Well, this is my first ever post to be done with this new Blogspot platform changes. Everything is so white here and I don't know if I can change things later. However, I really don't have the mood to even think about doing changes to this. Why does everything I get used to change? How do people get the time to adapt to new changes every now and then?
Anyway, never mind the grumpy mood and the whining here from the very beginning of this blog post. I've lost track of my posts and I didn't have much material to be posted here anyway. I was seriously thinking of stopping to blog for a while. My life with the camera and conlangs had been significantly dormant. I could hardly motivate myself to do any work or even think of any idea. If, by miracle, I do think of an idea, then I'd not the power (and mood) to work on it.
Yarding
I guess I'm inventing new words into English. Hope you don't mind; English is not my first language and I'm trying to be innovative in the last bits of mind that are left intact still. Anyway, the term "yarding" is just a term I'd like to use for my activities in the yard, where I take my sunbath almost on a daily basis. Now that we have some nice and shiny plants, I've been trying for many times to get away with some shots, specially in ultraviolet. My attempts, though, failed miserably for most of the time. No denying that such failure did put me down even further, and made me lose the appetite to hold the camera often. A whirl of emotions that was, and still is, hard to get out from.
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| The yard as shot with my favorite Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens from my room's window; (top) normal, (bottom) Red/Blue channel swap. The rectangle at the center is the swimming pool. |
One thing (to be positive a bit here) brings me joy though, is when I go out to check the yard and all the plants there that I've been watering myself (not every day) and some of them were planted by me personally. Anyway, I was thinking of some sort of a challenge with my own like I used to do back in the day when I would go to work every morning taking my camera with one lens only, as a challenge to squeeze creative juices out of this rotten brain of mine. Probably thinking too much about ultraviolet and infrared photography did ruin (in some sense) my appetite for just normal photography trends.
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| HDR version of the same shot. |
Noticeably though that I've stopped thinking about doing bracketed shots (for HDR merging later), and this is good and bad in the same time. Probably I've stopped thinking of shooting in HDR as I usually do because of the long immersion with infrared and ultraviolet in the past few months (because I usually don't shoot bracketed for such type of photography). Anyway, this is a good and bad point as I've mentioned, because bracketed shots do have the initiatives for more artistic work and not necessarily just for HDR merging, specially as I've learned some new editing techniques that basically uses under-exposed images (or pulling back the exposure down for a properly/brightly exposed image). But did you really think I could stop shooting infrared or ultraviolet?
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| InfraPots |
And just to get myself ongoing with the camera work, I've decided to play around with my fisheye lens (Rokinon's 8mm of course) in the yard, fit on my modified 7D. Since I didn't do a panorama in AGES, I've decided to shoot a little one. I was stuck between the swimming pool and the scene I wanted, so this lens was the best for the job here. And just as if I do need more problems as it is with this very simple shoot, the weather was humid and I had to shoot the scene twice after noticing how humidity blurred the corners of some shots.
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| InfraPots (Red/Blue swap) |
Since the work was with the Rokinon fisheye lens, I didn't really put any filter into the lens to shoot infrared with my modified camera. So, probably I shouldn't call InfraPots with such a name since the image is, technically speaking, a combination of visible and infrared spectra. Shooting without a filter, even under a harsh sun, does make it easier to shoot in brackets for HDR, which I did here even though I didn't go crazy with tone-mapping like I did with the yard shot above. Stitching the panorama, as expected, did bear a lot of stitching errors; I've fixed some and neglected some. I really didn't want to waste much time with something I'm doing merely for fun and to get me going with my camera and break the dormancy. What I like here is the lines on the wall; These are not visible in reality, but only when shot in infrared (or infrared+visible). As you can see, too, that my shadow is on the ground in this panorama, so it is absolutely not something I would be wasting my time on fixing it. Shooting a panorama here would require a lot of work, and with the pool installed at the middle of the yard, it would be hard to setup a tripod even.
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| Lustrous Green |
With all that shooting during the daytime, I have to admit that it is probably by night that the plants (though simple compared to other professional gardens and other floral arts) do look fabulous; With all the LED lights in the yard that give a soft touch of light to the leaves. Finding a proper composition was not something to really work with specially in a (sort of) stacked yard like this but I tried. I've relied heavily though on the post-processing aspects, as in Lustrous Green and those that would come afterward. The main point though is to focus on shooting dark on purpose and processing the image with that intent in mind and not adjusting the exposure to get every detail possible from the shades of the image. With my 50mm at f/1.4 it was not a problem to shoot handheld in such a dark place with faint lights. The shutter speeds were just about enough at ISO100. Though later, I think, I've increased the ISO up to 200. No HDR shooting this time though.
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| The Bright Side of Shade |
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| Bougainvillea Stoccata Click to enlarge |
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| Tranquil Solitude Click to enlarge |
So, I got somewhat encouraged to hunt again, and this time during the day (morning time). And Ta Da, it was humid. Probably you can tell already how much I miss winter already as it is. Anyway, this time, I was more dedicated to find some details, and in order to do that, I've connected my 12mm extension tube to the 50mm; This is just to get closer and not to shoot macro (the magnification factor here is way below 1x). One of the striking shots (to me that is, I don't mean to the outside world) is a somewhat macro shot for the bloom of Portulaca oleracea (or some related plant) which I've struggled to shoot before specially in extreme macro conditions (reversing my 20mm lens and using a rail just to get it right, and never did). Turned out that this simple sitting of 12mm extension tube and 50mm lens was just about enough to get some nice details of the little bloom (diameter might be a bit more than 1cm). The reason for fitting a 12mm extension tube is not to do any work for macro actually; As explained, the magnification ratio is way below 1x. But I had to use it to shoot at a close distance because of the pool in the middle of the yard which limits my distancing from the plants (the shortest focusing distance for Canon's 50mm is 45cm). Anyway, I've used apertures between f/1.4 to f/2.8 to shoot several images (and still under inspection as I'm typing these words now). When checking Tranquil Solitude the photo looked promising even though there was maybe a slight motion blur (caused by the breeze) which I tried to compensate for by selectively sharpening (using NIK) the bloom. The image had undergone massive crops which probably enhanced the "proximity" of the bloom giving, maybe, the allusion that it is a macro shot at 1x. The cropping was due to some undesired elements and distractions in fact and also to re-locate the bloom at one of the cardinal points in the law of thirds (golden ratio in fact). Still, it looks not bad and I might considering uploading Tranquil Solitude to the stocks at some point.
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| Green Delight |
Now, since I didn't process or check closely all the images I've shot in that morning, but Green Delight was one of the images that got my attention from the first round of check-up. The light green hues grabbed my attention already without editing even. In editing, I've increased the brightness on various levels as much as possible and then stretched the blacks or shadows almost to the end. Finally, the image was sharpened selectively at some specific zones of the images. Another thing I like about this one is the fact that the maize leaves acted as a background (to most of the image). The image was also cropped according to the triangular method which fitted the two (left and right) branches perfectly.
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| (Golden) Triangle crop marks labeled on Green Delight |
I have to note though this is usually not the proper way to use this method of composition or cropping, because the trend is to use the spaces (the triangles) to put the elements within, and not the lines to set the boundaries in the image. However, it is a work of art and I guess we need to experiment from time to time. The whole thing is an experiment after all.
Finale
First of all, I have to say that this new design for Blogspot is really giving me a hard time typing the post and organizing the photos. So, you might have already noticed (if you reached this point in reading that is) that there gaps and texts stuck to the photos. I've also stopped checking the statistics of the blogs here because of the bulky design and navigating through the options and too many clicks just to check a graph or see origins of hits. Why do they do this? Why do developers like to complicate other people's lives? Specifically, my life; As if I don't have headaches of my own.
I wanted to talk a bit further about other things and ideas that have crossed my mind lately and I'm trying to work on them currently, but I'll keep these ideas for later posts, hopefully. One of these ideas involve re-working panoramas, and another one involves breaking the conventional photo display. The latter one is still under inspection and I'm trying to find the ins and outs and form some ideas about the... idea (if that makes sense). Anyway, we'll see if I can post in 2 weeks time.
I think I've been grumpy enough at the beginning of this post, so I guess I don't need to pour more into it here in the closing of this post. Everyone is waiting for 2020 to finish as if things will be better by 2021. I really don't know how they got this idea as if circumstances and epidemics do count the years and are limited by some time limits. To me, I don't find much difference anymore in the passing of time. All I want is a garden, or a sea, and some birds; And if possible, to die there as well…
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