Oct 28

neat!

KR0_7734.JPG

if anybody notices what is slightly wrong with this photo, you may get a little write up about it.

BINGO time: Jennifer nails it at #7! (and karla drives it in a little bit further. mjuboy cheated, he already asked me on flickr. congrats BG, on knowing exactly who is gonna get it done. this is why you’ll be the boss and everyone else a lowly employee!!)

this is a cool effect i discovered, for anyone using a camera with a manually focusable lens (any SLR, film or digital will fit the bill). it requires a little bit of trial and error with a huge helping of luck.

set up a long exposure, something like 20-30 sec., on a tripod. make sure you have an external timer to count out the time (like a watch maybe, or a mobile phone). focus your scene manually, and trip the shutter. at exactly half the exposure time, move the focus ring quickly to an out of focus position and leave it be till the end of the exposure.

at this point, any bright points of light, such as our streetlamps have come out well-exposed but their energy-deficient reflections are less bright and come out almost uniformly unsharp. the rest of the scene is also affected by some unsharpness.

some sharp people, like Jennifer or Karla, might notice i said ‘quickly’ above. what happens when you don’t do it quickly is something like this:

missiles away!

also cool, but not as mysterious. this is similar to the zoom blur, except that i used a macro lens which changes magnification as i change focus and hence the effect. and this is where the ‘double reflection’ comes in. i apparently changed the focus point twice. hehe :)

apologies for the nerdery, and the fake chtulhu invocation. maybe that was just the hunger talking after all.

11 thoughts on “neat!”

  1. Ok. I’ve been staring at it for awhile now. And the only thing that I can see that’s slight *wrong* is that there’s a reflection down below in the center, but nothing up top.

    Is that it? Is it, aif? Is it? Tell me!!!!!!!!

  3. Oh man. I don’t know!

    Jennifer’s gotta come over here and figure it out. She’s the one who got a perfect score on that stupid test thingy.

    ….I’m not even gonna admit what I got.

  5. There’s nothing on land to cause the 4th from the left reflection.
    There’s a candle flame-looking reflection, but nothing on land to account for it.

  7. I’m wondering why the top lights are in focus, but the small ones beneath are not. I think the problem with this photo is that aif was not drinking quite enough.

  8. I looked at the larger version and I think I read from the wrong book because now all I can hear is the stomping of unimaginably large feet and a whispered “he comes, he comes.”

  9. I am puzzled by the double reflections in the lower half (the bowling pin shapes) for each of the bright starburst lights in the upper half. Nothing else has this double image.

Comments are closed.