204. Chance - May 7-13, 2017
Kevin-
As most of you know by now I enjoy combining flash with available light to create motion blur. And that is what I wanted to try again for Chance, hoping that by chance I would be successful. The premise was simple, a couple of dice falling, as no one knows which sides of the dice would be face up when they landed. It’s all chance.
Getting a couple of large red dice was easy. Creating the photo was a bit harder. I first tried studio strobes, figuring I would use the modeling lights for the blur behind, and the flash to freeze the falling dice. But gravity was at work, and with the dice falling at 32 feet per second per second it took a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second to keep the blur part of the image from becoming so extreme it was really invisible. No problem I thought. That is the flash sync speed for me D4s, and the strobes are faster. True, but not fast enough to freeze the dice, even when turned to their lowest power setting. Lesson, they are great for portraits, but they are not capable of doing things like freezing a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun, let alone a couple a damn dice falling.
Okay, so I pulled out the Nikon strobe units. The advantage is that the flash duration is much faster. The disadvantage is that they gave no modeling lights to give me the blurred part of the image. So I also pulled out an old Smith Victor tungsten lamp I acquire a few years ago from my friend Steve Rouch and put it next to the Nikon strobe. Then I put a tungsten filter over the Nikon flash so the color temperatures of the blurred and the frozen image would match.
After that the task was to drop the dice again and again. I cranked the D4s up to 10 frames a second, and with one Nikon SB-900 series flash unit at 1/32 power (front light flash duration of 1/20,000 of a second)) and one at 1/64th power (back light flash duration of 1/35,700th of a second) the strobes kept up. I captured almost 280 frames, only 66 of which had any portion of any dice visible at all, as they fell through the frame so quickly. Due to that speed autofocus was impossible as well, so it took some care to get the lens pre-focused at the point I thought the dice would fall.
Like the dice themselves, everything was a bit random. You invest your time. You bet you money. And you take your chance.
That is a green background, just barely illuminated, behind the dice, for a slightly casino feel. Nikon D4s, mounted on a Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 tripod with a Acratech GP ballhead, 105mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor lens, ISO 800, f/16 at 1/250th of a second.
A note for the extremely technically-minded among you. The camera was set to rear curtain flash sync. That should have resulted in all of the blur being behind (which visually means on top of) the falling dice. Yes there are white streaks in the direction the dice are falling from, but also a little bit of red blur in the direction the dice and falling to. I am unable to explain that.
As most of you know by now I enjoy combining flash with available light to create motion blur. And that is what I wanted to try again for Chance, hoping that by chance I would be successful. The premise was simple, a couple of dice falling, as no one knows which sides of the dice would be face up when they landed. It’s all chance.
Getting a couple of large red dice was easy. Creating the photo was a bit harder. I first tried studio strobes, figuring I would use the modeling lights for the blur behind, and the flash to freeze the falling dice. But gravity was at work, and with the dice falling at 32 feet per second per second it took a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second to keep the blur part of the image from becoming so extreme it was really invisible. No problem I thought. That is the flash sync speed for me D4s, and the strobes are faster. True, but not fast enough to freeze the dice, even when turned to their lowest power setting. Lesson, they are great for portraits, but they are not capable of doing things like freezing a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun, let alone a couple a damn dice falling.
Okay, so I pulled out the Nikon strobe units. The advantage is that the flash duration is much faster. The disadvantage is that they gave no modeling lights to give me the blurred part of the image. So I also pulled out an old Smith Victor tungsten lamp I acquire a few years ago from my friend Steve Rouch and put it next to the Nikon strobe. Then I put a tungsten filter over the Nikon flash so the color temperatures of the blurred and the frozen image would match.
After that the task was to drop the dice again and again. I cranked the D4s up to 10 frames a second, and with one Nikon SB-900 series flash unit at 1/32 power (front light flash duration of 1/20,000 of a second)) and one at 1/64th power (back light flash duration of 1/35,700th of a second) the strobes kept up. I captured almost 280 frames, only 66 of which had any portion of any dice visible at all, as they fell through the frame so quickly. Due to that speed autofocus was impossible as well, so it took some care to get the lens pre-focused at the point I thought the dice would fall.
Like the dice themselves, everything was a bit random. You invest your time. You bet you money. And you take your chance.
That is a green background, just barely illuminated, behind the dice, for a slightly casino feel. Nikon D4s, mounted on a Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 tripod with a Acratech GP ballhead, 105mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor lens, ISO 800, f/16 at 1/250th of a second.
A note for the extremely technically-minded among you. The camera was set to rear curtain flash sync. That should have resulted in all of the blur being behind (which visually means on top of) the falling dice. Yes there are white streaks in the direction the dice are falling from, but also a little bit of red blur in the direction the dice and falling to. I am unable to explain that.
Paul-
The withered woman slept. Deeply. Sinking down into shadow that the word could only weakly describe. In her dreams and in her parchment frame a life of 92 autumns and 92 springs skirted the boundaries where predictable waking is transformed in something of greater certainty.
There was a chance she would see the next day’s sun--so said the town’s doctor. A chance, of course. Always. But he was sober in the pronouncement--applying his words as he might a delicate surgical tool--and implied, as he was shown to the door, that the sun wood certainly rise but the woman would not.
The great granddaughter leaned wearily against the closing door, and considered the whispered hallway verdict with the same brittle strength she had on the subsequent two nights—when the same doctor arrived and departed, the night rose up and fell back, and the early daylight softened the deep lines of the waking woman’s familiar smile
And so, as on the two preceding nights, the ancient and the anguished both slept together in the same cot. One gently yielding and slipping away across an endless, compelling current. And one restless in her slumber—as if pushing back against a river that courses through the deepest dreams.
There is no chance this is inaccurate: (Local time: Late afternoon) The picture was taken with my cell phone. A little tweaking was done in Adobe Lightroom 4.
The withered woman slept. Deeply. Sinking down into shadow that the word could only weakly describe. In her dreams and in her parchment frame a life of 92 autumns and 92 springs skirted the boundaries where predictable waking is transformed in something of greater certainty.
There was a chance she would see the next day’s sun--so said the town’s doctor. A chance, of course. Always. But he was sober in the pronouncement--applying his words as he might a delicate surgical tool--and implied, as he was shown to the door, that the sun wood certainly rise but the woman would not.
The great granddaughter leaned wearily against the closing door, and considered the whispered hallway verdict with the same brittle strength she had on the subsequent two nights—when the same doctor arrived and departed, the night rose up and fell back, and the early daylight softened the deep lines of the waking woman’s familiar smile
And so, as on the two preceding nights, the ancient and the anguished both slept together in the same cot. One gently yielding and slipping away across an endless, compelling current. And one restless in her slumber—as if pushing back against a river that courses through the deepest dreams.
There is no chance this is inaccurate: (Local time: Late afternoon) The picture was taken with my cell phone. A little tweaking was done in Adobe Lightroom 4.
Jerry-
I tried to make my chance photo by using a game that requires very little skill and much chance, Yahtzee. So there you go! It was taken using my Sony a6300 with 50mm f1.8 "normal" lens set to f11 at 1/15, ISO 1600. Location was the kitchen studio.
Yesterday I tried combining last weeks assignment, bokeh, with chance. The result is the dandelion photo. The bokeh or out of focus stuff is there combined with the idea of, um, what chance the little dandelion seed things will get to sprout. This was using the Sony and 50mm lens, f8 at 1/400, ISO 400. Location was the park across from our house.
I tried to make my chance photo by using a game that requires very little skill and much chance, Yahtzee. So there you go! It was taken using my Sony a6300 with 50mm f1.8 "normal" lens set to f11 at 1/15, ISO 1600. Location was the kitchen studio.
Yesterday I tried combining last weeks assignment, bokeh, with chance. The result is the dandelion photo. The bokeh or out of focus stuff is there combined with the idea of, um, what chance the little dandelion seed things will get to sprout. This was using the Sony and 50mm lens, f8 at 1/400, ISO 400. Location was the park across from our house.
Don-
Its close enough to Saturday here because it almost Saturday
in Minnesota land.
Do I "CHANCE" it or not. I chose not to try, to chancy.
Steep climb and its slightly raining. Why take the CHANCE?
Metadata.....Auto Exposure; focal length 3.99mm; ISO 20; f/1.8;
shutter 1/1996 sec. The altitude was 5681.83 feet. I was at
latitude N36 degrees 47 minutes 49 seconds and longitude
W108 degrees 11 minutes 21 seconds. Photograph taken
with an iPhone 7 Plus, the data recorded with the picture.
And,,,,,,, as I type this I am listening to Iron Butterfly doing
'In-A-Godda-Da-Vida 2006 Remastered Full Version. Had I been
listening in the Jeep I would have made the climb.
Its close enough to Saturday here because it almost Saturday
in Minnesota land.
Do I "CHANCE" it or not. I chose not to try, to chancy.
Steep climb and its slightly raining. Why take the CHANCE?
Metadata.....Auto Exposure; focal length 3.99mm; ISO 20; f/1.8;
shutter 1/1996 sec. The altitude was 5681.83 feet. I was at
latitude N36 degrees 47 minutes 49 seconds and longitude
W108 degrees 11 minutes 21 seconds. Photograph taken
with an iPhone 7 Plus, the data recorded with the picture.
And,,,,,,, as I type this I am listening to Iron Butterfly doing
'In-A-Godda-Da-Vida 2006 Remastered Full Version. Had I been
listening in the Jeep I would have made the climb.
Byron-
One very old game of chance is the coin flip. It was used as far back as the Roman Empire. They called it Ship or Head. The coin flies up in the air while flipping and then returns. All this movement makes it extremely difficult to capture a photo of a recognizable coin and the person doing the flipping. The photographer could set up the camera and then shoot photo after photo until a good one was captured. I didn’t do it that way, I cheated. I placed the coin on top of a monopod. I used a tripod that was tall enough to attach a horizontal boom arm to hold the camera about 1 foot higher than the coin. How was the shutter tripped with this arrangement? I mounted a gopro camera on the end of the boom arm. I turned on the wifi. I used an old iPhone as the monitor. While I posed, my able assistant held the phone and pushed the red button 5 or 6 times. All the exposures were made with no vibration to shake the boom arm. The coin is a 1922 Silver Dollar that I received from Grandma Peterson when I was a kid. Or did I remove it from her purse when she wasn't looking? No, I received it as a gift.
ISO 100, 3mm, f2.8, 1/955 sec
One very old game of chance is the coin flip. It was used as far back as the Roman Empire. They called it Ship or Head. The coin flies up in the air while flipping and then returns. All this movement makes it extremely difficult to capture a photo of a recognizable coin and the person doing the flipping. The photographer could set up the camera and then shoot photo after photo until a good one was captured. I didn’t do it that way, I cheated. I placed the coin on top of a monopod. I used a tripod that was tall enough to attach a horizontal boom arm to hold the camera about 1 foot higher than the coin. How was the shutter tripped with this arrangement? I mounted a gopro camera on the end of the boom arm. I turned on the wifi. I used an old iPhone as the monitor. While I posed, my able assistant held the phone and pushed the red button 5 or 6 times. All the exposures were made with no vibration to shake the boom arm. The coin is a 1922 Silver Dollar that I received from Grandma Peterson when I was a kid. Or did I remove it from her purse when she wasn't looking? No, I received it as a gift.
ISO 100, 3mm, f2.8, 1/955 sec