Annoying Man With A Camera

OK, so not really making money, but I've found another thing that doesn't mind being photographed. Coinage. In fact I've found money to be something totally devoid of feelings or morality or ethics, which I'm quite grateful for given how much I have abused it over the years.

However this is a little post to demonstrate progress, or better still How Not To Learn To Do Something. Take me into a shop, where I can't find what I want, supermarket, clothes shop, camera shop selling millions of tiny and very specific accessories, do I ask for help? No, absolutely not. I am unable to do this. I will quite happily, or unhappily, wander round the shop constructing a complex catalogue of everything irrelevant they sell, in the hope that I will chance across what I'm looking for. Don't ask me why, some childhood traumatic experience relating to abandonment maybe.

So it is with my progress in learning how to use new computer software like Photoshop. Do I book myself on a course? No. I skulk around Youtube watching various small and perfectly formed videos and attempt to piece it all together in my own head.

So it was with learning how to produce photos that were entirely in focus from the front to the back. This is something that can be difficult in everything but the most wide-angle shot, where you can sometimes set the focus point to near infinity and pretty much the whole picture is in focus. Mostly with everything else, part of the photo will be out of focus. It also comes up in macro photography where the bit of the picture that is in focus (depth of field) is so narrow, it literally doesn't even cover the width of an insect.

Excellent example of a narrow depth of field - fly eyes bang in focus, rest of fly not - and you can see a 'stripe' of leaf in focus that also demonstrates it

There are photographic ways around this of course, there is a sort of triangular relationship between the shutter speed (slower speed lets in more light), the aperture (smaller apertures give better depth of field but let in less light) and the ISO (film speed, how sensitive it is to light), and you can mess about with these three - or alternatively you can just flood it with arc lights, but macro photographers tend to frown at this because you're supposed to be photographing the insect, not frying it.

However, one way to do it, is the ubiquitous 'stacking' technique - used for different reasons in astrophotography, but in macro photography, you can simply take lots of pictures, with slightly different focus points and blend them together. It's got to be the same broad image to be able to stack them, so it is impossible to do in the field, and that brings us to the other no-no in macro photography; it's not considered the done thing to photograph dead bugs, put simply.

You could glue one on a stick and take hours photographing every micromillimetre of it, but it wouldn't be accepted among your photographic peers. I have done it once with a dead butterfly I found, and I have to say, I felt spiritually soiled afterwards and I never shared it...

So we come to the bit about Learning How To Do Stuff. I found a youtube video which talked about some basic photostacking techniques you could use for landscape photography. You load all the pictures up, put masks on them (no I don't know why either) and then paint out the bits that aren't in focus.

So this first picture, is an example of a penny. Or rather it's 11p. It is 11 photographs of a penny, photographed with different focus points, and painstakingly blended together by hand, using a mouse, and leaving me with a slightly more frozen shoulder and slightly worse eyesight, as well as several unproductive hours older. However it looks quite good, I think.

So, I have done many photos this way. And quite by chance, the other week, I discovered that you can load the lot into Photoshop, and press the 'AutoBlend' button, and it does it all for you.

Second attempt, using More Money is below.

Both photographs taken with Sigma 150mm macro, first shot taken with Canon 70D, second with Canon 5DSr.  Tiny dents in the £1 coin on the left probably due to Sookie, my dog, trying to eat it. — Both photographs taken with Sigma 150mm macro, first shot taken with Canon 70D, second with Canon 5DSr. Tiny dents in the £1 coin on the left probably due to Sookie, my dog, trying to eat it.

First photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 2 hours editing it.

Second photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 5 minutes editing it. To be fair, 4 of those minutes were spent with my computer going 'AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH what the hell are you expecting me to do with this lot????' The working file size was 254Mb, or, put it another way, 8,000 times larger than the memory held by the Apollo Command Module used in the first moon landing.

Progress. Very slow progress. But at least I didn't bother anyone...

Even an Annoying Man With A Camera can't annoy stars.

Having lived in UK cities all my life, with all their inevitable light pollution, I didn't really know stars existed, until I visited New Zealand and the Coromandel Peninsula, and I looked up and saw the Milky Way for the first time. WOW - where have I BEEN all my life????

Cameras are not very good at managing extremes of contrast, so where your eye can cope quite happily with a sunlit sky and a landscape, your camera will quite often over expose one or under expose the other. But in astrophotography, they really come into their own. You can look up into a night sky and see maybe 10 stars, but take a photograph of it with even the most rudimentary DSLR and you'll be amazed at what the sensor has picked up.

So we start with this -

And the camera sees this...

This is the same image. To be fair I've faked the effect slightly because obvs I can't demonstrate to you how your eyes work, you are looking at this with them, so I've simulated the effect with the original picture, and the same picture, that has been worked on in Photoshop to enhance the contrast a bit.

I thought this was absolutely mind blowing, and I was pretty impressed with my own handiwork, but a quick search on the internet will show you that these are beginner pictures compared to some images that the big boys (and girls) post on the net. Some of them are actually boys, too - one of the most spectacular shots I've ever seen was posted by a 17 year old who has obviously spent far too much time on his own, and who is headed for a successful career in astrophotography, just as surely as his genetic line will die out with him.

The camera will pick up the faintest points of light, so faint that it will actually pick up stray photons that hit the sensor - and register that as a 'star'. So although this is pretty, it's not that accurate. Some of the stars you're seeing, are not there.

Of course in reality quite a few of the stars you are seeing are not there - they burnt out billions of years ago, but their light just hasn't finished getting to us yet.

There is a whole realm of utter geekdom in astrophotography, not just in the equipment, where surprisingly the actual camera is the cheap bit, but also in the post processing where you truly descend into Astronerdia - however I'll try to chip away at that massive topic in another post.

For this post, I'd like to concentrate on what I had to do to get this shot.

So picture Sutton Bank, a 'dark sky' site about 40 minutes drive away. I had to wait for a clear night, of which there have been, let me see, in 2016, three of them...

In the UK we're blessed with three different weather systems, one coming from the arctic, one from Europe and one from the Atlantic, and they all fight with each other, giving us mostly, well, clouds really. Which is partly why British people are so obsessed with the weather. So actually getting a night that is clear, and REMAINS clear while you drive for 40 minutes to Sutton Bank, is a challenge.

These shots were taken in Summer so, with the long summer days, that means waiting until about 2.00 in the morning to take the shot. It's getting less attractive, isn't it?

So, waiting up until 1.00am, then bundling the tripod, camera, two layers of thermals (yes, I know, in JULY) and a hefty wrench, into my car. The wrench is not actually essential photographic equipment, but a safety precaution which will become obvious shortly.

Finally I arrive at the car park of the Sutton Bank Visitor Centre. I pay my £1.50 car parking charge, even though nobody will ever know I was there, because I had an honest chip embedded at birth.

Interesting thing, waiting in my car in pitch darkness for the sky to clear, is a whole lot creepier than standing outside it. If you have the interior car lights on, all you see outside is a wall of black, harbouring axe murderers, chainsaw wielders, venomous snakes, crocodiles (I have a fertile imagination).

There are strange noises. Some startling - sitting in your car with all the lights off and the doors locked, when you haven't fully read the car manual can, for instance lead to your car alarm going off. More unsettling are these strange dull thump noises coming out the dark woods. Days later I was told these were conkers, dropping off the trees. It was that quiet they sounded like poachers taking pot shots in the dark.

Sutton Bank has an atmosphere all it's own at 2.00am. I'd like to say quiet and peaceful, but peaceful isn't quite the right word. Menacing, threatening, intimidating, 'they found his body in some woodland, drained of blood' those are better words. Now you understand the need for the wrench.

I had driven around up there once in the early hours, trying to make myself feel more comfortable. There are occasional farmsteads up there, usually with a yard lit with one solitary light, and a lot of dark corners and the vague feeling that these premises have witnessed a lot of inbreeding over the centuries, producing a lot of closely related cousins who have an unhealthy interest in chainsaws.

So that didn't make me feel any better.

I set the camera up on the tripod, with a manual wide-angle lens (Samyang, really good optics, completely manual so no autofocus - but autofocus is useless for astrophotography anyway). I used something called the '600 rule' to decide what the exposure should be - it's a calculation based on the focal length of the lens, that will allow you to expose the sensor for the maximum amount of time without getting 'star trails' as the stars move across the sky.

It means that with a wide angle lens you can expose the sensor for about 20 seconds for each picture. It actually takes 40 seconds to take a shot like that because after you've taken it, the camera takes another picture, with exactly the same settings, but without exposing the sensor. This is because the rays of light are so dim that tiny fluctuations in the sensor can appear like photons - so having taken two shots, the camera compares the image shot with the dark shot, and if there are 'stars' on both, it knows the one on the image shot is a fault, and cancels it out.

To take really good astrophotos, photographers use the same technique by shooting sometimes hundreds of photos of the same image, and software can compare all the photos, delete out the anomalies that come from stray photons, atmospheric waves, passing jets, and produce one, much sharper, picture.

This picture is compiled from about 30 photos and has been stacked into one image. Posterity will judge whether it's better than the ones above, but theoretically at least, it SHOULD be a more accurate picture because there shouldn't be any stray photons or faults masquerading as stars.

Canon 70D, Samyang 14mm manual lens, F2.8, ISO 1600, 25 second exposure (30 images)

Of course, while you're up there in the dark, taking these multiple 40 second photos, time passes, you get colder. Random people drive past in their cars and you wonder idly what you would do if one of them stopped, and say, 4 burly guys with a chainsaw got out...

You keep thinking it was such a trek to get out here, I'm going to stick it out as long as I can. And you don't know until you got home whether you got anything that's any good or not.

One time I went to Sutton Bank, it was winter, so I could take advantage of the shorter days.

Cold, shorter days.

I stayed out too long, and the reason I called it a day was because it was getting increasingly difficult to stop my breath fogging up the lens, and I was vaguely conscious that my fingers were not working as well. On this occasion, I wasn't in the car park, but deep in the woods, where, paradoxically, I felt safer.

I looked down at my tripod, and saw this.

Time to go.

I was having to take my glasses off to look at the back of my camera and so around this point I put them down and decided I should call it a day and pack up.

Put them down.

Where?

I'd just put them down somewhere in the grass. No idea where. No matter, I thought, I'll just use the torch and get the reflection off the glass. But by this point all the grass was covered in ice too, so everything was glittering and reflecting, and I gradually realised that a) I wasn't going to be able to find my way back to the car, and b) I wouldn't be able to drive home anyway...

Oops. Obviously it wasn't just my hands that had been affected. Incredibly stupid thing to do, meaning I was going to have to ring my partner and ask if he'd drive 40 minutes, then hike into the darkness somewhere to come and get me, because I'd mislaid my glasses. Otherwise there was a pretty good chance I was going to die out here of exposure.

About 15 minutes of frantic searching later, I found them, so I'm pleased to say that the outcome of this story is I still have my glasses, and a relationship.

So ended one of my last forays to Sutton Bank. I dare say there will be more. One moonless night, the stars will call to me, and I will away.

It's still easier than street photography.

Making Money!

Descent into Astrophotography