Geese in the Kitchen

On cold, rainy days taking pictures can be outright unpleasant. That does not mean that you can’t have fun with photography. I recently joined a Google+ community that is “dedicated to learning the art of Black and White photography through weekly assignments, discussion, and critique”. It has been enjoyable and sometimes challenging.

A recent assignment was to shoot some photos of textures and patterns, followed with the task of combining a texture with a photo. I looked a my texture collection and then some recent photos of Canada geese came to mind. The weather was miserable when I set out to photograph the geese. It had rained, the water of the pond was murkier than usual. Then it started to rain again. I kept shooting until my camera was so wet I started to worry. The photos were no masterpieces. A little prank came to mind.

One of my texture pictures was of a restaurant floor. I tiled about eight images of this together into a large one. In PaintShop Pro I manipulated the image so the tiles would appear to be seen from an angle. One of the geese photos was superposed in a layer. I duplicated this layer and selected the geese, making the rest of the image transparent. Then I adjusted the transparency of the middle layer.

Of course it was not quite this simple as I did not get the tiles image right the first few times.

I had to include more tiles and make the edges match, then “tilt” the image so it would be similar as the plane of the pond water. It took me a lot longer than it would an expert, but I am sure that I had more fun.

Once the stack of images looked right I collapsed it into a single image, made the final corrections and added my signature. Now here is my masterpiece:

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Color is where you find it

.:.

It was a dark and foggy night …

It was a dark and foggy night … visibility was a few yards, not many lights besides the streetlight to reveal any detail. Yes, my friends, this is a mystery story. But fear not, I will not bore you with dull and dreary prose, my flair is photography.

Even on the camera monitor this looked pretty dull and dreary. No photo masterpiece potential here. Maybe the “art department” can make something with these frames. Always a chuckle there.

So I decided to use flash. Now, mind you, I fully expected the result to be closer to a view of a photo gray card than a useful picture, but what I got surprised me. Let me show you. I enhanced the contrast so you can see better the object of my astonishment.

Are these ghosts, small-scale turbulences in the fog, condensation on the lens, ghosts, GHOSTS?

Have you ever photographed fog with on-camera flash? This is the way to bring out ghosts where there are none!

OK, have you figured it out yet? Inspect more closely. Note that the “ghosts” are made up of various sized uniform circles. Circles! Bokey circles, out-of-focus, blurred images of points of light. Yes, the fog consists of tiny drops of water. It was thick, as I told you. There were enough of these small drops floating in front of the camera to act as tiny bright specks, illuminated by the flash.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck