This might be fun!

Here's a new feature. Try and guess what this is a picture of! Do your entry and in a couple of days I'll post a perspective that might help your guess.

Maybe THIS way I can get some comments.

I Guess It Used to be Green

It's finally warming up in Texas and I'm doing out door things again. I played two rounds of disc golf this week. I threw 5 (count em, five!) discs in the water (very windy on the Allen course this weekend) and Michelle walked 5, in the Walk MS.

Then this afternoon I got back out in the shop. My old truck is still there so I started working on it again. I finished sanding the bumper, pulled off the emblems and took out the head lights. Next I started sanding. As you can see, red isn't the original color (no real surprise there - red wasn't a color option in 1954.

Earth Hour

I got an email today. It said the following:

Hi Everyone

Earth Hour 2010 will take place on Saturday March 27, 2010 from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm, wherever you are in the world. This is the invite for you to do your part by turning off your lights and minimizing energy usage during Earth Hour.
For more check it out at http://www.earthhour.org/homepage.aspx?o=ignore

Enjoy the darkness!!

I wrote right back! Here's my response!

Seriously? Didn't you take any physics? Energy can't be consumed, only converted. The way I see it, energy is bored most of the time and it's our job to entertain it. Imagine spending 2.4 billion years tied up in a hydro-carbon state and totally bored. They dig you up. Still bored. Truck ride to the hopper. Still bored. Loaded on the train. Still bored (but granted all this is better than the 2 billion years in the ground). Now you get to the coal fired power plant and the good stuff starts.

You get to be converted to heat and then excite some bored water molecule so much that it converts from liquid to gas. The water then "pays it forward" by spinning a turbine and helping some other poor schmoe out in the ether get to be converted into electricity, travel across a wire, converted again into light, then shot back out into the ether. Excitement for the energy in the magnetic induction. Excitement for the water molecule. Excitement for the kinetic energy in the turbine bearings getting converted to heat because of friction.

I'm not making this up. In physics they even talk about molecules getting excited as thing heat up because they get to move around more.

You want to do the earth a favor? For crying out loud! The whole darn thing is made of matter and matter is made up of energy (just ask those folks who split the atom). Do the earth a favor by doing your part (even though your part is small) in offering the earth a little excitement!

Get out there and convert some hydro-carbon!

Photography Lesson #3 - Depth of Field

Michelle and I are working our way through a photography class together. This assignment was about playing with lighting and shooting a still life. I came up with three things worth writing about in doing this assignment. My first one is about depth of field.

This is essentially the same picture. I had the camera on a tripod and took the picture with a small aperture (F22) and a large one (F1.8). This made for different shutter speeds but the depth of field change makes it a completely different picture.

This first picture (to me, anyway) is a photo of a the front of my pickup with some tools in front of it. My eye goes right to the Chevy emblem, then to the yellow sander.

Aperture is f/22

I want to show you the same picture with different depth of field. When I look at this picture the pickup more or less goes away. Sure, it's still there but because if it out of focus my eye goes straight to the sander (probably because it's yellow) and from there to the dust mask. The picture becomes something different. It is now a still life picture of tools.

Aperture is f/1.8

Your choices in depth of field have everything about what your picture becomes. I can make you look at different things by using focus, but only if I'm controlling depth of field. When everything is in focus other factors decide where you look.

If you're convinced depth of field is all about controlling where people look, you are not completely right. Depth of field done correctly will make you look where I want you to look but sometimes, when you turn all the control over to the camera you can create a picture that can only be described as "bad". Let me show you what I mean...

If you look at this picture it is just annoying. At first glance you might not even realize why. The composition is wrong because there is too much stuff in the frame and it isn't arranged correctly. As a result the picture is cluttered in confusing. That is annoying but is not as the focus problem.

Your eye is drawn to the yellow sander but it's not in focus. The whole front row is fuzzy and annoying. The dust mask in the back is kind of in focus but even it is off a bit. I half pressed the shutter button 3 times (making it choose different spots to focus on). Ultimately when I took the picture I had let it "choose" to focus on the stripping tool in the right rear corner.

Look at the enlarged version of this picture. The stripping disk is in great focus but it's such a minor part of the composition it does nothing but make this bad picture worse.

In summary, the learning point here is that you can use depth of field to control what folks are looking at in your photographs. Done correctly it's a nice tool for turning your pictures into whatever you want them to be but done wrong it can make your pictures really bad.

In Case You're Wondering...

Kroger had pork picnics for 88 cents a pound (limit 2). Fiesta had pork butt for 77 cents a pound (limit 3). I read the ad and kept seeing the word "Sausage". I'm down to my last 5 pounds of Italian.

We got all 5 (2 from Kroger, 3 from Fiesta). Total weight (still in the package) was 45 pounds. Michelle and I boned it out and cut it into chunks that will fit in my meat grinder. The loss was 13.3% and we just put 39 pounds of "ready to grind" pork into the freezer.

This means we're going to have lots of sausage at the Crawfords so for a limited time I'll play "let's make a deal". I will trade 2 pounds of my home made sausage (Italian, Breakfast, Polish, Bratwurst or William Tell Polish) for a whole chicken (don't care how small or big) which I will donate to the food bank.

Those of you who have tried my sausage - stop drooling on yourselves. Those of you who haven't tried it...this window is rare. People who try my sausage often ask to buy some. I always give the same answer:

"I don't sell it. If I sell the stuff it stops being a hobby and starts being work" That means this offer is not only a limited time - it's finite in nature. You snooze you lose.

Photography Lesson #2 - Using Shutter Speed

Use The Shutter to Show Motion

I suppose most photographers already get that to freeze motion in a picture like this you must use a fast shutter speed. In this case I cranked the ISO up to 6400, put on my low light prime lens and took the shot at one five hundredth of a second.

1/500th second @ f1.8

There is another technique where you can use shutter speed for on the other end of the scale - showing motion.

Last weekend Michelle and I went out on a photo expedition. We were taking pictures of a windmill (see Photography Lesson #1 - The Magic 15). While we were shooting a very gentle breeze was blowing. The blades on the windmill were lazily turning at a speed of maybe a single revolution every half minute to a minute. By shooting a picture of them with a 1/125th shutter speed all motion was gone:

1/125th Second - f8 - ISO-200

I then decided I wanted a picture that showed some blade motion. To do this I needed a much slower shutter speed. As it turned out, there was far too much light during the bright part of the day to get the effect I wanted. In a situation like this you could use a .9 neutral density filter which does not change any of the colors but adds 4 f-stops of "darkness" to the picture. Using such a filter would have allowed the shutter speed I needed but in this case I didn't have one so I had to wait until the sun was starting to set (and there was less direct sunlight).

1/10 second - f32 - ISO 100

As you can see from this picture, changing the shutter speed to a tenth of a second gives the impression that the blades are turning. I hand held the camera for the 1/125th exposure above but needed a tripod to shoot the tenth of a second shutter speed.

Increasing the time the aperture is open will suggest even more motion. In this final picture, the shutter speed is twice as long (1/5th second) as it is in the picture above:

Photography Lesson #1 - The magic 15

The Magic 15 Minutes before Sunset

I took this photo at 5 p.m. on February 27, 2010. The exposure is correct and the composition isn't bad but something amazing can happen if I just wait 39 more minutes prior to snapping the picture.

At noon on any given day sunlight must pass through around 6 miles of the earth's atmosphere to get to your subject. There are two points in a day at sunrise and sunset when the light must travel horizontally through literally thousands of extra miles of atmosphere and, more importantly, the light must pass through atmosphere that is close to the planet surface where there are more air-borne particles.

As the light comes across the horizon, these atmospheric particles filter the light and the result is a change in color that photographers call warming. The difference in your picture is amazing.

Look at the full size copies of each picture by clicking on them and notice the difference. Same camera in roughtly the same postion. One picture at 5:00, the second at 5:39. By 6:00 it was too dark to take a good picture.

The next time you are shooting a landscape or natural scene, consider not only the composition and exposure of your picture. Think about using the magic 15 minutes to give it a tryly unique and appealing look.