Photos and the Reasons Why

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Taken on September 7, 2008
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/14
Focal Length: 55 mm
ISO Speed: 400

This is a quite old photo which I still think of as one of my favorites. I took it at some random beach on the Oregon Coast one day while driving around. I thought the ball in the basket would look great as super saturated yellow amongst desaturated blues. It rare that a photo looks the same from in my head, to shooting, to post processing. Usually the final product and what I was originally planning on getting are quite different.

Usually you have to approach each stage as “ok, I have these tools, what can I make from this?” Sometimes “what can I make from this” is always the same.

It’s always a nice surprise when you’re able to achieve a close representation of your original goals. Perhaps that’s why I like this photo more than it’s fair share’s worth. I find that the emotion presented by the ball, neglected in the basket, the muted tones, and the two guys sitting on the beach is a nice, flat, attractive melancholy.

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September 5, 2007
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.003 sec (1/400)
Aperture: f/7.1
Focal Length: 18 mm
ISO Speed: 200

Location and musings:
This photo is very representative of the road trip, a least in my mind. This was taken in Illinois on my way to Chicago. I found myself getting drowsy about an hour before sunset, so I pulled over to the side of the road and took a nap while I waited for the sky to begin it’s nightly light show. It was a gorgeous evening and was plenty warm enough to roll down the windows and enjoy the air as I listened to the corn rustling in the breeze.

Every time I think about the time I spent doing that, I feel a great calmness. Of course, then I remember the fears and worries I had back then and I’m glad I’ve got a new set now.

Technical thoughts:
This was definitely early on in my study of photography, I have next to no lighting control. My only flash is the on camera flash, so there ends up being far too much debris being lit to have the photo be particularly interesting. I probably should have taken the photo over closer to the corn stalks to be more midwesty.

Still, that is one gorgeous sunset.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 1/5000 sec
Aperture: f/4.8
Focal Length: 60 mm
ISO Speed: 500

It’s tough to make a bird look majestic when it has clipped wings. It can’t be proud and powerful when it’s so obviously missing something, and in such an unnatural fashion. Indeed, a photo of a kite that had lost some feathers in a fight would be quite interesting.

I’m just happy that it’s a sharp, well exposed photo. The framing isn’t too terrible either. That pre-sunset sky is pretty great with just the slightest hint of pink in the sky. Alas, there isn’t much detail in the kite, and the clipped wings scream “this is unnatural and wrong.”

It was taken while some employees were firing bits of meat into the air with a slingshot which the kits swooped after. It was tough to catch them with a background other than the trees, and when they were showing a nice profile. This is probably about as difficult as a shot can get while at the zoo, so having the basics right makes me happy.

With this, I am pretty close to running out of all interesting Singapore photos. I have taken my camera on a couple of experimental photo-trips, but I’ve yet to achieve anything I really liked. I’ll get something new, eventually. At the worst, I’ll be traveling for a whole week in mid-april, where I’m certain to get better photos. I may end up diving more into my archive until then.

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Taken on September 3, 2007
Camera: Apple iPhone
Aperture: f/2.8

I took this photo on the very first day of my Road Trip, as I was driving out of Yosemite. It ended up being a perfect iPhone desktop screen, one I kept for quite some time.

I’ve always like the incongruity between the size of the stone in the foreground when compared to one of the world’s most famous domes, in the background. The line which leads directly from the foreground rock to Half Dome is also fun.

Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places in the world and I desperately hope to spend some significant time there in the future, especially now that photography has become a serious hobby of mine. Yosemite is so incredibly beautiful that the pictures that come out of it continue to be mind boggling, even after seeing hundreds or thousands of them. Each crag or nook or cranny or waterfall at sunrise is on it’s own a beautiful place, yet the valley in central California is one of them.

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Photo Taken October 29, 2007
Camera: iPhone

The Grand Hotel in southern Alabama has a mint julep on the menu.
I have a particular way that I like a mint julep to be made. I’m fairly certain that, much like the old fashioned, it must be made at home to have it made right.
That said, atmosphere is important. A nice warm October evening in the south, the back yard of a 200 year old hotel, it seems like some pretty nice atmosphere.
The sunset was remarkable. I had brought my nice camera, but I left it in the car. This was taken with my phone. I do rather like the shot.
I ordered julep, this time with a little more sugar. The bartender was a very upright fellow wearing a tux.
“Yes, sir, right away, sir.” He spoke with a heavy german accent.
This one was better. I continued exploring the grounds, stopping briefly to remark on the wonderful weather and remarkable sunset with a nice old lady.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Taking pictures of birds at these shows is always difficult because they have clipped wings and leashes to keep them from flying away. This bird appears to have some stray feathers that I doubt you’d see on a healthy wild hawk. I don’t know what it means in the birds, but it probably isn’t healthy.

I think it works for this photo since the strain the bird appears to be under is explained by the out of character elements. This photo reminds me a lot of the tiger about to jump through a hoop photo that I’ll post on Sunday. I imagine I’m going to post some images over the next few days as I explore my thoughts on animal abuse in zoos and whether or not animals are here for our entertainment.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.3
Focal Length: 105 mm
ISO Speed: 500

This photo invokes some pretty severe unhappy feelings in me. It was towards the end of the day in Singapore. I had been walking and sweating all day, and I was tired and hungry. I was feeling rather lonely and short tempered.

When I took this shot, I was really happy how it turned out, especially with the kids in the background. I figured I would offer the photo to the parents them with no strings attached, just so the photo would have some purpose. More importantly, I would have some purpose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the parents treated me like a hustler and refused to even speak to me, dismissing me with a wave. I’m unsure how I would have reacted, you definitely build up a lot of mistrust of people offering you things here. I don’t exactly fit the profile of the normal huckster, and I guess I figured my honesty would shine through. Alas, I was left rejected with my photo.

I felt like not just my offer was rejected, but my purpose. I could have felt great for doing a kind thing, instead I felt terrible for being unwanted.

Still, it’s a fun photo with a lot of vectors going in every which way, all of them interesting to follow. They say of action and sports photography that you want to show the player, the ball, and the goal. In this case the ball is the meat, the player is the guy holding the meat, and the bird is the goal. You can tell he is trying to keep the meat from the bird and that his expression, along with that of the audience, tells you that the bird missed it.

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Taken on February 26, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This photo was taken, once again, in the Singapore bird park. A group of lovebirds were building a nest inside a birdhouse up on a tree. I stood and watched them for a while, taking an occasional picture. The bird park has a sign referring to them as black masked love birds, but they are also referred to as yellow collared or just masked lovebirds.

Lovebirds are an interesting subject with their eyes. They have the white feathers around the eyes giving them the appearance of having enormous whites, when the eyes themselves are entirely black. It produces a slight Uncanny Valley response. That is, the birds appear to have eyes very close to what you would expect, but it’s not quite right, so you have a natural revulsion of a sort.

In any case, it’s a fun if slightly blurry shot of four birds looking quite chummy while they build a nest together. The one bird with the straw in it’s beak is essential for the setup to work.

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Taken on October 29, 2007 at 12.18pm
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1600)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 55 mm
ISO Speed: 200

This remains one of my favorite photos. It is at first difficult to discern what the subject is, which is part of the reason for the explicit title. Mud is drying under the hot texas sun in such a way that it cracks and curls up like tree bark.

I took the photo in the middle of the “Grand Canyon of Texas,” also known as Palo Duro canyon. That trip remains one of my most successful days of photography. The landscape is stark and beautiful with an abundance of interesting rock formations and interestingly shaped woodlands. I’m sure several future Road Trip Friday photos will be from Palo Duro.

I like this photo because it maintains it’s orange-red earthy pallet throughout while still having shadow and definition. The out of focus background, or bokeh, fills the top third of the screen with regular curving lines of similarly colored weeds. The weeds and the mud effectively echo one another, though the weeds are more chaotic.

There is a bit of a circle formed by all of the mud with the four centermost pieces lying inside that circle. The circle is broken enough to not appear unnatural, but is solid enough to keep your eyes in the photo. Finally each of the pieces curves differently and its simply strange to look at all the different pieces and see how something as simple as drying mud can make these shapes.

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This photo is not nearly as intriguing as yesterday’s photo, and I’m posting it next to explain some of the reasons why I liked the staring starling.

This photo has a few advantages. First, It’s more dynamic. The motion from the birds wings blur a bit and provide a bit of forgiveness for the general softness of the photo. The branch the bird is standing on is a nice solid line along the bottom of the photo, a line that is nicely echoed by his beak.

His eye isn’t looking at us, but it’s still white with a black pupil, so we can follow it and identify with it. Evolutionary biology teaches us that one of the essential factors in human biology are the whites of our eyes. In fact, we are better able to identify with other humans because we can identify what we are looking at. This New York Times article explains it a bit better.

“An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.”

I’ll post a photo of a monkey tomorrow to explain why I think it’s a challenge for a photo of a primate to be as effective as a photo of an animal with white whites.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I don’t think this is a very good photo. First, its blurry. It’s a 1/160th of a second exposure, so the blurryness is not from camera vibration, but rather because it’s out of focus. I had autofocus on, so I just didn’t give the camera quite enough time to find it’s focus. Either that or it was too dark.

The real problem with the photo, though, is that branch in the background. The unfocused part of the photo, referred to as the bokeh, is often as important as the in focus section. Some skilled photographers make the bokeh itself the subject, usually when there are interesting lights, reflections, or distortions. In this case the bokeh is distracting. The line it traces right past the birds beak pulls you away from the eyes and runs you right out of the photo. You can’t look at the bird without wanting to look above or below the photo so the whole point is lost.