Seeing Clearly Through Clear Glass

Well, I seen it. The customer brought it in and told me about it and I was just about to dismiss it as nonsense...but I took a look and he was right. I seen it.

He was concerned that the lens on his Nikon camera was playing up - that or the focusing screen. He said that when he took pictures of a bright light source on a dark field that he got "ghost" images all around the image. I was initally going to dismiss it as either a figment of his imagination or lens flare but I took his camera over to the bright LED lights on the new Nikon cabinet and looked.

You could see flare alright - no way you can expect not to. But there on either side of the main image were two separate faint images of the light. They moved around when you waved the lens past the light. Ghosts, but perfectly formed ones... ooeeooeeooeeooee...

A different lens showed none of this effect - you could get flare but no perfect little ghosts.

The culprit turned out to be an old uncoated Focal UV filter on the first lens. Clean enough, but every time you screwed it on the ghosts came back.

We screwed on a multi-coated UV filter from Kenko - not an expensive one, either. Ghosts exorcised!

Moral of this is listen to the customer, and throw out your old cheapjohn film filters and get some modern ones. There may be a lot of your image that is being obscured by ghosting right now that you do not even realise.

The Dawn Of Beauty

Landscape photographers are romantics. They must be - they go a thousand kilometres to camp overnight in freezing bush so that they can get up at 3:30AM and hike through bush to a beachfront. Then they haul 500 Kg of equipments over wet rocks and stand there shivering while they are waiting for he sun to rise. They have $ 8200 sitting on a tripod in front of them on the slippery rocks and are waiting only an incautious moment to tip it into the sea.

Then they drive a thousand kilometres back home and spend week of nights in a dark room trying the HDR the result. This seems clear evidence of either romance or madness.

One of the symptoms of this madn... I mean one of the useful and perfectly normal items that every landscape photographer needs is the circular polariser filter. See the opening image for a typical polariser in operation.

The polariser makes blue skies bluer, green seas greener, and white bride's dresses whiter. Foliage loses the blue cast that Western Australian skies put into it and the colours seem much richer. They can also be used to see through water surfaces and glass shop windows to reveal the goods within. It makes everything look like it is straight from the pages of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

Good? Yes. Bad? Yes. WHAT?

Well, consider - if you want to see bluer skies and greener seas and fluffier clouds, all very well - you can produce this effect and good luck to you. It is charming but fraudulent. If you wish to represent what your eye actually sees in a scene, consider that your eye is seeing the light scatter anyway - remove it and you are interpreting rather than representing.

Morals aside, if you want to get the full effect of the polariser remember that it works most effectively at 90º from the sun. If you try to put one onto a lens that has too wide an angle of view it will work in one portion of the scene differently from another portion. You may be better in these cases to seek your colour enhancement by computer means further down the track.

Please note that the polariser filter and polarising sheets may be a real boon in art copy and scientific work - letting us see what the light scatter spoils. We are seeking science, not art. And generally don't have to stand on wet rocks to get it.

Under The Radar At A Wedding With Lightsphere

Please note the dome in the heading photograph. This is not the targeting guidance system for an Atlas E missile - though they are nice as well. It is a Gary Fong Lightsphere - in this case one of the collapsible ones. Beside it is a packet of gel filters made by Honl. They are the absolute bullet for event and wedding photographers.

Those of you who reel back in horror at the thought of a flash at a wedding - like M. Cartier-Bresson - are welcome to move further down the car. By all means ramp your ISO up and clap a 2.8 zoom to the front of your DSLR and hover over there in the shadows. I'm sure your photographs will be all the better for your artistic decision. I should de-saturate a few of them and tilt a horizon to provide variety. Remember to browse the salad bar at the reception...

I shall be running around in the meantime popping up out of prepared positions to ambush the bride with my camera and the flash attached. That'll be me down there at the front of the aisle as they exchange vows - look for the balding head and the occasional electrical discharge. Note that I will have the Fong Lightsphere firmly attached ( and it does attach firmly ) to my DSLR and a short zoom on the front. And I will be elbowing interlopers out of the way.

If the wedding is to be held in the warmth of a tungsten-lit church I will push one of the amber Honl filter gels down the throat of the Lightsphere to match the prevailing light. Likewise I will push in a slightly weaker amber if I am filling an outdoor shoot in the last hour of the day. My flash will be about the same as the sun then and the subsequent computer work will be so much easier.

If, horror of horrors, the wedding is in a filling station lit only by flickering fluorescent bulbs and the demonic eyes of the guests, I will substitute one of the green filters. Don't laugh - I once covered a wedding where the groom chased the bride through a burial ground with an axe. Nice colours. Nice axe.

The Lightsphere softens and spreads the flash so that there is s pretty good agreement between the illumination on the main subject and the stuff that filters through to the background. Of course you can force the flash to put out more or less light with the controls on the back - all flashes can do this to some extent - and you can force the light to spot the subject by your choice of positioning and distance, but generally you can set a ratio and then just chase the bride at will.

The amazing part of it is that even if you think that your flashes are disruptive, it is unlikely the happy couple will notice. I spoke with the bride from two weeks ago and she did not realise I was working as much as I was until she saw the video from another guest. Thats under the radar. Mind you, if I wanted to promote the brand I would have to have a sign on the back of my shirt advertising the studio to the wedding guests.