming Alone

Sanfte Aufbau

Zentrum Aufbau

The Dark Side of Beauty

Introvert Petals

Lumini

Vortex

Floral Fractal

Mother's Heart

Die Sanfte Ringe

New Toys:

With the rush of the events lately I've ordered some new toys for my camera that I've barely touched or experienced something with. I hope in the coming days I will do this accordingly.

Source: B&H

One of the simplest "toys" here is a step down ring which is aimed at fitting filters on lenses with different diameters. My ring here is a step down from 62mm to 58mm (62-58mm) which I got specifically for my Tamron lens (70-300mm). Most of the lenses that I'm using have a diameter of 58mm and hence most of my filters (polarizer and IR for example) are ordered accordingly to this diameter. In order to make these filters somehow complete and fit all, this step down ring can do the job. The only problem here is that it sometimes gets stuck in between or stuck into the filter read itself. Typical problem (and I'm planning to get special wrenches to detach filters from lenses).

Source: B&H

The other toy is an eyepiece from Polaroid which acts as an extension at a right angle. It is supposed to be quite useful for shooting at waist level but I didn't test it for long. One of the hardships in this piece is how to fit it into my camera. It comes with plenty of adapters for various cameras (specially EOS cameras) but unfortunately, there is no direct adapter for EOS 7D camera and I had to make several tests. I could hardly fit one of the adapters into my 7D and I'm not sure it is quite useful for shooting at waist level but probably more useful to shoot on sides (i.e. to be on the side of the camera and look into the eyepiece). I will leave this for time to sort out its benefits.

Source: B&H

Maybe the most important toy for me right now (and didn't try it yet!) is the Ubertronix Strike Finder trigger. Some years back I got a cumbersome circuit to trigger the flashes by sound (and needed the PC cable to connect it to the flash but never got this cable). This trigger now is all-in-one type: sound, motion, laser and lightning. The difference here though is the fact that it is a camera trigger (and it comes with N3 cable to be connected in the place of the cable remote into the camera). Without trying it all seems good, but with one thing: the short cables and sensors. I want to try this as soon as possible but yet I didn't formulate any ideas on how to do so. The trigger box contains a jack port saying "flash/camera" thus I do believe I can connect it to flashes (speedlites) by special cables too and it's not limited to cameras only. Among other models, this brand was the only one probably to support Canon EOS 7D. In a twist of options, it has the Laser gate, i.e. triggering the camera with the change in Laser reception as I understand it while other brands depend on infrared gate which triggers the camera only when an object crosses in between a transmitter and a receptor. I'm not sure though how I'm going to use the trigger for Laser but according to the instructions it works as well for infrared just that way, as well as for lightning photography. Too bad the lightning season is over right now!

Thoughts:

In the passing weeks, with Mom's sickness and up till this moment, I had some weird urge in geometrical wisdom and started to read whatever comes my way from Wikipedia; specially the schläfli symbol. There were many stuff that were complicated of course and my mind couldn't digest but reading about simple stuff could spark some imagination. Reading about mathematics and geometry can never be in vain - it is up to you of course!
I'm trying in the meantime to look at the problem with Mom's health as a test for something; probably to change my attitude toward the world, probably to test my capabilities of challenging the world with increasing responsibilities and yet keeping up with my own projects and photography. Mom cared for us as a mother would do, and her memories still race in my mind at the moment; memories of some time when I was 10 years old or less and how she used to dress me for school. Despite the health problem is upon her, but it is our test, her children. Probably God wants to see how we do care for her and I'm lying my hope in succeeding in this test. After all, I arrived to the realization of the fact that at some time, at some moment in time, there should be that point of departure between her and me as it is the case always with every living thing. My only prayers go to make this point in time just far away; far enough in time to make me stronger to bear it. I've realized as well the fact that just wishing to depart life before her so I wouldn't have to see her leave me alone in this world is a mere selfish thought. Mothers can't bear the departure of their kids from her sight - it is me who has to bear it all instead...