Still-up Your scope Part-3

A very long sought obsession for photographers and artists has been to carve out the complexity in simple water drops. After a very tiring effort of about 4-5 hours, I managed to get about 350 pictures of waterdrops, of which I liked only about 30 and these 5 are among them. This is a very difficult task to perform and requires patience ( the most difficult part) along with many other headaches. Here are the things that you will need. You can do this exercise very comfortably in dark indoors using camera flash.
1. Dripping water. A tap which is a bit far from the wall supporting it(about 2 feet) serves well but then such taps are difficult to find. I had used a plastic bottle with a small hole and had stuck a toothprick in the hole to help regulate the dripping rate.

2. Vessel. Never pick steel vessel . It competes for a lot of attention in flash light(see right side pic). Plastic vessel with wide opening(about 6 inches) is good-Nothing like it if you have a blue vessel. You will neeed to fill this vessel upto the brim.

3. Background. Background can be matching or contrasting the vessel colour. It should be placed placed behind the vessel at a distance about 4 times the camera's focal length for best results. The farther the background the better the result but then a larger background is required. You may use a folded bed sheet or plastic sheet for this. Dont use wall for background, it s**** bigtime. The reason why the dripping source needs to be far from the wall is the background position only. I didn't have anything for a good background. :(. Here is how my setup looked like. I tried another setup too, where I tried to turn my bathroom into a blackbox. But it blew because I could not find a space for keeping my background. Now coming to the camera, you'l need to set it to Flash on mode and make sure it is the only significant source of light. Set the shutter speed to about 150 and use a large aperture (This is the aperture size with a smaller fstop number). Large aperture will ensure a smaller depth of field and will keep the surroundings (like background and vessel's periphery) out of focus so that they dont compete for attention. Keep the ISO as low as possible.Turn the auto focus of the camera off.It is impossible to get these pictures with autofocus. Position your camera close the the vessel and manually set the focus on the point of contact of drops and vessel. Try to bring your camera closer and set the focus manually to the least distance your camera has, mine had 0.5 metrewith macro. If your camera has a macro lens, use that as well (You'l need to turn off wide/tele/closeup to use this lens). The closer the camera , the better the pictures will be but make sure you are only as close as the focal length is. For further close-up it will be better to crop the images out instead of getting closer to get more magnification. Now, let the water drip and take lots of pictures, for starters let the source drip fast, so that you get more action pictures, when you get a grasp of your camera's performace, slow it down and keep taking pictures. Keep changing the camera's height and angle after about every 20-25 shots and readjust the focal length accordingly. Try changing shutter speed too. Dont reduce the aperture though.Take a lot of pictures and keep reviewing them time to time to see if you are going wrong somewhere and try correcting it. Another good trick is using stuff other than water drops (like peanuts, pebbles) to capture more explosive splashes. In the most explosive splash in above pictures (tallest one with green background) I dropped gems (ha ha ha! yes cadburry gems) from about 1 and half feet. Gems serve as good advantage because they are circular (giving natural looking splashes) , coloured ( giving additional effect, although I couldn't exploit it) and a consistent sized (giving regular splashes). But you wont be able to enjoy them after the same way after the exercise as they'l look horribly worn out like this .. When you are done, crop them to your requirements. Try sticking to the rule of thirds while cropping. Finally if you do this entire exercise, let me know anything new that you learn while you were at it and share your pictures too.

Still-up Your Scope Part-2

Capturing the moon with Texture

This part of stilling up things is a bit more difficult. Here are the tips for taking these kind of pictures.

1. Low contrast and high sharpness mode works best for the moon.
2. This cannot be taken with camera in the hand. I used a tripod stand. Keeping the camera on a surface and using something (like wood pieces) for inclination works equally well.
3. Don’t use digital zoom as it will make the image look broken.
4. If your camera allows so ,better switch of the camera's auto focus and set the focal length to infinity. ( Its not a big deal, cameras which allow focussing always have this option)
5. Set a timer. The camera will shake as you press its shutter button. 2 seconds is good enough.
6. In manual settings mode, use lowest ISO( about 50-100), moderate shutter speed (1/5 to 1/40) and adjust aperture for appropriate brightness.Mine was 4.5.


If first picture doesn’t work for you. Try under various settings of exposure. The difference between all these pics is not just because of zoom level but the other settings like exposure and Image sensitivity as well ( if your camera allows you to program them manually) because this clarity cannot be achieved with auto shoot mode no matter how advanced the other features are.
Depending on the brightness of the moon, the sky and other factors the speed of the shutter and size of aperture may vary. The aperture here only takes care of exposure as depth of field is not a concern for such long distance object.

Still-up Your Scope Part-1

I have been spent quite some time in a last few days learning and understanding features of my camera. It now gives me pleasure to share what I have learned in the past few days.
Part 1 of Still-up your scope is actually a trick, exploiting a feature of camera and making people ghostly. Like this one where I have posed with my office colleague and friend Manjeet.

And no, the trick I am talking about is not a cheap photoshop trick. This is a very simple trick which lies in photographing and not in photo editing. You will be needing a camera which allows you to manually set the shutter speed and aperture. Once you have it, here is what you got to do.

1. Set the camera to a very very slow shutter speed. I used 30 secs. You will have to reduce the aperture size ( be carful with this, a small aperture is the one with bigger f-stop number) to compensate the amount of light entering the camera. Also, if possible try to reduce the light in the room to an appropriate limit.
2. Set the camera to a two seconds timer to avoid shaking while you are pressing the shutter button.
3. Ask your subjects to pose in front of the camera, and instruct them not to make any movements at all to avoind blurring and then click the shutter button. Remember, it will take significant time( 30 secs) for the camera to take the picture.
4. At just about half of this period (15 secs), ask one of your subjects to quickly move out of the frame.
5. Wait for another half of the period (15 secs) and see the picture after your camera has done the magic.

What has happened during these 30 secs is pretty simple. You have exposed your subject on the sensor for half of the time and his background for another half of the time, because of which the camera will show you a mixture of both the pictures. It is important to chose a background where things aren't moving, and also not to hand hold the camera, and also to make sure your subjects stand absolutely still for the whole while.

If the exposure for the first picture doesn't work for you, try different settings. The picture above is 30" f/9 and ISO 100. Although 15 secs of shutter speed also works fine. Also try regulating the light in your room like drawing the curtains or using dim light ( eg. swtiching off your light and switching on the neighbouring room's light).

Go ahead, blow ghosts out of living people and have fun.