Bad Dates

It's hard to start a paragraph with, "It sucks that my airship ride was canceled today" without sounding like either a fat cat, or at least somebody way, way too into Steampunk, but that's what happened to me today. Turns out, zeppelins lost out because they have a hard time taking off in anything other than a gentle zephyr.

By way of consolation, I do have a picture of some zombies for you.

We had our ginormous Halloween party on Friday, and every year they hire some ringers to dress up as zombies. Most of the time, I'm like, "Eh, zombies. I can't throw a brick without hitting some hipster dressed for a zombie flash mob!" However, it turns out these paid zombies are actually great hammy horror actresses, and had a fun time attacking passers-by.

I shot most of the Halloween party in what I now think of as "Folsom Style" (um, maybe not the best term) -- with a flash held in my left hand on a TTL cable, and manual metering on the camera.

Happy Halloween everyone, and I hope somebody is flying in a zeppelin out there.

The Past Through Tomorrow

Last week, I was hoping for rain. This week, I'm hoping it stays clear -- because I have a ride scheduled with some coworkers on this airship you may have seen hanging around the Bay Area. We went last year and flew around the South Bay. Great flight, but I really wanted to catch the city and the Bridges from above. The opportunity came up for us to fly out of Oakland, and so now I'm sitting here, hoping we don't get rained out or socked in with fog. Wish me luck!

Rain Dropped

Shot this one after I stepped off Caltrain and was headed home. Composition at an angle on these windows continues to niggle at me, but I loved the drops on the glass and the world-weariness of the man.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I've had intense myopia since the second grade -- without corrective lenses, I can't even make out the big 'E'. So, I have to make an annual pilgrimage to my eye doctor for various obscure tests (why yes, I can see that blurry-shaky thing at the corner of my vision, and the balloon on the road in the distance, and managed to go another year without my retina detaching!). Last but not least of these is the bit where she puts these drops in my eye to make them dilate. Hello, f/1.4 eyes!

The bad news is the same drops that hold your pupils open super-wide also paralyze some of the muscles that allow your eyes to focus. So, dilation inevitably results in this 2-4 hour window for me where it's almost impossible for me to read or focus on anything close. As a bonus, everything is overexposed, so stepping out into natural light is painful if I'm not wearing sunglasses.

It's generally not a good experience for me, since I spend my day reading and writing things on a computer terminal, or taking photos and examining them on the screen.

So, naturally, I decided to do something tricky -- get a macro shot of my eye while it was in this state. Hey, it's Halloween: attack of the mole men and all that.

I had a few problems: With a macro shot, depth of field is going to be razor thin. And if I wanted to beat this back with smaller apertures, I was going to either need to be out in direct sunlight or to use a flash -- neither of which were going to happen in my state. And even if I did have more than a frog's eyelash of focus, AF is tricky with macro at best. So, I had less than an inch of depth of field, manual focus, I was holding the camera, and I was so unable to focus my *own* eyes, I couldn't even tell if the frame would be in focus.

Pixels are free though, so I just did something simple. Got roughly in focus on my eye, switched to manual, then took about ten frames, moving the camera gradually from the focus distance in and out. For light, I used my house's built-in softbox -- the bathroom with the frosted window.

As I was squinting at my eye on the frame, I realized I was picking up a reflection in my eye of the camera. So, I tried to find a place where the reflection was the most visible, and positioned myself there -- on the theory that a huge pupil would be cool, but one with stuff in it would be cooler. Mission accomplished! I love the way my lens is right in the center of my pupil -- iris in iris.

Liked the effect, and I'm only a tiny bit sad that the opportunity for this only comes once a year.

In the Soup

This is another one from my set of rain pictures -- a little chaotic around the edges, but I love the character of the bellhop at work, juggling rain, baggage, guests, the works.

I suppose I should talk a little bit about how I went about shooting the rain. If you want rain that kind of looks more drop-like (kind of like what our eyes see), shoot north of 1/320s. If you want long, cinematic streaks of rain, go lower -- probably south of 1/100s. I had a little physics debate in my head: Do fat raindrops fall heavier than small ones? Terminal velocity is going to be affected by things like the drag coefficient, the mass of the drop, and inversely proportion to the area. Would the drop being heavier have more of an influence than the larger area a fat drop would have? My meditation on the subject was cut short by Googling it on my phone, where I found this page, which tells you the terminal velocity of raindrops. Big and fat? About 30 feet/second. Tiny and drizzly? 6 1/2 feet/second. So, as rain gets fatter, you might end up needing more shutter speed to sort of freeze it as a drop -- but easier to get that long, flowing effect.

Ok, I'm probably boring you all by now, but at this point, I thought I was all set.

Well, not quite, and if you look at the picture above, you'll see why. Notice how the place where we see the rain most clearly is under the man's umbrella? I like it here, since it gives me the impression he's having a permanent rainy day -- but it's sort of the opposite of reality. What gives?

Well, basically, on some rainy days, you have flat, diffuse light everywhere. Pretty good for portraits of people, and bringing out some saturated, sunk colors -- but not so hot at making little drops of water stand out. The way I thought of it was that if the little drops of water get hit by light in any direction, light refracts off it equally from every way you look at it. It ends up being not standing out on the sensor. But give the light a direction, or drop the rain in front of a dark background, and the rain shows up again.

That's my theory at least, and it was certainly born out by all the rain I saw last weekend.

If you are stuck in flat, diffuse light, what should you do with your rain? Well, I think most of our brains are pretty good at accepting the fact that there's more rain near umbrellas. It's aphysical, but there's some weird logic to it our brain accepts. You can also look for dark surfaces to set your rain against (plenty of asphalt in the city), or wait for the errant ray of sunlight (or city lights, if it's night) to pop out. The other option would be flash -- of course, lots of electricity flying around there, so you really would have to wrap everything up if you wanted to end up not frying your flash (or at least discharging the batteries). That would probably put me outside my limit for carting around gear and remaining nimble, but to each their own.

Pennies from Heaven

This image is weird -- it actually took me a bit to explain what was going on with it when I found it while processing. Basically, this guy had a translucent, dollar-signed themed umbrella. To the human eye, it was a little more translucent. But since I underexposed this a bit when I shot it (other than the b&w conversion, the only alteration is brightening the dude at the bottom), it brought out on the detail of the umbrella, which breaks up the even brighter background sky in a way that's so weird, it looks like I photoshopped a layer of dollar bills on the umbrella.

Weird, but I like how it turned out.

Inclement

I was a little worried to be shooting in the rain. My d700 is weather sealed, and even though prominent madmen use it inclement weather, I figured I might have a few problems. One, the little rubber door on the left that leads to the tethering and/or ports_I_never_use has gotten a little used with age and tends to pop up and can't be properly sealed. Also, I don't tend to use my uber-weather-sealed-if-you-should-encounter-God-on-the-road-he-will-be-cut-by-this-lens-it's-just-that-sharp lenses out on the street.

I mainly use my cheap-o Nikon 28mm f/2.8 and 35mm f/2. On the plus side, they're not zooms, so they wouldn't be sucking in rainwater. On the downside, they're a little plastic-y (particularly the 28), and I had visions of water dripping through some tiny seam I'd never seen. Still, they ARE pretty solid, so I just put on a lens hood (less sprinkling on the glass), and crossed my fingers.

I also carried a small umbrella with me, and put on a treated leather jacket. I didn't have galoshes, but I reasoned if they're anything like the oyster boots everybody wore where I grew up, they'd be a chore to walk around in.

Here's the deal: I didn't grow up in a city (where masses of people walk around in the rain for no good reason), and I've lived in California for the last ten years in suburbia. It turns out my wet weather survival skills have atrophied.

Here's what I discovered on my first day in the rain:

• Carry the camera bag UNDER your jacket. Not perfect, but with something small like the Crumpler 5 million dollar home I use, it's totally possible. Keeping it outside my jacket resulted in an increasingly moist top to my bag, and eventually it made my lens cloth (which I keep at the top) a little damp.
• Umbrellas with a little hand strap rock, since they're less likely to go flying and you get some use out of your off hand a little. I kept on shooting at 1/500s, so I could wing one handed shots for everything.
• The small umbrella is portable, but expect stuff you carry not directly near your head to get wet.
• Consequently, keep your camera near your eye (useful anyway, even if you look a little weird).
• Crocs are great until you get in water deep enough for them to seep in.
• Moving crowds of people in umbrellas are actually kind of a danger to your eye or something if you or they don't raise your umbrella at just the right moment.
• People love to shake the water off umbrellas onto you. 
• Everybody recommending storing your lenses in a bag with desiccant in order to keep moisture from building up. I didn't do this, but I don't keep desiccant on hand.
• If you have to duck in somewhere to get warm/dry, the Apple Store might not be the best place if they just came out with a new netbook. "Boy, an 11' MBA might just overheat enough to warm me up right now..." Plus, all the cold and wind seem to lower willpower. ;) 

If I had it to do over again, a poncho over everything might help (particularly if it were warmer and I wanted to skip the jacket). There are also rain sleeves for the camera, but I didn't feel like I needed one, and they seemed like a lot of effort in order to make me less able to shoot in the middle of a swarm of umbrella-carrying people, so I skipped it.

Now, if I were seriously crazy, I would look into getting covering for a flash, so I could use that off camera in the rain. Seems like a good recipe for me frying my flash, but you never know...

I also picked up a fair amount of insight about how rain shows up in your images and what it does to the light -- but I think I'll save that for another post before this one gets too big.