☣ cUKi's photostream

Two Ebay macro focusing rails (about £8 each, delivered) and one half of a flash bracket (also about £8), mounted together make a gimbal bracket sturdy enough to hold a rather heavy camera and allow maintaining the centre of rotation exactly on the lens's nodal point. Stitching photos free of parallax errors is a breeze - especially great when the subject gets relatively close to the camera.

BTW, those macro rails (there are longer ones available) are also great for focus stacking and stereo photography.

I'm looking into ways of enhancing "presence" (which I understand as 3-dimensional contrasts of high and low frequency details, both as graphic elements and visual cues for depth). There are many kinds of contrast to consider, but for B/W I generally worry about tone and sharpness. HDR is of course a popular quick and easy way to add structure, Silver Efex has its handy control points, but the manual dodge and burn (here, done on a single layer with the History Brush in different blending modes) still look much more promising since they allow user's control over each particular edge's contrast, as well as over the low frequency contrasts. No one says one can't combine all methods though.

Shot with a Lensbaby Original, f/5.6.

BTW: Low frequency contrasts - ie, the overall contrasts in the image, the ones you see from a distance after you've blurred the image. I've just discovered that there's no need to repeatedly create a merged layer, apply blur on it, then go a few paces away from your monitor while you work. A pair of strong reading glasses from the 1-pound store works great for quickly blurring the image - I tried, and noticed that the general contrast between the clock and wall's highlights is still a bit too subtle, never mind :( I bought my glasses (+3.5) for manual focusing.

At the working aperture/ISO, this radio's display needed 4 seconds of exposure in order to register in its colour when internally lit. Lighting entirely with flash and dragging the shutter made it look pretty much like in manufacturer's own illustrations. But in normal light - as the buyer will soon notice - that display light is much, much dimmer. In broad daylight you could barely tell if the screen is lit or not. What do you think, is such a picture false advertising?

(Since I'm in doubt, I added a warning to the description. But I've never seen such warnings before, so am I nuts?)

First test outdoors with my new Arax tilt adapter and a heavy, first generation Flektogon 50/4 lens I got off Ebay (neither of them peanuts-cheap, but still way cheaper than any tilt-shift lens!). Even wide open, the tilted lens allowed me to get in focus both the rippled water in the foreground and the distant clouds.

Shot handheld at 1/60s, f/4, ISO 400. The shutter speed barely allowed me to shoot handheld (1.6x crop factor) and freeze the motion of the water, but any ISO setting higher than 400 doesn't look great on my camera. I was standing about 3m above the water level, so I tilted the lens down slightly less than 1° and focused (using LiveView) on the clouds above the horizon. The clouds high in the frame were out of the plane of focus - but that's hardly noticeable since they were rather fluffy anyway. What was important for me was the sky above the horizon and its reflection in the Humber - considering the slight motion blur, I think I got both sharp enough, since on the full res file I can still see the power cables hanging more than a couple of miles away. I'm sure I could've done better (down to one-pixel sharp!) if I used the tripod and focused more carefully, but I was in a hurry and this was just a casual test.

Although tempting when shooting handheld, it's worth remembering it's not always a good idea to focus and recompose with a tilted lens!

Oh, and sure, the sunset was magnificent, as usual :)

Photographers love to mention the Inverse Square Law when they're trying to scare an audience. It's admittedly very important, but in essence it's waaay too abstract to actually help the busy photographer take his pictures. Light falls off not with the distance, but the square of it - fair enough, but why think of the decay as quadratic when fall-off is such a visually obvious fact? (Continued...)