My circular polarizing filter

To say that equipment doesn’t matter (in Photography at least) would be a lie. They say that a bad tradesman blames his tools, but that is only because a truly good tradesman can extract a good result out of bad tools. For the best results however, good tools are a necessity. Here I will talk about a nifty little tool that I have been using ever since I got into photography in 2007 – the circular polarizing filter.

A CP filter usually screws onto the front of a lens and has the interesting property of being able to rotate. As a practical matter, this can make it difficult to tighten or loosen the filter, but it shouldn’t matter, and you shouldn’t have your filters screwed on too tightly anyway. If you ordinarily keep a UV or clear filter on the front of your lens to protect the front lens element (a good idea) then, you should take it off before placing the CP filter, rather than stack the filters on top of each other.

What does it do? It polarizes light. What does that mean? Well, light travels in waves.. well, actually in many ways it travels more like particles (actually, there’s a cool particle-wave duality thing going on here that is beyond the scope of this article, but I encourage the interested reader to look it up). So imagine light as a bunch of skipping ropes and some dude is jiggling one end of each rope and the light waves propagate down the rope. The direction that these waves “wave” is pretty random. A polarizer acts as a sort of “comb” for waves in a particular direction. If a wave is waving up and down in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the comb bristles, then it won’t go through, but if the wave direction is parallel, then it will go through.

The most obvious difference is the greater range of blue gradients.

So far, we’ve learned that a polarizer will filter out some amount of the light that runs into it, and that the direction of the light waves affects which ones get filtered out. What does this mean in the context of photography? Think about the sky for a second. Have you ever wondered why the sky is blue? The daytime sky gets its colour from light waves being scattered by the atmosphere. Without the atmosphere, the sky would be black, even in the daytime, and the sun would just light everything directly and we would get some amount of reflected light from things it hit. So light gets reflected from particles in the atmosphere, and because of the size of these particles, the light is mostly blue.

The following photos are presented in pairs, and will be most effective if you click through them.

first shot - take note of the contrast between sky and clouds, and also of the way light is reflected on the roof

the second shot, taken with the polarizer turned 90 degrees shows the difference in "cloud pop", but also in the way the roof reflects light

So here’s the rub – all light that is reflected becomes polarized in some way. The sky, being a very significant light source in photography, is basically a big source of polarized light. Depending on where you are looking in the sky, relative to the sun, the light waves you are seeing will be polarized in a slightly different direction (because for you to see them, then they will have had to be reflected at a different angle). What does this mean for CP filters? It means that filter will give your blue skies a stronger luminosity and saturation gradient than if you didn’t have the filter. This is the first and most obvious effect of having a CP filter. If you point your camera at the sky (the best effects happen when the sun is perpendicular to your angle of shooting) with your CP filter, you can “tune” the way the reflected light gets polarized by turning the filter. Then, if you turn the filter by 90 degrees, you will get another, very different effect. It’s a lot of fun.

another example of contrasting effects, this time with a picture consisting of mostly water and sky

for those who know Prague, this is facing north from Charles Bridge, pay special attention to the difference in the way the water looks

There is a second use for CP filters other than to really add oomph to your sky. I said before that all reflected light is polarized in some way. Especially reflective surfaces such as water, glass, and metals are no exception and twisting your polarizing filter with any of these in shot will “tune” the amount of reflection you get. This is very useful when you’re trying to shoot through glass and you keep getting that annoying reflection, I’ve included an example below showing maximum and minimum reflection which is simply achieved by turning the filter by 90 degrees.

controlling the amount of reflection with the filter has many obvious uses

for example, this cat can no longer hide behind the window's reflection

A third use for a CP filter is simply as a neutral density filter. Neutral density filters are useful when you want to take photos at a wide aperture (say for example if you had one of those nifty Leica f/0.95 lenses) and low shutter speed, but there is too much light in the scene. Also useful for long exposure shots, like the ones where you draw things using light.

An interesting, if totally irrelevant to photography, use for a polarizing filter is to clean your laptop screen. All LCD screens have a polarizing filter on them (if you’ve ever taken apart a calculator, radio, or computer as a kid and flipped the thin film that covers most LCD screens, you will have noticed that it reverses the colours). If you hold up your polarizing filter to a laptop screen and turn it the correct way, the screen will go completely black (looking through the filter). What you will see, will be the little specs of dust on your laptop screen illuminated by the screen, yet starkly visible due to the blocking out of polarized light.

now you see it...

now you don't... (ok, the dust didn't come out so well, click the image for a closer look)

So there you have it, another useful tool of the trade. Mainly useful for outdoor landscape shots with lots of sky in the frame, but also useful for other things if you’re willing to be a little creative and experimental. These filters are reasonably easy to find as long as you’re in a city with at least one reasonably large camera shop. I bought my first CP filter in Ushuaia, Argentina, the world’s southernmost city (population 60,000). Of course, being a major launching point for Antarctic expeditions probably means that its photography shops are better-stocked than similarly-sized cities, but you get the picture.

Kit for turning a DSLR from a still camera into a video camera

Many of the loyal readers of this website are probably wondering where I’m at in my mini-sub-career as a photographer. The short answer to that is that I am waiting. Waiting not only for something to really sink my teeth into, but also for new equipment to be released. Why is this important? I’ve never been hugely concerned with equipment in the past, and in any case it seems that I have everything I might ever need. To really understand why I am waiting on equipment, one must first understand where photography equipment is at at the moment.

Curiously enough, it was Nikon that threw the first punch. When the D90 was announced as the successor to the D80, it seemed like a pretty regular incremental upgrade except that it was the first DSLR to shoot video. Compact cameras have been able to shoot video (of fairly low quality) for as long as digital compacts have been common, but since DSLRs are much more complex machines, with mirrors and shutters and whatnot, even “live view”, where one can preview the image in real-time on the screen, is a relatively recent addition to the DSLR feature list. As live view became more and more widespread, the obvious question arose as to what was stopping now stopping video to come to the DSLR market. The answer: not much.

Video came in the form of 720/24p on the Nikon D90. After spending some time explaining much of the technical terminology in my previous entry “Photo Gear“, I should probably give similar treatment to the technical jargon of the video world, which I have been slowly learning over the last few months. The big number (720 in this case) is the number of horizontal lines of resolution. 720 usually means 1280×720 pixels. The “p” refers to “progressive scan” as opposed to “interlaced scan” which is usually indicated by an “i”. What does all of this mean? A movie is like a flip-book, your moving picture consists of lots of still pictures being shown to you in a sequence. Progressive scan means that every single pixel is scanned at one time per frame, so every single picture in the sequence represents the full resolution. Interlaced scan means that all the odd-numbered horizontal lines are scanned for one frame, and the even-numbered lines for the next frame, and this process alternates, meaning that each frame contains half the resolution. Progressive scan requires twice as much data to be throughput as interlaced scan at the same resolution and framerate. (more info on resolution can be found in the post “Notes on Resolution“).

A curious decision on Nikon’s part was to set the framerate of capture for the D90 at 24 frames per second. To the best of my knowledge, 24fps is only used on motion pictures. The standard for TV is 30 (that’s HD, standard definition TV it gets a bit complicated… PAL is 768×576 at 25 fps, while NTSC is 640×480 at 30 fps) Anyway, I thought it strange because, if anything, a DSLR being used for video would have applications more immediately in the realm of TV than in motion pictures. The reason I felt this way was simply a matter of resolution. TV resolution is fairly low, while film resolution is… the resolution of film, which I discussed previously to be approximately 24 megapixels in digital-speak. Even 1080p (1920×1080) is 2,073,600 pixels, which is less than a tenth the resolution of film. In fact, the closest equivalent standard in digital video is called “6K” and is simply 6000×4000 pixels. Unfortunately, there don’t yet exist digital motion picture cameras in those resolutions. The problem is data throughput.

Bayer pattern filters on an image sensor

With so many DSLRs now with resolutions to match high quality film, some people wonder why shooting motion with these is so difficult. A digital stills camera captures an image by first filtering the light into red, green and blue components using filters on top of the pixel sensors as can be seen in the diagram above. There are twice as many green filters as any other colour simply because dividing things into three evenly is difficult to do on a rectilinear grid. Our eyes are also more sensitive to green light. Anyway, it takes four of those little squares up above to count as one “pixel”, which will have a number for red, green, and blue (RGB) which is how computers store pixel information. When you hear high-end DSLR salesmen talk about 12 vs 14-bit colour depth, what they really mean (whether they understand this or not) is the amount of space given for storing the numbers associated with each individual pixel. More bits is better because it allows for more “steps” in the luminosity for each individual R, G, or B component, resulting in a finer degree of colour graduation. Also, the number increases exponentially – 14-bit colour is four times better than 12-bit colour. The point I’m trying to make is that every time you take a picture, a whole bunch of numbers need to be recorded and stored, and a typical 24-megapixel camera will need about 24 megabytes per photo.

24 megabytes is a lot of information. Try writing down a single 0 or a 1. That’s one bit. Eight of them make up a byte. So 24 megabytes is about 192 million 1s and 0s to write down. Obviously camera technology has advanced to the level where we can do that, but to do it 24 or 30 times a second, that’s a throughput of 576 megabytes a second. That comes to about 35 gigabytes per minute, which means that a typical 2-hour film would represent 4,200 gigabytes of information. Of course, anyone who’s ever edited film knows that the production team of a typical 2-hour film goes through a lot more than 2 hours worth of film. The way storage and data manipulation technologies are going, it won’t be too long before we have storage media, and applications that can reasonably handle that amount of data, but at the moment, we’re still a touch behind.

The Canon 5D mk2 - setup for still photography

mind the gap

Same camera, but now with all the bits added for motion picture photography

At the moment, the current gold-standard for DSLR filming is the Canon 5D Mark 2. It captures video at 1080p at either 24, 25, or 30 fps. Other Canon cameras such as the T2i, 1D Mark 4, and 7D all capture 1080p as well, but the important difference with the 5D is that it is a full-frame camera. Recall from my earlier article that full-frame sensors are the same size as old-school film used to be, that being 36x24mm. This is significant because, frame rates and resolutions aside, the main thing that makes films look so much better than normal TV is the shallow depth of field – the amount of the image that is in focus. Even high quality HDTV cameras that TV Networks use to broadcast have 2/3″ sensors which have about a fifteenth of the area of a full-frame sensor. Anyone who has ever tried to purchase a high-end video camera knows that even cameras with 1/3″ and 1/2″ sensors can be very expensive. For reasons of optics, you want the sensor’s dimensions to be a large as possible and in the world of digital video, only the RED One had anything near this.

The nice thing about this, is that the RED One reached the top of that ladder by approaching the problem from a completely different direction. Regular digital video capture works by splitting the incoming image into three separate beams which are then filtered with red, green, and blue filters. Expanding the size of those sensors generally meant making three larger sensors, along with all the filters and prisms that went along with it (you’ll notice “3 CCD” advertised as a feature of higher-end video cameras – that is what they mean – that those cameras bother to split the beam, resulting in better colour reproduction). The RED, on the other hand doesn’t split the beam, but instead has one sensor of 4096×2304 pixels and each and every one of those pixels is recorded for every frame of capture. This camera was a bit of a game-changer at the time of its release and many successful motion pictures have been shot with it (such as District 9).

Typical setup for the RED One

Of course, the RED was aimed at professional film makers and although cheap by their standards at $17,000 not including lenses, it didn’t exactly jump out as an option for small-time independent film makers. Once you start throwing in lenses, follow focus, eyepiece, batteries, monitors, matte boxes, and tripods, the whole setup can become very expensive very quickly. Of course, this is a setup for producing feature film quality footage (albeit still at not-quite film resolution). Still, 9.5 megapixels is impressive – imagine a 10 megapixel DSLR shooting 24 shots every second continuously for however long a sequence lasts. Such a feat is, in a technical sense, still impossible in the current world of DSLR cameras (of course, in a few years I will re-read this article and laugh). A DSLR filming at 1080/24p is basically shooting a 2 megapixel image 24 times a second.

The Canon 5D shoots 21 megapixel stills at a maximum of about 4 frames per second. What really happens with motion picture shooting is that some fraction, let’s say a tenth, of the pixels in the sensor takes a photo for the first 24th of a second, then a different tenth of the pixels takes another shot in the second 24th of a second, and so on (I think this process is called “downsampling”). If you’re doing the maths in your head, you might be thinking that the 5D should be able to shoot at 1080 resolution at 40 frames per second, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Having to process all of those megapixels is a rather severe bottleneck in the digital workflow and I wouldn’t be surprised if 30 frames per second is already a struggle with current technology.

So with all this new DSLR technology, what is the point of having all these old sensors? They are surely completely obsolete by now. Well, not quite. Even though the sensors are relatively small, and they don’t give you the “film look” the technology is very mature and has been in use in TV broadcasting for a very long time. One of the biggest advantages that the small-sensor cameras have at the moment is their auto focus. (Just as a comparison, motion picture film cameras are all manually-focused). Although it is generally more appreciated by those who are old enough to have used cameras that didn’t have auto focus, auto focus is a very obviously useful thing, and in some cases essential. Basically any situation that involves either a crew that is limited in size (i.e. one camera man + reporter) or events which are difficult to predict (like sports). Actually, the only situations where auto focus isn’t essential are ones that take place in controlled settings, like film shoots, and on the set of TV shows, where everything is scripted and rehearsed and planned out in advance (and repeated many times).

Small, compact, ergonomic - the product of mature technology... but quickly becoming obsolete

Even in the world of small-sensor video cameras, technology has been improving in leaps and bounds (probably as a response to the whole DSLR-video thing). My camera, very new technology when I bought it, shoots in 1080p at 24, 25, or 30 frames per second. The sensors are 1/4″, and the big feature of this camera is that it shoots straight onto SD card media. This is significant because until very recently, all video cameras recorded onto tapes. Tapes are all well and good, but transferring video on a tape to a computer can only be done in real-time, that is – an hour on the tape takes an hour to transfer to your computer. With the SD card, you just pop it out, put it in a card reader, and hours of footage takes only minutes to download AND it is already in a readable electronic format and requires no extra time or computer wizardry to convert to something usable. Of course another advantage of my JVC is that it is built to take video, and everything I might need to do that is already included. The Canon 5D (which I don’t own btw) is a stills camera first and foremost; it just happens to also shoot video – it can’t yet auto focus during the shooting of video.

The question of “the look” and focus is actually quite an important one. The reason films look the way they do is because the lenses they shoot with have very wide apertures, and therefore give a very shallow depth of field. The downside to this, is that if you are even slightly out of focus, your picture is going to be blurry. With a small sensor camera, I can be several inches out of focus and you might not notice; on a large sensor camera, that kind of error would make a shot unusable. In fact, very high quality lenses for motion picture film cameras are even able to control their “focus falloff” which is the degree to which the image becomes out of focus and how quickly that happens. When you combine this shallow depth of field with the fact that all the cameras used to shoot films are manual focus, you might wonder how any of the shots stay in focus at all. Well, that is a job for the “focus puller” which, in America is known as the first assistant cameraman (yes, there is more than one assistant cameraman).

This is how it works – the director goes through shot with all the actors and effects people and set people and the camera operator (the guy who points the camera at the stuff). The focus puller makes a note of where everyone is and when, and measures the distance from the camera to those marks. He then has a fiddle with the lenses that he’s going to use for the shot because they will have focusing distances marked on them, and he will practice moving the lens from one distance marker to another. It’s a pretty difficult job, and much harder than the job of the second assistant camera who only has to worry about loading the film and clapping the clapperboard (then there are the people who move the camera around, and the crane operators if the camera is on a crane…). The focus puller also has to make small compensations on the fly because things don’t always go quite according to plan, and until recently he has also had to do it with no feedback, but thankfully these days we have high-res digital monitors to assist the focus puller.

Family of Zeiss Compact Prime Lenses (click to enlarge, the distance markers can clearly be seen)

So where is all of this going? The only thing that delivers the resolution of film is still actual film, digital cameras for cinematography are hideously expensive, dedicated broadcast-quality video equipment is (sometimes) cheaper but doesn’t look as good as film, and DSLRs look like film, but aren’t ergonomic, lack features, and can’t auto focus. Of course, there are always compromises, but let’s consider the resolution. The highest resolution that a TV will offer is 1080/60p and not a lot of broadcasts are made in that resolution, most HD broadcasts are 1080/30p and the vast majority of people’s TVs don’t go anywhere near this resolution. The only place where you could make a good argument for needing more than 1920×1080 resolution is in a cinema, where the image is projected onto a very large screen and let’s face it, very few of us will ever produce a film to be shown on a cinema screen and even fewer of us will ever produce a film to be shown on a cinema screen which will actually end up being shown on a cinema screen.

What’s on the horizon then? RED has been talking about two new cameras, the Epic and the Scarlet for quite some time now and one hopes that they will be released soon. They have made an unfortunate error in their timing however, because the lower-end versions of these camera (read: more affordable) were aimed at precisely the people who now use DSLRs like the Canon 5D to shoot things like the season finale of House M.D. Of course, the real groundbreaking versions, like the full-frame (35mm-sized) RED Epic which should be the first digital camera to shoot 6K (or 6000×4000 pixels, or 24 megapixels, i.e. the resolution of film), but RED will be making it’s money off the much larger volume purchases of the cameras further down the line.

Another exciting development I believe is on its way is auto focus. High quality video cameras have never really had auto focus and, as a result, require at least two people to operate at any one time if there is any movement in the scene. But now, in a completely different segment of the digital photography market – the one of micro four-thirds cameras – compact cameras with large sensors that do away with the use of the reflex mirror (where the “R” in SLR comes from). These cameras have pushed the development of very fast contrast-detect auto focus (as opposed to the already-fast phase-detect which is what all SLR cameras use these days). Nikon recently filed a patent for a fast continuously-focusing contrast-detect auto focus which is potentially a game-changer for the world of large-sensor videography.

Simplicity - Nikon 50mm f/1.8 - manual everything

In any case, I’m really waiting for Nikon to release its answer to the Canon 5D, possibly in the form of an updated D700 (recall that the camera body I currently own is a D700) which can shoot 1080p video. This way, I can do away with my video camera and be able to travel with only one camera body doubling as two cameras. One of the reasons that Nikon is particularly attractive, is that, if forced to manual focus, it is much better to do so with a lens that is designed for manual focusing than one that is not. The only current lens models that do this are the Zeiss primes (some are in the picture above) which are obscenely expensive (and beautiful) things. The wonderful thing about the Nikon lens mount is that it is compatible with very old fully-manual focus lenses (if you stick to prime lenses (fixed focal lengths, not zooms) the optical design is essentially the same). Sadly, old Canon lenses aren’t similarly compatible with the current EF mount. Lens manufacturers have also noticed this important trend and Zeiss for example released a set of “Compact Primes” (pictured above) which have interchangeable lens mounts, so they are able to mount onto either Canon EF, Nikon F, or the PL (the current standard for cinematic lenses). They are also clearly targeting the film makers on a lower budget because, as you may have noticed from the photo, all the lenses are roughly the same size, and importantly, have the same diameter, meaning you only need one “matte box” on all of them (the matte box is the thing that looks like an overgrown lens hood and is used to minimize lens flare, and also for holding filters).

My long term plan with all of this is to sell my old (a whole 9 months!) video camera and perhaps even my D700 camera body, buy the replacement camera body (which I imagine will cost a little bit more) and all those little extra bits that are required such as a matte box, manual follow focus equipment, some better microphones, and if there’s any money left, one or two of those sweet Zeiss lenses. Why? Because making films is something that I want to eventually get good at, even if I don’t make a career out of it (I almost certainly wont) because it would be a useful skill. Of course, my upcoming documentary about the story of the Australian long track speed skating team¹ has been the inspiration for my recent interest in the technical aspects of film making, although to be honest, I’ve been interested in it for a while – I’m that crazy dude who watches Lawrence of Arabia on DVD, then watches it again with the director’s commentary (did you know that all of their shots of the sun were paintings because they kept burning the film every time they pointed the cameras at the sun?). Nikon recently released a more entry-level DSLR, the D3100 which has an APS-C sized sensor and shoots 1080/24p which does feature the continuous autofocus in video mode, although it remains to be seen how well it performs in real life. It also has no external microphone jack, which will make it difficult to mitigate the sounds of the lens focusing. In any case, the rumour mill has it that the D700 replacement won’t be out until early next year, so I guess I’ll just have to wait.

Jente and Josh

Photographs are very powerful things. I am only really just starting to appreciate that. One thing you can always do is just take a lot of photos randomly, and hope for the best. With digital photography, this strategy is much less expensive than it used to be, but even so, when reviewing the photos, you still need to know what you’re looking for. For the purposes of this discussion, we shall refer to that extra little bit as the “magic”. The photo above of Jente and Josh was taken at a small Christmas celebration with the Aussies in Holland. There was something about that party, it wasn’t raucous or anything (although there were raucous moments), but it was quite subdued in mood (and lighting). I really wanted to try to capture that in my photographs and this photograph seemed to capture it best. This might sound strange, but you just sort of have to “feel” the moment.

Everyone probably knows what I mean if I talk about the mood in a room changing when someone walks in or out. The same can sometimes be said of individuals smiling, or when a decisive moment is reached in a game of poker. This “mood” is often reflected in people’s faces and expressions, which in turn contribute to the mood itself (there are probably differential equations describing this). Thing about a photograph, is that at any one time it only captures a very small part of the room. Moreover, it’s capture is limited to things that can only be perceived with your eyes. So the photographer’s challenge (as I see it) is to somehow capture a very complex emotion, which is the sum of events leading up to a point as well as the product of multiple things, perceived through multiple senses, and to capture it in a two dimensional visual representation.

I tried a lot of different things that night; taking pictures of ornaments, taking very wide-angle shots with a lot of dead space, taking very close-crop face-shots. All in an effort to convey this mood of contentment, yet with a nagging sense of loneliness. I already knew that I was going to make all my photos black and white, or at least desaturate them considerably. It was not the right kind of mood for colour photographs. Feeling moods and emotions is one thing, and it is very important for a photographer to be able to do that, as well as sensing the emotions of others. But capturing it in such a way that similar emotions are triggered in the viewer of your photographs is extremely difficult. There is no formula for doing it, you just have to feel the magic.

Silver medal

This might sound strange, but I’m not a huge fan of sports photography. I find it a bit boring. You see, if you’re a sports photographer for a newspaper, there are certain kinds of shots that they are after, and they are mostly boring. In speed skating, where a perfect race looks almost identical to a not-so-great race, the photographer’s task is challenging. If I were a sports photographer for a newspaper, I would probably be fired very quickly because I would submit lots of non-standard photos, such as the one above. Without context… it still works. You’ve got a girl who looks a little disappointed. Notice the flag, indicating that she was probably a medalist… obviously not a gold medalist. If this accompanied a newspaper article, you would know that her name is Jenny Wolf, the current world record holder, who has held that record for a few years now, who is the leader in standings for this event at world cups, and who was heavy favourite for the gold medal. Now the photo makes even more sense. She has that distant look in her eyes, that “what if” look. I’m sure she was happy with her silver medal but I’d bet a lot of money that at the moment when this photo was taken, she was thinking more about the gold medal that she didn’t get, than the silver that she did. With a photograph, you’re not just trying to tell a story with the image, but you’re also trying to convey emotions.

Obvious emotional moments

Sport photography shouldn’t be boring, because there’s something about sport that brings out a very complex range of emotions in people, and not just the athletes. Sometimes, you’re lucky and you get moments like the one above, which happen during the course a sporting event. Moments where the emotion and the context are (literally) screamingly obvious.

a less-obvious moment

And at other times… between the hurly-burly of the action. Maybe it’s when someone is getting ready on the start line and has some kind of strange ritual, or perhaps it’s the moment when they recognize someone in the crowd, but these moments are much more interesting, because they remind us that athletes are also human. This is one of my favourite photos from the 2010 winter Olympics because it captures the moment when Annette realized that her olympic dream (at least in the 500m) was over. She did bounce back later and get a silver medal in the 1000m (missing gold by only 0.02 of a second!)

Eric Heiden

The portrait is easily one of the most challenging types of photos to take. It is relatively easy to teach someone how to take a technically-sound photograph, but teaching someone how to take a good portrait is difficult. Why? Because being a good portrait photographer depends a lot less on your technical skills with a camera, but much more on you ability to connect with and interact with people. Most people freak out in front of a camera, and even if they don’t, their behaviour changes noticeably when they’ve got a large camera pointed at them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re trying to distill the very essence of a person in a photograph, and sometimes (often) you will hardly know the person you are photographing. Of course, it helps to remember that the person you are photographing is themselves, so you can hardly capture a photograph that doesn’t communicate *some* of their essence.

The first step is to get the subject relaxed. The best way to do this is to talk to them. This accomplishes two things – firstly, it relaxes them so they are more “themselves” and less “them reacting strangely to a camera”; secondly, it gives you the opportunity to try to get to know them a bit better. The ideal portrait photograph is one where a close friend of the subject looks at the photo and say “that is SOOOO [insert subject's name here]“. The above photo is one that I took of Eric Heiden (who I encourage everyone to look up if you don’t already know who he is). Eric is such a chilled-out, down to earth guy that I didn’t realize who he was when he came to sit with us for lunch. I eventually realized and was somewhat awestruck by how totally cool and accessible this guy was considering he is the greatest speed skater ever to have lived. I wanted to capture his very relaxed nature, which was difficult because the room where we ate our lunch was also next to the warm up/down bikes at the Utah Olympic Oval, so the background was always very cluttered and busy. I employed a very simple trick which was to shoot from a lower angle so that only the upper part of the wall and the ceiling would be in the background of the shot. He now uses this photo as his profile pic on facebook.

The real key to finding the magic has nothing to do with lenses, sensors, focal lengths and whatnot. That’s like saying that the key to good poetry is all about good punctuation and vocabulary. Obviously you will need to learn about all those technical aspects in order to take technically sound photographs. But really good photographs, the ones that reach out of their two-dimensional confines and speak to our hearts, rely on… well… our hearts. You need to have an open heart, and connect with the subject matter, be it a landscape, a flower, or another person; and you have to have to the courage to let your heart speak through your photos. It’s about noticing the small details, the quiet moments, and being able to hear the whispers in the crowd, but it’s also about seeing the bigger picture at the same time, giving context. It should be like poetry, or music, always speaking to our hearts and always finding something new, something different… and occasionally something beautiful.

As I said before, it is difficult to describe. I spend a lot of time looking at the work of other photographers (and not just internet porn) for inspiration. Whenever I look at a photo I ask myself “what was the photographer thinking?”, “why did she make the photo like this?”, and I often ask the same questions of my own photos. It is important to allow yourself to “feel” the emotion of the image; try to be the image, and feel what it feels. Maybe it’s crying out in pain, frying some greasy bacon for breakfast, or maybe it’s giving you the cold shoulder, then try to communicate that. Also, keep it simple. It’s just a photograph. You look at it. That’s all. And practice, this is perhaps the most important thing.

Maybe none of what I just said makes any sense at all. That is probably part of the reason that people consider me a better photographer than a writer. But many have asked me about photography, and when I point them to the article about photo gear, and the two preceding articles – “The Truth Behind the Shutter” and “More Truth Behind the Shutter“, I am told that I haven’t said enough. Now I’ll probably be told that what I’ve said makes no sense… oh well. I guess it goes to show that you can’t learn how to be a good photographer just from reading. Good luck!

As many of you know, I enjoy taking photos. Some of you even enjoy viewing those photos. Seeing as I do not have any kind of media accreditation for this event, my ability to bring you photos may be somewhat limited because my access to stuff will be somewhat limited.

Even so, there’s no doubt that I will snap many pics while I’m here (some of them might even be good, but don’t hold your breath), and if you really want to see them, I’ve set up a dedicated page on my darkroom photoblog specifically for the purpose of displaying those photos.

The link is here.

Old links to photo albums of the European Inline Championships, the Dutch Single Distance Championships, the Calgary World Cup, and the Salt Lake City World Cup can be found by clicking on the text.

Enjoy!

I am not ordinarily a betting man. But when Swedish speed skater Claudia Wallin suggested we place bets on placings for the Dutch single distance championships, I couldn’t resist. Memories of chocolate bar prizes from high school footy tipping flooded back into my head (yes, everything is about food in my life). For the first two days, the betting was close and I had eked out a narrow lead thanks to almost guessing the correct finishing order of the top 5 men in the 5,000m race. On the final day of competition, however, Claudia snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by backing a handful of unknowns who ended up surprising everyone – including those in the press room where I was hanging out with my photographer’s press pass. But rather than feeling bitter at my defeat at the hands of a small Swedish girl, I’ve decided to try to take something positive away from the weekend (aside from all the free food that is served up in the press room).

In a sport where you travel around a 400m track made of ice at close to 60 km/h, balancing on a sliver of steel which is about 1mm thick, it is easy to forget that the people hidden inside the aerodynamic racing suits are just like you and me. Sure, they spend countless hours in the gym, on the bike, and on the ice refining their physical condition and technique, but come race day, they still have to put it all together. Now, I’m probably one of the most un-jock-like elite sports people ever to have existed, but I would actually be one of the first to jump to the defense of sport, and especially elite sport, for the life lessons that can be learned. Sadly, many of these lessons are often missed, and mostly because of a lot of the ridiculous misinformation that abounds about elite sport and what it entails.

Human beings are not machines. This is a mistake that is frequently made, even by very high-level coaches and athletes. If we really were machines, then the teams with the largest budgets  would win all the time because they could afford all the best facilities, equipment, and athletes. In other words, they would just outspend everyone on the inputs, and could reasonably expect the best outcomes. This almost never happens. Of the three aforementioned underdogs who did well on the weekend, only one was from a fairly major professional outfit – Rhian Ket, of APPM. Even though APPM is a great up-and-coming team, it is still nowhere near the likes of TVM or DSB in terms of budget and, dare I say it – prestige. The other two had a number of personal sponsors, but nothing like the support of a full-blown team. Obviously the big teams did very well, but the fact that relatively unknown skaters could seemingly come out of nowhere and challenge (and in Ket’s case, win) the big names is clear indication that nobody has it all figured out – another very important take-home lesson for life.

In sports which haven’t been around for a long time, or in sports where the number of overall participants is small, it is not unusual for unknowns to very suddenly become very good. Developments in technique, coaching, and simply having a smaller talent pool to compete with allows for this kind of variation to be fairly normal, even expected. Take for example speed skating in Australia; there’s no way in hell that I would be on an olympic training squad if speed skating was as popular in Australia as cricket was. But in Holland, where speed skating really is as big here as cricket is in Australia (or baseball in the US, for those of you who don’t know what cricket is), such happenings are far more unusual. Almost everybody here skates and speed skating has been and organized sport for well over a hundred years. In that time, significant progress has been made in technique and coaching methods. As little as 20 years ago, skaters used to train three times a day and hardly ever rested. The belief that training harder and for longer guarantees success is one of the most ridiculous myths that gets passed around. Part of the reason for this is that, for the vast majority of the population, whose training volume is almost negligible, this rule of thumb holds. However, for athletes who train fairly regularly, there are decreasing returns to scale, and over-training, by definition, actually has harmful effects on performance.

What does it take to win? There are many obvious things – focus, commitment, concentration, time, and money. There are also many things which are difficult to teach or learn, such as knowing one’s own limitations, being able to feel what one’s own body is saying (i.e. “eat more”, or “take today off”). Between athletes and coaches, knowing when not to train is always a dilemma. Most good athletes are highly motivated people, and it is often one of the most difficult things for an athlete to do – to stop training. To do so effectively requires realizing that stopping now often results in not having to stop later, and often for a much longer period of time (usually from injury or exhaustion). In highly technical sports (most of them, but especially speed skating) the ability to relax, to clear your head of clutter, and to be able to “feel” the ice, is also important. So many things have to come together to create a winning performance that most of them really must happen out of habit rather than being consciously brought to bear. At the elite level, nobody is strong enough to win on the mere strength of their talent or physical conditioning.

It is also impossible to cram for sport. I have lost count of all of the important examinations and essays that I have gotten through by simply sitting down in a library somewhere with a large pile of books, and working continually and obsessively, sometimes for over 40 hours at a time (although I wouldn’t recommend going for more than 30 – your brain becomes too useless to even spot simple spelling errors). It is just about impossible to change the result of a race by training intensely the day before. Actually, that isn’t true – if you try that, you are likely to change the result – but not in your favor. Sport is absolutely unforgiving in that regard. When you step on the line, if you stuff up, nobody will care if you trained more or less than anyone else. There is a ridiculous notion circulating in our education system that so long as a student puts a lot of effort into their work, then they deserve a high mark. There are no such illusions in sport, and at the very highest level, the athlete who trains hardest doesn’t always win.

Last weekend, three unlikely heroes unexpectedly made it into the top 4 in their respective events at Dutch nationals (a top-4 finish gives the skater a berth to represent their country at world cup events). They were able, under extreme pressure (nationals are televised live, nation-wide), to string together a confusing and intricate tapestry of, perhaps not all, but enough of the pieces whose sum is a brilliant performance. They all had to skate huge personal best times to do it. Even in such a big sport, with such a deep field of talented skaters (qualification times for Dutch nationals are faster than those for world cups!), with big teams and bigger budgets, it is still possible for an underdog who “gets it together” to leapfrog up the order. Perhaps me and my fellow Australian teammates can draw inspiration and learn from this, in our quest to make it to the Vancouver Olympic Games.

(for those of you who are only interested in my) photos:

http://darkroom.danielyeow.com/nk-afstanden-2009/

If you’re interested in the results of the championships, click here.

Michel on the second corner of his 300m Time Trial

Taking good photographs is not only about being artistic and having a good eye. Modern SLR cameras are seriously sophisticated things and learning how to operate one properly is no trivial matter. Sports photography is probably one of the least artistic and most technical sub-discipline that you can do. You just need a fast camera and a good lens right? Well, yes and no. Sports is the most unforgiving type of photography there is if you don’t have good gear, especially lenses. But you still need to be good at operating a camera.

Joji Falls

Joji Kato is the junior world record holder in the 500m, and is one of the leading contenders for the gold medal at the upcoming winter games in Vancouver. He can hook it around a corner at about 60km/h which is scarily fast. Tracking an object moving at that speed through the eyepiece of a heavy SLR camera and a 200mm lens is not easy. A camera that can take 8 frames per second certainly makes the job easier, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is to track something at this speed while taking photographs. A trick I like to use is to actually keep both eyes open – my right eye keeps the subject in the frame while my left eye is able to see the bigger picture.

When Joji exited the second corner of his 500m at Heerenveen, I knew something was amiss. His left skate “booted out” which basically means that he put it down at a slightly funny angle and it caused the skate to be whipped out from under him. I instinctively pressed the shutter release and ended up with an amazing sequence of his crash. This is the second photo in the sequence and is my favourite because it is the point-of-no-return. You can see his left skate digging into the ice and twisting his body out of line. He slid about halfway down the straight before slamming into the cushion – he was physically unhurt. The next day, he skated it again and won.

Lunge at the Line

Another important thing to remember is to keep your wits about you. When there is a close finish, it is sometimes easy to get caught up in the excitement only to miss the photo. Everyone knew that this race was going to be close, there was a handful of people who possessed one or more world championships jerseys. There was a lot of pushing and shoving going in, and coming out of the final corner so I stepped around the official photographer for the event (who was busy watching it and not taking photos) and pointed my camera at the line and just pressed the shutter.

Team USA

Just because sports photography generally focuses on the more technical aspects of taking a photo doesn’t mean that you can’t be artistic. While I would be the first to admit that a photo like this would probably never run in a newspaper, I like the way that the motion blur gives a sense of movement. From a technical standpoint, this was notoriously difficult to capture. I had to wait for precisely the right part of the skaters’ step so that they would be moving directly towards the camera as I panned from left to right with the shutter open (which is why they aren’t left-right blurred as much as the background).

Nicole Skates

Sometimes, in editing, you chance upon something unusual that happens to look good. This was the first photo I took of the entire meet, and I was just playing with the settings on the camera. Afterwards I was playing with the contrast and shadow settings, and adjusting the curves because I didn’t like the way Nicole’s braces seemed to “pop out” of her mouth because of the way they caught the light. The result was this dark and very sharp-contrast image which eventually got used by one of her sponsors on some advertising material.

Discussing the Race

Another thing I like to remember is context.  For me, what a photo is basically try to do is to communicate something. The more, or the more powerfully it communicates something, the better. You’ll hear photographers talk a lot about “dead space” which is basically wasted space in the photo which isn’t giving the viewer any new information. This photo is almost at risk of trying to convey too much information. You have the peleton of skaters with the information board in the background showing how many laps have been skated. You’ve also got Wayne and Bill Begg in the foreground discussing the race (they kind of “frame” the photo nicely though, don’t you think?). Context is also important for knowing what you’re looking at.

Olympic Oval

Nicole seems to have a way of sneaking into my good photos. I like this capture because it doesn’t really show very much, but just enough for you to know what’s going on. Here you’ve got a skater skating… but where is she skating? If you couldn’t read, you wouldn’t know, but these days it is reasonable to assume that the viewer can read (especially if you’re on a website).

Scrum

Sometimes freezing something in mid-air can convey motion just as much as blurring it can. This is a rugby ball just as it has been thrown into the scrum. Anyone who knows the sport of Rugby well would instantly recognize what’s happening here. This photo was part of a series of photos which made up an audio slideshow showcasing Columbia University’s rugby team.

Memorial Service

There are many tricks the photographer can use to draw the viewer’s attention to a certain part of the photo (other than freezing a rugby ball an inch off the ground in the middle of a scrum). While not particularly common, the method of using a lens’ distortion to draw the eyes of the viewer to elements of the photo occasionally crops up even in print media. The memorial service following the tragic death of a student at Columbia was attended by many. I wanted a way of capturing the large crowd without the crowd dwarfing the candles or the photo. I opted for the fisheye which enlarges things in the center of the frame and brings your attention to them. Although the news editor at the time wasn’t particularly fond of fisheye photos appearing in the newspaper, the editor in chief liked it enough to put it on the “good work week” pin-up board.

Christmas Eve

The best photos need no explanation. The laptop computer towards the right of the shot can possibly be viewed as a distraction, but it also helps balance the light-dark balance of the photo. There is nothing tricky about the exposure here, just like the shot of St. Nick’s pub discussed previously, this was one where I just saw something that I thought looked cool, and took a picture.

The photographer photographed...

Parties present a wealth of photographic opportunities. The real trick is to somehow capture the mood of what is happening through the photographs. Capturing kids on camera is an especially difficult thing to do because they are often camera shy and, in any event, will usually react to having their photo taken in some way. Whenever I photograph events, even parties, I try to be a “fly on the wall” and not be noticed (which I’m generally good at doing) but kids seem to have a knack for noticing you. I liked this photo because it shows one of the kids doing something that she would have done regardless of whether or not I had a camera. As soon as she lifted the camera to her eye and had committed to taking the photo, I quickly did the same and was able to beat her to the shutter (I was surprised that the auto-focus was quick enough to take this actually).

A bee

Taking good pictures of insects is almost as difficult as taking good pictures of children, but for slightly different reasons. They are both small and unpredictable. Capturing this bumblebee was tricky because it moved too quickly for the autofocus to track reliably. The answer – manual focus. Manual focus with a 200mm f/2.8 lens is not an easy thing to do, and my keep-two-eyes-open trick came into play once again. To get the focus right I tilted backwards and forwards slightly to make slight adjustments to the plane of focus and, as soon as I saw the bee in focus (or saw that the bee was about to be in focus) I pressed the shutter.

Night market

Night photography presents interesting challenges because of the lack of light. This often gives you more scope to be creative with exposure. Modern digital SLR sensors are extremely sensitive to light, much more than our eyes or film. In this photograph, I was able to take advantage of this and overexpose the image slightly (the real scene was a bit darker than what you see here). The sky, for instance, was almost completely black at the time, but the sensor was able to pick up the slightest amount of light leftover from the sunset. The overexposed light from under the tents also makes that part of the photo look much “warmer” (I also played with the colour temperature of the photo) and more inviting, reflecting the “feel” of the scene.

Traffic Jam

This was one I took for the Spec. We needed a photo for the story on congestion pricing, so a traffic jam seemed like a good idea. The photo editor knew a good location to get a view over the West Side Highway but it was getting a bit late. By the time we got there, we had lost the sunset light. To make matters worse, the bridge across the highway had a very high fence around it which would obscure the view onto the road. So I did what any self-respecting photojournalist would do and climbed the fence. When I got close enough to the top, I reached over and started snapping away, but I wasn’t the only thing snapping – an overzealous security guard was fast approaching and shouting at me to get down. I looked at the screen at the back of the camera and wasn’t satisfied with what I had, so I changed the settings to get a longer shutter and reached over and started taking more photos, keeping an eye on the screen and adjusting the exposure as I went, all the while shouting “I can’t hear you above the traffic” to a very angry security guard. I eventually apologized to the guard, insisting that I couldn’t hear what he was saying above the noise of the traffic. This photo was the lead photograph on the front page the following day.

Times Square

This final photo is another product of my 5am wake up which was discussed earlier. The light was perfect and there was very little traffic (by times square standards) so I took a series of about 12 photos from the one spot in the middle of the intersection (I waited for the red light, don’t worry). After playing with the stitched panorama for a while, I couldn’t get it to work in the “usual way”. I had envisioned a dark asphalt ball with buildings radiating out from it, but it never seemed to look right. Instead, I flipped the photo and transformed it the other way, so that all the buildings pointed to the center of the circle. I instantly knew that I had hit on something… and there you have it.

I hope this two-part series has enlightened you on how I go about taking my photos and has possibly inspired and informed you for your own photographic endeavours. The most important thing is to enjoy doing it, and don’t be afraid to try new things. Digital photography allows you to take as many pictures as you like at zero extra cost and that is something that you should definitely take advantage of. Good luck!

The Pitch

A while back, while living in New York City, I visited the old Yankee Stadium for a Yankees game. Baseball, while I appreciate the way the game works and the impressive skill of its players, is not really my cup of tea, but it does make for some good photos.

I was sitting a reasonable distance away from the pitcher’s mound, in seats that me and a friend had purchased for about $55. The position did offer a good angle of the pitcher’s throwing action. The only unusual thing to note in the action is the follow-through, mostly because the ball is thrown at close to 100mp/h. This photo appeared in the magazine “116″ (not as big a deal as it sounds) and was also featured on bwog. It was also the last title image on the old version of this website.

Contrary to popular belief (ask anyone), this was not a multiple exposure. Whenever you do a multiple exposure, when you go over 5-6 frames, it is too easy to end up with a moving subject that is far too faint, or a background that is so bright that it overwhelms the subject, which wasn’t the effect I was going for. This was actually painstakingly done in photoshop. I cut out the pitcher from each individual frame and placed him in, one-by-one, manually adjusting the opacity until every individual frame “looked right”. There are about 13 frames in this photo and, believe me, it took a long time.

Thialf Corner

Same deal, slightly different approach to the photo. This series of shots was taken with a wide angle lens at the widest setting during Dutch Nationals in Thialf, which is where I practically live right now. It is also, by far, the best venue for taking photos since (1) the air circulation system (those yellow pipes) keep the air a balmy 15º C above freezing and (2) the white painted concrete beneath the ice (most ice tracks are slightly grey) reflects the light onto the subject very evenly. The televised events are the best, because they turn all the lights on full-power. Actually, the photoshopping here was much easier because I didn’t have to worry about the opacity of the subject at all, I just pasted her in there.

commuter panorama

Speaking of wide-angled shots, I have become well-known (among my facebook friends, who clearly didn’t know me very well before all this) for panoramic shots. This one comes from a memorable photo shoot for the Columbia Daily Spectator, or “Spec” as it is affectionately known. The effect seen here can be achieved with something called a “fisheye” lens (apparently this is what a fish sees, whilst waiting for the subway). However, this particular photo was not taken with a fisheye lens (I didn’t own one at the time). The tell-tale way of knowing that is because the overall resolution of the original photo that I submitted was many times that of my camera, while a fisheye typically takes a perfectly circular photo which you then have to crop to get a rectangle resulting in a lower resolution.

Aside from the obvious reason – that I didn’t own a fisheye, I wouldn’t have used one anyway. You see, the article was about Amanda, the girl on the far left of the photo (you noticed her, right?). She commutes every day to-and-from Columbia, which is unusual for undergrads here because everyone is expected to live on campus. It was, therefore, important to be able to make out her face. I actually shot this with a “normal” zoom lens (not a wide one) and took 6 photos (at a 28mm focal length, if you’re interested) which I stitched together in photoshop. Recent versions of photoshop have tools that make this very easy, the thing you have to remember is that “auto” often screws things up, so the setting I used to distort the photos before blending them together was called “cylindrical” which basically bulges the photo in the middle and pinches it a bit towards the sides, depending on the focal length.

Subway Party

The New York Subway is such an iconic and recognized setting that some find it difficult to get a new photographic angle on it. About once a semester, the folks at Potluck House organize a party which takes place on the subway. It ordinarily gets on somewhere in the city and goes out to Brighton Beach for a skinny dip before hopping back on the subway to return home. All this usually takes place between the hours of 1am and 4am. I thought I would take my camera along, and it’s a good thing I did…

This one is a textbook example of a technique that I have recently learned is called “dragging the shutter”. This is what happens when you take a scene where you normally just use the flash as your main source of light, but hold the shutter down for a long time so that the ambient light has time to illuminate the background. On a normal point-and-shoot compact camera, the flash usually lights up (often overexposing) the subject while the background remains very dark. With an SLR and good flash (and some knowledge of how to use them both), you can get around this by (1) turning the power of the flash down and (2) holding the shutter open longer.

To achieve the above effect, I deliberately moved the camera around a bit (I promise, I hadn’t been drinking) and set the flash to synchronize with the second shutter – that means that the flash flashes when the shutter is about to close rather than when it has just opened, this doesn’t mater at all for this photo, but becomes important later. The result is the feeling of motion caused by the blur, but not of total disorientation because there is still a very sharp image in amongst all of the zany-ness.

Drums on the beach

Sometimes though, there isn’t much to be gained by lighting the background. This was the case here, another photo from the subway party. After skinny dipping we played drums and sang on the beach. Taken with a normal zoom lens at the widest setting, I’ve used the distortion in the corners to not only accentuate the flying of Morgan’s hair, but also to sort-of focus the energy in the picture which is centered by the direct flash illuminating the middle. In the background, it is very dark, but for the distant lights of the city which almost look like flames in the shot.

St Nicks Pub

Continuing the theme of shooting late at night in New York, we have a photo of St. Nick’s pub in Harlem. Come here any night of the week, and you’ll be treated to several hours of pretty awesome jazz in a very full pub. There is a somewhat timeless quality to this photo. There really isn’t anything to it, and I could have taken this photo with any camera that has existed since about the turn of the century. I decided to make it black and white because I felt that the colours confused things and were distracting in a photo which is really about nothing more than good composition. There are no “dead spots”. The top-left corner is a bit quiet, but the art of good composition is about not making your photos too “busy”. I was trying to capture a mood here, and the long shadows, overexposed light from within the pub and stark contrasts were more important than filling the frame with every little bit of information possible. But really… I just saw this scene and thought “that looks nice” and took a photo.

Overlooking Columbia

Laurel will probably kill me for including this one, although she did make it her facebook profile pic for a while, so I assume that she likes the photo. This unique view was captured from the out-of-bounds roof of the International Affairs Building at the corner of Amsterdam and 118th. The shutter was open for about 2 seconds and, for a hand-held shot of a live subject, there is almost no motion blur! I was testing my new Nikon’s low-light capabilities (verdict: unbelievably good). There are actually a number of similar shots where Laurel does different things, like look into the camera, but I liked this one the best.

As you may have surmised, I’m not a huge fan of using the flash, preferring instead to use available light. It was about 11pm in October and there wasn’t a whole lot of natural light… so I used just enough to illuminate her face (I also like how it’s illuminated from below and how there’s even some rimlight around the top of her head) which resulted in the buildings being slightly overexposed. I experimented with stopping down the aperture (this was f/2.8 – wide open) to try to get more detail out of the buildings but realized that (1) I was having enough trouble getting enough light as it was and (2) overexposed buildings out of focus looked nicer than overexposed buildings in focus. I also desaturated it a little (took some of the colour out) because I thought that the way the camera’s sensor picked up the colours in the shot was a bit too vivid, and I was going for a more subdued look, to go with the weather (who knows, if it had been a hot night, this may have been a more saturated photo).

The thing I like most about this photo is that, for those who know the Columbia Campus, it is immediately obvious what it is, despite being out of focus. The girl and the dark ledge frame the photo and give it context. I also like it because the look on Laurel’s face reflected my mood at the time, and so I probably think this photo is much better than it actually is.

John Legend

This was actually from one of my earliest assignments with the Spec. John Legend and Jeffrey Sachs got together (not like that!) to talk about poverty and how to fight it. Actually, that was mostly Jeff, John played the piano and sang a little. The only shots that ran in the paper were the “standard ones” which were mostly not-mine. I just asked myself “how many photos are there of people playing the piano” (answer: a lot) so I was trying to get a slightly different take on it. In this photo there is just enough information for you to see what is going on, yet it doesn’t look like the standard “a man playing the piano” picture. On a technical note (har har), I should’ve used a flash (although there is a chance that I was told not to) because if there’s one thing that stage lighting does that is bad for photographers, it is that is messes with your “white balance” (the balance of the intensities of red, green, and blue so that colours are reproduced correctly).

The Mall

During spring break, I took a quick trip up to Washington D.C. to see if I could get the opportunity to slap George W. Bush in the face. That opportunity didn’t present itself as I had hoped, but I did get a chance to take some photos. On the point of light sources affecting your white balance, this photo is an interesting example. Sunrise and sunset are the best times to take outdoor photos because the light is really good. Overcast days are also good because the clouds diffuse the light and spread it evenly and without sharp shadows on whatever it is you’re shooting.

This photo was taken near sunset, from on the steps in front of the Capitol Building. It is difficult to tell, but this photos has undergone a huge amount of editing. For some unknown reason, the colours just didn’t want to work, so I twiddled with individual colour channels’ luminosity and saturation for hours just to get it looking like I remember it looking. Was it worth the effort? I don’t know, but this photo got published in a travel guide.

Then and Now

This one was just kind of cute. While in DC, I chanced on the St. Patrick’s day parade. I saw one, then the other, then I KNEW that I had to get them in the same shot (and facing opposite directions). It proved surprisingly difficult (you’ll notice that part of the front wheel of the penny farthing is out of the shot) because one of them, I’ll let you guess which one, was moving very quickly. Sometimes being a photographer is like being an army sniper, you set up your target, stalk it covertly, then shoot it at precisely the right moment. There are crucial differences of course, like your target not being dead afterwards, having an unlimited supply of ammo, and being able to dress more casually.

Times Square

Sometimes stalking your prey is more difficult than just chasing strange things or waiting for stuff to line up. In this instance, the thing being chased is… buildings. They don’t move much, but in Times Square, everything else moves… quickly. It is surprisingly difficult to stand in the middle of Times Square at any time of the day, so I went on a fairly summer-ish day at about 5am and hoped that the sky was clear. Stalking good weather and very very early mornings can be frustrating because these factors are largely out of your control. Once the light got good, it was just a matter of putting on the wide-angle lens and using the distortion to create an over-accentuated perspective which gives the viewer a feeling of being trapped in a hole – a very brightly-lit hole, in the middle of an awesome city.

Dawn Panorama

Another 5am photo-stalk. The sun is just beginning to come up, enough to light the scene, but not enough to actually cast a shadow. It also allows me to overexpose all the lights, which turned off only a few minutes after I took the photos (there’s another version of this, made up of photos taken only five minutes later… it looks completely different). The photo editing was a two-stage process, first I stitched all the photos together into a long left-right panorama using the process I described above. The final trick is to make the very long rectangle into a square (by stretching it) then “convert rectangular coordinates to polar coordinates”. For those less mathematically-inclined, it is simple – everything on the bottom edge of the photo goes to a point and everything on the top edge gets spread out over a circle. All the bits in between end up… in between, and voila! you get this. A print of this was donated to a community art auction… I don’t know if it went for much, but I did hear that it got a lot of “wow”s. (I donated an almost identical photo the year before except it was taken midday on an overcast day on the day of the first snow in December 2007… so it looked like a big snowball).

To be continued…

The Minolta SRT 101

This is a camera that I have not commonly been seen with. My first foray into the world of SLR (single lens reflex) cameras was this trusty Minolta. Delightfully fiddly, everything on it was mechanical. The lightmeter required a button-battery to be installed in the body, but the camera could operate without it (but you’d have to guess the exposure). I’ve shot several skating events in Australia with this camera and a lens whose specifications I cannot recall. Obviously, this was a film camera, and I have boxes packed to the brim with negatives to prove it.

My SLR adventuring took an extended break when digital cameras became prominent. I went through several digital point-and-shoot cameras and almost forgot my love for photography until I was traveling through South America. When one finds oneself on a 5-month backpacking tour of a continent such as South America, one finds that one has many opportunities to take photographs. After a few months on the trot, I was starting to feel limited by the abilities of my (admittedly very good) point-and-shoot Sony DSC-N1, a 10 megapixel camera with a touch screen.

Unfortunately, when one is traveling, one is generally on a somewhat limited budget and my decision to dive into the world of digital SLRs could not have come at a more inconvenient time. I was in Bolivia… and my next stop was Paraguay. Neither of these countries possessed a shop which would sell many DSLRs. Even if they did, it would be difficult to gather enough cash together to purchase one. After Paraguay was Brazil, so I planned to make the purchase in Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, and the center of commerce in Brazil.

Fortunately, I was able to get internet access while in Brazil, so I was able to research my purchase. At the time (early 2007) the market for entry-level DSLRs was just beginning to heat up. The incumbent was the first sub-1000USD DSLR ever – the Canon EOS-400D, also known as the Digital Rebel XTi. The challenger was the Sony Alpha-100. Both had almost identical specs and prices. The Canon had the advantage of being one of the two big players in the DSLR world (the other being Nikon) so it had a very wide range of lenses and accessories to choose from, as well as a very clear upgrade path in the unlikely event that I should wish to continue pursuing my passion for photography. Sony, however, had just bought out the DSLR division of Minolta and were just starting out in the DSLR business. That meant that it didn’t have a huge range of lenses, or a medium or high-end camera to upgrade to at the time, but it meant that old Minolta lenses would mount on Sony cameras. Nikon wasn’t even on the menu at this stage, because it’s entry-level model, the D40, only had 6 megapixels (the 400D and A100 both have 10), and none of the shops in Sao Paulo stocked Nikons anyway.

The Canon EOS-400D (Digital Rebel XTi)

In the end, the Canon won out. I figured that my dad (the previous owner of the Minolta) was too frugal to have bought any good lenses (this proved to be correct), and the availability of Canon accessories made this the best choice for me. I bought the camera body in black (silver looked very tacky, in a bad way) with a battery pack (because I knew that I would have to go for long stretches between access to electricity) and the EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 lens. At the time, I only really understood what focal length meant, and had no idea about aperture (the numbers after the “f”).

I was instantly happy with my purchase, and didn’t experience any buyer’s guilt. Owing to lower pixel density on the sensor (more on that later) there was much less noise, and pictures in low light were subsequently much more usable. All the controls that come with a modern SLR camera were a delight – the ability to control exposure through shutter speed and aperture, and the very tactile feel of twisting a zoom lens all contributed to a much better photography experience. The 3 frames-per-second continuous shooting also allowed me to capture certain things better, like a glacier calving.

For those dedicated danielyeow.com readers who were following my exploits in 2007, the point at which the camera switch happens is just as I arrive in Rio (you probably noticed). From then on, I took photos at a much increased rate. I started the trip on the 11th of January, and took about 6,000 photos between then and the 8th of May (when I got the camera). Between the 8th of May and the 12th of June (the end of my trip), I took about 6,000 photos (although, to be fair, I also saw stuff at an increased rate towards the end of my trip, but even allowing for that, I was much more shutter-happy).

Apart from having manual control over the parameters of the photos, the advantage of a DSLR lies in the image sensor. It’s easy to get caught up in the megapixel-war that camera manufacturers have manufactured. Just for reference, 6 megapixels is enough for a 10cm by 15cm print, 10 megapixels is plenty for an A3-sized print, and 25 is good enough for a large poster. 25 megapixels is also roughly equivalent to the resolution of film, and when I say “film” I don’t mean the cheap stuff you buy from the street vendor outside Ankor Wat, I’m talking about really good film, like Fuji Velvia. If all you ever want to do is put photos on the web, you never need more than 4, if you’re sending photos to a newspaper, you’ll need 8-10, and if you’re putting things in magazines and coffee table books, you’ll want as much resolution as you can muster.

Megapixels aren’t everything. My Sony DSC-N1 and the Canon EOS-400D both had 10 mp on the sensor. The crucial difference is that the Sony’s sensor is about the size of my little toe’s toenail, while the Canon’s sensor is the size of a small postage stamp. This means that each individual pixel gets more “space” and experiences less electromagnetic interference from adjacent pixels. That might sound ridiculous, but when you put 10 million light-sensing dots on an area the size of a toenail or postage stamp, these things add up. When you have a lower pixel density, it also means that the image doesn’t have to be focused on such a small space, which is slightly less demanding on the quality of your lenses.

Another small technical detail that made me choose the Canon over the Sony was the type of sensor. The Canon sensor is a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS), while the Sony’s was the more common charge-coupled device (CCD). CMOS sensors are usually only found on the high-end cameras because they have a higher rejection rate in manufacture. They also dissipate less energy than CCDs which means that they’re a bit better for battery life, and they have slightly better light sensitivity.

Sadly, my experience with the 400D was cut short in Colombia. While attending and participating in the 2007 world inline speed skating championships, my laptop, camera, ipod, and cash was stolen from my locked hotel room (which was, mysteriously, still locked when I came back). I thus had to journey from Colombia straight to New York without a camera, and live without a camera for a nontrivial amount of time. In the intervening time, I was able to plot my next move.

In September 2007 Canon released the EOS-40D, which was very much NOT an entry-level camera. Mostly the same specs, but a larger and more durable body, slightly more advanced image processing circuitry, and a staggeringly quick 6.5 frames per second continuous drive. I also finally figured out what aperture meant. The number after the “f” is simply the focal length divided by the diameter of the pupil. In laymans terms, a smaller number means more light goes through. This helped explain why lenses with small “f” numbers were so much more expensive.

The Canon lens lineup, complete with specification

Being able to let more light in has a few obvious advantages. It allows for a faster shutter speed, which is useful for things like water droplets and sports photography. It is useful for shooting in low light situations where a flash is impractical or not allowed. A smaller “f” number has another advantage which is not quite so obvious – it gives a shallow depth of field. That’s just a fancy way of saying that the amount of world that will be in focus will be small, and the out of focus blurs will be much bigger. If you think about the way optics works, it makes sense… alternatively, think about a pinhole camera – everything is in focus, to the point that a lens isn’t even required. (FYI, the f-number of the human eye is about 2)

So I set about collecting a range of lenses to cover a wide range of focal lengths as well as getting some lenses which had very low “f” numbers. I added a good external flash to my arsenal at which point I realized that, in bang-for-your-buck terms, a good flash is a better move than a better lens (trust me, taking time to understand and experiment with light and how it affects your photography is the best thing you can do to improve it).

The Canon EOS-40D and all that went with it

Around the time I was completing this collection, I also took my photography to another level when I joined the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator. Shooting assignments gave me the prefect opportunity to practice my skill. The assignments were varied, presented new and interesting challenges that I would not have normally encountered, and often had very tight deadlines to be met. I was flabbergasted when my first assignment appeared on the front page the next day, and I also broke some kind of unofficial record for fastest promotion to the position of staff photographer, although to be fair, I joined at the beginning of second semester, during which there is less competition among new photographers for assignments.

At this level of photography, there is just about no excuse for not getting technically good photos, which is why I am always surprised when complimented on my ability as a photographer. Between all of my lenses, I had almost the full range of focal lengths covered, including a 180-degree field-of-view fisheye lens. In addition, a perk of having the resources of the Spec, is that we have the occasional guest speaker in the form of Ed Keating, a two-time pulitzer prize winner from whom a young and inexperienced photographer can learn a lot (and perving on his Leica MP camera was fun too).

Where do you go from there? Well, it’s all about the sensors, and technology moves at a scarily fast pace. The 40D, with its specifications, costs just under 1000USD for the camera body (no lenses) at the time of writing. As recently as 10 years ago, a film camera body with equivalent specifications would have cost upwards of 5000USD, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as user-friendly. Current sensor technology is superior to film in many ways, especially in regards to light sensitivity. So far, the only thing that has been lacking is that the sensors in most DSLR cameras are usually about 24mm by 16mm – slightly smaller than a piece of film (36mm by 24mm).

The advantages of having a larger area over which to spread your pixels has already been stated above, so why aren’t all DSLRs made like this? Well, it’s expensive to do, and the rejection rate is very high in the manufacturing process. Full-frame (as it’s called) cameras are also usually slower than their APS-C (referring to the type of film with the same dimensions) counterparts because the shutter mechanism has to move a larger mirror out of the way. Lenses have to be larger and heavier (read: more expensive) because they need to focus the image onto a larger space. Also, and this was never a problem with film, more data needs to be processed simply because there are generally more pixels on the sensor. But as I mentioned above, technology moves very fast, and by about September 2008, I was ready to move with it.

Three top-of-the-line Nikkor Lenses and Flash

By this stage in the game, Nikon had finally got their act together and entered some seriously good contenders into the entry-level and pro-sumer markets (the Canon EOS-40D is considered a pro-sumer camera). Generally more expensive, but with build quality to match, Nikon had fallen behind Canon mostly because it didn’t make full-frame cameras, and its other cameras were considered expensive for what you got. Then they pulled a fast one, and released the infamous, game-changing D3. The D3 was full-frame, could shoot 9 frames per second, and (here’s the kicker) had 12 megapixels.

It seemed unusual that Nikon’s new flagship model would come with only 12 megapixels, especially when Canon’s equivalent, the 1Ds Mark III had 21, but Nikon did a very clever thing by not competing directly with Canon, but offering a similar, but slightly different camera with different advantages. 12 megapixels on a full-frame sensor leads to a ridiculously low pixel density. That means that the sensitivity in low-light is a touch absurd. How absurd? Consider film, which used to get grainy if you went above 800 ISO (higher numbers are more sensitive), then there’s digital point-and-shoot cameras which produce unusable photos after 400 ISO. Most DSLRs produce usable photos up to 1600 ISO. The D3 produced usable photos all the way up to 64000 ISO, and marginally usable ones up to 128000 ISO.

That camera body costs about 5000 USD, which was a bit beyond my budget. Months later, however, Nikon released the D700, which was a smaller, cheaper, and slightly slower D3, and this one only cost 3000 USD. After doing some calculations, I figured that I could sell all of my Canon gear, and a few pieces of furniture, and be able to afford the D700 with three top-quality lenses. So that’s exactly what I did.

Nikon D700 with the Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 lens

I was also very sneaky and didn’t tell anyone that I was replacing my camera, instead opting only to inform them that I was selling my old gear because I was moving overseas (the truth, but not the whole truth). The truth was eventually revealed at my going away party to the machine-gun sound of 8 frames per second in a dimly-lit room where we made merry and sang kareoke.

So, at the end of the day, I had a few less lenses to play with (I do miss my fisheye), but I have a much faster camera, an infinitely better auto focus system, and a weather-sealed one (I can shoot in very heavy rain if I ever need to). The Nikon lenses are also professional-grade with weather seals on all the moving parts and joints. I use Tiffen high-transmission filters on the front of all my lenses to protect the front lens element from scratches.

Although I have done professional work, and have also sold many photos to newspapers, magazines, and the occasional book, I’m certainly not making any money from this “hobby” of mine. To this end, I am considering starting a satelite site to showcase and possibly sell photographs that I take (and I do take a few). If anyone has any suggestions or experience with this, I’d love to hear about it.

Several days ago, a new wooden floor arrived from the US with the purpose of enriching the experience of inline speed skating training in the Netherlands. Four containers later we found ourselves looking at a very shiny wooden floor fully-constructed in the middle of Thialf, the premiere (ice) speed skating facility in the Netherlands and, arguably, the world.

Costing upwards of 30,000 USD for the physical pieces of wood themselves, it was a significant investment for the Skeeler Bond Nederland (SBN) which has recently been allocated more funding owing to incrementally better results in past world championships. The Dutch inline speed skating team has lacked an indoor surface with significant grip until now, and it is hoped that this move will contribute significantly towards making the Dutch more competitive at international competitions such as European Championships and World Championships.

Skaters from the United States, long a dominant country at the World Championships, are believed to benefit from regular, competitive, indoor competitions on indoor floors with a lot of grip which makes them technically strong when negotiating corners. Skaters from Europe and elsewhere regularly travel to the US in order to train on grippy indoor floors and, until now, Europe has lacked its own grippy indoor surface to train on.

After unloading the pieces of the disassembled floor from four trucks over the course of several days, members of Team Totally Awesome (previously known as Team Gold Rush) who had recently moved to Heerenveen and maintain very close ties to the Dutch inline coach, Desly Hill, set about the nontrivial task of constructing the floor. Initially faced with difficulties concerning those workmen who were allocated to assisting them in the task, those difficulties were eventually ironed out and the floor finally came together late on Saturday. Afterwards, cleaning took place and an initial analysis of the grip properties was made with the verdict being that there was considerable room for improvement.

Click on any of the images below for a larger version (you want to, trust me)