Flash

One of the biggest steps you can take to allow yourself a wider range of options photographically is to get an external flash for your camera. Very high-end or prosumer digital cameras will usually allow you to do this (eg: Canon G Series - >$300 used) and I have never seen an SLR or DSLR that doesn't at least have a hotshoe. High-end SLRs will have a PC Sync port (at right), as well.

External flashes will usually allow you to tilt the flash head itself, which gives you the ability to bounce your flash off of the ceiling or walls. It really helps to alleviate the whole "This is a picture" feeling that direct, on-camera flash (at left) gives. It tends to give much more natural-feeling light due to the fact that we, as humans, are use to light coming from above us. The sun, most room lights, etc, are all above our heads, so we spend our whole lives accustomed to lighting from above. When you take a picture and use the on-camera flash your main light is now on the camera. How often do you have lights behind your retinas? "Retinae"?

Further, an external flash can be used with all sorts of lighting gear, such as remote triggers, umbrellas, snoots, grids... people... With a flash and a remote trigger (eg: PocketWizard - ~$400/pair), you're able to hand your flash to someone (preferably a friend, so they don't run off with it) and use them as an emergency tripod. This setup is sometimes referred to as using a "Voice Activated Tripod". "Fred, turn left, would you?", and such. You're then much more likely to get what you see at the right.

And then there's the downside to doing all of this on the cheap: it's all manual. You're not using any i-TTL, or CLS, or anything like that. You're directly controlling the flash power (Full, 1/2, 1/4, etc) and the exposure. You can leave the exposure on auto sometimes, but the camera doesn't know what the flash is doing, so it usually won't work right.

At left is an example why you don't let the camera figure exposure when you use off-camera lighting. There are other and better reasons, but those are a topic for a blog of their own.

Thanks to Kilik for unknowingly providing me with examples.

Calligraphy Brushes and Combinations

I went to a calligraphy class today* and talked to the teacher for a while afterward since he let everyone out early. We talked about various paper sizes, various weights of paper, and the different things you call some quantities of paper. I was kind of surprised he didn't have any business cards on him.

Apparently, he gets a paper the size of the classroom and uses a brush that could very well be a broom to write out a massive... thing. I don't know what he does with these things. I mean, we're not talking a small classroom, in case you're wondering. Figure... 30' x 40' or so. It's about $200 worth of paper. Yes, he stands on it to write and, yes, he has to walk around to write individual strokes.

He had some of his brushes with him, and he let me take a picture of them. Well, about 20 pictures, actually. Today's pictures were an exercise in photography and photo manipulation more than anything else, because I'm sure most of you know roughly how I feel about calligraphy.

First up is an overhead view of all of them. The one on the right is made from horse hair, though I don't know if it's tail or mane or of there are very fluffy horses, or if they pick their ears, or what.
The next one to left is made from sheep hair, and the next one from tanuki, which is something like a hybrid between a dog and a raccoon. I was going to link the Wikipedia article, but I can't access any of the Wikipedia servers right now, strangely enough. Anyway, there's quite a bit of folklore about them, apparently, and then there's the actual animal.
So what I did to this picture is fairly limited. I corrected the horrible distortion using my 18-55mm at its wide end creates, and I think I changed the colors slightly.

This one was just gratuitous and really didn't need to be included, but I had two similar shots, so I thought I would see about combining them. I've carefully exported this at the same low resoluation as everything else, so it's hard to see the weird misalignment. Apparently, I can't kep the camera perfectly still while handheld. Imagine that! It's one with the flash on, and one with it off and a longer exposure.
Anyway, don't do this, and if you do, be steadier than I am. Or use a tripod, like someone smart would.

Last is a dramatic (in as much as a pile of inanimate hair can be dramatic) shot of the brushes. I took a few pictures, doing my best to keep it lined up by using two scene elements and my viewfinder. I focused each one on a different brush, and then I picked the two that had the most of them in focus and combined them by hand.

The next version of Photoshop will do this for you automatically. And it only costs $800! You can even trigger this kind of stuff from inside of Lightroom, if you've spent a further $300 on that. It's probably worth it for people who do this kind of stuff a lot, but this is the first time I've done it and I don't see myself doing it a lot in the future.

Anyway, I like this picture the best.
...

DRAMA!

Basic Camera Modes

People are often a little bit confused on what some of the things on the mode dial on their camera does, and which they should use, and when. What symbols and abbreviations are used varies a little, but the basic concept is the same, in general. The standard for me is the set that Nikon uses on its SLRs, but you should be able to figure out what's what given the following information.

Green = Take pictures mode
P = Take pictures mode, but stop popping up the flash all the time mode
S (Tv) = Take pictures at the shutter speed I specify mode
A (Av)= Take pictures at the aperture I specify mode
M = I'll figure own damned exposure, thank you very much mode

Green - The first mode is usually a symbol of some kind instead of text, and it's usually green, so that's what I'm calling it. The "Playback" mode, is also usually green, so don't get the two confused, or you will be very lost.
Green mode is generally what you want your camera on if you hand it to someone else, as it lets the camera make its best guess at what the picture should look like, and often has a simpler interface than the other modes. A good place to start, if nothing else.

P - Stands for "Programmed Exposure". On a Nikon SLR, this is mostly the same as Green, but gives you control of whether or not the flash pops up when the camera needs it.
I use this as my default mode, simply because I don't like having the flash pop up all the time, and I never take pictures in decent light.

S (Tv) - Stands for "Shutter Priority" mode. On Jes's Canon Powershot A540 (an excellent camera I could recommend to nearly anyone), this is Tv, but I don't know what that's supposed to stand for.
In any case, what this mode allows you to do is set the shutter speed, and the camera will try and get the correct exposure by varying the size of the aperture. Shorter shutter speeds (1/125 is shorter than 1/30) let in less light, but also combat shake and subject movement.

A (Av) - Stands for "Aperture Priority" mode. Again, note about other cameras' abbreviations.
This mode allows you to select the aperture and let the camera worry about changing the shutter speed to match.
Larger aperture numbers (f/32) indicate a smaller hole through which light can hit your film/sensor. This inverse property is due to the fact that the f-number (ex: f/32, f/8.0) is a ratio of the focal length (zoom) of your lens compared to the size of the aperture. So as the aperture gets bigger, the ratio becomes smaller because it approaches 1:1.
What does this mean to you?
Large apertures (f/2.8 is pretty big) let in a lot of light, which is good for low-light photography, but give you a very small depth of field (the area that's in focus).
Small apertures (f/16 is small, but f/32 is smaller) give you a larger depth of field, which means you don't have to be quite as worried about getting a super-accurate focus. On the other hand, smaller apertures let in less light, so you are more likely to lose a picture due to shake when you use smaller apertures.
Zooming in generally forces you to go to a smaller aperture, so if there's not much light, zoom all the way out*.

M - "Manual exposure" mode. You control the shutter speed and aperture, which means the camera will not help you much at all in terms of getting the picture to come out at the right brightness. Depending on the camera, it might mess with the ISO for you, but you can turn that off. If you do, it's entirely up to you to get the picture right. You have to balance shutter speed and aperture, along with ISO, to expose the picture. Your camera will usually still help you figure out white balance and focus, however.

*For those of you that have $1,000 to drop on constant-aperture lenses where this wouldn't be the case, I expect you to know what I mean, and to know that it doesn't apply to you.
I'm also envious.

Post-Processing

You might think that simply because you take pictures on a digital camera, the days of processing are all over. I was working on something for a friend and made this image to show the difference that two seconds' processing makes. It only takes that long 'cause I'm on a 1.6GHz machine. On a modern computer, it'll probably happen faster than you can see.

"Jeff"

There's a prof at 京都外国語大学 (my school) who has, as far as anybody can tell, entirely too much cash. Whether or not that's the case, I have no idea. Maybe he's just very frugal.
In any case, he invited all of the foreigners to his place for an end-of-semester party that was pretty cool. We had nice company, good food, and I think everybody had a good time.

House is huge, 180 tatami mats, if memory serves. And beautiful: old-style paper doors, some of which have sumi-e on them. It dates from the Edo period, I think he said.

Oh, and it has its own alley.

It's kind of designed for... Japanese people, so the stairs are a little dangerous if you're over 5'6", but he has a nice view of the river and Gion. We did the whole party out on his veranda that's on the Kamogawa river (the main river in Kyoto), where the wind kept us nicely cool. As it would turn out, they take down the outer veranda every year at the end of summer, then put it back up at the beginning. This somehow makes it slighlty less illegal, I guess. In any case, it's the norm for the houses along the river, if I got what he said right.

As an added bonus, there was another party going on next door, and we got to see some maiko (apprentice geisha), which was pretty cool. They even posed for me! It's hard to get them to let you take their picture, but as you can see, three posed in this one! And they look kind of cute, even, which rare among geisha.
The teacher managed to accidentally make some new contacts, and by "some new contacts", I mean three Japanese men who all looked pretty well-to-do themselves. This happening was what confirmed my suspicions: diplomacy.

That's his secret, as far as I can tell. He's probably the most diplomatic person I have ever met. When people talk to him, they always walk away smiling or laughing, and he does a very good job of playing up his foreign-ness when it will help, and downplaying it at other times. It's... impressive, to say the least.

As a note, I toted a Japanese girl for a picture, but someone else took it, so I don't have the shot.
Here's an example of how to completely miss your focus, though.

Also, I got my first shot of a Japanese policeman. Normally, they get flustered and run away when I try to take a picture, but this guy was really excited. I took a couple, but his vest combined with me using onboard flash kind of completely blew out, as you can see.
Notice the glow on his vest?

Zoom Lenses

This is in response to thots about stuff's comment on another post. It seemed like it might be useful information, so I thought I'd put it up as a post.

"Zoom", when talking about lenses, refers to the ability to change focal length. Large (long) focal lengths bring things closer to you, and small (short) focal lengths provide a wider field of view.

The 18-55mm lens that comes with entry-level SLRs is an example of a zoom lens. There are wide-angle zoom lenses (Ex: Nikon's 12-24mm), normal zoom lenses (Canon's 28-80), and there are telephoto zoom lenses, which is anything longer than about 100mm* (Nikon's 600mm).

The opposite of zoom lenses is a prime lenses (Ex: Sigma's 30mm f/1.4) which are always stuck at one focal length. In other words, if you're using a prime lens, you have to move the camera to zoom in and out. They are generally cheaper than a zoom lens that includes the same focal length, in addition to being much smaller and lighter. From what I know, you can't buy a zoom lens that will go to f/1.4, but there are prime lenses that actually have f/1.0, which means that they have the same focal length as they do aperture, and will have a very small depth of field when at maximum aperture. Keep in mind that smaller aperture numbers indicate larger aperture sizes, which means more light hitting your film, sensor, AF, or eyes.

*This is not strictly true. Telephoto lenses have special optical properties, but I suspect that most photographers don't know or care about this.

Gion Matsuri, with an Oops

So I took quite a few pictures today. 627 to be precise.
Well, 628 if you really want to be precise, but the bowl of peanut butter and jelly rice doesn't really relate to the rest of what happened today. Today was the parade for Gion Matsuri, and it's a pretty big affair. There's about a week of lead-up to it where random people from around town build the floats out of various bits of stuff. There are around 30 different floats, and the parade lasts from around 9AM to well after noon. The floats are pretty, if not exactly to my taste. And I'll admit I was a little creeped out by the plastic people mounted in all but the lead float. But! It's pretty neat as parades go and everybody takes lots and lots of pictures.

I'm still working on translating some stuff for my last class tomorrow, so I haven't had time to sort through the pictures, but I think I got some pretty good shots...

...

... at 3200 ISO.

[seppuku noises (whatever those are)]

Here's the story of how it happened:
So last night I was demonstrating to Aaron what difference ISO makes and why it is that you would never want to take pictures you care about at 3200 ISO. The noise reduction required to get a vaguely decent picture completely drains all the color out of it, and all the detail is sort of smudgy. If you use RAWs or turn off noise reduction, you just have a very, very noisy picture.
If you open up that picture, you'll see it looks very much as if I took it with my cell phone. Except my cell phone doesn't let you change settings like this, so you can't screw up in quite this fashion.
[Edit: It would seem you can't see the noise itself very well, as the picture was downsized to 1600 pixels in width, which is about 1/3 of how big it was to begin with.]

Ahem.

I have 627 very, very noisy pictures using six more stops of ISO than was necessary, given the lighting conditions.
I had been wondering why it was that my camera seemed to be over-exposing things and using tiny, tiny apertures. "Gee, 1/4000th of a second is odd in this light..." is something I thought a number of times, but I never thought to check my ISO setting. As much as I want to say something like "Man, what an amateur mistake!" it would be entirely too accurate.
But as long as I learn from it, it's a good thing, right? Right! I mean, at least I've made this mistake during something that happens annually. Imagine this at a wedding!

Next time, I'll be sure to check my WB and ISO settings in addition to physical checks and cleaning.

So, here's today's lesson for everybody:

If you're going to show someone what not to do,
make sure to not do it yourself.

Friday evening: "Gaidai Summer Gala"

Light-ish warning: My jury-rigged hard drive is a little too jury-rigged, it would seem, and it's being fritzy. Because of that, I didn't process these pictures at all, and they're the massive, 10.2MP 2.xMB JPGs my camera spits out. In sum: they will probably load slowly. Especially for you, Wash. I''m hoping to take care of this today, but I'm not sure I can fix my drive and write the other two blog posts in addition.
Maybe I'll just put one up as a gallery...
When I went to this, I figured I would take pictures and be bored pretty much the entire time. "So... why'd you go?" you might ask. I mean, you just might.
In large part because it was the largest gathering of study-abroad students in one place, and I didn't want to miss out on cool stuff.

That there was free food and drinks may have been what clinched it for me, but I'll never tell.

Aaron Poulliot (sp?) did some juggling stuff on stage. He dropped stuff a couple of times, but I thought he was really good. The fact that handled the drops so well only made it better, I think.

You can see him at left, dancing with his juggling clubs, or at right with his recipe for disaster that he likes to call "eggs". I understand he almost threw one into a speaker, but I didn't see it first-hand.


The school had at least two photographers there (not counting me, 'cause I don't get the cool armband), plus a three-person camera crew (at right). And I think every Japanese person has at least one camera. And there about 250 people. So there are plenty of pictures of this event.

From a photographic standpoint, I don't think I had a lot of options, so I used the very high-level, pros-only (sarcasm!) "Nuke 'em till they glow" flash method and turned my flash up to full power for every shot. Went from 80% charge to 30% charge in about 70 pictures, so you can see the drain of the flash on the battery, which can give me 400 pictures on the same amount if I don't use a flash. I had a spare with me, of course.

Here are two of the school's photographers. I call the girl on the left "Canon chick" because, well, she uses a Canon (whose model I can't recall right now) and she's kinda cute.
The guy at right is... I forgot his name, he's the guy that helped me check over my Japanese camera terminology stuff. We took pictures of each other whenever we saw each other, working especially to catch the other by surprise. He's an Olympus shooter, probably a 410, but I didn't get a close look.

This is Asano (at left), one of people who works in the international exchange office, which is what keeps us alive and out of jail here in Japan. They help us with banking, paying bills, laws, and all sorts of things. Her English is pretty good.

At right is Kumada (in the purple), who deals mostly with people who are not yet in country, but she also helps us a lot. She also works in the international office. The thing that surprises me the most is that she's able to pull off so many different fashions, and do a pretty good job of 'em.

About halfway through the gala, I ran into a student from the dual-language class I TA (?) in. I wish my Japanese was as good as her English, but it's nowhere near. Her friend took a picture of us, and here it is. My camera seems to do strange exposures whenever other people take pictures with it, but I don't know why.
I just press the shutter button; they just press the shutter button. Where's the difference?

After they kicked everybody outside, I met up with Bryen, who wanted an action shot. He was trying to flirt with this girl, but she was completely and skillfully cold-shouldering him. "Well played!" is what I kept thinking. We had her take a picture of us in "action poses", and you're all probably familiar with my silly basic stance, but here's another picture, just in case you aren't.

Don't worry, I'm almost out of decent, relevant pictures. I'll finish up in just a couple more paragraphs. Hopefully.

Ran into Chise, my student assistant a couple of times. She is looking good, as she is wont to do.
I'm trying to get her to introduce me to her boyfriend, 'cause he's a gamer , but he's apparently hard to pull away from his many hobbies. Or something.

I met a British guy who will be here for another two weeks, and some of his friends. He was pretty cool and we got along very well. We talked largely about accents and comedy; in particular, Dane Cook and Eddie Izzard. He snuck off at some point and I haven't seen him since.

This is Catherine, one of the Swiss girls I mentioned a few posts back. She's in kyuudo, which kind of like archery, but only in that involves both a bow and an arrow. The similarities end there, and I'm not really joking. She works in IT back in her home country and is 24.

Here's a portraiture tip: apparent nose length/size in a picture has very little to do with actual length or size. The key that makes or breaks (ouch.) noses in pictures is whether or not they break the line made by the cheek behind them. You can see her nose is inside her cheek-line (above-right picture), as opposed to breaking it at left.

Surprising difference, isn't it?

Her nose is just fine, by the way.


Well, that wraps up the gala. I think I may have spent more time writing this post than I did actual time there, though.