Mass Photography

This is not a Physics post because if it were, it wouldn’t be here, it would be on WordPress. This is actually a photography post since I’ve not written any in quite a while. But first let me rant about the fact that I don’t like writing ‘E=mc²’; I prefer ‘E=γmc²’, where γ=1/√1-β² and β=v/c. Why so? You might ask… Read this expository article here.

Now, let me get back to photography. This post contains a few tricks that I’d like to learn myself! That statement doesn’t sound OK so let me rephrase it: What I want to learn is how to capture snapshots of things behind glass-panes or plastic-panes or any transparent material for that matter when there are a lot of bulbs / tube-lights being reflected in them (including me) such that these reflections are highly minimized. See for example the photo above! And here are some more (do learn about alt texts… that’ll make my posts more enjoyable!):

From what I can tell, choosing proper angle to take the photos and carefully placed flashes can do the trick. But I neither have extra flashes nor a 3D orientation sensor with ray-tracing capabilities so I’ve got to do with just one tiny flash on my E-PL1. Standing right next to the transparent material (Why the hell would I do that? You may ask after seeing that huge bright overexposed spot at the bottom center of the photo above… How the hell am I supposed to know about that beforehand? That’s how it happened… I even adjusted the flash strength to 1/4 or lower) and positioning the camera on the ledge to stabilize it, I took the 3 shots above and as you can see, the flash screwed up the white balance in the last one (could be corrected if I’d paid a bit more attention to whatever I needed to pay more attention). Though, it did decrease the brightness of the tube-lights a bit and the shadows / reflections are also less sharp, which is a nice thing. But still the ‘navel’ bit is irritating, isn’t it? So that’s a nice trick: to combat light with light! Who could’ve thought? Well, whatever… this post is getting too full of clichés! Let’s move on… before someone gets a split.

Some more Flash Photography:

What else can I share? Oh ya… the Moon-Shots: Check this tutorial and forget what it told you to do as that advice didn’t work for me. The shutter speed of 1/200 for ISO 200 at f/16 aperture gave an underexposed spot over a black background. What worked for me was:

Finally a photo not shot by me but it features my hand so I guess I can put it up here. It was shot by him (let’s call him SjD) with his iPhone 4S:

Care for some colourful photos of

Autumn