Photos and the Reasons Why

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Taken on April 12, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 105 mm
ISO Speed: 800

Location and Musings
Like Yesterday’s post, this one features an elephant getting washed in the river. It was taken within a few seconds of the previous photo. The elephants in question had finished their washing and were entertaining themselves by getting their mahout’s wet.

I was sitting on a bench a fair distance away taking this photo, rapidly switching from subject to subject. I was desperately trying to capture each of several different elephants and mahouts as they splashed water on one another.

Technical Thoughts.
This is a fairly poor photo. I chose it to contrast with yesterday’s. The dark skin of the elephant provides little contrast. She stands out from the river, but the spray from the water is very distracting. It doesn’t for a clean arc, but scatters all over the place and looks a lot like a really dusty scan of an old photo. This feeling is slightly enhanced by the washed out colors in the background. I suppose I could have edited it a bit to look more like an old fashioned photo.

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Taken on April 12, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.003 sec (1/400)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 200

Musings and thoughts:
Mahout is a hindi word for elephant rider/trainer. The thai is ดวาญชาง or kwan chang. In doing research to write this blurb, I learned about the depressing processed used to break elephants to their lives as tourist attractions. It involves small cages, starvation, chains, nail-boards, and all sorts of other unsavory things. The process sounds rather miserable, but I suppose the elephants lead somewhatgood lives once they are done being broken. I’m not sure, I’m probably just trying to justify something terrible and my complicit guilt in the matter here.

Still, this is probably my favorite elephant shot. The mahout and the elephant appear to be sharing a rather touching moment as the mahout gives the elephant his bath. I like the way the elephant’s trunk rests mostly in the water, but just peaks above the surface so he can breathe. She looks pretty relaxed, sitting in the river with the mahout’s hand on his head.

Technical thoughts:
It is very difficult to take pictures of wet elephants in a river. Their skin turns from light grey to dark grey. The river, already dark green, provides no contrast. If I had lighting options other than the sun, I might be able to do something about this. As it is, I just have to hope the elephants are standing in a sunny patch or, as in this case, there is a nice lightly colored reflection.

Really, I couldn’t ask for a better position for the elephant. Her light colored trunk is nicely echoed with the lightly colored background above her back. The light-yellow reflection nicely transitions to dark green as it moves towards her head. The mahout’s light blue shirt is a nice contrasting color from the elephants yellow-orange trunk yet complementary color to the green water. The mahout’s legs echo the trunk color and contrast with the shirt color. The only thing I don’t like is the shadow on his legs from the hook strapped to his back. That’s distracting and undesirable.

There are also some very nice vectors here. The line from the elephant’s back runs straight up to the brim of the mahout’s hat, which then runs nicely over his head and down his other shoulder. Clean and uninterrupted. I could do without the little bit of water dripping from the basket. That is kind of confusing as it’s not quite clear what it is. It’s also a vector that runs down and away from the subject, down and away from the photo.

The vector running along the bottom of the elephant is also nice, with the mahout’s legs entering the river at about the same point as the elephant, the little bit of height difference is echoed by the curve in the trunk, so it’s forgivable.

I’m also a little concerned about where I cropped it on the left. There was a very undesirable log in the river in the upper left that I cropped out, so I could not have gone any further to the left. You can get away with cutting off an obvious edge like the hind side of an elephant, but you have to be very careful not to give people an uncanny valley “I should be seeing something I’m not” experience. I may be too close here.

All in all, a photo that I’m very happy with. I’ll put this one up there with Superb Starling Startlingly Stares at Me as “photos I particularly enjoy.”

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Taken on April 12, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 135 mm
ISO Speed: 400

Musings and thoughts:
The painting on the left was created by the elephant on the right. The gentleman in the center handed paintbrushes of various colors to the elephants who then applied the paint as they saw fit. It’s pretty clear that the whole exercise represents learned behavior, but it’s still fun to see the elephants create works of “art.” The colors of the branches were created by dabbing repeatedly semi-randomly at the board, an act that the elephant appeared to particularly enjoy. Perhaps that is because the trunk is not a particularly accurate tool to be using for painting and the elephant didn’t have to be very accurate when dabbing semi-randomly.

Technical thoughts:
The photo is not quite sharp, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps there was some dust on the lens or in the air that gives a slightly blurred effect. At 1/640 of a second and with plenty of light and time for focusing, there is no technical reason why the shot should be anything other than perfectly sharp.

I could do without the elephant legs in the background, though I think they’re sufficiently abstract to provide a pleasing thematic pattern. If they were any stronger they’d be way too distracting. The person behind the elephant is far worse in terms of how distracting he is for the photo.

I like the color palette of reds and browns with a few greens in the painting. The elephant taking a bow tells the story immediately and the trainer looking at him provides as nice a vector as I could ask for. Naturally if I could have controlled the situation I would have set things up differently. As it is, it turns out to be a quite passable shot.

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Taken on October 24, 2009
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1600)
Aperture: f/2.8
Focal Length: 70 mm
ISO Speed: 400

This somewhat dreamlike shot was taken at the Khao Kheow (Green Mountain) Open Zoo. They feed the tigers meet on the inside of the pool you can see here, a pool which has a large glass wall so you can see inside. It’s great to watch, but the glass is always dirty, which usually makes photography difficult. It does, however, make for a nice soft focus effect when the tigers are some distance away and the krud on the glass is out of focus. In that instance, it acts like a soft focus filter and gives a nice dreamy look.

I like how calm and relaxed he looks, especially with the beautiful markings on his face. The damaged ear gives him a slightly war torn look. It’s nothing spectacular, just a good solid photo.

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Taken on November 21, 2009
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 800

Location and musings:
This shot was taken at the Tiger Zoo in Sri Racha, the same place I took the tiger-through-the-hoop shot from last weekend. People putting their head in the crocodile mouth is a pretty famous circus trick, and suppose I’m not surprised they do it here. Before she puts her head in there, she spends a while banging a stick around inside the animal’s mouth. One theory is that she does that to remind the animal of the beating it will get if it closes it’s mouth. My theory is that it provides some sort of instinctual incentive to keep it’s mouth open. I’m unsure of how well a crocodile can be trained.

Also, she puts her head right up in the corner of the croc’s mouth, I’m sure part of the reason there is to keep the animal from getting much in the way of acceleration on the mouth.

Technical thoughts:
This photo was taken at the extreme limits of my old D40. At 200 mm, I was at the longest end of my longest lens. The photo has been further cropped, so that, with the additional APS-C crop factor, means this was probably effective 4-500 mm. I fired the flash, and it did have an effect, although not enough for the camera to register a return. The aperture is wide open. 1/125th of a second is the absolute minimum speed I could possibly imagine holding this shot steady. 800 ISO isn’t the highest setting the D40 has, but with the amount of noise that registers in the shot, I don’t think I could have feasibly bumped it up any more.

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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 August 11, 2009
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 800
This photo was taken at the Sri Racha Open Zoo. Sri Racha is a city located about 30 minutes north of me and means “Grand King” or “Grand Royalty” in Thai. There is no “Sr” sound in Thai so it is often written as “Si Racha” even though the thai spelling, สรี, has all of the letters s, r, and i. There is a popular condiment in the U.S. called Sri Racha. It is spicy and shares a name with the city, but has no other connection to Thailand.

There is a cage in one of the back corners of the Zoo that had rather lax security. I probably shouldn’t have spent much time there, for my own safety. There was a metal gate, some electric fencing, and the tigers. They were probably two to three feet away from me. One of them roared, a truly intense sound that set me back on my heels.

The location allowed for some great close up shots though. Tigers are such huge, powerful animals that any little section of them ends up being a great photo. This series has a lot of closeup shots, lots of eyes, lots of glares and stares. I love this shot because I think it’s about as powerful as a photograph of a mammal can get without showing eyes.

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Taken on January 16, 2010
Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 1/2500 sec
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 500

This photo was taken at the “buddha on the hill” monument in Pattaya. It’s a half religious half tourist attraction between me and town. As you walk up to the buddha, the road is lined with people who sell birds in cages which you are supposed to release for good luck. The birds then return to the people with the cages, who feed and then sell them again.

Cats crawl around underneath the buddha looking for any birds that land too soon, or who are released too carelessly. Meanwhile some people pray underneath the statue, or make offerings to the buddha representing their date of birth, one buddha stance for each day of the week plus one extra for Wednesday. I’ll go into which image is for which day of the week later, probably spending an appropriate week on the matter.

I did a few edits to this photo, trying to figure out what I like the most. I ended up desaturating the reds and yellows on the cage in order to de-emphasize that and allow your eyes to follow the open door over to the bird. Ideally viewers will follow the arms up to the cage, then over to the bird. Theoretically people will identify with the unseen cage holder and with the bird, depending on which will appeal to them the most intensely.

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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.