4 posts tagged “photography”
We've been entertaining almost every night for the past week. If it's not entertaining, it's a business meeting at home which entails, well, some sort of entertaining (coffees, teas, drinks, chocolates, sweets, etc) till late hours, certainly later than I am used to. And it's not over yet. We've looking forward to entertain my sister and her friend tomorrow night...
BUT, today was MY day in the garden... after a business meeting which lasted all morning and ended up with a potentially good partnership. But after the gentleman has left, Frances and I attacked the garden centre and came back with more than 180 seasonal flowers! Geraniums, Allisums, Colliuses, Salvias, little purple fluffy things, Snapdragons and Alternanthera... so Arif and I went and planted all of these things in their respected places around the garden, watered them, tinkered some more in the garden till about 6pm.. it was tiring work to be sure, but it is that kind of tiredness that makes you feel that you actually accomplished something! So I won't complain about the gardening this afternoon. I enjoyed it a lot, and hope to do some more of it tomorrow.
For now, enjoy this picture I took through the Cassia (scrambled egg tree) looking into the front garden. Once I get my "proper" Canon camera (I hope!) I will take another picture from the same place and you should see the plethora of colour and texture that should have taken good hold.
The season has started!
Adrenaline.
Pulse.
Life!
And at this particular moment, there is nothing that I can be more passionate about than making a good documentary.
I think I've always been interested in film making, but never had the nerve to actually do it on a professional level.
My love of making images started when I was young; my cousin Mohammed and I read about photography, and as the process talked about "contact sheets", that is, putting a negative film on "paper" and then "developing" it, we thought that's an easy thing to do. And we were both desperate to have a look at our first processed image. So we went into dad's study, ferreted out a negative film, sat on the stairs of our old house in a spot that had direct sun, tore a paper out of a notebook and sat there for about an hour with the negative held firmly against the notepaper, completely convinced that we will get a "picture" any minute now!
It was this state that my dad found us at when he came back from work! He had a good laugh and told us that's not how it's done and explained to us in simple terms that we need "special" paper called "photographic paper" to actually print the picture on.
A few days after than incident I convinced dad (nagged, more like) to get that special paper. He was good enough to get me a box of 4x5s I think and left us to it. He did explain that he needs to buy us some chemicals etc, but would we wait? No way! No patience whatsoever. So back to the stairs we went, got the negative, got one photographic paper out and once again held the negative firmly on the paper and exposed it to the sun for a while - I can't remember how long we sat there this time, but I can distinctly remember that a contact sheet was produced, and the paper turned purple of all things and its edges curled. But we got our image!
We probably were 10 or so at the time.
That's how my love of photography was born, and it was my dad who nurtured it. At a teacher's salary, he found enough money from somewhere to go and buy me a "proper" SLR 35mm camera - the Russian Zenith SLR - as well as a Zenith enlarger, some photographic paper, developer and fixer chemicals and away I went. I spent countless ours in my makeshift darkroom making pictures.
That's a very long time ago now, but I never stopped loving photography. Even though I stopped developing my own negatives and stopped printing my own prints quite a while ago, I continued to spend whatever spare cash (and sometimes not so spare!) to get the best shot, and develop my slides (ultimately) and prints at the best labs in Bahrain.
I continue to appreciate and participate in photography to this day, but my other passion now - or rather desperation! - is to go "really" into film making. Although I do sell ALL the equipment and services required to actually make movies, I've not had the courage to actually make one, yet.
Sure I've made home movies before, in fact if you look at my YouTube section you will see that I have uploaded 47 "vlogs" or short personal movies so far, but that's not the "enterprise" that I am looking for. That is not the real "movie" where I can lead several people and direct them to expose a dream, or in the non-fictional sense, create a visual book, a documentary which I can share with people to educate them about an issue or open their eyes to the world around them.
This opportunity has come knocking now, and I can do it, with the help of professionals whom I have had contacts with over the last 10 years or so. I am now fully engaged into the process of making my first documentary, one about my recently departed father, an artist, a scholar and a good man.
We're at the pre-planning stages at the moment. I have identified four possible script-writers, an assistant producer, a researcher, and a consultant. We're heavily engaged in brain-storming of what we want that documentary to be, its duration, target markets, etc. There are far too many loose ends at the moment to tell you about the project in more details, I think that only thing that we are fairly sure about is that it's duration is not going to be longer than 30 minutes. Apart from that, I want it to be released on the 16th of June, 2007; that would be my father's first death anniversary.
We have a lot ahead of us, the first thing I have got to settle are the non-negotiable deadlines. I have given myself 8 months to completely finish the movie, and launch it simultaneously with a full exhibition of dad's paintings on the anniversary too, by which time, a parallel project should have come to fruition as well, and that is a full colour, high quality book which will show the best of dad's paintings.
All in all, this is going to be a very busy year for me, and one that has winds of change blowing thoroughly... could this be yet another career change for me?
Yes, you guessed it. The first thing I did this morning was go out in the stifling humidity as soon as the light was good to take some pictures to test this HDR for myself. Here is one set of results, my first attempt really:
The image above got treated to my usual workflow, which is simply adjusting the lighting a little and using the Unsharp Filter just to get slightly better definition on edges.
Now let me share with you the image that resulted from the HDR program (Photomatix Pro):
If you go and look at the larger image in my Flickr account you will probably be surprised at the difference it contains when compared to even the "worked on" picture above. To really put things in perspective, I have created a composite of half-and-half of the same shot for you to see the huge dynamic difference, especially in the shadows:
Can you see the difference?
Let me confess something to you now: I have always thought that this HDR lark is nothing more than trying to "punch" the picture so it appears that it has depth, a sort of cheap way of getting 3D without having to put on those stupid bi-coloured glasses. It never clicked with me that that perception is a direct attribute of achieving such a deep dynamic range of luminocity in a picture!
Now I know, and I'm off now to produce more HDR shots... what better way to spend a Friday?
Happy Friday everyone!
Look at these images:
These are HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. If you don't know much about HDR, like yours truly, you might want to Google it and get completely swamped with technical jargon. But let me help you: these images originally contained information to the value of 32-bit, that 2 to the power of 32 which is a hell of a lot, per pixel!
Why do I emphasise originally? Becuase the resulting images cannot be displayed on normal monitors, and through my cursory examination of the HDR scene tonight, there are NO production monitors which could truly display them. Nor are there any printers which can print them. So the HDR images you see are no more than 16-bit representations after being compressed down by a program, which originally combined several images to produce the 32- or even 48-bit dynamic range in the photograph.
What's the point then of even considering HDR at the moment? Its proponents insist on a better resulting photograph as you can see details in both shadow and light. Judging by the best there is in Flickr's HDR pool, and one of its highly regarded people, as a photographer, I can't bring myself to really empathize with their processes. To me, HDR is a lazy way of setting up your shot, in post processing, rather than at the time of composition. That to me is fake, if the photographer insists on describing this process as done to get a "better picture". If however s/he describes the process as another creative avenue, then more power to him, as it is a medium worth exploring artistically.
I can't pass judgment on the medium yet though. My exposure to this method of photography to the millions of shots that my brother Jamal has taken, and him being so enamored with the result that I don't think he has taken a "normal" photograph since he discovered HDR. Click Click Click. You kind of recognize his approach not by the click of his shoes, but rather his camera's shutter which is always in triplicate.
So what is HDR then?
According to the veritable Wikipedea, it is:
In computer graphics and cinematography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows.
HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a HDR image from a set of photos taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy to use desktop software, many amateur photographers have used HDRI methods to create photos of scenes with a high dynamic range (i.e a large difference between light and dark areas). However, HDRI has many other applications and "HDRI" should not be mistaken for just this use.
Ah, so HDR is really to try to represent a photograph in physical reality, as the eyes sees, that is. But with the absense of the ready availability of display or printing devices which can render those images in all their glory, we have to depend on applications which initially theoretically and mathematically goes the distance by combining variable exposured shots to 32- or 48-bits per pixel, and then a user must downgrade the resulting final image to 8- or 16-bits to be able to display his artistic abilities to the world. Defeats the purpose.
It does have merit though, in as far as being another artistic exposure to talent. Beyond that, I personally don't think there is any particular use to this new methodology.
That said, my own feeble attempts only started tonight after a discussion and a brief demonstration of the art with my brother Jamal after lunch today, with him showing off his behemoth 17-inch MacBook Pro which he acquired recently during his Malaysian holiday, that I started to appreciate what he was going on about for weeks. I asked him to explain to me the basics, and to show me how he acquires such images at the front-end, with his camera. He explained that his Canon 300 SLR has a function that automatically brackets the shot by under-, over- and normally exposing the image. That function resides in a menu on his camera called AEB. I of course insisted that that feature is not present on my trusty Canon 20D, though a degree higher than the 300, as I have never used it, I just naturally assumed that it was not available (I don't read manuals, I might add!) yet, he was insistant that my camera had that feature.
In any case, he went on to demonstrate to me how a series of pictures could be combined in order to produce a photograph with better dynamic range which should be more representative of the real world, and is more pleasing to the eye.
I have my reservations on the "pleasing" part and even with the "representative" one. Me being a traditional photographer much longer than me having a digital camera, I apply my long-standing training and methods to photography, regardless of whether I am using my old Nikon F3, Bronica GS1 or the digital Canon 20D. So I can't but cringe when I see photographs as those represented above. To me, they are really just computer generated images, rather than story tellers.
Look at any of Sam Javanrouh's pictures, here's an example:
and look at the dynamic range he has captured. As far as I can tell, and reading his forum and investigating his workflow, he does nothing really that a typical chemical photographer wouldn't do in his lab: dodging, burning, exposing, etc. The normal darkroom stuff, though Sam does that using Photoshop and his workflow typically is brightness and contrast and saturation adjustments, then sharpening using the Unsharp Filter. He seldom does anything else. But you must surely agree that his images carry within them some sort of magic, and inner sense, a depth, that I have not (yet) seen in the samples of those uploaded to the HDR group on Flickr.
Having said all of that, will I investigate this new medium? Of course I shall, especially that I have now located the manual, and Jamal was right, my 20D does have this capability as it describes it on page 84! However, I think I shall just continue with my traditional approach to photography, using Sam as an idol and guide in my humble efforts.
