182. Joint - December 4-10, 2016
Byron-
I decided to go Avant-Garde this week. The joint is the contact point of several pieces of wood. The photo is taken with a GoPro camera that is looking through the high magnification portion of a magnifying glass. I enjoyed the checkerboard pattern on the right and the concrete and wood pattern on the left. The lighting was a mixture of daylight LED lighting coming from the right and the good old Sun shining through a window and hitting the subject from the left. The joint is the corner of my one of my basement steps.
ISO 383, 3mm focal length, f2.8, 1/15 sec
I decided to go Avant-Garde this week. The joint is the contact point of several pieces of wood. The photo is taken with a GoPro camera that is looking through the high magnification portion of a magnifying glass. I enjoyed the checkerboard pattern on the right and the concrete and wood pattern on the left. The lighting was a mixture of daylight LED lighting coming from the right and the good old Sun shining through a window and hitting the subject from the left. The joint is the corner of my one of my basement steps.
ISO 383, 3mm focal length, f2.8, 1/15 sec
Kevin-
Well I quickly rejected many definitions of Joint like the slang term for a marijuana cigarette, or a joint as a divy music place. Thinking about joints in tools and automobile suspension components took more of my time, but none of those ideas panned out either. Even more time was spent thinking about joints in the human body. But trying to find an interesting way to photograph a knee or an elbow didn’t really get my motor running. Ultimately I decided the a joint was just another expression for a pivot or rotation point.
There is a lamp that has been in my living room for many years. I have always liked the simple ability to rotate the lamp position around the thin center support, change the angle of the arm, and further change the angle of the lamp head (that carries an extremely hot halogen bulb).
At first I was tempted to drag the lamp to the studio and experiment with various closeup views of that arm movement or rotation. But the more I thought about it the more compelled I was to photograph the lamp where it has usually been positioned, next to the comfy reading chair, which is in turn next to the fireplace. Then to make a simple photo really difficult I decided to capture the image just after sunset when the cloudy sky would be a deep blue/purple but not yet black.
Ahh the challenge of multiple lights and light sources in the frame. There was available light in the room, there was the remaining light from the setting sun, there were holiday lights on the deck railing outside, there were fixed but dimmable lights that shine on walls of the room as well as an indirect soffit light that circles the room, there was the fireplace burning, there was a single Nikon strobe unit adding a bit of front light so that the feature lamp wouldn’t be lost entirely, and there was that feature lamp (which was also the key light). Whew!
My brother Brad to come over and posed for the photo. I handed him my totally non-autographed copy of Lost Moon by James Lovell, which is the story of the Apollo 13 moon mission near disaster.
Meanwhile Squirt posed nervously on her sleeping bag bed next to the fireplace. Normally she will curl up there, but tripods and light stands truly make her paranoid.
This shot required a long exposure. The strobe popped quickly, but then shutter had to remain open for two seconds so that the fire in the fireplace and the holiday lights on the deck would show up and so that I could stop down enough to get reasonable depth of field. Nikon D4s on a Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 tripod with a Acratech GP ballhead, 24-70mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens set to 32mm, ISO 100, f/8 at 2 seconds.
In truth I wished I had set up two more strobe lights. One behind the chair to provide a little rim light to the jointed lamp. The other shining on the framed print hanging above the fireplace. And that big image is of the moon of course. But I knew that by the time I got those lights set up the sky outside would be totally black. So I decided to go with what I have.
Well I quickly rejected many definitions of Joint like the slang term for a marijuana cigarette, or a joint as a divy music place. Thinking about joints in tools and automobile suspension components took more of my time, but none of those ideas panned out either. Even more time was spent thinking about joints in the human body. But trying to find an interesting way to photograph a knee or an elbow didn’t really get my motor running. Ultimately I decided the a joint was just another expression for a pivot or rotation point.
There is a lamp that has been in my living room for many years. I have always liked the simple ability to rotate the lamp position around the thin center support, change the angle of the arm, and further change the angle of the lamp head (that carries an extremely hot halogen bulb).
At first I was tempted to drag the lamp to the studio and experiment with various closeup views of that arm movement or rotation. But the more I thought about it the more compelled I was to photograph the lamp where it has usually been positioned, next to the comfy reading chair, which is in turn next to the fireplace. Then to make a simple photo really difficult I decided to capture the image just after sunset when the cloudy sky would be a deep blue/purple but not yet black.
Ahh the challenge of multiple lights and light sources in the frame. There was available light in the room, there was the remaining light from the setting sun, there were holiday lights on the deck railing outside, there were fixed but dimmable lights that shine on walls of the room as well as an indirect soffit light that circles the room, there was the fireplace burning, there was a single Nikon strobe unit adding a bit of front light so that the feature lamp wouldn’t be lost entirely, and there was that feature lamp (which was also the key light). Whew!
My brother Brad to come over and posed for the photo. I handed him my totally non-autographed copy of Lost Moon by James Lovell, which is the story of the Apollo 13 moon mission near disaster.
Meanwhile Squirt posed nervously on her sleeping bag bed next to the fireplace. Normally she will curl up there, but tripods and light stands truly make her paranoid.
This shot required a long exposure. The strobe popped quickly, but then shutter had to remain open for two seconds so that the fire in the fireplace and the holiday lights on the deck would show up and so that I could stop down enough to get reasonable depth of field. Nikon D4s on a Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 tripod with a Acratech GP ballhead, 24-70mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens set to 32mm, ISO 100, f/8 at 2 seconds.
In truth I wished I had set up two more strobe lights. One behind the chair to provide a little rim light to the jointed lamp. The other shining on the framed print hanging above the fireplace. And that big image is of the moon of course. But I knew that by the time I got those lights set up the sky outside would be totally black. So I decided to go with what I have.
Paul-
To give you a better idea of how I handled this week’s theme, I need you take a minute or two to search your house for a decent-quality, hard-cover book.
I’m serious. Do it…now. Go. I’ll wait.
[Insert two minutes of “Girl From Ipanema” here.]
Back, already? Good work. It’ll help, trust me.
Most hard-bound books of good quality have—though there are exceptions—a “joint” as a part of the book’s construction when being bound. Take a look at that book you just retrieved. You need to open the book in order to read it—though you might not know this after listening to some cocktail party discussions.
Anyway, the thick piece that makes up the front of your book is called a “board.” Naturally, there’s one at the front, too. (Some people are adamant about the book’s spine being regarded as a third board. Others are equally adamant it is not. (So far, NATO has distanced itself on the matter.) As it’s necessary for the front board to open to get to the contents of the book, the pivot point—where the front board meets the spine—usually has a slightly concave channel that runs the vertical length of the book. In some books this channel is very pronounced; in others not so much. In any event, this feature is called a “joint.” (On the inside of the book, on the opposite side of the joint, is the “hinge.”)
Now, wasn't that interesti…oh, for pity sake, wake up.
Without even bending the rules: Nikon D5200. 18-55mm lens set at 32mm; ISO 1250; ¼ sec. at f/6.7; aperture priority; Auto WB; matrix metering. The camera was set on tripod. The (hand-held) light source was a 6-volt flashlight I keep in my car. I shot some pictures with the flashlight in one hand and depressing the shutter button with the other. (Heaven forfend I should make this easy.) I also took some pictures with the camera set to take three consecutive shots with a 5-second delay between them after an initial 10-second countdown to trigger the sequence. In both cases, I wanted to move the flashlight around until I got the light fall-off I was looking for on the left side of the volumes.
To give you a better idea of how I handled this week’s theme, I need you take a minute or two to search your house for a decent-quality, hard-cover book.
I’m serious. Do it…now. Go. I’ll wait.
[Insert two minutes of “Girl From Ipanema” here.]
Back, already? Good work. It’ll help, trust me.
Most hard-bound books of good quality have—though there are exceptions—a “joint” as a part of the book’s construction when being bound. Take a look at that book you just retrieved. You need to open the book in order to read it—though you might not know this after listening to some cocktail party discussions.
Anyway, the thick piece that makes up the front of your book is called a “board.” Naturally, there’s one at the front, too. (Some people are adamant about the book’s spine being regarded as a third board. Others are equally adamant it is not. (So far, NATO has distanced itself on the matter.) As it’s necessary for the front board to open to get to the contents of the book, the pivot point—where the front board meets the spine—usually has a slightly concave channel that runs the vertical length of the book. In some books this channel is very pronounced; in others not so much. In any event, this feature is called a “joint.” (On the inside of the book, on the opposite side of the joint, is the “hinge.”)
Now, wasn't that interesti…oh, for pity sake, wake up.
Without even bending the rules: Nikon D5200. 18-55mm lens set at 32mm; ISO 1250; ¼ sec. at f/6.7; aperture priority; Auto WB; matrix metering. The camera was set on tripod. The (hand-held) light source was a 6-volt flashlight I keep in my car. I shot some pictures with the flashlight in one hand and depressing the shutter button with the other. (Heaven forfend I should make this easy.) I also took some pictures with the camera set to take three consecutive shots with a 5-second delay between them after an initial 10-second countdown to trigger the sequence. In both cases, I wanted to move the flashlight around until I got the light fall-off I was looking for on the left side of the volumes.
Jerry-
I have this funky multi-jointed thing that I found a few years back in a dumpster during a lab remodeling at the U. My first thought was to put a fire cracker in each of the clips and then light them off but I doubted my timing would be good enough to capture just the right moment. It would also be rather noisy and messy, perhaps with some shrapnel flying around. So I grabbed a string of decorative lights and made this happen.
Camera was the Sony A6300 mounted on a tripod, 16-50mm lens set to 44mm, exposure was f11 @1/6 with an ISO of 1600.
I have this funky multi-jointed thing that I found a few years back in a dumpster during a lab remodeling at the U. My first thought was to put a fire cracker in each of the clips and then light them off but I doubted my timing would be good enough to capture just the right moment. It would also be rather noisy and messy, perhaps with some shrapnel flying around. So I grabbed a string of decorative lights and made this happen.
Camera was the Sony A6300 mounted on a tripod, 16-50mm lens set to 44mm, exposure was f11 @1/6 with an ISO of 1600.