Third Week of Project 52

Since I started, third week of Project 52 coincides with valentine’s day and so naturally the theme was “Romance” for the week. Unfortunately, valentines day was on Monday, a very busy day for me. I also didn’t want to photograph couples as I knew that would make me miss my gf even more (we are in a long distance relationship right now). Given these constraints, I kept wondering what would make a good “romance” photo that I can shoot in Davis.

Sitting indoors with my camera, I was thinking about this when I noticed the LED of room heater and decided to draw the love sign with my camera. I switched off all other lights in the room (i.e. the room was pitch-dark) except for the LED. Put the camera on TV mode i.e. shutter priority mode and then started to move my camera in the shape of a heart focussing on the light source. After multiple tries, a 6-seconds exposure time seemed reasonable for the speed with which I could move my camera and draw the symbol. I must say it was quite challenging to move my hands in the shape of a heart and yet bring the hand to the exact same place from where I started, I am quite happy with the shape that I drew in the following photograph.

Update Feb 20, 2011: Lover’s Island on Google Maps.

Second Week of Project 52

Who knew I will complete the 2nd week of ‘Project 52’? Not me! Ahh.. the sense of achievement and satisfaction. 🙂 Theme for this week was “body parts”. While I could always shoot myself/some part of my body and say project completed, for some reason the idea didn’t excite me and I decided to look for other sources for motivation.

So, saturday afternoon, I was out photographing at UC Davis Campus for my Canon EOS group project when I realized the Eggheads can be an interesting object for the theme of “body parts”. I have walked past at least one of the Eggheads among the 7 present in the campus on everyday of my life at UC Davis and yet never took their photographs because to me, they lacked any theme (except once when there was a rumor on campus that their positions are clue to hidden treasures buried in the campus ground but lets ignore that!). So today, I went ahead and decided to shoot the Egghead sculpture just beside the arboretum.

The sculptor’s theme for this Egghead is “See No Evil/Head No Evil”. Lacking ears and with closed eyes, I decided to use the late afternoon light to shoot them in such a way that life illuminated only one side of the image. I interpret this as the way reality is: What one chooses to close their eyes to/shut their ears off to and call evil is also white and black.

Here is the image:

First Week of Project 52

Yes!! I completed the first week of “Project 52”. The theme for this week was “Sleep” and after desperate attempts, I finally found a man sleeping on the edge of Twin Peaks in San Francisco!! I was so desperate to at least start with this project that I was even ready to convince myself that “sleep” can even mean buses parked in their maintenance facility! I even went to the maintenance facility to take photographs of the buses parked but now I don’t need to tag those photographs as “Sleep” after I shoot the following photograph. Comments welcomed of course.

Difference between Macro and Zoom

While trying to learn macro photography, at times I felt that standing close to the subject, I was just zooming into the object. This popped into my head the question: What is the difference between macro and zoom photography?

A naive way to describe what I was considering was to say that with macro photography, I was standing very close to a subject and then trying to zoom into it (what a 18-55mm basic lens can give!) and for zoom photography, I stand very far from the object and try to do the same. In other words, Why can’t I stand further away from my object and just zoom in? So, whats the (scientific/photographic) difference between the two? Once, I returned home, I naturally hit Google and the following is my understanding:

Macro photography is in principle dealing with images that are magnified, i.e. bigger on the sensor than they are in real life. True macro photography is with image sizes between 1:1 (life size on the sensor) to 10:1 (10 times life size on the sensor), (beyond 10:1 is Micro photography). 1:1 means that if you are taking a picture of something the same size as the sensor then it will fill the frame. Macro lenses are lenses typically optimized to focus sharply on a relatively small area, usually used for close-up work.

A zoom lens allows you to use multiple focal lengths with one lens and the subject remains in focus, compressing the distance between objects, making it appear closer to the photographer than it is.

With a 50mm non-macro lens, you’ll need to be at least half a meter away from your subject for it to be in focus. It simply can’t focus on anything closer. A macro lens in these circumstances can still focus giving the requisite 1:1 image size.

To summarize, macro photography means getting really-really close to a subject such that the sensors can get a 1:1 image of the subject. Zoom photography means changing focal lengths of the lens to make the object appear 1:1 when they actually aren’t.

Read more at: pentax forums or at digital photography school. A good sample image I found from flickr is here.