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  • How'd They Do That? :: Illuminations

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    Illuminations
    by Konador


    To those of you who thought this was a capture of fireworks, well, sorry to disappoint. I guess you'll think this way is sort of cheating!

    For the December Free Study I wanted to try something that I'd never done before. Since I'd only just got my first DSLR a few months earlier, I tried to think of something that it could do, that couldn't be done on my old digital camera. I remembered seeing a technique used by Gordon a year or so before and really wanting to try it out. Basically, all the technique was, was turning the zoom lens during exposure to create trails of light. This is what I decided to do for my entry. For those of you with a camera which locks the zoom during exposure, if you have a steady hand, you could physically move the camera towards the object. Obviously this is a lot harder and takes more practice, but it is possible to get good results.

    The next challenge was finding something that would look good with the technique. I wanted something nice and colourful so that it really stood out amongst the crowd. I tried doing it with normal objects, but I just couldn't get it looking right, so I thought of using Christmas lights. It was December, so there were plenty of them around. To get the photo I was looking for, I needed a dense area with lots of lights of many different colours. I remembered a photo which I took at the same time the previous year, and thought that it was the perfect location. There is one house in my town which is decorated beautifully every year, to raise money for charity. Here is the house without the zoom effect.


    Sparkle - Konador

    Just incase anyone is wondering about that photo, I took it with my G2. I didn't use any kind of starburst filter, but just set the aperture to a high f-number. This, coupled with a long exposure, creates a natural star effect at points of light.

    Anyway, once I'd travelled to the house for my December Free Study photo, I setup my tripod outside the gate and started experimenting. It was surprisingly difficult to get a decent photo. The main problem was overexposing all of the lights. I had to put the ISO down to 100 to stop the camera being too sensitive to light, and I also had to use a high f-number so that not as much light could get into the camera. This allowed me to use a longer shutter speed. Another problem that I encountered was trying to get the trails of light smooth. As I was turning the lens, it moved the camera, which meant that unfortunatly the trails were a bit shakey. When I got to the end of the zoom, it created a nice little spiral effect, which I thought about using for the challenge, but decided against. Here is an example of the spirals:

    As you can also see in the full-size crop from the original file, the lines are quite shakey. In the resized 600x406 version that I entered, it is harder to notice this. As with any challenge, there are some outtakes. Here are a couple of them, along with the reasons I didn't enter them.

    This outtake was too bright. You can't see any of the background, which means that the colours don't seem as vibrant.
    In this one, I didn't like the composition. I tried using various distances, but this was definatly too close. I used a wider-angle one in the end, because I wanted some kind of definition as to what the photo was of. I also wanted black around the edge to make it look like there was more space for the lights to 'zoom into'.

    As you also may have noticed, in these 2 outtakes, the 'spiral effect' that I mentioned earlier is at the near point, rather than the far point, of the trails. This is because I zoomed out instead of zooming in. I experimented to see which looked the best, and if there was any difference at all. The spiral is the only difference I could see. The zooming in effect was more practical though, as I could set up the composition before the shot, rather than leaving it to luck at the end of the exposure.

    Once I had got a shot similar to what I wanted, I had to call it a night, because it was freeeeeezing outside! I made sure that when I got back inside, I didn't use the camera for a while. The warm air hitting the cold camera means that it may condense, and turning on the camera could possibly damage it. When I looked through the photos, I saw immediatly which one I liked the best. My entry is almost completly unedited. I could have cropped to make the black area on the left smaller, but this would have created an even more off centre look, because of the angles and sizes of the trails. Here is what I mean:

    I had to leave it uncropped, because of the natural centre-point caused by the zooming of the lens. The only other editing I did was a slight Brightness/Contrast adjustment to make the colours 'pop' more, and a Hue/Saturation adjustment. I had to move the saturation slider up quite a long way. Because DPChallenge has a 150kb limit, and because this photo has so many colours and it's quite sharp, I had to use quite a lot of compression to get the photo uploadable. The compression didn't really affect the image quality much, but what it did do was to make the colours look dull and faded. Here is a side-by-side example.

    On the left is the non-edited version, and on the right is the highly saturated version. The actual original, straight out of the camera, looks like the one on the right, but when saved it looks like the one on the left. As you can see, the saturation was necessary for creating a vibrant photo.

    After that, all I did was to add a thin black border, and a dark red keyline to separate the border from the photo. And there you have it, Bob's your uncle.

     




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