albert_richardson1

Make a snoot for it out of a material like 'Cinefoil' to get a beam of light aimed at the subject's hair without a lot of spill. You can then put the light back where you had it before.

Google 'Santa Barbara beaches' for ideas. An hour's travel will take you south (east) to Ventura or north (west) to Santa Maria. The 101 freeway turns north at Gaviota Beach where it runs inland to San Francisco. A possible location on the west side of Santa Barbara County for sunsets would be Point Sal State Beach near Guadalupe. This will take you out of the Santa Barbara city area, but you could take an opportunity to to travel North through the San Marcos pass past Lake Cachuma into the Santa Inez Valley. See http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=605 for more information about Point Sal.

 

The beaches in the Santa Barbara area all face south. This description from a site about the Point Conception lighthouse explains my confusing directional notations:

 

Description: Most of the California coast runs in a general north to south direction. However, along the Santa Barbara channel, the coast runs in more of an east to west direction. At the western end of the channel, the coast makes an abrupt 90-degree turn northward. It was on this point, which some early explorers termed the Cape Horn of the Pacific and where mariners following the coast had to make a severe course correction, that the Point Conception Lighthouse was built.

 

There's plenty to see and photograph along the beaches close to the city. Have a great time. Post some of your results!

Use what you have. Position the light boxes 45 degrees left and right like a giant copy setup. Evenly light the whole paining and set the camera dead center flat on in front of the area of the shot. If a painting is very large consider splicing several shots in a panorama fashion to get better detail than you would in a single shot of the whole thing.

 

Take great pains to get the color true to the original.

 

Don't take the frames off yourself since paintings can be valuable and you would likely be liable for any accidental damage you do. This is a matter for the client to handle.

 

Don't forget to ask the client if he wants any detail areas photographed separately.

 

Search photo.net for "photographing paintings".

The question is how to photograph the instrument panel of a small aircraft in flight without any reflections from inside the cockpit on the windshield. (See sample photo posted by same OP on another forum.) The plane is noisy and there is a lot of vibration making flash photography a must.

 

The actual subject of the sample photo isn't clear. The instruments take at least 2/3 of the frame, but they cannot be read. The cloudy sky in the background out the windshield doesn't have enough space to be the actual center of attention.

 

Some reflection in a small confined place like a cockpit seems inevitable. It is impossible to move around to get a better position because you are confined to your seat in flight. You could position the camera on some kind of bracket before take off once you find through trial and error the best place to mount it. But the trial and error testing might be the answer to your problem in the first place. Why not take the instrument panel pictures you need on the ground in existing light? You can set the plane and the lighting as needed for maximum effect without glare or reflections.

 

If you would be able to position both the camera and flash close to the roof, the light should reflect off the windshield down into the pilot's lap. There could still be reflections off shiny knobs and the mouldings around the instruments that would show up as bright highlights. The plane's vibration and shaking in the air might make it difficult to hold the camera on target, and you won't know what you photographed until you see the replay...

I think ethics enters into photography when the pictures might be used as evidence for something. An example would be as an exhibit in a court case to show a defendant's innocence or guilt. Another would be as an example in the court of public opinion to document some problem or condition worthy of concern. In either case, there must be an understanding established in the presentation of a context for the image to show that it is not intended to be simply a fiction made up out of an artist's imagination. This image must be known to represent some clear point of view to be effective.

 

I wonder if the seminar speaker is not taking himself a little too seriously to believe that one makes pictures of animals only to document something. Besides, simply seeing an image of an animal is not what forms a person's opinion of the natural world. We know that California dairy cows spend their lives standing in milk factories and are not the "happy cows" depicted in the ads. We also suspect that the feelings and behavioral explanations offered for animals in the narrations of various nature documentaries are more fanciful than not. Well-intentioned people use fiction as a shortcut to get a point across when they don't have to prove in a treatise that they're telling the absolute truth.

 

I would be interested in asking the speaker how he would have photographers sort out the stories that explain the pictures of animals they take so they can show that they didn't deliberately misrepresent their material. What pictorial elements do that?

 

Who says that there is no room for the artist to photograph animals for some different purpose? I can't believe that it's unethical to make pictures that don't worry about poaching, starvation or the approaching extinction of the species.

It's been a long time since I used my old 35mm, too. I forgot that once you press the rewind button there is no way to engage the mechanism again except to open the back of the camera. This would double exposures such a nuisance I would use another camera altogether.

 

Incidentally, amateur astronomy magazines and books should have a lot of material and examples to help set up and make celestial photographs.

Oops! Thanks Mark. I only ever used the button to release the mechanism to rewind the film. I hadn't occurred to me to use it to make double exposures!

I would add just a few observations:

The purpose of the long exposure times is to allow the earth to rotate enough to make a nice star trail. Pointing the camera toward the North Star will make concentric circles, and directly overhead & somewhat to the South will get straight lines across the sky. (I'm in the Northern Hemisphere.)

 

Expose the film for the stars not the sky. Reciprocity adjustment is intended to adjust low light scenes to make them brighter to read better on film. The advice given above to use trial and error starting with about a 5.6 f-stop is probably more helpful. This is actually the opposite of reciprocity adjustment. The intent is to keep the sky black in the picture even after a long exposure that would otherwise make it too light. The theory is that you really can't underexpose the black night sky.

 

Bulb setting originated when photographers used air hoses and rubber bulbs to trip their shutters. Squeezing the bulb caused the shutter to open and releasing it allowed the shutter to close again. Timed setting requires you to press the cable release to open the shutter and again to close it. Timed is probably more useful for the night sky. Set the camera on a good sturdy tripod and make sure that it is standing on a good footing. Adjust the camera for the part of the sky you want. Focus on infinity. There is really no DOF so there's no need to sight anything. Do everything possible not to touch your setup again until the photograph is finished once you open the shutter. Bumps and jiggles will show up in the light trails you get.

 

Timing to the second is not so critical with exposures that are many minutes long. If you don't mind having to lug something else along, an ordinary kitchen timer will probably do the job. You'll need some kind of small flashlight anyway.

 

To get stars over mountains, I think I would set the camera with the mountains at the bottom of the frame around sunset so I could still see clearly enough to get the composition right. I would wait until the twilight sky makes them look right and take my first picture. Then I would adjust the exposure for the night sky without moving or jarring the camera and wait for the stars to rise. Then I would take my starry pictures. I think I would put two pictures together for the finished image. The point of keeping the camera still is to get the pictures as perfectly registered as possible.

 

The whole thing would be a lot of fun. Have a great time.

 

BTW: Film SLRs usually will not take double exposures because the film advance lever cocks the shutter as it move the next exposure into position. There is no way to cock the shutter independently on the SLR cameras I've seen. I don't know about making double exposures with DSLRs. I think I would prefer separate exposures to try together later so that I would be able to select the combination I like the best without fear of ruining the whole project.

Metering doesn't apply to flash pictures except for slow sync settings intended to mix a relatively dim background with a bright flash lit foreground subject. Flash is an instantaneous burst of brilliant light that the camera can't detect until it goes off. The flash setting on the camera should override the metering setting. I have not heard of a camera, even a camera designed to stop an exposure when it detects enough light from the flash, that would be engineered to know what area of the subject is brightest during the time the flash lights it.

 

If you set exposure manually for the flash, the distance from the flash head to the subject (when the intensity of the flash is constant) always determines the proper exposure. There should be a procedure that converts distance into a flash guide number that gives you the range of shutter/f-stop settings that would work.

My Great-Grandfather was a Corporal in Hiram Berdan's famed 1st Regiment United States Sharp Shooters (U.S.S.S.) in the American Civil War that lasted from 1861 to 1865. Sharpshooters were both loathed and admired for their prowess with a rifle as this reference to a web site about Winslow Homer's well known illustration of a Sharpshooter firing his weapon will attest. http://www.sonofthesouth.net/Winslow_Homer_Letter.htm

FWIW Winslow Homer and my GGF might have met. Both of them were present at the Seige of Yorktown during the Penninsula Campaign. Yorktown was taken May 4, 1862. This is more interesting to me than to you; this coincidence of the famous with the ordinary, but then it's impossible to really understand the everyday details that challenge unremarkable people to develop and perfect awesome skill in something so difficult as photographic image-making.

 

The war captured the interest and attention of everyone, and as it progressed, I dare say hundreds of glass plate images were made every day of every sort of military subject and location a photographer could reach with a camera. This went on for five years.

 

After the war all the thousands of these images became worthless and a great many of the glass plates were broken and thrown away. Many more were used to make greenhouses and windows for various outbuildings. So much for technology! Still, I would like to see whatever images of Sharpshooters might exist in hope of seeing a picture of my GGF as a young man. Gone but not forgotten. In its own place not very silly either. Simply the way things were done. Straight up.

 

It's too bad we're photograhers and not writers. The idea of a window that is itself an image of another reality has obvious and hidden symbolic overtones too good to pass up in a good story. Would anyone like to accept a challenge to see how one might put this notion in a visual context photographically?