Photoshop, First Attempt

I decided to learn something or two about photoshop. Even though I was originally a naturalist, after doing much reading about photography, and looking at some great photos, I realize that there are just a thing or two that you can't achieve without digital post-processing even with the most powerful photographic equipment to date. And here is a statement from a master whom I've been learning from all this time.

"Digital photography is one part photography, and one part post-processing software.

Since post-processing has such a big impact on composition, why ignore it?"

-Harold Davis-

I think that is all needed to be said. So after spending 12 hours of clinic work with just 4 patients, this is what I come up with.

Of course this are just some experiment about the usefulness of "layer" in Adobe Photoshop. What I'm planing to do with post-processing is something different than these result. but enough for today. I'll experiments some more later on. :)

Orchid

Okay, enough with religion, philosophy and awareness thingy for a while. I have some analysis related to the "humanity" post, but haven't had the "feel" to write it down yet, so here is just some light update.

These are images that I had taken about several weeks ago during my early days of learning photography. I used these image to measure the sharpness of my EOS 400D in a variety of light condition and at the same time trying to appreciate the beauty of my mom's orchids by taking it from several angle.

Enjoy!

Some comment please, along with which one do you like the most and why. Thank you. :)

On Human, Human Race, and Humanity

Sure you have heard the word “humanity” (kemanusiaan). When you hear it, what is the first thing that crosses your mind? I imagine you will visualize a scene somewhere with poor people – By the merciless economy or by the wrath of mother earth – helped by social workers of any professions like doctors, military, etc. Hence the words “Dana bantuan kemanusiaan” or “Misi kemanusiaan”. Well of course it is not false, but not entirely correct either. Using it in such way as I mention above will narrow the potential of the word in which it only represents the “sympathy” part of human quality while human qualities are much more than just sympathy.

Humanity has the word “human” within it, it represent every part of the quality of human. Therefore it describes humans along with its histories, achievements, discoveries, religions, cultures, philosophies, and every other aspect of “human race”. Every greatness of human race is a part of humanity, yet every wickedness, savagery, trickery is also a part of human race. The politics between the rulers of the nations are part of human’s histories. The savagery of war is also a part of human history. Those are the way of the mortals and therefore also represent by the word humanity.

Many of you of course will feel uncomfortable with the idea that humanity can also be associated with the negative aspect of human being. If the word has been used for a good cause like those that I mention above, how come it has a bad meaning at the same time? But let me gives you an example. When a man has done something bad and he regret it, yet can do nothing about it, what would most people say to calm him? “Don’t be too hard on yourself; you are just human after all”. When we somehow getting careless, or worst have our emotions, or lusts and desires out of control, we are doing a bad thing in many living standard of human, but that is a part of being human, we make mistake, we get careless. Even In many prayers, phrase like “Have mercy on us dear Lord for we are imperfect, and perfection only belongs to You” appears in many religions. As a human we realize our limitation, and should have embraced it as a part of being a mortal living.

Humanity represents human being as a whole. When you hear the word humanity, you can’t just think of it as good human qualities, even if Webster told you so at the fourth meaning of humanity, because it would be cheating. To separate the negative aspect of human from the terms humanity is a denial, a rejection towards reality, because the nature of human being itself is not perfect. If it is perfect, then it is not human, it has surpassed human, It isn’t humanity anymore, it has become a being beyond humanity. It is Godliness.

So humanity neither represent goodness alone, nor badness alone. It has no polarization of the good and the evil. It has no standard. But nonetheless it is a great word; a concept with profound meaning. It is greater than the many concepts that represent goodness alone like virtue, wisdom, humility. It is only surpassed once again by the concept Godliness.

Bliss

A vision beyond perception

A feeling beyond emotion

A mind beyond rational

An understanding beyond judgement

A passion beyond desire

A serenity beyond patience

-Aron Husink-

Quote of the Day

This quote teaches me the best lesson for today, and I shall remember it. Because no matter how deep you learn about awareness, sometimes you’ll still lose your grip.

“What you see here, is not me, but an illusion of me”

-Wongky MD-

And it strikes me for the second time at Gold’s Gym while running at treadmill and there is a commercial HDTV shows this.

“A Character is like a tree and reputation is like its shadow.

The shadow is what we think of it.

The tree is the real thing"

-Abraham Lincoln-

FN: spending 45 minutes at treadmill will either make u contemplate, or make your eyes stray to find some nice looking chicks. But it certainly helps to make your abdominal muscle lines appear more contrast, due to the effect of slight dehydration, at least until the dehydration resolve. :P

An Absolute Sense of Awe

No this is not another experiment, this is my spontaneous artistic soul comes into play if you want the most nauseating description, and at the same time not entirely correct, because the words artistic soul is very-very not me. I’ve always interested in taking pictures of clouds and sky, whether its bright blue sky, grayish cloudy sky, or dusk and dawn. Their constantly changing shapes and colors are always intrigues me. And this is my first attempt.

Not quite impressive I suppose. That was the first time I realize that sky – no matter how beautiful and moving it is – is a very hard subject to photograph. It looks good in your eyes, but looks completely dull when captured casually. So a couple of day later, right after the rain stops, I tried to take some more pictures. But the only one that I thought quite worth showing is this.

But it is still embarrassing. Still looks – again – dull. And then comes the sunset.

A little bit of improvement, but still not quite there yet.

And then comes today’s evening. As I rode my motorbike home from Gold’s Gym, I noticed that it was sunset already. The sun wasn’t visible, because it was cloudy. But the clouds which reflect the sunlight were just beautiful, very beautiful. You know I usually photograph the sky from the ground, or from my window at the second floor. I had given a thought about climbing to my roof, but it just sounds crazy – A jobless man climbing his roof to take a picture of the sky, what is crazier than that? But this time it was different. Even as I rode home, the thought strongly cross into my mind “I have to go up there, I must”. So there I was, climbing the roof like Spiderman only with 3 extremities – my left hand was safeguarding the camera – and found myself a stable spot to sit at.

“It’s important to move beyond your comfort zone, even if that means venturing beyond the things you know and have photographed in the past.”

– Harold Davis.

And that was the moment I realize the beauty that has been taken for granted by humanity. I sat for a while, staring, contemplating. It was not like “Oh it’s so beautiful it makes me wanna cry” sort of thing. A “Twilight” reader might say that, but not me. So I’ll describe how I felt with only one phrase at the top of this article, and I’ll repeat it again.

“An absolute sense of awe”

Then I try to memorize a thing or two from what I had learned from Harold Davis’ articles at photo.net, and start to take some pictures.

These are the widest perspectives that I can get with my camera, just to get the feel of being up there.

And here are the main cookies.

Diagonal line

These are shapes that I accidentally captured. I only realized it after viewing it at my laptop

Phoenix

Dragon or Godzilla, you name it

An aeroplane passing by

If any of you couldn’t quite get the reason why I feel so intensely passionate about it, it is only because my extremely limited skills and resources.

This is the kind of sensation that keeps me from drifting away into a gadget collector. This is when I feel the stronger sense of why I want to learn about photography. It is not about technical ability (although it’s a prerequisite), or satisfaction of owning expensive priced goodies (which is still necessary at some point, like wonky said “Man behind the gun my ass!”), but it is about “to communicate the beauty of the world as I see it”.

Whatever

If you like a cute toddler, try to watch this...haha :D

Turtles

And now just some pictures of my turtle. I like to take its picture, because it has this funny look at its face, and its also very slow, means you can get a pretty good result in a low light condition as long as you can rest your arm on something. this picture was taken in rather shadowy condition, its dark, and no tripod. all picture are taken with ISO 400, aperture f/5.6, focal length 55mm, and Speed 1/50, except for the last one, it is 1/13, that is why its a little bit brighter.

And this one at a pixel level.

More Experiment about DOF

On the next day, thanks to the generosity of Amon Ra or Apollo for showing his face, I was able to capture the image with smaller apertures to get a deeper DOF. Here are some more pictures that I took with the same object and relatively the same angle, and with different DOF. I crop and resize them so that the different of sharpness can be easily seen.

f/7.1

f/8

For comparison I also add the cropped version of the picture from the day before.

f/5.6

As you can see, there isn’t much improvement even when I decrease the aperture opening, but as I try to capture from a different angle, something happened.

Viola

It is also using the same f/8, but I move the camera a little bit higher, so that the relative difference of the distance between the front and the rear groups of flower to the camera is lessened a little bit, thus both groups of flower are now within the DOF. And there is more to it about DOF, which I forgot to take attention to other than aperture and angle, it is distance.

Look at the rabbit, it has a round body shape, but you can see that there aren’t any out of focus area to even a single fur. That is because when I capture the flower, I use the closest distance that the lens is capable of, which is 28 cm. But I took this picture from much farther distance, about 1-1.5 meter. Increased distance from the object will increase the DOF despite the aperture opening. But that’s kind of problematic isn’t it? If I want to take a portrait of a small object like the flower above, to take it from a far distance will hamper the composition right? Because the main object will be too small. Or, the other solution is to decrease the aperture opening right? But what means you’ll need a good light source, or else, the shutter speed will be too long, and your shaky hands will tell you that you aren’t meant to be a neurosurgeon. And that is when the money comes to land a hand. A telephoto lens is the answer. With it, you can use the largest aperture, but at the same time taking it from greater distance without losing control over the composition. That is why a good portrait lens always uses short telephoto focal length, which is about 60mm to 80mm, even 100mm. Long live money eh :P

Another picture that I took at the same day was my mom’s Adenium.

Noticed that the background is somewhat less blurry then my yellow flower pictures. That is because the distance between the main object and the background is much closer, and in this condition, the only way isolate the main object even more is a larger aperture opening, like about f/2.8 to f/3.5, and that my humble friends, means more money. Sadly there aren’t so many cheap “fast lens” (larger opening, means it requires less time to capture the adequate amount of light) with zoom capabilities, and now is the right time to add a quotation from photo.net in their guide about buying lens.

“Be careful (and Rich)”

And, discussing about this DOF and background reminds me of Mr. Toad’s analogy about shoot and leave friends. A good portrait photo shows you the main object pleasantly, but no background is perceivable. Same as shooter and leaver friends will looks good and nice to you, but the hell you know about what lies beneath their hearts, and the hell do they know about your life and the depth of your soul.

And here is how the above picture looks at the pixel level.

But don’t get too excited yet, I had about several dozens of this same picture, only 3 or 4 of them are qualified. Mostly, what I get is this.

Or sometimes even worse. So life isn’t that all convenient even with a DSLR in hand. But that’s the advantage of a digital camera, you can just take as many pictures as you want to, and choose the good one later on. And of course a DSLR with a good lens will make life easier. :D

And, there is one more thing that I can show from this particular experiment. Look at the two images below.

Notice anything different from the first one? See that the green fence at the background looked farther at the first image, and farther even more at the later, while the main object looks exactly the same. That is the effect of using a different focal length. If you use a wider lens as 28 mm like the later image, it will give the impression that the object and the background looked farther. But if you use a 55 mm focal length, it will as if the background is at s very close distance, as the first Adenium picture shows.

I think I’ve done quite a lot experiment about DOF for now. Some of the picture I took in the subsequent post also got something to tell about DOF, but let’s just save it for later. :P

Edit: I have increased the picture that I upload to 700 pixel wide, but somehow the blog setting limited the appearance to 400 pixel wide, and I have found no way to alter it for the time being. Perhaps I'll make a flicker account. But the pixel level image has been readjust to 400 pixel only.

Flowers, Day One

Messing Around With DOF and WB

Why another post about photography? Because I’m lazy, writing about other serious things will require quite an effort to create a well formulated theory. Not to mention most of them are just the peculiar side of my head, or like Cheiro the astrologer mention “Children of their brain” (“their” refers to me, the 4^th of April born guy). So I think I’ll just enjoy the simple things first. This is what the Taoism called a non-action act, a wu-wei act, or a meditative action.

“Act without action

Do without ado”

-Tao Te Ching

A similar concept to what Mr. Toad has told me about doing things one at the time. Perhaps he’ll write something like “A Toad’s Prayer 3” in the future.

After spending like more than a week in my own garden, capturing images of the same objects for dozens of time from many varieties of aperture, ISO, WB, different angles, and sunlight intensities, I came out with hundreds of photographs. But I’ll start slowly, one post represent one day attempt. As for the day after, I’ll make a different post.

My first attempt is to create a portrait with a shallow DOF (depth of field), to isolate the object that is to be the starring of the image. And my first subject is flowers, red and yellow flower which names I don’t know. Well this is the primary result.

Although it looks pretty fine right on, but at the pixel level (zoom to 100% magnification with your image viewer) I noticed that not all the flower is in focus. I only use 55mm f/5.6 and it seems that the DOF is quite shallow already. The background looks readily blurred, but unfortunately with the expense of some body parts of the main actress is also out of focus. The next image will depict what I mean more clearly.

Noticed that only the several front flowers are in focus, the rest are in misery. But the 2 images above have a 3 dimensional shape, meaning each small flower has a significant range difference, and it is more pronounced by the relative close distance which I took this image (as close as I can get with this lens, that is 28cm). So my next-day attempt will be to capture it with smaller aperture, hopefully with the effect of increased DOF, and get a sharper detail for all the flower, and capture another flower with a more 2 dimensional shape.

This is also the first time I ever noticed the huge difference between different settings of WB. The first picture was taken with the WB set to auto, and here is the same object with more or less the same angle but with the WB set to sunny, cloudy, and shade. By the way, it was about 3 PM when I took those pictures, its cloudy and no direct sunlight.

Sunny

Shade

Cloudy

The shade setting always gives the most reddish color, or what Mr. Ape called “hot” several days ago, which sometimes makes my eyes sore a bit. The cloudy and sunny setting looks better IMO. I think I like the sunny best. The auto setting just looks too dull, but sometimes it does get the job done.

Now the post gets too damn technical. Well, what can I say, during my infantile photographic life, exploring the technical aspect is the basic requirement. Great photos are about artistic soul, momentum, and luck. But when the opportunity does come, or the artist of your brain gets the tickle, you would want your photographic skills as superb as you can get, not to mention having the suitable equipment required to capture that specific moment. So be enthusiastic, be aware, be diligent, and be rich. PTT salary, here I come. :D

NB: any tips about uploading image to Blogger?because I'm not quite satisfy with the resolution they provide.

New Year 2010's Firework

First project with Canon EOS 400D/Digital Rebel XTi

It took the eagle quite some time to figure out what would he like to post, since he got a mate to be dealt with, nest and eggs to be taken care of, and not to mention setting up snake traps here and there for either protection and free lunch. But here it is, the eagle eyes are still a bit sore from 2009’s lack of sleep and depression, so it hampers his ability to learn early on. But fear not, more projects and experiments will be posted as more knowledge is gathered during this lazy useless idle life phase of him.

This picture was taken from eagle’s mate’s second floor balcony, right at 00:00 am 01-01-2010, the fireworks actually launched from La Piazza at Kelapa Gading Mall, but since it only happens for a few minutes, and I didn’t brought my tripod, plus I was lazy, so there is no use of running down the street to get a better position, because it will be either too late or result in a horrifying image quality caused by either my unsteady hands (not a neurosurgeon’s hands I guess), or streetlights hampering the metering process.

This is my first attempt to get pictures with my sister’s Canon EOS 400D + 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit zoom lens (which I had just claimed for ownership :D ) and I will stick to this camera for quite a long time. Because it happens so fast, there is no way I can use manual setting to determine the effect that I desire, so I set the ISO to 1600, used the P program to let the camera determine the correct aperture, which always 5,6 at 55mm focal length (the focal length that I use for all this images), and I rest both elbows on the balcony’s fences to act like tripod (which I couldn’t had done so if I ran down the streets).

All the image above were taken under correct exposure determined by the P program, so the aperture is varied from 0.6-2.5 s. although some of them are quite satisfying, personally think that the auto metering makes the sky look a little too bright.

Below are a couple of images that is accidently captured without waiting the camera to be ready, so that the shutter opens up quite briefly. But in my opinion it gave quite a decent effect. It isolate the fireworks with no trees or grainy sky background, and it freeze the fireballs along with its smoke, contrary to just some lines of colors u see above.

And that’s it for now. Please give your comments especially Mr. Swikee, Mr. Snake (If you haven’t tripped on my snake trap), Mr. Ape, and Mr. Bunhead (even if it’s just to make fun of the snake).