Ok so my dodgy Duran Duran title did very little to entice you into this months blog entry about our Caterpillar Photography Society’s assignment which was Reflection.
There’s plenty of scope for this one of course, water reflections, mirror reflections, non-literal reflections like an old dude sat on a bench looking thoughtful about his old days.
Not a Bridge Camera
First chance to take a photo was after an evening of shooting my air rifle for the 10m target shooting league. I stopped the car in the Quarry area of town by the Armoury pub and walked to the Porthill Bridge, which is now lit up at night since it’s very smart restoration job.
There over the river stood this bouncy old suspension bridge, alight with LED’s and on the surface of the Severn was it’s perfectly formed reflection. However, I couldn’t find a spot where I could put my tripod to take a good photo without some small piece of the local flora interfering with the light between the bridge and my lens.
I needed my tripod to get a good picture here, it was 9:08pm and completely dark, save for the led’s and the outdoor lighting of the very nearby Boathouse Inn’s beer garden. To get a decent exposure I figured I’d have to leave the shutter open for a while, it turns out that around 1.5 secs was ideal. My ISO was turned up but not to the max, around the 1600, as I didn’t want to completely ruin the photo with grain. The higher the ISO, the quicker the light is accepted into the CCD (the sensor that captures the image). Unfortunately the higher the sensitivity the more digital noise is created. This means lots of weird dots of random colours appear in the picture.
This is actually representative of actual Film too, like we all used to use. The reason is that to make a film more sensitive, higher ISO, it had to have bigger grains of material that would pick up the light quickly, but as these grains weren’t as fine as Slow ISO 100, 200 films the grains were more visible. For more info on film click here
Holy Bat Photos
It was while I was here trying to get a decent photo of the bridge and the Boathouse Inn, here this photo is f/8 ISO 1600 with 1.6 secs shutter, that I noticed things moving around the surface of the water. After a few moments I worked out that there were a number of Bats flying around barely clearing the surface of the water and in some cases even dipping in to the wet stuff. I figured that they must be gathering food in the form of larvae and there were millions of midges about this particular week. I set to work trying to photograph a bat in flight, not a reflection photo but I love anything to do with bats.
This was to be the opposite of the longer exposure photos that I’d just been taking. For this I needed a super fast ISO, I chose 3200, and a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second. The f stop was 5.6 and I had the built in flash to use too. The idea of having it on Manual was a bit daunting but if I’d had it on auto it wouldn’t have focused and prepared for the shot in time.
I fixed the focus on a point on a wall close by and knocked it to MF, this meant that the AF wouldn’t search back and forward in the dark to find a focus point, as it wouldn’t find one on the water anywhere. The flash was set to On also so when I pressed the shutter release button it was virtually all done. It just needed to do the shutter and expose the scene.
Now I’m not afraid to look like a knob sometimes, I ride unicycles and have often dressed up in ridiculous outfits for different events, so I’m used to that. However, as I was holding the camera on my chin and moving it around with my gaze, setting it off and releasing the pent up photoluminescent power of the flash at seemingly random intervals, I probably looked a proper tit.
I’d chase the bat into the frame and when I thought he’d flown into the relevant area, that had been prefocused I’d snap. Got some good pictures too, well I say good, they’re not bad for an amateur with a built in flash. Here’s one of them, and it does have a reflection too I suppose, the blue light is the reflection of the bridge led’s again.
Project Projector
After this it was time to try some alternative ideas, I wanted to play with mirrors and do something interesting with them. A couple of weeks before one of my colleagues, a placement student, tried to replace a bulb in a projector but inadvertently ended up stripping apart completely. I think in fact only the bulb was left in it in the end.
I grabbed some of the components that had been disposed of as a result of this breaking down the projector and laid them on my desk in various configurations, most of them looked contrived and I found a “dice throw” approach to work better and provide more natural results. The reflections in these lenses and mirrors were odd as they were all different, some magnifying, some fisheye’ing and some just partially reflecting.
My favourite of this set was this one where I used natural light in my home office and a desk lamp. I like the photo as you can see me and my huge hands with the camera, but if you look closer at the central lense you can make out my guitar hanging on the wall and other stuff on my book shelves.
Mirror Mirror Off The Wall
I had a few more ideas about taking the bedroom mirror off the ceiling, sorry, wall and doing something with that. I had an idea of getting a reflection of something that changed. Hmm, how to make that clearer?
I put my iPhone 4 in front of the mirror on the floor, after first laying down a black piece of material. I took a photo of the scene, mirror, material, iPhone and reflection. Then taking care not to move the material or any other part of the scene, I removed the iPhone and replaced it with all manner of previous generation tech, like an old phone, a camera, a playstation 1, a tape recorder etc then repeating the photo.
The idea was to split the photo and have the one half of the photo with the iPhone in the front and the old gear in the reflection, to symbolise how we’ve moved on and the technology now fits into the package that is the iPhone. But it wasn’t working as I’d envisaged so after a few attempts I looked for something else to do. I think I will revisit this another day though, as I think it didn’t work due to the contents of the reflection being completely different from the “real” plane.
Because I’m “Worth” it
It was after I’d played with this mirror that I remembered that my Ikea wardrobe has two mirrored sliding doors. I figured out that I could remove one and take it around the house. Doing this allowed me to put it in bizarre positions to figure out an interesting outlook on the scene.
I experimented with this mirror by doing a Harry Worth and having half of me reflect to take a daft photo. The next idea was similar to the phone / tech in the mirror where I wanted to do something and then play with the perception. I asked my son to stand at the edge of the mirror in two different poses, took a photo of each and then merged them together. People look at the photo and think that there is somehting not right with it, that’s spot on. His reflection should be the same as the “out of mirror” position. While it piqued my interest I felt that it wasn’t a strong enough photo to be entered into the catps.co.uk website for the competition voting.
The chosen photo
Using the same mirror I tried to get the infinite effect like Ariadne’s mirrors in the film Inception, by standing between the two mirrors with my camera on a tripod but it just didn’t cut it. I think if I’d done it in the middle of a meadow in the daylight that it would have been fine. However, I don’t have a meadow close-by and I’m not prepared to trundle off with my fragile wardrobe doors on the roof of my car. After a reset I positioned one end of the mirror close to the other and stood at the more open end with my camera. I tried various angles and one out of all of the photos I took had the appeal that I was looking for.
The mirrors were close enough together and I had room to stick one of my legs in to make the picture more interesting. It’s quite a confusing picture if you look at it quickly but even after considering the image for some time, it can still be tricky to see what’s real, what’s the forst reflection and then how it goes from there.
So, that’s it for this month, the pictures are all submitted to the Cat PS Reflection Gallery for judging by the members of the Photographic Society.
Once the votes are all in, they’ll be independently adjudicated and then we’ll have the announcement next monday.
This comes right after the interesting talk and presentation on Landscape Photography by Joe Cornish who is a world famous ‘tog and will be appearing at the Severn Theatre on Monday next.
Executive Summary
To sum up this month then I’ve got no bulleted list but suffice to say that I’m still enjoying my photography and learning by playing around with the features of the camera and software and by also talking to other members of the photographic community.
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