Chemical Brothers

So I'm shooting at this chemical trench at Bristol Dry Lake in the central Mojave Desert one day when these two dudes see me and mosey over to look at what I am photographing. This is odd in itself. The few people on this minor, desolate desert back road are normally passing through on their way to Joshua Tree or Vegas. But these guys had pulled over to wander around on the empty salt flat.

They peer at me and my tripod and the trench and ask me, "what is this?" and I tell them I guess it's calcium chloride from the dry lake crystallizing out of solution. Or it could be regular table salt. Or it could be they are harvesting chlorine for bleach and pool cleaner. At any rate, it's chemicals they are crystallizing out of solution in the dry desert air.

There is only one way to find out for sure, they decide, and that is to get into the trench and taste the liquid. They start clambering down into the trench. I tell them "dudes, you don't know what that is, and it'll be hard to get back out again". But they are determined to taste the chemicals, to actually put this wild fluorescent green chemical in their mouths.

"Right on", I say, and take their picture. "Put us on Facebook," they call out as they wet their feet and hair in the trench.

The Sky is Not the Limit

The actual edge of the sky, the end of the Earth's atmosphere, is pretty close... only about 62 miles away, depending on how you define the edge. It sort of slowly peters out as you leave the planet, but it's essentially a thin blanket of air we live in. When we say "the sky's the limit", we want to say there are no limits, and that puts us at least well past the sky and out into space.

The most distant thing you can see with the naked eye is called M33. It's a large galaxy in the constellation Triangulum. On a clear moonless night in a very dark place, it resembles a tiny dim smudge of fog in the sky. I've seen it many times, though I don't have any of my own images to show... yet.

So let's push our boundaries out a bit. At only 62 miles, the sky is not the limit. If you want to go naked-eyed and forgo telescopes or cameras, then let's say M33 is the limit. It's around three million light years, (or about 1 followed by 1,200 zeroes miles), away. And as you already know, that means when you see M33, you are actually looking at that galaxy as it was three million years ago. Here on Earth three million years ago, humans did not yet exist. There was only a little ancestor hominid called Australopithecus afarensis  who couldn't even make his own tools and loped around not fully erect. So that's old, old light you're seeing.

You can take lovely star pictures with your own dSLR camera. Pick a dry, moonless night. Put your camera on a tripod, use your widest angle lens, go into manual mode, open the aperture up all the way and turn up the ISO as high as you can get away with before the images get too grainy (hopefully that's ISO 3,200 or more). Manually focus on infinity (live view mode can help with this). Leave the shutter open as long as you can.... usually around 30 seconds on most cameras. (If you want to go longer, you may need a cable release for your camera, and the stars will begin to show as streaks due to the rotation of the earth.) Under an autumn sky, M33 will probably even be visible in there.

Above all, experiment in everything you do with your camera! The sky is not even close to the limit if you're willing to try new things.

Taken with the 6D and the 17-40 f/4 L at f/4. 30 seconds.

Taken with the 6D and the Peleng 8mm f/3.5 fisheye at f/4, 30 seconds. This is the entire sky all at once, and the entire 360 degree horizon.

How Are Photos Like Maps?

Photographs and maps have a lot in common in interesting ways. I love both of them dearly, have always loved them, and I want to talk about just one characteristic they share.

A map can't show the real world and all its detail in a 1:1 correspondence. It's impossible. If it could, it wouldn't be a map, it would be reality itself. Reality is of course far too complicated, fluid, and grand to be fully represented by a 2 dimensional static diagram. Instead, a map has to pare down the detail it shows about the world until it becomes simple enough to be useful; one of the most salient features of any map is what isn't there, along with the moment in time the map represents.

So the mapmaker must decide what to show and what to omit. He may have several criteria for the choices he makes, things like utility and elegance and history. He must make something that communicates beautifully without adding confusing clutter, because in including more or less than necessary, the map will begin to fall short of being the very best map of its kind.

Making a photograph is the same. The photographer isn't reproducing exact reality because that's impossible for a photograph. Instead, he interprets, decides what should be included and what should be omitted when he composes the picture. Timing the image can be as important as what's included. The photo itself serves a function, a varying combination of utility and beauty, which are both forms of communication, just as a map is a sort of communication.

How much to include, how much to omit, and when to freeze the moment are design choices for the mapmaker, and aesthetic choices for the photographer. Some of us want to include as much as we can while others attempt a spartan minimalism.

I strive to be a photographer who has a rather different approach from the mapmaker who made the map below: I want to omit as much as I can, and in saying less, communicate more.

1909 Map of Los Angeles

Time to Shine

My wife Stephanie and I were eating on the patio of a restaurant last weekend. (Actually, it was a gourmet sausage restaurant, which is a wee story in itself). I saw her raise her iPhone to take a picture of me. Realizing the setting sun was behind me, I suggested she turn on the phone's little LED flash. It really helped add a sparkle to my eyes (called "catchlights") and fill in dark areas to make the photo more appealing. (If only the camera could have fixed my goofy wind-blown hair!) The photo was finished off by hitting "auto enhance" in the camera app, which is how my tan got so golden, I think.

Most people think of flash as something to use when it's dark out. But on-camera flash often looks terrible when it's dark out. Try using it during the day to fill in shadows... it can really help.

A Different Angle

We went to an event last night with my camera, a soiree for the opening of a public concert series downtown. My favorite shots from the evening didn't show the event at all; they were the ones that treated architecture like landscapes.

Macro Photography is Hard... But Fun

For years with my old camera system I made extreme macro photos the old fashioned way... by holding the flash on a cable in my left hand and the camera in my right, peering through the viewfinder and slowly rocking the camera in and out of focus a mere couple of centimeters from the subject, hoping for an in focus shot (you can't use autofocus on really close macros). It's physically demanding--the only photography that makes me sweat-- and requires patience and precision. You can't use a tripod... by the time you get the camera aimed, the critter will be long gone. So it's flash and timing and a lot of patience and sweat. Most shots aren't keepers, so you have to work for it.

Now that I've moved over to Canon, two things have happened. First, my new macro lens, the EF 100mm f.2.8 L IS macro, has a lot longer working distance from the subject than my old Olympus Four Thirds macro lens. And that makes it much easier to get the animal shots.

And second, I treated myself to a Chinese copy of the Canon macro ring flash. This will be a LOT easier than holding the flash in one hand and the camera in the other... things will be a lot steadier! The critters will be photographed before they even know what's happening.

I'm really looking forward to the next few years of macro shooting!

The Duck Rule of Photography

Just like Newton had his laws of motion, photography has its rules as well. There are the Rule of Thirds, the Rule of Space, and others. Among these steadfast rules is the celebrated Duck Rule of Photography: "If you see a duck, you must shoot it."* No one who sees a duck while carrying a camera can avoid obeying this simple but powerful rule.

*Applies to geese, swans, llamas, and carousel horses as well

We saw this mother duck and her brood while walking the dogs.

A Second of Intergalactic Fame

I was delighted to find that my self portrait was licensed by the producers of the television show Cosmos. The original Cosmos with Carl Sagan was an important part of my childhood and I adored it! Now we come full circle, with my portrait appearing (albeit briefly, in a montage) in episode 9 the new Cosmos with Neil Degrasse Tyson. There are so many ways my portrait could have been used commercially, but this... this is the best possible outcome! Huzzah!

New Beginnings

They say that when one door closes, another one opens. Or you could just, you know, open the same door back up again. That's how doors work.

There aren't any doors here, just code and pixels, non-sequiturs and a brand new thing in the world...  this blog, which I hope will entertain and sometimes inform.

Hello world!