526, 525, 524......

It's clear from the title of this post that I am counting down to something. If I were counting days, 526 would be a lot - more than a year. I am in fact counting down the number of views required for me to reach 100,000 views of my photos on my Flickr photostream.

Flickr is a photo and video sharing site and online community owned by Yahoo. It was started in 2004 by Ludicorp and bought by Yahoo in 2005. In 2011 the site had 51 Million users, and as I write this, Flickr is approaching it's 7 billionth upload. I joined Flickr in May 2008 and currently have 1,178 items on my Flickr photostream.

The site has an interestingness algorithm which ranks one's photos based on a variety of factors - number of views, comments and fav's as well as a range of hidden attributes. Each day the top 500 interesting photos or videos make the Explore pages.

So, you may ask, how long will it take me to accrue the 526 views? On an average day I receive about 70 views. The views often come from internal flickr users or external searchers.

Ironically my most viewed photo is one I took using my cellphone! I took the photo while on a business trip in Uganda. This picture is of my lunch - a whole deep fried Tilapia! This image is viewed on average 10 times a week. Digging a bit deeper into the search term history it seems that most people are looking for a recipe. To help these people out a posted a recipe onto one of my older (now pretty much defunct) blogs. The recipe blog post is also quite popular - over 600 views in 2 years.



Titles can all be deceiving to search engines. The image below must shock some interior design people searching for pictures of purple wallpaper! This Image is viewed on average 8 times per week. The spider is a Flower Crab Spider (Thomisus citrinellus) on a purple daisy.



My most interesting photo according to the Flickr Interestingness Algorithm is also one of my favourite photos I have ever taken. I photographed the bee below in flight using a tripod mounted Canon 50D, with a Canon 100mm macro lens. Focus was achieved manually and photos were shot using a remote switch. I was focussing with my right hand and shooting with my left. The bees were feeding on an aloe. I shot about 700 exposures and ended up with 15 usable shots (i.e. those with good focus, exposure and composition). This photo made it to 12th position on Flickr Explore. Overall the photoshoot has been my most profitable - the photo below is available as a postcard from spressit.com and another from the series won a competition in the South African "Good Taste" Magazine.



Speaking of Flickr Explore. I have 1 photo that has made it to the front page of Explore on the Flickr site. I shot the picture of a Speke's Weaver male is full breeding colours trying to woo a mate at the Nakuru National Park. I was visiting the park with my parents and we had just enjoyed lunch at the Sarova Lion Hill Hotel. For this photo I was using a Canon 50D with a Canon EF 100-400mm lens. The lighting for the shot was near perfect, and a wide aperture created a great soft background.




I could keep going and show you more of my favourite photos and tell you their back stories, although this post is probably already on the long side. If however you would like to see more of my work and also help me to get to 100,000 views why don't you check out some of my photos. Follow the links below to see a variety of my photo collections:

Photos that have made Flickr Explore

White & Yellow Daisy

Masai Mara Safari

Kenya Birds

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!

Fork

Fork, a photo by jdkvirus on Flickr.

I captured the image above at the cutlery second-hand "store" down the road from our house in Karen, Nairobi. The store consists of several tables under a tree arrayed with cutlery, pots, pans and other assorted kitchen items.

This kind of shop finds it's roots in another Kenyan (perhaps East African) tradition called Mitumba. This is a Swahili term which literally means "bundles" and refers to bundles or bales of 2nd hand clothes donated in the west and then sold in bales to local merchants who then sell them on.

It's common place here in Kenya for people to go to the Mitumba for their clothes shopping. In Nairobi the largest and most famous Mitumba is Toi Market, located on the outskirts of Kibera slum. It is known as THE place to shop for cheap 2nd hand clothes. Almost all the big western brands are available here at very low prices (a fraction of the cost of the high street boutiques). The only real draw-back is that you won't necessarily find what you want in your size!

The knives and forks on sale down the road from our house have similar origins, the left overs from European and American tables. Finding matching sets is tricky, but if you're looking to outfit your kitchen cheaply, this is a good place to pick-up quality flatware.

Forks have been in use as eating utensils from the 2nd century AD, but only came into common use in Western Europe in the 10th century! I wonder what those early Westerners would have thought of these piles of 2nd hand forks? For an interesting history on forks be sure to read the Wikipedia entry.

The image above is one of the few black and white images I have produced amongst the tens of thousands of photos I have taken over the last 10 years that I have been taking my photography seriously. As an aside, I have always pondered the name "black & white" as its more like "shades of grey", but I suppose there is a sexiness to "black and white"!

One of reasons I take so few black and white images is that I am addicted to color! I usually find my inspiration in nature where color abounds, even at the most minute scale. The flower below is an example of the range of color in nature.

Natural architecture , a photo by jdkvirus on Flickr.

The first computer screens were true monochrome - white, green or amber on black. I remember my family's first PC was an XT with an amber screen. It was 1986 and I was one of the coolest kids on the block! Times have changed.

These early monochrome screens could display shades of grey, or degrees of brightness that emulated grey, but nowhere near as many tones required to display a meaningful black & white image. These days standard computer screens can display 16.7 million colors (or shades of them anyway). I wonder how they measure this? Perhaps a subject for a future blog? Even Apple's Ipad can display over 65,000 colors/shades!

So why so few black & white? Well perhaps it's in celebration of the ability of technology to reproduce the amazing spectrum of God's creation?! Nevertheless, enjoy the rarity of this black & white image - at least on this blog!

Ghost in the machine

Ghost in the machine, a photo by jdkvirus on Flickr.

Of late several of my Flickr photos have made it to Flickr's Explore Page. Flickr Explore is a measure of Interestingness - a word coined and copyrighted by Flickr. It's basically a measure of how interesting your photo is in comparison to all the other photos uploaded on Flickr. Each day Explore selects the top 500 interesting Flickr photos for Explore - creating the Top 500 photos for the day.

It's estimated that about 2 million photos are uploaded daily, so making the TOP 500 is quite an achievement. On the useless information front, Flickr currently has over 5.6 billion images in it's database!

To date 33 of my photos have made Explore, and one of the images has made it to the Flickr Explore Front Page. To determine  whether any of your Flickr photos have been in Explore, use the Scout tool at BigHugeLabs.com.

I have been looking critically at some of my photos that have made Explore in an attempt to inform future photographs. There are blogs out there that suggest ways to get your photos into Explore, although in reality you have to start with a good image.

The bulk of my Explore'd shots are macros and most include flowers.

Looking at the non-macro shots, like birds or insects, one of the common denominators seems to be an appealing background.

With this in mind I have specifically shot my latest photo (the one at the top of the page) with what I hope is a visually appealing background! Now the work begins of getting this image noticed with the hope and aim of it being selected for Explore!

Nakuru Photo Blog

I have visited Lake Nakuru National Park three times since we moved to Kenya in 2008. As a whole it is one of my least favorite parks, perhaps because it is so small. I much prefer the wide open spaces of the Masaai Mara or Tsavo, however for a day visit it allows one to see a large number of animals and birds. I visited the park again on Tuesday 19th April with my family.

The park's focus is Lake Nakuru, one of the Rift valley soda lakes. There are 2 great vantage points to see the lake - one is Baboon Cliff look-out which is to the north of the lake (from the main gate travel to the right). The more spectacular of the two is Lion Hill Lookout. This is a bit "off the beaten track" but well worth the drive. The access road is just before the Lanet gate.

Lake Nakuru National Park's claim to fame has always been the hundreds of thousands (even millions on some occasions) of Flamingos that feed on algae on the shores. Unfortunately this is no longer the case, with the bulk of the Flamingos having moved to Lake Bogoria and Lake Simbi Nyaima. We did see small groups of Lesser Flamingo and even fewer Greater Flamingo as well as large numbers of Pelicans. We saw about 25 species of bird in total as well as Lion, White Rhino, Buffalo and assorted antelope.

Hope you enjoy the photos below (you can click on them to see larger versions on flickr):

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.

Random Photography

Well, this blog was and perhaps is on the brink of obscurity! When I started it at the end of last year I had high hopes that I would be able to sustain regular postings and in so doing build a readership. I realize today as I write this that its been about 2 and half months since I've posted anything here!

I can cite many reasons for the lack of posts of late - my busy schedule, lack of interesting subjects, blogger's block, etc, however these are probably more likely excuses.

I guess what's more important right now, is whether this trend will continue. I hope not, but actions speak louder than words. For the next few posts I am going to go back to one of the original reasons I started this blog - to talk about photography.

This week I have been taking nature photos while at work! Under normal circumstances a statement like that shouldn't justify and exclamation mark. After all many people I know here in Kenya work in the outdoors and could quite easily take some snaps of their surroundings. I made use of punctuation as I was (for the most part) at my desk in mid-town Nairobi while these photos were being taken. I achieved this feat using trail camera.

Trail camera mounted in the tree above the bird feeder.

Trail cameras, also known as camera traps are digital cameras in weather proof cases that are triggered by motion or infrared signals. These cameras can be mounted in remote areas and are triggered by passing animals (or people). The model I have is able to shoot still photos (up to a 9-shot burst), and video in daylight and also at night using infrared lighting.

One of the more successful shots.

Like any new piece of kit, it requires some experimentation and practice to get the most out it. I have only had this unit for a few days (on loan from a friend), and so the results to date have been less than spectacular. One of the challenges is that the unit has no view finder requiring a literal "point and shoot" approach, made worse by only being able to see the results afterward when the results are downloaded. By example, yesterday due to an alignment that was probably 1 degree out I managed to shoot 830 photos of the lawn below the bird feeder! Another problem I'm experiencing is that very small animals don't seem to trigger the camera - quite a problem if the subjects are birds.

In the short term my remote photography will be limited to our garden and surrounds. I plan to mount the camera in one of the big trees near the house to try to catch the nocturnal Tree Hyrax population in action! In the longer term, I hope to use this the next time we are camping in the bush to see what nocturnal animals visit our camp at night. Watch this space and my Flickr stream for more results.

Making the most of what you have.

We just returned from a 4 day safari in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya. Usually when we go on safari we choose the "self-drive" option. On this trip we decided to treat ourselves to a fly-in package - we flew from Wilson airport in Naiorbi to a small airstrip in Buffalo Springs National Reserve (adjacent to Samburu) and were collected by our lodge (Elephant Bedroom Camp). We were then treated to 2 game drives a day in an open sided (and open roofed) safari vehicle, and all meals (3 course lunch and 4 course dinner).

I will be writing a full "travel blog" about the safari itself over the next few days. For this posting I'd like to reflect on some curious behaviors and habits I observed amongst the wildlife over the last few days.

One of the biggest advantages of one of these "all-inclusive" safari packages is that you are provided with a vehicle AND a driver. In the self-drive version I am usually the driver which can really cramp my photography style, so having a large vehicle with open sides and top was a great aid to getting some good shots. In Samburu (as with most parks in Kenya) the proportion of people on "self-drive" safari's is very low, with most vehicles we encountered driven by professional safari guides. Many of these tourists were on photographic safari's - game viewing with the primary purpose of photographing the animals.

Elephant Bedroom Camp Landrover

On the morning of our third day we encountered a Southern Lesser Kudu doe with her calf. We also encountered 2 photo safari vehicles. The two safari vehicles each had 3 photographers, each person sporting a long lens of between 400 and 800mm of zoom. As we sat watching the buck (and as I tried to line up the best shot) amongst the sounds of nature I heard the click-click-click of shutters firing at 4 to 6 frames per second. I realized in that moment that we were Wildlife Paparazzi candidly capturing every movement the buck made.

Lens envy is defined (by me :-) as "a feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's photographic lenses", and I for a few brief moments felt it! Many of the people were using the same lens that I have - Canon 100 - 400mm, but there were a few with even longer lenses - I saw 2 people with Canon 800mm lenses (they cost about USD 11,000). I could just imagine the images I could snap with a nice long lens like that in my camera bag (although a lens that long usually has its own bag :-)

Some of the lenses in question

Later in the day, when we encountered a small pride of lions and still later when I had a very close (photographic) encounter with a leopard I realized that the secret to good wildlife photography is not dreaming about the shots you could take with a better lens, but actually taking the best photo that you can when the opportunity presents itself. You might have the longest zoom and the best camera set-up, but you could be parked with a tree or bush in front of you!  

For all of the big cats, we had the best photographic spots - no obscuring trees or bushes and with the cats either looking at us or facing us! We were in the right place at the right time - something that money can't buy you.  

Happy Lionesses

Cheetah cub

Lounging Leopard

A new blog?

Hi All

Growing up I never managed to keep a diary. I tried once or twice, but it always failed. The failure wasn't a spectacular nor catastrophic one, the diary just kind of faded away. Perhaps self-discipline was a cause, but in all honesty I never really saw the value in writing to myself - isn't that a bit like talking to yourself after all?

Blogging I suppose shares some elements of diary writing (especially if like this new blog you have no followers ;-). My previous blogs have gone the same route of my diaries - faded to black somewhere in a desk drawer. If I couldn't sustain a diary, will I manage to sustain a blog? Time will tell no doubt, however I think I have the necessary elements to make it work:

1. Something to say (I'm older and wiser).
2. A love (perhaps just a like) of writing.
3. Access to blogging technology.

Hopefully over time I'll add Number 4 - An audience! (otherwise I will be talking to myself again).

The next question you're probably asking is, what is this Blog about?

As an avid photographer (to see my work go to my Flickr page), I love to change the way I look at my world by fiddling with the focus. As I have got older and matured as a person I have come to realize that my world view, my area of focus differs from everyone else around me. I'm not suggesting that my view is special or peculiar in any way, just that it's my unique view point.

The word Bit has many definitions. I mean "a small piece or quantity of anything". Another meaning of Bit which is also appropriate for this blog is a binary digit, the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications.

This blog - The Bit in Focus will be my narrative of my journey through this life. It will definitely contain examples of my photographs and the journeys I take to capture them (some physical, some metaphysical), there will be cooking (and eating). There will be fun and laughter, but also the occasional sad and somber moment. In short, I intend it to be a snap shot of my life, but since I am the photographer I get to choose what you see!

Join me on the journey?!