Camera Challenge 9 - Using artificial light indoors

At The Littlest Thistle Katy sets a challenge each month to help us get to know our cameras better. Over the past nine months I have learnt a lot, but this month's challenge was really challenging! This is something I have seldom done up to now!

First a word about the artificial lighting in my apartment - it's atmospheric! In other words it's orange tinted to make the place look warm, and is pretty useless for handwork. The ceilings are quite high and the ceiling lamp in my sewing room is the equivalent of 40 watt - not bright enough even to find a dropped pin!

This very cheap Ikea lamp below is perfect and is usually hooked over my sewing machine, illuminating the fabric as I feed it through. For this exercise it is raised about 12cm courtesy of a box of fabric in order to be directed onto the subject!

This next lamp is the best in the house, if you want to see what you're doing, that is.

It belonged to my mother-in-law who went blind towards the end of her life and had this lamp with 2 small tube lights on each side of the magnifying glass (4 in all) to enable her to embroider and do crossword puzzles for a little longer. I rarely use the magnifying glass, but the lamp is perfect for the cutting table, swivels round for the ironing board and was the other half of my indoor photography lighting. I set the two lamps up opposite one another.

Unfortunately this is the best I got with these two combined and the ceiling lamp!

With this I am not satisfied!

Camera setting:
Manual
ISO 1600 (the highest value I have)
Av 4.5
Tv 1/400 (clearly much too short, but the pointer was in the middle of the scale)

A few days later I went for a second attempt. The lighting set-up was as before but this time I used flash. You probably wonder why I hadn't done that before, but thereby hangs a tale! (coming later) As I couldn't find how to use flash with manual camera setting I switched to the menu setting "macro".

Better, but I still don't like the dark shadows.

Camera setting:
Macro
ISO 400

The objects are lying on a white A4 sheet of paper, but I find the shadows annoying and as for that white sheet of paper ...!

Part of the problem for me is that I always jump when the flash unit jumps up on top of the camera! And I mean that literally. I know it's coming, but the loud noise always takes me by surprise and wobbly photos are the result. This was the umpteenth attempt and the only sharp one. I really don't like using flash, but it's there so I should learn how to use it.

I'm not going to buy proper photography lights because I have nowhere to store them, so I will have to investigate this combination further. Maybe a second Ikea lamp would help (€9.-) Up to now I've only taken photos indoors where there was enough daylight. I've avoided artificial lighting, and it shows!

I'm linking up with The Littlest Thistle 

so click on the button and go and see more indoor photos.

Happy snapping

Marly.

Camera Challenge 8: Using natural light indoors

Each month Katy at The Littlest Thistle sets a camera challenge, with a follow-up post showing what we should/ might have discovered, a link up and some very helpful comments. The challenge this month has been to photograph a small group of objects in different positions indoors, firstly in different locations with good natural light - near windows.


I warn you this is a post with an awful lot of photos of the same thing. Not exactly super interesting, but bear with me.

1 Sunrise

My first set was taken within twenty minutes of sunrise:

Don't you like the IKEA trolley: now available in anthracite and cream?

All photos were taken with ISO 800 and aperture value 4.5 on an overcast morning.

The two photos on the east side of the apartment were taken further from the window, but when I tried to repeat that on the south side I discovered that, although I can hold my breath for one and a half seconds, I can't keep still! Of course I could then have changed the ISO to 1600, but that would have upset the experiment.

I found it interesting that the shutter speed became faster over the ten minutes. Clearly in response to increasing light as the sun rose. (Not that it was visible from the ground!)

What really surprised me, however is the time difference between the 2nd and 3rd photos (on the east side). When I'm at the sewing machine the trolley is immediately behind my stool, so between taking the photos I simply picked up the tray, turned through 180°, and put it on the trolley; no walking involved. The tray was, however about 15 cm (6") lower in the second photo. Personally I prefer the result with light from that angle. All in all I prefer the lighting in the fourth photo:

Just after sunrise: south side of the apartment has the best light,

the east side has the least bluish colouring, but all are blue.  

 2 Midday

All the photos were taken with the same ISO setting (800) at about our natural midday - 13:40. The weather was heavy cloud and rain.

good colour; less glare than in the early morning

Midday: good colour but probably different effects on a sunny day

but don't expect a repeat!

Late afternoon

ISO was still set at 800, and Av at 4.5. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still overcast.

good colour, but had the sun been shining there would have been interference from glare (hence the net curtains)

I think all the late afternoon photos have good colour. It was too early (around 18:00h) for the "golden glow" we were looking at last month, but there was little prospect of actually seeing the sunset that day.

Late afternoon: good colour, 

differences would probably be more marked in sunny weather

And now for the big

Surprise!

At least, this I had not expected:

as far from the windows as I could get

At midday; ISO 800, shutter speed 1/13th second: perfect colour.

I should add that living on the ninth floor with a lot of windows and no other tall buildings close to cast shadows, and certainly no trees this high, I have a lot of light to work with. 

And now for something completely different!

Sometimes  we can witness strange weather phenomena too. Such as this photo just after sunset during a thunder storm on 26 August, just too late for last month's challenge.

The setting sun illuminating the underside of thunder clouds. The second of three photos.

The sun had just set over to the right, but incredibly had been visible for a couple of minutes, following two hours of torrential rain and thunder and lightning. Then the last of the sunshine lit up the underside of the thick cloud cover and bathed the whole landscape in gold. I've never seen this before and found it impressive. People living closer to the ground hadn't seen the sunset, were worried and called the police!

photo 1: through the glass, when I was playing safe

photo 3: the effect is already less.

I took all three photos within one minute. The second two with the window being held open by my husband so that this crazy woman could tempt fate and stick her head out of the window at about 50m during a thunder storm!

Thanks for reading so far; I hope all the photos of the tray with coffee stuff weren't too boring for you.

I'm linking up to

so click on the image above and hop over there to see other photo studies using natural light indoors.

Happy snapping

Marly.

Camera Challenge 7: Using natural light outdoors

The challenge this month was to photograph an object just after dawn, at the natural midday, and just before dusk, on both sunny and cloudy days. I took hundreds of photos, so I warn you this will take a while!

This is my first attempt:

Unfortunately I left the light balance setting on "Cloudy" instead of "automatic", but it is consistently cloudy! In fact it wasn't really cloudy at all!

Then I waited for a really cloudy day, and waited, and waited, and had a couple of thunder storms, but no opportunity to go outside and take photos of chess pieces while the sky was overcast.

When, earlier this week,  I read Katy's review post I got a shock: she had sky in all her photos. I'd got it completely wrong! I had four days to do it again.

Which of course I did, but may have focussed too much on the sky.

Looking east:

Not all the photos in this series were taken on the same day, so I've added a note on the date, and the weather conditions. They were all taken at ISO 400 setting, and manual exposure.

Saturday 22/08 brilliantly sunny day!

Friday 21/08 cloudy in the afternoon

Thursday 20/08 sunny day

If you live in a flat land there is inevitably an awful lot of sky! (It's no wonder Rembrandt was an expert at painting light!) If you live on the ninth floor you have more than most. I love the colour of the sky in the 21:23h  photo, so here it is again!

and, in spite of the light pollution on the right, white surfaces are also showing blue.

Of course I can look in more than one direction:

Looking south-west.

Yellow glow shortly after dawn (well, an hour after; I should have got up earlier!)

bleached at noon

just after sunset: blue glow?

just after sunset: blue glow?

Again these weren't all taken on the same day.

What have I learnt?
Just after sunrise objects are tinted yellow/orange and just after sunset they're tinted blue.
Just before sunset objects have an orange glow (White Queen)
The midday sun bleaches objects.

What I didn't learn from doing is what happens just before sunrise because I reacted too late (the sun woke me up!). But these I learnt from early-bird Katy in her review.

Thanks Katy: it was a puzzle but I think I've got it now!

I'm linking up to 

 

so hop over there and see what others have achieved

and marvel at Katy's wonderful photos.

Happy snapping!

Marly.

Camera Challenge part 6: Finding your inspiration

 
 For the Camera Challenge at the Littlest Thistle, Katy set the assignment this month to find photos on-line that we consider inspiring and interesting compositions, that we would like to aim for.

I found some wonderful photos in the photography section of Pinterest, and have acknowledged the owner where possible, but many of the photos were without the photographer's name. I apologise to anyone whose work I have included without giving recognition.

I was looking to learn lessons on composition and made some discoveries about the use of triangles in composing a photo (or a drawing or painting, for that matter). More about that towards the end of this very long post.

Here are some portraits:

Here the face is turned away slightly yet the eyes are looking straight into the camera, so that the left eye is at the centre of the photo. I like the way most of the head-dress is out of picture giving prominence to the facial expression.

Not full-face again; this time almost in profile, and again we have to imagine most of the head-dress. The face occupies the centre top sixth of the whole photo. I like this style of portrait, because of what's not seen - this creates mystery and raises questions: why is she dressed this way? where's she going?

It seems that the old

and perhaps also the very young can be photographed full face. This makes the subject open, hiding nothing, no mystery. The child below is interestingly looking to one side. These three portraits may or may not be posed but each gives the impression of being the natural state.

Perspective is another topic that features predominantly in my selection.

With the vanishing point in the centre:

03 New York black/white Photography by Frédéric Bourret

by Margaret Bourke-White Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co, 1928.

by Robert Doisneau

Cars Paris 1950s Robert Frank

This one is humour! If you imagine a line linking the back wheels of the pram and the first car, and do the same with the front wheels you get a triangle with its apex in the foreground, as opposed to the usual perspective with the apex in the distance. Extend the line on the left and you find more wheels - another car and a bicycle. This can't have been posed; I wonder how many photos Robert Frank took that day to get this one shot, and that in the pre-digital era too!

and to one side:

Paris 1950s Robert Frank

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan by Not Quite a photogrphr

I love the play of light here - the over-exposed / under-exposed.

Werribee Mansion Melbourne, Australia by Scott Carr

Here I wonder where the vanishing point really is. I think if I wanted to photograph such a piece of architectural detail I'd be walking round it for ages, and never even see this view. This is photographic genius in my book!

The Burma Railroad

I know how to do this now (thanks Katy!) - low aperture value, single focus point about one metre into the photo - but I'd never have thought of it! It adds so much to the subject: no beginning and no end, neither to the railway nor to the suffering of the men who built it.

Miscellaneous I have included because:

I mostly photograph plants and here the lighting is perfect

Podoserpula Pusio (photographer or subject? Update: It's the subject: see Dasha's comment below.)

flowers are my favourite subject, and I must remember I don't have to show the whole arrangement; the blooms are in a triangle across the top half of the photo and I live in Holland!

and because some photos are just plain clever:

Linda Morand by Helmut Newton _ Vogue Paris, September 1973.

This looks natural, but it's posed: it's posed nonchalance; it's Vogue: it's fashion: it's all about the coat! The lines of the building and the fence posts and lamp-post (they have waists too!) draw the attention to the model's face, while the lamp-post and fence posts together extend the lines of the coat out to the right of the picture - another triangle. I imagine Helmut Newton on a Vespa or in a Deux-cheveaux whizzing  round Paris looking for the right location.

I don't want to take fashion photos but I think this is an interesting example of the use of the triangle in composition. Here the apex is off-stage right, in the "Cars" photo the apex is centre front, in the tulips it's centre right. In the perspective photos the apex of the triangle is the vanishing point, in the distance.

As for collecting other people's photographs I shall be doing that more often in future.

Meanwhile I'm linking up to 

so head over there and see more inspiring photographs.

Happy snapping

Marly.