J. Shaul's Photography 264 Blog

Other People's Horses Featuring F. J. Bergmann Horses are more like us than they initially appear.  I distrust them enormously.  If left alone they become bone-idle, indifferent, and lame.  They forget how to horse. Just as in isolation, we forget how to human. We do for the horse what they cannot for themselves.   The brushing, the ride, the kata   of leaping and stillness through words spoken and unspoken.  Sometimes they need to be reminded of the words.  Sometimes they pretend to have forgotten. Sometimes they have. We remind them.  We are their burden to carry. As they are ours.  When they shed weight or catch colic or lame, we rectify it through the ancient ways. And new ones.  There is gelatinous linseed oil; there is hammer, and forge, and endless oiled leather.  There are a  lot  of faeces. And we venture forth to converse in the way horses know best. The warmup is slow; circuits in the paddock We must canter...

 Making, Not Taking Photography is not holding a mirror to reality. A camera captures a selected perspective from a point in time, but the truth is a continuum not an instant.  Clever lighting can drastically affect appearance. A wide or long lens distorts space and distance, while the right instant may depict a totally misleading narrative. Fit a wide enough lens, and the smallest among us will tower over mountains; hit the shutter at the right instant, and lies become truth.  I elected to convey my cynicism using an actual mirror - a warped old sheet of silvered glass.. Using mirrors to distort space is popular to the point of being cliche, but rarely are they pointed back at the photographer.  I initially placed the mirror on an easel and  planned remove it in post by compositing a second exposure with neither. Unfortunately, this first attempt was a substantial failure - aiming the mirror was nearly impossible, and the smallest movement from wind moved ...

   Hard light Hard light is fairly simple - keep it small, and keep it distant. The sun in an empty sky is excellent, but it's perpetually gray and miserable here, so I put a flash on a light stand instead. Some ambient light is visible, but it is very flat, so the shadow is clearly defined. In order to prevent reflections, imagine you're photographing a mirror; if you can see a reflection of your light source, you're going to get glare. As a result, I have the flash at a very steep angle to the subject - about 30 degrees, or roughly 8 o'clock.    Rim lighting Rim lighting is simple: put the hard light behind the subject. The sun works well, though it does tend to overpower the scene. This one required substantial adjustment in post, courtesy of shooting RAW. You don't need a fancy camera,- this was a point-and-shoot - but it helps to keep the ISO low. Finished product:  Without adjustments: Broad Light Broad light is easy here - the sky is a uniform gray most d...

Portrait by the lake This photo gets zero points for creativity: pretty model, flat black dress, flat light, gray sky, windy day, shallow depth of field. It did, however, turn out pretty well.  The original looked like this: This is not  an accident.  The underexposure of the foreground was mandated by the brightness of the clouds - if the model were exposed correctly, the background would be totally blown out beyond any ability to recover. Moving some sliders got me this: Much better.  I was trying for a fairly centered composition, but my model kept moving in the wind and I felt I had a bit too much dead space so I cropped it a bit. Then I adjusted the curves so the shadows weren't so dark and the highlights had some definition.  I have a bad habit of using too much contrast, so doing a fairly flat photo was good practice for me.

I have minimal experience with motion pictures. One good exposure is difficult; 24 of them severely so; 24 per second, for minutes or hours is beyond me. But I am acquainted with some of the basic: requirements: The traditional CinemaScope aspect ratio is an extremely wide 22:9 aspect ratio. Use of relatively low contrast to keep detail in highlights and shadows is combined with color grading to provide visual interest. Reducing the contrast so ambient light isn't a problem can make the image quite flat; adding color in post is now standard. If light is to be added to the scene, hard light - usually in the form of a fresnel - is more common, especially outdoors. Providing soft light to a large area requires far too much bulk and far too much power, especially with traditional halogen lamps. I live near a minor switching yard that backs a frontage road, so I figured I'd use the trains as a convenient backdrop; they provide visual interest and create a narrative. Unfortunately, m...