Measuring farmland with a small ruler.

Well it’s taken a while to put a post up about the competition for the month of May with the Caterpillar Photographic Society.

During May the members of this slowly expanding society were tasked with capturing an image using the techniques learned in the meeting at the start of the month surrounding Shallow Depth Of Field.

Alwyn had given us a great tutorial on Depth Of Field and Aperture and the club decided to use this as a perfect topic by limiting it to a Shallow DoF.

Grave

Some of my ideas were simple and some not so, I was gravely concerned. On a visit to Blackpool with my wife and two children I was looking for the perfect capture everywhere, but things seldom pop up to me if I’m super-focussed on finding them.

In the SeaLife centre we moved around the various tanks and pools investigating everything from Sea Horses to Gigantic Crabs and I had my 50mm prime lens mounted to the front of my Canon 500D. The light in these places is seldom bright due to the nature of the nature enclosed therein so I figured that the f/1.8 would be great to suck in the light while also giving me the separation of the subject from the background.

All this was great apart from the fact that it was a 50mm and I had to stand some way away from the subject to fit it in. This wouldn’t be so bad but when there are loads of rude people pushing and shoving their way through without even an “excuse me”, and small children who manage to get the back of their heads in the way just as the shutter opens it was a challenge.

One photo that I liked from here was of a chameleon, to capture this I actually had to stop down the exposure by 1 & 1/3 due to the tank lights washing the colours out. The focus on his eye was sharp and the picture foreground and background were both blurred, as per design. The film speed (ISO) was set to 1600, perhaps explaining the washout, but I had it set on aperture priority so this wasn’t changeable. It would have been, had I moved to manual mode.

From SeaLife we moved into Madame Tussaud’s where I snapped many a photo of celebs galore, such as Keith Lemon, Cheryl Cole, Gok Wan and a David Beckham that looked very little like him, perhaps the thermostat had been damaged in the last place he’d been sat. No really stand out pictures from here so up the Tower we went.

Dive

From the very top of Blackpool Tower you could take no decent photos at all, they’ve got some ridiculous netting all around it to stop small children making a mess on the top of the tower Ballroom when they’ve dived to their deaths. From the next level down however you could get a decent photo of the promenade and all the way up the beach to the South Pier. This is when I planned the Tilt-Shift effect picture.

I snapped away trying to get a decent foreground and background while having people and cars in the centre or on the lower horizontal third grid line. When I took the picture, I wasn’t impressed but knew that Photoshop could add a dramatic Tilt-Shift effect that would drastically change it’s impact.

Again, I liked the effect but felt that I might be penalised by the other members of the society for Photoshop trickery.

Hal

It was around this time that I thought about using models (scale models not topless babes) to get the similar effect as tilt-shift so when I returned home I fetched some of my Batman Toys, sorry, Memorabilia down from the attic and take some close up shots. I dug out a few of my old die-cast models of the 1960’s Batmobile as designed by George Barris, based on the Lincoln Futura concept car and also a couple of Batcopters, Jokermobiles, Batplanes and action figures. I set up my little studio box thingy and set about photographing them using my nifty fifty but found that sometimes better effects and results were forthcoming from my 70-300 Tamron lens on a tripod.

The first picture series I took was of a 90’s comic book style Batmobile with a similar era Batplane in the background. This was shot on a grey “infinity” cloth in the little studio with table lamps either side of the translucent material, almost behaving like a softbox. This was done with my Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens and I was happy with the result but thought I may be able to do better. So I kept experimenting.

This next one was also using the 50mm lens and was an aperture of  f/3.5 but I was still unhappy. You could see what it was, you could see what I was trying to do but it didn’t make for a pleasing photo.

The next picture to be sucked into the lens onto the now Bat-shaped ccd sensor was of a Hot-Wheels model of the Tumbler Batmobile from Batman Begins. I tried many different focus points to use as the central focus and have the blurry stuff in front and behind, but the pictures I took were all too sharp or too blurry. In the end I settled with an F/2.8 on my nifty fifty and got this result. Not the best but still a good example of Shallow DoF.

Ground

It came down to the last idea, brought forth from the bag of bat-bits a Batman Begins Bubble Bath in the shape of a  plastic Christian Bale in a fighty pose as if to take on Ra’s Al Ghul. In other groups that I’m a member of on Flickr I’d noticed a Batman Collectables group where people (comic nerds) like to pose their action figures, some costing hundreds of pounds into lifelike poses against a Gotham City backdrop.

I figured that it had to be better than the plain Grey background, (Shrewsbury’s weather isn’t always great), and found a suitable donor piece of cityscape artwork on the web which I then printed out on two pieces of A4. I did this using the Banner document template in Publisher to get a wide picture that I could stick together.

These papers went into the rear of the box studio and I snapped away. I used a table lamp to light up the model so it looked relatively realistic and not plasticky like it really looks. (I’ve confused myself with that last sentence).

Several pictures were taken, focusing on the eyes of the Dark Knight meaning his leading fist was slightly out of focus and the rest of him and the city scape even more-so. I’d underexposed too by 2 stops and had the ISO set at 100 for less grainy pictures.

This was my entry into the competition for the month and surprisingly won the vote. I’d thought that a member called Michael would have won with a cracking picture of a kid on a climbing frame but people seemed to like the Batman picture.

take a look here for the entries into the May competition and see just how tough it was. There was another favourite of an ice cold beer on precariously perched on a ship in the arctic that I liked a lot too, Graham had taken this on a cruise. One of the other entries worth mentioning, but gone from the album was Steve’s photo of his garden shed which he’d utilised the Brenizer method to produce and incredibly shallow dof image using multiple shots all stitched together. Technically a marvel, but people aren’t interested in the technicalities as I’ve discovered before. I still like the photo though.

To wrap up then I had to keep taking photos of things using a lens with the largest aperture I could get to really get that separation which makes up the photo’s as you’ve seen above. I had to try many variations of each image to choose the best one from different settings.

There’ll be a new post soon also, describing the month of June and the results of that months competition which was based on a “Tin Of Beans”. There was some heads being scratched that month. Keep reading and coming back for more info from the Caterpillar Photographic Society.