Photography: Canon EF 100mm Macro Lens

Just ordered it on amazon, so looking forward to playing with the new lens.

Shall hopefully be posting more pictures as the spring is just around the corner.

Stay tuned for pictures and other news.

Photography: Photo Study Numero Dos

After a few days of inactivity because of work, I have been finally able to get the next blog up. Although, I regret to say during this time of inactivity, we have been set back with the loss of our previous model. It seems that a better oppurtunity was found elsewhere and it left us even though its contract was not quite up yet. We shall be taking this through the full extent of the courts system and that model shall never work in this industry again.

Anyway.

We have a new model now, one that which is a bit better on the eyes as well. This is Stuart. Would like to give him a big warm welcome.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

The last time I posted, I did a test changing only the F/stop and not changing the shutter speed at all. This time I did the reverse sort of. I changed the shutter speed, but let the camera change the F/stop number automatically. I used the Tv setting on my camera instead of the full on manual setting I used before.

This time when letting the camera set the f/stop number in a low light enviroment, it would appear the that camera picks the inverse end of the spectrum. If the shutter speed is fast, the F/stop is at its highest point (ie, 1/1000 shutter speed = F/5) Or if the shutter was slow it would pick the smallest F/stop. (ie 30" shutter speed = F40)

Now before I had posted this I had to do some digging, as quite frankly I had no idea what either of these values meant. Which I think now I have a somewhat less retarded view of these numbers. Basically shutter speed tells the camera how long to leave the exposure open, or rather, how long to let light into the camera. A 30" exposure would mean the camera will take 30 seconds before it actually takes the picture. This works nice for night time as it gives you the chance to pull in more light and therefore be able to actually see what you are doing.

There is a downside to this though. With the shutter open so long, pretty much any movement from the subject will cause the object to become blurred. Long exposures like this would be nearly impossible to do to a human subject, animal or anything else alive for that matter. Although, I did find out something cool with this as well, it seems that once the shutter has been hit on these long exposures, that you the photographer could actually walk right through the frame, and you wont be in the picture. I am curious why this is, although I have a couple of theories.

1. You are just not in front of the camera long enough. There is just not enough time for the light from the scene to bounce of your person and back to the shutter long enough for you to make an impact on the final picture.

2. not much a theory but perhaps an observation. I am also thinking though there is a drawback to jumping in and out of the frame. I am thinking it might very well also darken the overall composition if you jump in front of the camera for too long a period as it would disrupt the amount of light bouncing off the subject.

3. You are just that blurred that you dont show up. Perhaps that the amount of time you are in frame, you are in fact in the picture but you went through so fast that the blur is almost not noticeable in the final shot.

Have not had the chance to mess with either of these yet, although I do wish to sometime here in the near future start messing around with this as I think its quite interesting to see.

Now the F/stop, is basically the Iris of the camera, same as the eyes of a human being. A low F/stop number, F4 for instance, is equivalent to having the your eyes wide open in direct sunlight. A ton of light gets into your eyes. Now with say a F/40 setup, you would need a much longer exposure in order to get a brightly lit picture in a dark enviroment. This is because its letting in much less light then it would be with the aforementioned setup.

Now I would imagine that in very bright environments, you would need a high F/stop number to limit the amount of light that is needed to expose a picture, since there is that much more light available. This is something I will need to look into.

Now with the image below, I had started this little test with the fastest shutter speed my camera could give me which was a 1/4000 of a second exposure. As mentioned the F/stop was left to auto, needless to say though, with the amount of lighting in the room, my F/stop could not go low enough to bring in enough light to properly expose the image. Whereas, by the end of the shoot, a 30" exposure was letting in almost too much light to expose the film and it was starting to blow out the colors a bit.

After this whole thing, looking at what I learned in the previous post, and taking into consideration what I have here as well. I think the .5" and F7.1 image has the best exposure and blur for the background of all the shots together. With that said though, it would need a bit of postwork to get it to where I think it would look really good. I prefer the color on the images around the 5" mark better. Which with Photoshop though, it would be fairly easy to alter the colors to be that from the .5" image.

A somewhat larger image of this, as it seems the images in the post are not thumbnails...

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/TsukiyonoS/ShutterSettings.jpg

Photography: Photo Study Numero Uno

I took the time today to try to learn a bit about the settings on my camera. Mostly this first study was the relationship between the F/# and the background blur of the subject. In the process these test though I also decided to do a quick test to see how the ISO worked as well. The only thing I am not really able to change here is the distance, as the area I am testing at is sort of small in size.

Anyway, the perimeters are as follows:

Distance - about 4ft

Focal Length - 75mm

Exposure - 1/13 (1/200)

ISO - Auto (unless I changed it set them all to 400)

WB - Auto

(all other settings are camera default)

First Image - 1/13, F/4, ISO 400, 75mm

Great subject huh? I looked around and right now it was the easiest to control. Anything else would have too many moving parts and make taking about 50 pictures a trial in tedium. Anyway. This first image looks quite good to me, the subject is in the foreground (imagine that? ) the background is quite blurred (albeit busy) and takes little of the focus away from the subject. Our heroic bottle of colored water. God bless him.

Surprisingly I was expecting to see some blurriness here, as the shutter speed being 1/13 I thought would be too long of a shutter and me pushing the button down would cause camera shake. I guess not though, although I did push down on the button a bit to hard and slightly lowered the captures from here on. All the rest though are at the same area (more or less, scientific experiment to the max here)

Second...ish image (fast forwarded a bit here) 1/13, F/8, ISO 400, 75mm

With the second image here, you can see its gotten a bit darker, which is most noticeable from the light reflection off the top of the bottle. Also you can notice that the blur in the background, while still being a bit blurry, its not nearly as much as before.

Third Image 1/13, F14, ISO 400, 75mm

Again, much darker then before. My understanding is that the higher the F/# the larger the ISO would need to be, or the longer the exposure would need to be in order to get an adequate amount of light in. Also, the blur is almost completely gone from the background, many of the items back there now can almost have their titles read.

Last Image (this sequence) 1/13, F32, ISO 400, 75mm

Much much darker obviously. The blur is pretty much all gone and along with it all sense of depth in the image. The shelves in the background appear to be immediately right behind the bottle which is in fact closer to 5ft behind the bottle. Would likely need some sort of dedicated lighting system in order to take a picture with this F/#, although, the only purpose I can see of needing this high of a number would be for taking pictures of textures... which is a story for another blog.

In closing, I think its easy to say that for at least the types of photos I will be doing, (with the exception of textures again) that using the lower level F# on my camera. The blur to the backgrounds is no more important then I could have possibly imagined. I took and lightened the last image of the series to see it a bit better and am still completely surprised by the lack of depth in the image. I really didn't realize the importance of achieving a good blur to the images I take.

Thoughts: A New Beginning

A new year is upon us yet again. Its time to try to once again refocus myself on the work that needs to be done to get to the future that is what I wish to happen. As with last year, one of the things that I need to fix is my apparent ADD that I seem to always have when it comes to trying to focus on my task at hand. I always start with the best of intentions, but I always seem to fall short. I have started many projects, but I have finished o'so few of them.

My triumphs though of this past year, I have managed to get some models up for sale and free download. The free downloads are doing pretty well, but sadly I have not gotten a sale yet. Although, the fact I only have 5 models currently up for sale probably has something to do with that. Alas, this is a start and a great one as well. I hope to get a fair bit more models up this coming year. I also hope to make a sale, even if it is just a few bucks in profits, perhaps it shall provide me a bit more of inspiration to continue on the path. Things always look the most bleak before the sun comes up, or say its said, so perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel?

At least for the career minded portion of my life, that IS the triumphs for the year. The year went much quicker then I expected it to, this year is likely to do the same. Which forces me to act quicker which each passing moment. What will the new year hold? What will be my accomplishments? What will be my failures? For I assure you, there will be failures. How will I over come the obstacles to learn from these failures so I dont repeat them again in the future?

My failures this year: Wanting to learn and use more with the DSLR that I have in my possession. I have a camera and wish to get some photos for use as textures for 3d modeling purposes or for posting up for sale for others to make use of. I have the tools, yet, cant seem to get it through that I actually need to go out and use it to get those photos taken. Its a simple matter really, get dressed, go out, click the shutter, go back inside, edit inside photoshop for later use and posting. Done. The closest I get to that is, waking up.

Lesson for the new year: Waking up earlier. Getting work done on those days when I work the afternoon shift instead of sleeping till I need to get ready for work. That would give me a few hours at least of which I can work on things that need to be completed. Would give me time to read a few of the books I have purchased to teach me new skills for use with these projects. Would give me time to go out and take a picture of a tree, the grass, a cloud, the sky, a brick wall, random animals and so on and so forth. Do I get the picture? (no pun intended) Time will tell.

My failure this year #2: Modeling. I am modeling, but, its taken me way to long to complete a simple model such as a chair. Sure, I can chalk some of this up to inexperience. I have only been back into modeling heavy for the last two years now. I have had to relearn alot of what I forgot in that absence. But, the main thing is, even with forgetting alot of my training before, it should NOT take me two weeks to model a simple dresser. I proved that the other night, modeling an armoire in just about 3 hours. I am still not completed with the model though, I finished the modeling in 3 hours, but because of lack of working on this and finding excuses, I have been working on that model now for almost a week. I have most of it textured and UVmapped finally, but I could probably have had it posted in about an hour after I finished the modeling. I did not though. I got sidetracked by things and did not follow through.

Lesson for the new year #2: Follow through. As I said, I start ALOT of projects, I finish very few of them. I am the creator of my destiny, and right now the destiny I am creating will never be completed because I will get distracted by a shiney object in the background and walk off forgetting about it for a few months before I get back to it. I need to figure out a way to set a schedule and stick to it. This year I would like to add 100 small items to my online model store. I would also wish to add several larger objects to it as well. These large objects will take me much time to work on, but it will help boost my confidence level if I can ever manage to get them completed. Everytime I get distracted and dont complete a project, my confidence level in my abilities goes down alot. I need to rectify this and complete things, as I know I can do.

Projects for the year I wish to work on:

Modeling

As stated above, I would like to add 100 small objects to my online store. This would include chairs, tables, lamps and various other small assets scene around the house.

On top of this, I need to create a few larger projects as well. These will be more inline with the Venetian bridge I wish to create. It will take me much time for these, and texturing and all that will take even more time. So I will need to budget my time between these large projects and small ones so I can work on them at the same time.

Photography

Finally learning my camera and making use of the abilities it can add to my overall workflow. Learning a bit more about retouching, and trying to retouch my photos just for simple posting, instead of trying to be a professional right out of the gate. This will help me get used to the controls and workflow, as well as just giving me time to play in photoshop again.

Using the camera to take textures. Simple to do overall, allows me to do some post work as well. Then create the maps and after I get 10 or so, post up for sale. Simple really and I need to get on this. How though? Walk in the park I think would be great. We found a great pond inside of south park (local park) which is a great area for photography. Plus they have ducks :)

Movie world

Working on a unknown project with Matt that will give me a reason to start learning some compositing work as well. This should be an interesting experience for sure, I just dont know much details on this yet to even know where to start on this one.

Ipod Development

Working on a project with Chris as well. Will be a simple game for an ipod service that we can post up and make a few bucks for hopefully. Once again, more details on this project later as it develops.

Now, we look forward and never back, and we create that future that we only see inside of our minds and make it a reality. There is only one person that can persue that goal, that person is me. I am also though my worst enemy as I am the only person that can hold myself back. Time to destroy that person and to make a few steps forward instead of jogging backwards.

Craig Menne

Thoughts: Back on Track

Working once more, seems halo has taken a bit more of my time then I prefer to acknowledge.

Anyway, the chair model I am working on is nearing completion finally. I actually managed to finish the modeling about 2 weeks ago, but halo came between us lol. I have the chair Uv mapped for easy texture access, its modeled to scale and set at the 0,0,0 coordinate plane. So I think I shall be posting it up for free download later today. I am just awaiting my render to get done showcasing it.

Also, planning here in the next hour or so going and start taking pictures for my first full scale personal project. This project I expect to spend a long long time working on, as I believe it is above my skill set currently, but it will be nice to try anyway and see what I can do. Either way, shall post more about that once the project is underway.

More to come...

Retouching: Addendum to photo retouching post below...

Realised as I was looking at my work files, that the method that I am using right now, does not allow me to go back and retouch the skin I had been smoothing. Granted the results are nice, having the ability to go back and retouch anything at all at any time is worth much more then the current workflow I have.

So far I am thinking I need to do things in this order:

1. Color adjustments allowing me to better represent the full range of colors inside of the image. These are then grouped and left at the top of the stack.

2. Skin retouching. This was where I messed up before, I need to actually do this FIRST, and not wait and do it after the skin tone is fixed. The reason being, the current way I do skin tone is uneditable if I do it first. Fixing skin tone second allows me to work out all the blemishes first.... or perhaps I just need to rethink how I work out my skin tone....

3. Skin tone: See above....

Need to think about this..

Retouching: Photo Retouching

After

Before

Finished the first piece that was done via several tutorials. Learned to use many tools I had not ever used before as well as working with layers which was a nice change of pace. Not to mention though, working with many layers makes things easy to go back and edit various aspects that might need retouching again later.

Anyway, still go things to learn, but there is no better way to learn then through repitition so I am going to try to keep editing various pics that I have at home from my own camera.