Category: Photography

One last set of photos from the Gardens, and then I’m off to travel a bit, walk a lot, take care of some business and maybe even more photos.

The weather has been in the 80s and wet. Spring didn’t happen, it exploded. Normally the flowers occur in stages, with crocus, daffodil, and magnolia in stage one; followed by the flowering fruit trees and tulips in stage two. This year, everything was up at once. Walking through the park was like walking into Nordstrom, between the two ladies with the perfume.

Before going to the park yesterday, I was browsing about when I discovered a weblog post where the author asked the question, What makes a great photo?. Several people had responded and the responses were published in the post. After reading it, as I was walking about taking pictures and later, as I was processing photos from my trip, I wondered why no one ever celebrates their less than perfect photo picture taking quirks. After all, if we all took photos like the experts recommend there would be no individuality. Prettier, more profound pictures, perhaps–but no individuality.

For instance, take the following picture. It’s of new leaves. Normally in the Spring, you take pictures of flowers, not leaves. But look at this picture: what are those things surrounding the leaves? That’s the first thing I thought when looking at the tree, what are those things around the leaves? I don’t remember seeing weird little things like that before. Have they always been there, and I hadn’t noticed them? Unique to this tree? Some kind of unhealthy, tuberous growth, which makes itself look green and innocent so it isn’t sprayed?

Quirk one: Nature works really hard, don’t waste the effort by focusing only on tulips.

This next violates probably a dozen rules of photography. There’s conflicting patterns all over, way too much detail and screams ‘busy’. Look at that tree? It doesn’t even have the decency to lose its last few leaves from fall. No, they’ll probably hang around until they’re pushed off by the new leaves.

And the trunk of the tree looks like it has an eye.

Quirk two: Go ahead and take a messy picture. Tell people to look for the fractal patterns. Sit back and snicker.

Daffodils. I got your daffodils here.

Not a bad grouping, but I didn’t have the focus straight on, and so the flowers aren’t sharp. That’s violating the most cardinal rule: sharp photos. However, I liked the grouping–it’s like the flowers were having a chat.

Quirk: It’s a weblog, you can post fuzzy pictures. People will think they’re just tired from reading 342 feeds.

In this one, now, the fuzziness was intentional. It’s called bokeh.

Quirk Four: As long as your mistake has a Japanese name, it’s intentional.

Now this is a split corona daffodil. It’s it an absolutely beautiful flower. With flowers such as these, doesn’t matter what you do with the camera, it will look good. You could take pictures of the flower behind you by bending over and pointing the camera between your legs and the photo will look good.

Quirk five: Bend over, take pictures behind you by pointing the camera between your legs. Suggest you save this for wilderness pictures.

The next two photos are of the same type of flower. Now, typically you won’t publish more than one photo of the same subject. You’d pick your favorite, which shows a fine sense of discrimination by picking only the best rather than put up many.

Why am I repeating the flowers? I liked the first photo better, but I liked the pollen dribble on the second.

Quirk six: Flower drool.

The next photo is sharp enough, positioned correctly, and the light seems to be good. But it just sits there, limp. Why this picture then?

I liked the background. That’s my deep, dark secret for most of my plant and flower pictures: I find a background I like, and then I go look for something to plunk into the foreground to justify the shot.

Quirk seven: Backgrounds. Find a background, hope a deer walks in front of the lens.

This next picture, my god what was I thinking? It looks like Van Gogh decided to paint over a picture by Monet.

Quirk eight: create a photograph that looks like a combination of the work of Van Gogh and Monet.

Hey! We’ve seen this flowering tree before!

Have you ever noticed with flower photos how the photographer will place the flower in the last or first vertical third, and leave primarily blank space in the rest of the frame? This technique gives the photo sensitivity and mood?

This is a crass American photo: if one flower is good, two is better! If one SUV is good, two is better! If one 50 inch TV is good, two is better! If one…

Quirk nine: Nature abhors a vacuum.

Again, same tree. I love this tree. It’s one of my favorite trees.

Quirk ten: one can never have too many pictures of something we love. Next week: pictures of Peeps.

I’ll end with just ten quirks and the last few photos from the set. I not only captured my first butterfly of the year, but captured my first bee–throwing in a cardinal for good measure because you can get away with anything when you add a cardinal.

My leaf!

I have not been taking many pictures. This last winter, circumstances were such that I didn’t have much opportunity. Now, I’m more of a mood to go for walks without the camera. Still, spring is pretty here, though cloudy this year.

This fine fellow is a wood duck, considered the prettiest duck there is. I’ve always been fond of these creatures because they have the most unusual personality. They’re very shy, but also opportunistic. The female seems more dominant than with other duck species. And the males will stare at you, fixedly with blood red eyes, which can be somewhat unnerving.

The photos don’t do the birds, either male or female, justice–their colors are brilliant during the winter months.

This is also a test of another piece of functionality I’m trying to create. This one is a replacement upload page for WordPress that allows one to upload a photo to the server, to Flickr, or to S3 (or any other site that provides an API). It also allows you to specify class names for the image, the link surrounding the image, and a way of specifying size.

Does some ‘stuff’ with metadata, too. You know, stuff.

It needs a great deal of work, still. When finished, I’ll provide the functionality as a plugin for those interested.

I wrote a post about camera sensor cleaning a few months back. It would seem that the concept of sensor cleaning is a little more complex than I originally thought. Maybe I was right to be paranoid.

Doug Pardee sent me an email with a warning about sensor cleaning, type of camera, and fluid used, and he gave me permission to re-produce:

Once upon a time, the front of the sensor assembly in every DSLR model was glass. You could just go in there and clean it with anything suitable for cleaning glass. The big concern was not making things worse by leaving spots and streaks.

In the past couple of years, however, some DSLR models have been designed with sensor assemblies that have exposed coatings on the front. Cameras that I know do this are the Canon EOS 5D and three cameras with dust-shakers on their sensors: the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi aka Kiss Digital X aka 400D, and the new Canon EOS 1D mark III.

This design change is basically a cost-saving measure, but the manufacturers seem to be spinning it as a “feature”. From what I can tell, the exposed coating in the cameras listed above is the dichroic “hot mirror” that keeps the sensor from being overly sensitive to infrared. The hot mirror coating is typically something like indium tin oxide, which is electrically conductive by nature. I believe that the manufacturers are spinning this exposed hot mirror coating as being an “anti-static” coating for dust control.

Ordinary Eclipse fluid has been known to attack hot mirror coatings. In the past, this only occurred when the sensor assembly was incorrectly assembled at the factory, accidentally resulting in exposed coatings. But now, sensors on some DSLR models are *designed* to have the hot mirror coating exposed.

Accidental removal of some of the hot mirror coating would cause the sensor to be overly sensitive to IR in those parts of the sensor where the coating was stripped away. In most photos that would not be noticeable. But some materials are particularly reflective of IR, notably clothing made of some synthetic fabrics. Some white paints also reflect a lot of IR. Photos of subjects with those materials can be subject to false color if the hot mirror is missing.

Photographic Solutions has developed a new cleaning fluid called Eclipse “E2” for sensors with exposed coatings. This was apparently done at the behest of Sony, who wanted a safe wet-cleaning fluid for the DSLR-A100. Sony has approved E2 for the A100.

Photographic Solutions recommends E2 for all four of the camera models mentioned above. But I was surprised to find four other camera models on that list: the Leica M8 and the Nikon D70, D70s, and D80.

Here’s the list.

I don’t know what coating(s), if any, are exposed on those four additional camera models. The Leica M8 sensor doesn’t even *have* a dichroic hot mirror coating – the photographer needs to use a separate hot mirror filter on the lens.

For an example of what the IR “false color” issue looks like, go to this article and scroll down about halfway. There are two photos there comparing a Canon 5D with a Leica M8. As I mentioned, the M8 doesn’t have a hot mirror coating on its sensor. Also note the other M8 photos that came out fine even without the hot mirror… er, well, now that you know what to look for, you might spot some less obvious false color in some of the other photos.

As I said, I don’t know what the situation is on the Nikon D70. But my recommendation would be to switch to E2 fluid. Photographic Solutions says that E2 is good on all sensors, with or without exposed coatings, so you could also use it on the D200. Or use your existing supply of Eclipse fluid on the D200.

Check ve-e-ry carefully about which sensor cleaning fluid you can safely use with your camera. Thanks muchly to Doug for heads up.