The Walnut…

Here i am with another post, and I was going to take another break for a moment, then I realized that I should talk about the walnut high-speed experiment. I'm typing this just days before my birthday (and it will be posted after my birthday), so Happy Birthday to Me!
Anyway, this might be rather a short post actually, as I gathered the shots in a video which I will be posting below. Unfortunately, i didn't manage to take a shot of the settings, but maybe a drawing would do?

Before I heed, I'd like to announce that most of the images from this experiment are available already on my Canstockphoto. They were rejected mostly from other stocks I deal with (maybe accepting 1 or 2 only) but the majority (if not all) are available on Canstockphoto.

The Walnut

Well, first let me post the schematics or chart, or plan, whatever you like to call it, and sorry for the lousy drawing here; I'm not the best artist out there you know…

The working area: (1) Silver small car shade, (2) 430EXII with globe diffuser, (3) The working area, (4) A group of speedlites; 2x 580EXII and 1x 430EXII, (5) Camera with controlling 580EXII speedlite.

Impact's oval diffuser
which was fitted
on 430EXII

Worth noting that the shooting here was done with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens. Also, the car shade (1) was placed there in the beginning to reflect off the light coming from the speedlites at (4) but I realized it's not enough. The speedlites at (4) in the drawing are placed on the table but in reality they were beside the working table on stands. Anyway, since the reflection was weak, I've decided to place (2), a 430EXII speedlite with globe or oval diffuser on top, and I've made several test shots to gauge the power of the speedlite here; All work was done in HSS mode (or high-speed mode) of course.

Canon EF 100mm
f/2.8 USM Macro

The lens in use here was just about right for the perspective that I was aiming for. However, working with this lens in particular in LiveView mode is quite challenging for the change in the exposure in each test shot despite the fact that the powers of the speedlites were not changed. Finally, I've fitted a blocker on the eyepiece and it seemed to work fine but still some shots were off (probably this time related to the power of the flashes this time). Not sure why, but this problem doesn't happen often with other lenses when I work with them in LiveView; only this lens!

Initially, I started with f/16 for the aperture, but eventually raised it to f/22 (maximum for this lens). Strangely though, there was some apparent shallow depth (out of focus areas and sharp in-focus areas) in some shots despite this high f-number! It seems to me now that high-speed and macro are a No-No combination. All in all, there was of course a tweak in ISO and other things, and even the shutter speed was eventually raised to the maximum; 8000⁻¹s

Cokin's special
effect filter

Also, related to the lens in use, I've decided to place a special effect filter which I purchased from a friend (actually they belonged to his brother). These Cokin filters are apparently old and I don't have the needed adapter to fit them on the lens, but still I could hold them in front of the lens with the help of some paper clips. Before this time, I've never used these special effect filters in a shooting except for testing. You'll notice the flare in the image of the filter on the left here, and I made it that way intentionally to the show the texture of the surface, as they won't show in direct shot upfront. The filter added some touch to the images but not quite dramatic as I hoped actually.

 

The Sinking Walnut

Now coming to the actual experiment and work with the walnut shells. The main idea was to capture the impact of a water droplet on the water surface or just above the walnut shell. However, this proved to be challenging. First of all, I don't have the proper Gate gear to trigger the speedlites or the camera for that moment of impact, so I had to do all the work manually as usual, relying merely on my senses and coordination between eyes and fingers on the shutter release (using the cable remote here).
Another hurdle was the shells themselves, as I thought  they would sustain some water, and they did for some time, but eventually, started to sink, as it can be seen in The Sinking Walnut which was a test shot but I kept it just for that sparkle in the droplet (thanks to Cokin's filter here!). Apparently the walnut shells are porous naturally. Trying to keep some luster and reflection off water, I've exchanged the bowl of water with some can, put it upside down, and rely on the shallow edge to keep some water. I've also placed play clay (or whatever they call it) to stabilize the shells which proved a bit annoying in the editing phase later on, but it was a must.

Anyway, I will keep it short here and let the video do the talk. You can click the button to view it on a larger size. The whole process ended up with about 220 shots (mostly test shots of course and failed attempts) and sieved down to about 34 shots and finally, probably around 11 shots that were properly edited. Actually of the images is a composite of other shots that I deemed unusable; Not going to tell which!
I've realized during the work that I don't really have to shoot water (was using a head-less syringe for that), but at some point I've started to blow air from the syringe into the shell that had been filled with water just to make a turbulence and it worked just fine! So, a lesson to keep in mind when working in the future that the goal can be reached in more than one way, and some might sound a bit unconventional… I leave you with the video now.

In addition to these, I've created some extra pieces, just some artistic composition from one of the shots. Not sure why but I just felt like it really, but these pieces are not uploaded to the stocks like the rest. The two were saved as PNG to preserve the transparent background; So, even they are rendered as squares, but in reality they form a "X".

Vortex Pac-Man

Gluttonite

Finale

Now that I'm done with the walnut experiment post, I'm not sure what would my next post be about, but we'll see. For this reason I might even take a little vacation off from blogging until I do something significant with my camera, or maybe to put a little announcement here for some new photos uploaded to the stocks. Meanwhile, it seems that I'm already breaking with the resolution of making an Arabic post for my other blog once a month, as it is already August, and I literally don't have any idea what to post about there. About this same topic of this post? Maybe. Even though I wouldn't know how to render it up because that blog is dedicated mainly to beginners, so a lot of instructions and explanatory must be involved; Tedious, and might be overwhelming for a beginner. I've done such a post about high-speed photography before though, so this is another thing which makes me think what is the use of a new post about the same technique (almost).
Artistically speaking, I do a lot of editing for old photos but I'm not sure if i want to post them here since they don't have any specific category or theme, or belong to some project I'm working on. But I'll keep them on the side just in case…

Eagerness for traveling is back at me again even though I know that it is even harder than before with all the crazy world around me and me being the weight of Retinitis Pigmentosa. Those travels I used to do were the only reminder for me that I can survive and live alone, doing my own business, and above all, with some peace of mind. But that's something farfetched for the time being. I think no escape from facing these mood swings and coping with an environment that feels so strange to me as if I wasn't born and raised here.
Meanwhile, I've been thinking about placing some orders online, and among the things I wish to have is some soundproof panels or anything like that to give me some peace and quiet atmosphere in this house. But because of the bad postal services, I have to think it over, as ordering is not as easy as before when I used to order my camera gear all from stores in the US. Things had changed for me. For this reason, I'm planning to check if such panels are available locally here and again, I might need someone to pick me up to and from. Sounds pretty much like begging… and just to think that some people envied me for retiring early…

Speed Gambling II…

I'm typing this in a very short time so I guess it will be a short post. Many things are going on and big part of that is vexing me, but some good things are happening (or happened actually by last week) when I posted my Arabic post about high speed photography in my Arabic blog.
I was not going to type anything here for this week and call it off, but I'm gathering my power (and mood) to do so. The whole week was busy and amazingly annoying with many things caused mainly by people not being able to regulate their timing and don't really know the value of time. I thought I was guilty of that myself but with this passing week, I guess I'm far way too wrong to judge myself like that. Anyway, among these tasks that I had to do, I had some time to process the last bits of my dice images which I've started 2 weeks ago, and also had the chance to filter some and even tag them (put information on these images) in order to upload them to stock websites. And there were strange events there but I will recount them later. Let's see first the Phase 2 of dice photography here.

Stroke-Stroke-Stroke

As I've posted the week before last, I was working on some high speed shooting for dice falling into water, and I've been fluctuating between the macro lens (100mm) and my trusty 50mm. However, the bulk of the work later on continued to be with 50mm since it was easier to deal with mistakes with this lens, while the macro 100mm lens needed precision (lot of it) to throw the dice exactly in place, in the viewing field of the lens.

Picasso's Dream

However, with 50mm lens, I do get the privilege of cropping the image and place the dice almost where I want in the frame. The drawback though is that the details in the water movement is not quite clear at times. Nonetheless, interesting shapes can be produced at this level. However, after some time, I thought why not speeding up the flash strokes instead of the shutter speed? In other words, what or how it would look like if I used the stroboscopic (multi) flash option? Which I did, and the results were pretty interesting here.

ارتطام (Collision)

I've started as usual with 100mm macro lens but soon I've changed to 50mm again. I realized right away that to get some nice images somehow similar to the high speed shots i can do this work alone by using regular shutter speed (far slower than the sync speed even) and simply go around that by using the stroboscopic function of the speedlite. Unless, of course, having a multiple occurrence of the object is not the aim, then the typical HSS methodology is the thing to go for, even though some shots I've made with the stroboscopic mode do look similar to HSS, as in the case of Three and Two Threes below.

Three and Two Threes

I'm guessing here that to get a closer look to HSS and eliminate multiple images is to quicken the shutter speed a bit. In the speedlite's manual, there is actually an equation to calculate the appropriate shutter speed required for a combination of flash frequency and the number of flashes. However, I've actually played around with these numbers and if there is one thing I've learned in this experiment is the fact that one should not lose oneself to the technicality and just do it. Things are not supposed to be perfect and things are not supposed to be taken with a single shot only; So, there must be a trial and error and experimenting. Calculating things can be useful as a rough estimation but NEVER decides what the end result should be nor the final outlooks.
Also, one more thing I've discovered here is the fact that increasing the number of strokes is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes having 5 or 10 strokes of flash in a single exposure is just about enough to record the movement in a clear way, while too many strokes can or might stabilize the object more or even congest the scene.

Dice Race

Another thing I've learned, the hard way, is to keep cleaning the lens after each drop of the object! As you can see in Dice Race, there are some octagonal flares caused by some water droplets on the polarizer filter over the lens. I was able to crop it out in some images but the majority persisted and it was not easy to remove them, and the best I could do to some is to reduce their "weight" in the image by cropping, and sometimes eliminating them by adjusting the curve and contrast.

Now at this level, I think I'm done with the dice experiment and I do have some ideas to further experiment with other objects and ideas. Anyway, I've taken the time to fill in the information for these images which I've prepared to upload to the stocks (31 in total). To do so, I've prepared a list of keywords and 2 descriptions to use (one for HSS shots and one for stroboscopic ones), while changing the name of the images only. It was a long process to edit these info with every image in Photoshop and I'm not aware of any software that does the work in an easier manner. However, I've uploaded the files to my main outlets: Canstockphoto, Dreamstime, 123RF, Mostphotos.
The weird story here comes from Canstockphotos. If you click the stream at the end of this post to get into my gallery (at the moment of typing and posting this blog post) you might notice 2 images being accepted ONLY. The rest were rejected for "inappropriate keywords". This took me by surprise because the keywords are the same for all images, so why accepting two of the series and rejecting the rest? This is something beyond my "intelligence". The other thing is that they don't specify really the keyword(s) that caused the problem so it is like a gambling game to adjust and re-upload and wait and so on. Thus, I've decided to delete all my images and leave only these 2 which were accepted for reasons I don't understand yet. Meanwhile, the whole collection of 31 images is available on my Mostphotos (they don't review images), which is a relief. Now, it is just a matter of time and waiting for Dreamstime and 123RF to either accept or reject. They usually take a long time; Sometimes, pretty damn long time…