Starting again!

Ever heard of the 10,000 hour rule? The theory is that the thing that sets an expert apart from a novice is not necessarily innate talent, but rather 10,000 hours of practice. That’s quite a long time. If you work 8 hours a day, five days a week for a year (no vacation or public holidays), you accrue just over 2000 hours a year. 

In an earlier post titled "Habit forming" I discussed the process of habit forming. In this post I described a study that shows a new habit can take over 250 days to become cemented as a habit. I suppose a habit practiced for for over 10,000 hours would then be considered an expert skill?!

I used to take photos every day of my life. I usually tried to spend at least an hour a day with my eye glued to the view finder, or more often studying the screen on the back of my trusty Canon 50D. If you’d like to see what I was photographing take a look at my flickr photostream. There are recurring themes - flowers, spiders and birds feature a lot, interspersed with wildlife and an occasional landscape. 

By a rough calculation, I think I’m between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way to becoming a photography expert. I think some of my work is good. I have entered and won a few local photography competitions and some of my photos are used by a commercial postcard company (spressit.com).

When I left Kenya, my daily photography stopped. I guess it was a combination of factors - change in environment, having the photographic gear scattered between boxes, a different rhythm and pace to my life back in South Africa. Mostly I think it was a lack of motivation and inspiration. In Kenya I was surrounded by wild Africa -  birds, insects, spiders, cool trees and landscapes. In Johannesburg I was confronted by a different kind of jungle - a concrete one!

Today I am starting again, on the photography that is! The picture below was the result of a 15 min kick-start ad hoc photography session. Just before I left Kenya I upgraded to a Canon 7D. I used this camera with my Lensbaby Composer and shot a total of 24 shots. I have called the abstract image “Tools, Tones and Textures”.

I realize that while Johannesburg is not exactly wild, there are still loads of places and spaces to photograph. I have resolved to start taking more photos again (I’m so close to being an expert after all ;-). I have also resolved, bearing in mind the 10,000 hour rule, not to be so hard on myself in my new job where certain functions and processes seem so hard - I am after all only a novice where these are concerned, and like anything in life - practice WILL make perfect!

It's a lens, baby!

A couple of months ago I bought a new lens for my camera, its called a Lensbaby Composer. When I tell people about my purchase I usually get one of two responses; either "That's cool, is it as nifty as they claim!" or "What's a Lensbaby?" I hope to answer both questions in this blog post.

In most cameras (an exception would be a pinhole camera) a lens is used to focus the incoming light onto an image sensor - either the photographic film (light sensitive chemical emulsion) or CCD chip (digital photocell). Most lenses are rigidly coupled to the front of the camera in such a way that the focal plane is parallel to that of the image sensor.

This means that the "slice" of focus (whose depth/thickness is dependent on the aperture and lens) is parallel to the image sensor. This parallel slice of focus is for most cameras and their users simply the way it is, and is a very powerful creative tool on its own. For example, by using a large aperture (i.e. a low f-stop), a narrow focal slice is created meaning that the areas on either side of the slice are blurred. The image below demonstrates this perfectly.

 

In contrast, a narrow aperture (or high f-stop) produces a broad focal slice. This is useful for landscape photos where you'd like as much of the photo to be in focus as possible. The image below was shot at f/10.0 which produces quite a broad focal slice, but even narrower apertures like f/22.0 or f/32.0 will produce images where almost all the visible image is sharply focused. A pinhole camera (which doesn't have a lens, but just a pin-prick size hole for the light to enter) has a very narrow aperture (my pinhole camera has an f-stop of 177! and practically everything is in focus.

The Lensbaby Composer (as well as the Lensbaby Muse and Control Freak) is a creative lens system that creates a circular "sweet spot" of focus surrounded by a circular blurred zone. Furthermore, the lens can be tilted allowing the "sweet spot" (think of it as a circular focal spot) to be angled versus the image sensor.

In the Composer model, this is achieved using a ball and socket design. Aperture is controlled by using metallic discs with varying size holes in them which are placed over the lens optic. Like traditional lenses, the aperture also controls the depth of the focal spot. So a large aperture gives lots of blur, and a small aperture gives little blur. Before we look at some actual Lensbaby images (I think in this case the pictures will speak a 1000 words), I should also mention that Lanesbaby is a lens system, with interchangeable optics. This means that different lenses can be plugged into the lens body allowing for different visual effects. Below is an image of the Lensbaby Composer from the side showing the unit tilted, and also 4 of the optics I own (from left to right: Single Glass Optic, Plastic Optic, Pinhole/zone plate optic, Double Glass Optic). Other optics are also available. I will cover all the optics in more detail in a future post.

So, onto some sample images! The image of the tree below has the lens centered (no tilt), and uses a f2.8 aperture (maximum blur). As you can see the center of the image is focused, with a radial blur extending outwards - almost like a motion blur. You can see a bigger version of the image by clicking the link above.

In the daisy image below, the daisy in focus is off-center. This is achieved by tilting the lens so that the "sweet-spot" is centered on the daisy. As you can see the whole of the daisy is focused, and not just a slice of it! Had this photo been taken with a normal lens by changing the aperture, the whole of the daisy could have been in focus, but the focal slice would have crossed the entire image. Here we see the rest of the image is blurred.

The orange daisy is another example of the creativity offered by the Lensbaby system.

The Lensbaby system also allows the addition of screw-on macro lenses, allowing for close-up shots. As a photomacrographer myself, this is a great option. I will share my experiences using these accessories in a future post.