Tag: photographic technology

Posted on

The Magic of the Lens

Hotel deVille, Paris

Do you ever stop to think about your lenses, besides wanting a shinny new one? There is a magic of the lens that we seldom consider and perhaps do not even understand.

Many constraints

My perception is colored by my background as an engineer. I see a modern lens as serving so many constraints that it is a wonder they do the job as well as they do. We expect high resolving power and “good” bokah. It needs to have a good zoom range but be small. It must be weather sealed and rugged, but inexpensive. And, of course, issues like low chromatic aberration and great edge to edge sharpness and low distortion and minimal light falloff (vignetting) and minimum flare are all givens. Oh and blazing fast auto focus, too.

The poor lens designers are in a tight place. Luckily for them computer design tools have advanced greatly. Also, new materials are available to help overcome some of the design problems of the past.

Still though, we ask a lot of a professional grade lens. Probably more than we realize.

Simple lens

We have an idea in mind of how a lens works. You probably did an experiment in High School Physics with a simple lens. Then you took it out and fried some ants.

What we normally picture is a biconvex lens. Don’t let a fancy word scare you. That just means both sides are thicker in the middle than on the edge. Like this:

By DrBob at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065907

The rays (red lines) illustrate how the lens focuses on a point. That focusing is what images the outside world sharply onto our sensor.

This is true. It works. But nothing in life is simple anymore.

Reality

The reality is that, because of our high expectations and the piles of constraints to satisfy, real lens design has to be much more complex.

I am going to use the Nikon Z 24-120 f/4 zoom as an example. For two reasons: it is a representative high quality modern design, and I like it – a lot. It is my go-to lens for everyday use.

Lens design has gone far beyond the “simple” lens pictured above. Here is a cutaway of the Nikon lens:

Photography Life: https://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-z-24-120mm-f-4-s

We can see that it has many lens elements (a word for a piece of glass in a lens) – 16 of them to be exact. Few of them are simple biconvex elements. Some of them are exotic glass. Things like high refractive index (they bend light more sharply than regular glass) or other properties. Some are aspherical. This means they are quite complex designs to achieve specific results. These are hard to design and manufacture. Usually they are necessary to correct for effects of other things and make the resulting image better.

Zoom

Let’s look at a few specific features. This lens has a 5x zoom range, from 24mm to 120mm. Now you would think that, for the lens to zoom 5x, it would have to get 5 times longer. This would be true for a straightforward design.

However, us users of the lens would not like that. It would have to be very big and bulky to do that. And it would be awkward when zoomed all the way out. It would be long and off balance the camera.

But complex design magic and some of those special lens elements allow them to shortcut physics. it zooms over the 5x range while only extending to less than twice it’s collapsed length. Amazing and very welcome.

Reflections

The real world is not a well behaved bundle of parallel rays coming into the lens, like in the simple lens picture above. Light is coming from everywhere. Most of it is what we want to end up on the sensor. But a lot isn’t. Light coming in from a sharp angle tends to “bounce around” inside the lens and cause a lowering of contrast. Kind of a fog look.

Modern lenses have special coatings on the glass and use some of the special types of glass i mentioned to fight this. These go a long way to canceling the reflections.

It used to be that shooting in the direction of a very bright source, like the sun would always cause unwanted internal reflections that degrade the image. Now it is amazing how little that happens. I really only worry about that if the sun is directly or nearly directly in view.

Abstract study in texture and shape©Ed Schlotzhauer

Chromatic aberration

Chromatic aberration is something we seldom consider, except when we are getting down to the last details of a final print. One of the nasty realities of physics is that each “color” of light is a different frequency. The amount of “bend” the lens gives to light is dependent on the color (frequency) of the light. This means not all the colors focus at the same point. That’s bad.

Have you every looked very closely at magnified blowup of a sharp edge in one of your photos? Especially if it is in a high contrast lighting situation. You may see a slight fringe of green or purple around the edge. This is called chromatic aberration. Not all the colors focusing together.

One of the purposes of the exotic glass and all the elements in modern lenses is to minimize this. They do a pretty good job.

But they are not perfect. Luckily it is a simple check box in Lightroom Classic to have the software automatically remove chromatic aberration.

Other considerations

If you ever carry a camera around all day you learn to appreciate light weight. Lens designers would like to design their lenses with a very sturdy metal shell and structure. But we would not like to carry that. Modern plastics and design techniques have allowed the designers to create our lenses at a more user friendly weight while still being sturdy enough to hold up to hard use. Thank you.

Did you know that some lenses make the light come into the sensor is a certain direction to make the sensor receive the photons better? Did you know that most of our zoom lenses, especially, have quite a bit of distortion and vignetting and resolution falloff at the edges? Those are some of the things that are part of the tradeoffs. But one reason they are traded off is there’s a bit of perceptual and software slight of hand.

First, we don’t notice it much. Really. We are not as sensitive to it as you would think. Unless you spend your time photographing test charts. Second, many of us set Lightroom Classic to look at the model of the lens and automatically apply a “correction” to the image we see. Adobe has a database of lenses with mathematical models to correct their distortions. This is a good thing.

As a matter of fact, Nikon has a special deal with Adobe such that the great Z 24-70 f/2.8 lens is automatically corrected in Lightroom Classic, whether or not the user selects that. It is impossible to defeat it. Hardware and software are joining in a symbiotic relationship. Making an image is a blend of both and it will only increase with time.

Almost everything done to solve one problem creates another. This is why designs are so complex and expensive. Everything is a tradeoff. It is all a question of how good can we make this property while not letting that other one get worse than a certain level.

Example black & white image©Ed Schlotzhauer

Magic

I am in awe of these brilliant designers. They achieve beautiful balance. Like I said, I regularly use this example lens I have talked about and I am generally very happy with it. But let me emphasize that pure, unexcelled technical perfection is not usually my goal. A lens like this is “good enough” for 99.9% of my needs.

For me, as a user, I take the camera out and start using it. What I see and feel is more important than technology. Sometimes, though, my engineer nature kicks in and makes me marvel at the complexity. But really, I shoot and expect my great gear to capture what I want. And it usually does. Marvelous.

The magic of the. lens. Like most good magic, how it works is invisible to us. But occasionally stop to consider how lucky we are and what an incredible piece of technology we have attached to our camera body.

Feature image

The image at the top was shot with this Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 zoom lens I have been using as an example. This is the Hotel de Ville in Paris – their Town Hall. You can’t really tell in this small jpg, but I am completely happy with the capabilities of this lens. If the opportunity arose I am sure I could make a very good 60″ print of this. Here is a section of it zoomed to 100%.

100% section, ©Ed Schlotzhauer

Let me assure you that I am not affiliated with or sponsored by Nikon. I am just using this nice lens that I use frequently as a representative example of what a modern zoom lens is and is capable of doing.

Posted on

Out of Focus

Interpretation of starry sky at night.

A few months ago I wrote about being in focus, both technically and mentally. I want to go a little deeper into how technical focus happens in modern cameras and an an experience I had recently where what I did was out of focus.

What is focus

Technically, focus is simple when the lens is adjusted so that the part of the subject you are most interested in is sharply defined. Your lens has a focus ring to use to manually focus. Most of us probably use the camera’s built in auto focus capability. This is much more precise than my old eyes. And a lot faster than most of us can do manually.

Focusing physically moves one or more of the lens elements inside the lens barrel. This is required to adjust the focus point.

I will let you argue whether focus is an absolute, precise point or just an acceptable range. I will just say that I am swinging away from being adamant about absolute technical perfection and leaning more toward artistic judgement and intent. Set your own values you will live by.

Whether we manual focus or use auto focus, we observe in the viewfinder the image moving from a fuzzy blob a crisp, detailed representation of the scene before us. Unless we have a very old piece of technology in our camera with something called a split image viewfinder. I had this in my first SLR. It was magic and awesome for most of the subjects I shot.

The split image viewfinder showed the image sharp regardless of focus. The image was divided into 2 pieces in the central circle. The pieces were offset from each other when out of focus. Use the focus ring to bring the 2 halves into alignment and the image was sharply focused. Magic. Enough trivia, though.

Little did I know this was a type of and precursor to what we now call phase detection auto focus. Let’s get a little deeper into the technology.

How does it work?

Auto focus in a DSLR or mirrorless camera is complex and requires many precise components. But it works so well now that we tend to take it for granted.

There are 2 basic technologies in modern cameras. The older one is called contrast detection and the newer and better one is called phase detection.

I have written on histograms, a subject I consider vitally important to photography. Histograms and their interpretation are the basis of contrast detection auto focus. It is brilliantly simple in concept and in process as what we do when we are manually focusing.

If an image in the viewfinder is out of focus, the pixels are blurred together. Kind of like looking through a fog. A result is that in the histogram, the values are clustered in the center. This is an indication of low contrast. But when an image is sharp, there is a wider range of brighter and darker pixels. This illustrates it:

From https://digital-photography.com/camera/autofocus-how-it-works.php

Focus process

So conceptually, the system moves the focus a little and measures again to see if the histogram got more narrow (more out of focus) or wider (sharper) . If it got more in focus, continue moving that direction and measuring until the peak contrast if found, But if it got more out of focus, move the focus the other direction and continue the process. It is a hunting process to find the optimum focus point. Just like we do to manually focus.

Unfortunately, this process is slow. It can take seconds to arrive at the focus. This is why phase detection auto focus came to prominence.

In phase detection auto focus, some of the light coming through the lens is split off to a separate sensor. Like the split image viewfinder I mentioned above, it is further split into two paths. Through some brilliant engineering, they can determine in one measurement how far off focus is and in what direction. The focus moves there quickly. Note that in mirrorless cameras all the light goes directly to the sensor, so these auto focus sensors are built directly into the sensor.

I said that phase detection is “better” than contrast detection. That is true as far as being very fast. Actually, contrast detection can achieve more precise focus. There is a kind of system called hybrid the combines the strengths of both. I will not discuss that or go into the bewildering variety of focus areas or focus modes.

Out of focus

This is all great as far as technology goes. It works quite well in the cases it is designed for. We are lucky to have it.

But all of these systems rely on the sensor having enough light to see some contrast. It doesn’t work in the dark. Yes, there is another variation on auto focus that is called active auto focus. It shoots a red beam from the camera to illuminate the focus area. This has a very short range and does not help the scenario I’m about to describe.

Recently I was in Rocky Mountain National Park, over on the west slope where there is little light. It was full dark on a moonless night. The mountains all around provided lovely silhouettes. The stars were astonishing. Beautiful. I had to stop and get some star images.

A trailhead parking lot provided a great and convenient place to set up – wondering if those occasional sounds I heard in the dark were bears. I guess not. It was perfect. Except. There was not enough contrast to focus, even at 6400 ISO. And the viewfinder image was too noisy to be useful for manual focus. I did not have a powerful enough flashlight to cast enough light on the nearest object, over 100 yards away, to allow the focus system to work.

Adding to the problem, the lens I brought on this outing did not have a focus scale (a curse of modern zoom lens design). Normally, in low light, I switch to manual focus and set the lens to infinity for a scene like this. I guessed, but missed badly for a big section of the images. They were uselessly out of focus. I am ashamed to show an example, but like this:

A blurry night shot©Ed Schlotzhauer

Experience is a great teacher

I write frequently advocating that we study our technology to become expert with it. And to practice, practice, practice to know how to use our gear, even in the dark. I failed. I encountered too much dark and a lens I had never tried to use in low light. The combination tripped me up. I am ashamed to admit I did not follow my own advice well enough.

But every failure is a learning opportunity, right? It can be a great motivator and reinforcer. I did some research and discovered a “hidden feature” I never knew my camera had. It should save me the next time I do this.

My Nikon camera has a setting I had never paid any attention to called “Save focus position”. When On (the default) it remembers the focus position of the current lens when the camera is turned off and restores it on wake up. But when Off – this is the brilliant part – it sets the lens to infinity on wake up. Now I will have a known infinity focus setting, even in total darkness! This setting is now in my menu shortcuts so I can access it quickly.

I would never have learned about this feature if I had not failed so spectacularly. Experience really is a great teacher.

So dig into those obscure settings you never bother with. There sometimes is gold there.

Keep learning and failing!

The featured image

That night’s shooting was not all bad. I nailed the focus on this star shot. It was purely of the stars and had no foreground. This foreground has been substituted from another blurry image that night (actually, redrawn by hand).

This is artistic expression rather than literal reality. I do that a lot. As photography progresses and matures, I believe that is more and more the norm.

Posted on

It Looks Like a Painting

Flowing green shapes and lines

This comment used to make me angry. But I have now rationalized that most people mean it as a compliment. If it looks like a painting then it must be art.

Is painting the standard?

For most people, painting means art. It is what they were taught. Photographs are those low value things they do on their phone. They’re mostly for memories and bragging rights on social media.

I believe most people view painting as “high art”. Like they might view classical music. After all, both are remote and fairly difficult to understand. Removed from their daily lives. High art is something they have been taught that they should value, but they seldom partake of it.

And paintings are viewed as difficult, labor intensive works requiring lots of training and “suffering”. That instills them with high value in many people’s estimation. It is not unusual for painters to encourage an aura of this being something so great and high that we cannot understand it. We viewers are lucky the artist will share a glimpse of such truth with us.

And on a practical note, a painting is one of a kind. The artist paints one original. This increases the value of the work in some markets.

Some people, looking at one of my images, describe it as “painterly”. To them, this is a compliment. Even photo reviewers occasionally use the term. Internally, I usually cringe, unless it was actually my goal to look like a painting.

So for my peace of mind I have decided to accept “it looks like a painting” as a sincere compliment. It may be alien to my goals and values as a photographer, but is probably the best way a lot of people know of to say “it is art”.

What does a painting look like?

I will consider that a “painting” is some type of color medium applied to a substrate like paper or canvas by hand. I will stretch the definition to include pouring or throwing paint. Typical color mediums are oil, acrylic, watercolor, or pastel.

The “by hand” seems to be important. Until print reproductions are made, all paintings are originals. Many people consider a “mechanically created” print inferior to a painting because it was too easy to make.

Brushes are most often used to apply the color. Although they come in a wide range of sizes, and it is possible to create very detailed paintings, generally paintings are a somewhat coarse expression of a scene. That expression is considered part of the artistry.

This is what people think of as a painting. It is an Albert Bierstadt painting titled “Rocky Mountain Landscape”. As someone who lives in the Rockies, I can attest this is purely fictional:

Albert Bierstadt painting, 1870From the White House Collection. Image from Google Art Project

An artist typically paints a scene they can observe (or make up). This means the scene is fairly static. Unless, of course, they take a picture of it and paint from a photographic print. Is that allowed? Does that make the painting something else? 🙂

So paintings are generally relatively large, static scenes, less detailed than a photograph, and created by hand.

Do I want my image to look like a painting?

Do I want my image to look like a painting? Great question. Sometimes yes. Usually no.

This is a fairly typical image I do that screams PHOTORGRAPH. It could be painted, but then that would be a painter trying to make his work look like a photograph. 🙂

Classic B&W photograph.© Ed Schlotzhauer

Why would I want an image to look like a painting? I do occasionally enjoy creating abstract images. Sometimes they work best done as a dreamy, blurry, hand drawn look. I love that photography can achieve a wide variety of effects. I enjoy pushing the boundary and creating an unexpected look.

But in these cases, I have chosen to create the image with this look. My goal was not to “make it look like a painting”. Sometimes an image tells me what it wants to look like. Sometimes what it wants to look like is what most people consider “painterly”. If that is what is right for the image, then OK.

Don’t feel inferior

I think photography is an amazing art form. Its versatility is unsurpassed. Being technology based allows it to operate somewhat outside the limits of the artist’s mind. We can explore time and scale and space and even non-visual realms in ways that other artistic mediums can only copy.

With photography, we can make one print and stop or we can make 1000 prints. We can re-scale a file to make a print very small to fit into a locket or up to wall-sized for a gallery or to decorate a large room. Or even billboards or the sides of buildings.

Never let the intelligentsia convince you you are somehow inferior to painters or other “real” arts. They are just trying to protect their self interests. Photography is as real as any art. Be proud of your art.

So when someone tells you your image looks like a painting, be gracious. Don’t launch into a lecture about why they are wrong and how they do not understand. This would be rude and even insulting. Accept it as a compliment. They are using terms they know to tell you they like your work and consider it good art. Be happy. But also be confident that it does not have to look like a painting to be great art.

Today’s featured image

The image at the top would be considered “painterly” by many people. Did I want it to look like a painting? No. I was exploring possibilities of long shutter speeds with flowing water and reflections in a river. I knew from experience that I could often get abstract results I like. This is an example.

I like it. It is abstract, and it flows and has a lot of subtle details of interest. Does it look like a painting? That is for you to decide. If you think that, great. But it is not a label I try for when I am creating. I would not market my work as “looks like a painting”.

Posted on

Diffraction

High DOF at f/22. Hang the diffraction.

Today I would like to try to help us understand a little about what diffraction is. Not getting too deep in the theory. Just enough to demystify it a bit.

Scary

Diffraction is probably a scary word to most of us. Even if we don’t know what it really means, we have heard of it and have been taught that it is a “bad thing”.

Have you been taught to avoid using apertures smaller than f/11? Note that when I say a “small” aperture I am referring to the physical size. Remember that as the aperture numbers get bigger the actual opening in the lens gets smaller. This simple graphic illustrates that:

Progression of physical f-stop sizes

The lore is that very small apertures (large f-numbers, like f/22) make an image too blurry to be useful. Don’t believe everything you hear without testing it.

Light theory

I’m going very light on theory (yes, pun intended). We’re just going to graze the surface without taking a deep dive in. (Here is a source to start at if you want to go deeper. Abandon all hope ye who enter…)

Light behaves as waves (most of the time). Actually, a number of things are waves: light, water waves, sound waves, gravity waves. Quantum mechanics theorizes that even matter is waves. Too deep for me.

We tend to visualize light going through our lens as rays. That is, straight lines. Yes and no. That is one useful model of looking at it. But light also behaves as waves. An interesting and important property of waves is that every point on a wave is a wave. So if the wave is blocked by a small opening, the wave spreads on the other side of the opening.

This picture by Verbcatcher does a marvelous job of illustrating that for waves in water:

Diffraction in water waves

See how the waves spread after going through the small opening to the sea? The smaller the opening (aperture) the more pronounced the effect. That is, a small aperture opening causes waves to spread out more.

What does it really mean

This is the basis of the recommendation to use physically large apertures (small f-numbers). Apertures that are large relative to the wavelengths of light do not cause much “bend” of the waves. Small apertures (large f-numbers) “bend” the light more.

What we can actually see in practice is that using small apertures causes our images to have a mildly “fuzzy” look. Because the waves spread more after going through a small aperture, the individual waves cover a larger pixel area. This slight spreading of the light causes the image to appear less sharp.

The best discussion of diffraction for photographers I have found is from this article by Spencer Cox. But even this gets too deep into theory.

I borrowed this image from it to illustrate the practical effects of diffraction as we change aperture:

Effects of diffraction with aperture

See how the larger apertures (small f-numbers) are sharper than the smaller ones?

This illustration below, also from Spencer Cox) gives a great conceptual representation of what is happening. Take that the grid represents pixels in your sensor. At f/4, the point of light only strikes one pixel. It will be seen as very sharp. But at small apertures, the waves spread some onto adjacent pixels and create a kind of fog.

Should you fear it?

Should you fear it and always shun small apertures? No, it is just a reality of physics. It is no more to be feared than gravity. As one of my sons would say, it is what it is. Be aware of what is going to happen and consciously decide how far you need to go.

All of the exposure determinations we make daily are tradeoffs. How much to stop motion? How much depth of field do we need? Is there enough light for a good exposure? What ISO setting should I use? All of these things and more have to be balanced in the moment of shooting, besides composition and esthetic issues.

Each setting costs something. As experienced photographers we must understand the tradeoffs and be able to judge what is right for us at the moment.

Diffraction is one of those tradeoffs. Know what it is going to do and how to use it or avoid it.

Sometimes you need more

But why would we ever intentionally make our image less sharp? We seldom actually choose to make it less sharp, but sometimes we need other things. I can give 2 easy examples.

The first and most common one is to increase depth of field (DOF). It is counter intuitive, but making the aperture smaller increases the perceived depth of field. So on the one hand we are making the image less sharp, but on the other hand we are making it appear sharper throughout. When we need to make a certain range of the field of view acceptably sharp we stop down the aperture until we achieve our goal. A tradeoff.

Depth of field with small aperture© Ed Schlotzhauer

The second case that comes to mind is to reduce the shutter speed. I often intentionally shoot motion blur. But I usually forget to bring a neutral density filter for the lens I am using at the time. I can generally achieve the effect I want by using my polarizer, reducing the ISO to the lowest setting, and cranking the aperture down to the smallest possible one. This will probably give me a shutter speed in the range I want to use. Yes, the small aperture increases diffraction and makes the image less sharp. But it is handheld at a long shutter speed. It is already intentionally blurred.

Intentional blurring based on small aperture.© Ed Schlotzhauer

But maybe more importantly, in a great video on Lumminous Landscape, Charles Cramer said “sharpness is something we have to get over.” He explained that if we take a picture just because it is sharp, it probably won’t be very interesting. We have to forget about how sharp is it and instead react to the scene before us on an emotional level.

Shoot the picture

Diffraction is a side effect of physics and our photographic technology. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t blindly follow some rule you learned in the past about what you can or can’t do. Understand enough about it to recognize it and know how to use it to your advantage.

Look at the image above of the woman’s face. Even at f/32 – an extreme case – it is acceptable. Extra sharpening can be applied in your editing tool to compensate for it.

So diffraction is just there. Allow it to happen if that is the tradeoff you need to make. Just like using a high ISO adds noise, that is acceptable most of the time and better than missing the shot.

I know many of us don’t want to deal with what we perceive as increased complexity or too much technical detail. We just want to go take great pictures. My hope is that topics like this will actually make your photography life simpler by providing some grounding for information you may have heard in the past. Rather than trying to remember rules for how to use your equipment, you now have a model for what diffraction is doing and how strong its effect is. I hope you will be able to stop fearing it and accept it is just part of the tradeoffs of the technology.

Today’s image

This is a great old WWII era truck I found in my town. It is a Coleman. This was actually a Colorado company. It was designed and manufactured in the Denver area.

I needed enough depth of field to span from the great rust and paint patterns on the near outside through most of the cab. So it is shot at f/22. Diffraction? Works for me.

What do you think?

Posted on

Seeing the Unseen

Time shift, ICM, intentional blur

Photography is unique in the arts. It can record things we cannot see or imagine. Photography can be an adventure in seeing the unseen.

Unique

Photographers are sometimes made to feel inferior. Usually by proponents of the “real” arts, like painters or sculptors. Get over it. Photography has qualities that go beyond any other arts. Qualities that make them envious.

Photography is a technology-based art. That technology can be used along with our artistic vision to capture and create things regular art cannot. We can peer into things the human eye cannot see. We can freeze time to examine events the human eye cannot show us. Likewise, we can extend time to show the effects of movement in new ways.

Exposure

The human eye is amazing. But it has limits. Even though it can see a huge range of light, photographic sensors can push beyond our eye’s limits.

When you look at the stars, for instance, we can see what seem to be an immense number. But I have astronomer friends who have a process of taking hundreds of frames of 1 point in the sky. Then they use special stacking software to combine them and sharpen them to create levels of detail far beyond what the eye can see. Even my amateur astronomer friends routinely show me pictures they have taken of distant galaxies that cannot be detected at all with the eye.

Those same astronomer friends have solar filters – essentially completely black glass – that let them view the surface of the sun! They can see and photograph sun spots and the corona. Things that would destroy our eye if we tried to look directly at them.

The technology and practice of photography allows these things.

Light range

And “normal” (non-photographic) art is all done in the visible light range. Makes sense, That is all we can see.

But most of us have seen infrared imaging. This is done using a special dark red filter that excludes most light we can see. What is left is what we would consider heat – the world of longer wavelengths beneath the red response of our eye. It gives us a subtly different perception of the world around us. A paint artist could not do that without taking an infrared image of the scene then painting from the photograph.

Similar filtering can be done to see the ultraviolet world beyond the highest violets we can perceive. And have you had an X-Ray? That is just imaging done in another range of “light” we cannot see well beyond the ultraviolet.

These are somewhat niche capabilities, but they can bring us information that is exclusive to the photographic world.

Time

Time is one of my favorite variables that is unique to photography. One of the three legs of the exposure triad is shutter speed. By varying the shutter speed we can effectively slow down or speed up time!

People have developed flash systems that can freeze movement in slices of 1 millionth of a second. Even the fastest bullets are frozen in midair. Explosions can be captured as they start. You’ve probably seen pictures of a drop of liquid falling into a dish. The splash patterns are beautiful and interesting. Not many things we come in contact with in our lives are not frozen at this kind of speed.

At less extremes, a waterfall at a fast shutter speed can look like a cascade of diamonds . A bird in flight is completely frozen at about 1/1000th of a second. Every feather is crisp and sharp. We cannot see it this way with our eye.

At the other end, long exposures capture movement over time. This is the area I like to work. Not super long. Just long enough to change our perception of what is happening.

We have all seen long exposure pictures of waterfalls or cascades, where the water is smooth and silky. It is so common that it is in danger of being cliche. But the reason you see it a lot is because it is a pleasing effect. Some photographers make exposures of minutes. This makes clouds streak and water blur to a milky texture. Not really my thing, but I appreciate the reality distortion caused by the time shift.

Movement

A subset of this idea of time is where the camera is moving relative to the subject or the subject is moving relative to the camera. The camera motion side has become popular as Intentional Camera Motion (ICM).

Like many techniques in photography, it is easy to do but hard to do excellently. Anyone can take a blurry picture because the shutter speed was too long to stop the action. Most of us have to work to overcome this. ICM deliberately pushes this “fault” to a point of art. I do ICM for some projects and I have seen a lot of ICM that I consider excellent art. And I have seen a lot more where I have to think, “yep; that’s your standard ICM”. That’s OK. Most experiments in doing something new and creative fail.

One interesting aspect of techniques that involve movement and time is that it is almost impossible to take the same picture twice. There is always variation. The variation often leads to pleasant surprises.

Stretch the notion of reality

So photography is unique in giving us alternate views of “reality”. With conventional arts, like painting, nothing can be created that the artist does not first see or imagine. Photography can show us worlds or effects we did not imagine. This sometimes opens up new creative paths to explore. And the exciting thing is it is actually reality. If the camera captures it out in the “real world” (whatever that is), it is reality. What we get may be a complete surprise, but that is part of the exhilaration.

Photographers, never feel inferior in the arts. Know that what we do is as valid as any other kind of art. And try not not to be smug knowing we have the option of being more creative than most other forms of art.

Go explore the unseen and enjoy your discoveries.

Live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ – the boundaries of the unknown. – J. Robert Oppenheimer

Today’s image

This is part of a series I did fairly recently. It combines ICM and time and subject motion and some secret sauce optical techniques to create this look. I consider it a creative view on a reality that happens around us all the time, but only photographers can see.

Is it “real”? Yes, absolutely. It is a minimally modified shot of a real, physical subject. It is a subject most of us can find right around our town.

To find out more about what it is, go to my web site and find a similar looking image in Projects.