The Physics Education Technology at CU Boulder (PhET) web site has a really cool simulation or interactive gizmo that you can play with to see how a lens works. It is tons of fun. Try it.
Starting page is here: Geometric Optics
Click the “Run Now!” button and expect to waste a good bit of your day playing with it and the other stuff on the site. They have a whole bunch of great interactive physics toys. I especially recommend the wave sims.
-Julie
Seeing is believing. Not seeing is … confusing.
Thus the admiration of Mike Johnston(of The Online Photographer) for Chris Jordan’s “Prison Uniforms” artwork which attempts to make visible — and therefore comprehensible — the number of people in prison in the US.
On the other hand, you have The Skeptical Inquirer writing articles to explain away the possibility of ghosts, vampires, and zombies — because the fact that we aren’t even supposed to be able to see them means (some of us) are not sure.
Or Eadward Muybridge’s famous early photographs of the motion of men, women and other animals.
The scale of the universe, in distance, size and contents is simply beyond any form of visualization. I accept it, but I can’t ‘model’ it in my mind. Ditto for the micro scale of the atom. Nothing new in this; one just ignores it.
Just on the local level:
Earth = 12.76 x 10+6 = 12,760,000 meters wide
(12.76 million meters)
Plant Cell = 12.76 x 10-6 = 0.00001276 meters wide
(12.76 millionths of a meter)
On the non-local scale, the distance to remotest quasars are 14,000,000,000 light years; for comparison it takes light 8.3 minutes to get from the sun to earth. You knew that.
On the other hand, we have, just for the fun of it, a wall entirely covered by 7,200 bananas. Seeing is believing. I’m not sure what I’m believing but I am seeing a picture of it. Think of the fruit flies in that room … now that’s something I can’t visualize.
For a review of the big/small scales that make up our reality, here are some cool links:
Good time/distance scale visuals
Just a reminder to myself of how little we have actually photographed with our “3,752 uploaded in the last minute” at Flickr and so forth. I think we may have missed a few photons from those 14,000,000,000 light years. I’ll get right on it…
-Julie
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
That opening sentence is considered one of, if not the, worst opening sentence ever. In digital art, and especially in compositing, it has a correlative in what I call “BOO! art”.
What’s the quickest way to completely grab someones attention? Startle them. Scare the bejesus out of them. Jump out of a dark shadow screaming BOO!! The effect only lasts for a few seconds, but, by golly, it always works. Where else to you find 100% effectiveness?
The obvious problem is that it’s … stupid. You’ve made pictures that are effective for two seconds. What a complete waste of talent and time!
I always put jokes at the top of my list of dumb composites, but, really, BOO! pictures are more dangerously wasteful – because they attract some incredibly talented people. Look anywhere on the internet where digital art/photography is shown and you’ll see their work. Weapons, wounds, mutilations, dangerous or threatening animals, dark, dark, dark, BDSM, monsters, dragons, loads of blood. You know the type.
An example of very good work in BOO! art would be Dominic Rouse. I pick him out of the many, many possible candidates, not because he’s bad but precisely because he is so good. He makes terrific art. But to me, its a waste of his great talent.
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The “dark and stormy night” line has spawned an annual contest to write the worst possible opening sentence in various categories. It’s called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Below are a few choice samples:
In the Purple Prose category:
The winner: “Professor Radzinsky wove his fingers together in a tweed-like fabric, pinched his lips together like a blowfish, and began his lecture on simile and metaphor, which are, like, similar to one another, except that similes are almost always preceded by the word ‘like’ while metaphors are more like words that make you think of something else beside what you are describing.” - by Wayne McCoy, Gainesville, FL
Runner up: ”The highway coiled up and around the mountain like a snake ready to strike because it was being harassed by one of those annoying guys on “Animal Planet.”" - by Brent Sheppard
Another runner up: “His feelings for Lydia became a jumbled mess, like when the pen slips out of the hole on a Spirograph wheel, ruining the drawing you have been working on for hours, or possibly, the pen running out of ink during the process, snagging and tearing a hole in the 110# cover rated vellum of his heart.” – by Russell Wren, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Winner in the Vile Puns category: “I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized — he was killing me softly with his sarong.” - by Karl Scott, Brisbane Australia
-Julie
Way back in December, I had a post about how I photograph things that I know I will never, ever use. I just like doing it. In that case, I was talking about dewdrops.
Another thing that I photograph compulsively is the striations in puddle ice. At least in this case, I sometimes can use the pictures. I used puddle ice as the background in some of my Red Line pictures. These for example: one, two, three, four.
Here’s a recent sample of puddle ice taken a few days ago:
I have tons of these; both dewdrops and puddle ice. Takes me back to a simpler time when I just photographed whatever I felt like without thinking about it so darn much.
-Julie
“If you’re like most artists, you probably live and work with artists, eat with artists, socialize with artists, and recreate with artists– and likely with other fine arts professionals as well. And when you’re on your own, you probably read about artists, visit art websites, and attend art lectures, galleries, museums, and more. You’re basically all art all the time.
… the problem with the all-art-all-the-time lifestyle is that the more inside the beltway you are, the more removed you tend to be from typical everyday people who like art, but who may not know that much about it– there’s plenty of ‘em out there, believe me. And when presented with everyday opportunities to talk about your art with everyday people outside the art-o-sphere, the more you risk lapsing into pretentious art prattle and rapidly rendering any such interested parties comatose.”
- from “Sell More Art; Market Research for Artists“
You mean to tell me there are people who don’t want to talk about making art 24 hours a day?? Nooooooooooo!! Well then … what do they talk about?
-Julie
I have read that the spooks in the CIA eavesdrop on everything, but then have almost no way of locating anything within the incredibly immense amount of data they collect. I expect they have computerized or automated ways to look for keywords, but that assumes the bad guys don’t bother to use any kind of code.
Digital photography on the Internet is the same way. Now, pictures made by everybody everywhere can be seen — which results in such a tidal wave of images that there’s no possibility of finding anything.
As of today, the US Census Bureau estimates world population to be 6,651,137,062 (that link updates every day, so my number is only valid today). Not all of those people are posting images on the Internet — though it sure does seem that way.
However, a lot of them are. Suppose that .1% of them are making ’art’ as opposed to travel/family/pet snaps (that’s point one percent). That gives you 6,651,137 people posting art photos. Average ten pictures per person gets you 66,511,370 pictures.
If I dedicate one hour per day to looking at photographs on the Internet and I look at each picture for three seconds — and they’re lined up and ready to go (not likely), I can look at 1,200 photos per day. Divide that by ten (per photographer) means that I can check out 120 photographers per day. Suppose I do this every day, without exception. That gets me through 43,800 photographers per year. I will need 152 years to get through all 6,651,137 of the current photographers.
What this means is that a lot of good photographers are not going to be found. Period. The ones most likely to be found and remembered will be those who are one part great artist and three parts salesman/showman. Those who simply make their stuff visible and sit and wait have about one chance in 6,651,137 of being noticed.
For some tips on how to improve your inner salesman, try the ArtBusiness.com site. It’s aimed at non-photographic artists, but the advice applies.
How Not to Succeed in the Art World – advice on what not to do
Artist, Art Gallery Scams, Time & Money Wastes, Empty Promises- if you are really new to the Internet, here are some basic warnings about scams and ripoffs
Full list of ArtBusiness essays - take a look
-Julie
If you want to try adding shadows to your composites, but you don’t know where to start, here is a very, very simple outline of the issues you’ll have to deal with.
First, be sure to start with simple objects. Round. Anything round. An apple, orange, plum, a tennis ball, a marble, a nut, etc. Round things cast round shadows. Can’t get any easier than that. They also have the very simplest on-object (self) shadowing.
Next, put your object onto a flat surface. Don’t even think about compositing onto bumpy or split level surfaces until you can do round on flat, square on flat and irregular on flat.
Make a good cutout of the object(s) that you want to composite. This means extracting your object by hand. No, you can’t use any of the automated tools. You can either have fast or you can have good, not both. For compositing, you not only need good, you need perfect.
Put your rough cut objects onto the new background and get them exactly where you want them to be. Make all positioning/compositional decisions now. You can’t move them later, so get it right.
With the rough-cut objects over their new background, match their edge tone (brightness) to that of whatever they are over. These edits are entirely dependent on what the thing is over top of, so you can see why you must have the object in place before doing any corrections to edge tone. In the picture shown below, the edges need to be darkened where they are over black, and lightened slightly where they are over white.
You can then do your edge merge (blending of the cut edges of the object to the new background depending on the sharpness or blur of the cut object) now or you can do it later. You want to do this on a layer-group mask, not on the object’s own layer (put the object into its own group). You’ll need the object’s own layer mask for other things, and you’ll want the edge mask to affect all layers (shadow and highlight) associated with that object, so the group mask is the way to go for edge blending.
Add your shadows in at maximum darkness with a hard edge. Treat the light as if it is a point source, and simply think about where light would strike and where it would not.
With the very dark shadow shapes in place, take them down very slowly (very large, soft brush at 5% opacity on the shadow layer’s mask) until the darkest parts of the shadow are at the desired brightness.
Then think about how diffuse your light source really is and apply transitions (edge blur and on-object shading) accordingly.
Finally, add highlights, if needed. Often the shadowing alone will be enough to do the job; the object’s own starting brightness will be bright enough relative to the added shadowing to work as highlights without additions.
Try it. Shadowing is really, really fun.
-Julie
Am I the only one doing this? I’ve looked and looked and I’m starting to feel really lonely.
George Gruel [links to .pdf file] seems to understand the concepts, but all he does is change day to night. He simply overlays a black layer and then adds back the light that’s already in the picture. That’s silly.
John Paul Caponigro [links to .pdf file] claims to paint with light but all he does is make exposures in different lighting, then layer them over one another and mask to show or hide various (non-matching!) lighting. Dumb.
From the Adobe Design Center, how to add one little bit of light painting. Geez, a five year old could do better!
Here’s one that’s trying to do it right, but … not even close.
This is depressing. Being able to work the light and shade is the key to near total freedom in compositing. Is nobody interested, or has nobody noticed?
-Julie
If you’re a photographer who aspires to, or already does, sell your work, you may want to consider Kevin Kelly’s article, “Better Than Free“.
To quote:
“… the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.”
He then goes on to identify eight “generatives” that are better than free: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. In other words, things that people are willing to pay for even if they might be able to get the thing for free without it.
I think only embodiment (the quality of a perfectly made print) and patronage apply to not-yet-famous photography. To collectors of “name” photography, interpretation and authenticity will be worth something. I hope that’s enough.
-Julie
It’s interesting to see what individuals in a large bunch of (street) photographers will choose from the rather well-known pool of famous photographer quotes. Here are two pages of such from the Flickr group “Hard Core Street Photography/Discuss“. (The best stuff is on the second page.)
Two of the more interesting ones:
“Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn’t examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing.”
- Shomei Tomatsu
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“”F/5.6 should be enough” – Greg Marinovich
He was staring in front of a burning man and the light meter reading was not enough accurate so he had to guess it.”
- from “The Bang-bang Club”
-Julie (not feeling very inspired this morning)
