Behind the camera

6 months ago

Heeeyho Readers! How about a behind the camera?

Ayyyiooo sexy bunch! Rains, lens fogs up, cleans, more rains. It's messing up with my brain big time. Le me makes big mess. Rain doesn't stop. Time passes and I forget to have dinner. Showers. Even more rain. Treadmill stops working. Gives up exercising and decides to edit photos. Makes tea. More tea.... That summarizes today — total madness. Good madness, partly.

I grabbed the camera to photograph my collection of coins for a future giganormous #hivecollectors post. Amidst the mess, an idea occurred me: How about a behind the camera post? Le me thinks that would make an interesting photography post; at least cooler than simply showing the final photos. So, I completely shifted the focus {no pun intended}. Instead of taking simple still photos of each coin I opted for something more elaborate {completely losing traction of time}.

Keep in mind, I'm no photography expert. Creating the best with what I have is the fun part of creating these photos. And also fiddling randomly with a bunch of sliders on Lightroom until it looks ~~crappy~~ noice. The idea here is to show what the hell goes in my mind when I'm working.

Les start

The goal is to photograph a pile of old (a few silver) coins. The words old, antique, historic tingle my mind. There must be objects that reassemble the past to fill in the picture. I go around the house collecting trinkets and pimba... throw everything on the table to see what fits.

^{50mm | f4 | ISO - 100 | Aperture priority}

A 50mm is the only lens in my disposal, which limits a bit what fits in the photo (cropped Nikon D7100). However, such limitations are quite fun. I consider it easier to force the objects into the frame rather than finding a lens that works for what I wanna do. Does that make sense? Simplification, folks.

This teeny lens from the 80's is pretty damn sensitive to light, so I generally take the photos near a window on cloudy days and use a bedside lamp to pretend I know what I'm doing {no joke}.

See below the battlefield and the war against shadows. Harsh shadows, sad; soft shadows, happy. It's weird, but that stupid lamp made a huge difference.

^{All this to photograph two coins {laughs}}

All the photos are taken using f4 — not sure why, but it's my favorite. Do you also have a sweet spot? It gives the photos that fancy blur. Playing with "layers" of objects enhance the effect; sometimes I place objects nearly glued to the lens to create a sense of depth.

^{50mm | f4 | ISO - 100 | Aperture priority}

This one took a while because the props were simply not fitting together. It takes patience to shift angles, go up and down. Camera too far would show too much; too close and I would run out of focus (manual focus lens). Here's the behind.

^{Holy mess}

Night approaches and natural light coming from the window starts to fade. To cope with that, I add another table lamp to the left of the chair. Its very soft lighting from the top kinda helps, but makes the photo no different from the others. I had in mind this idea of using some sort of red light to resemble a navigation table, when sailors used red light to preserve night vision. Here's the result.

^{50mm | f4 | ISO - 100 | Aperture priority}

My flashlight has a red light mode, but such strong LEDs were not working until putting the flashlight inside the purple bag. Nonsense? No idea. It took a lot of fiddling around. I'm still unsure of the result.

^{Different, to say the least}

As opposed to professionals who know exactly what to do to achieve certain objectives, my photos are the product of chaos. Nothing is controlled. Often, a post idea simply goes to trash because the photos didn't work. This time I quite like 'em.

Lastly, I switched the same photos to B&W and added a bit (quite a lot) of grain to see what happens.

Do you enjoy still photos?

This is by far my most favorite photography style, along with landscape. It gives unlimited sources to exercise creativity. It's relaxing. And challenging at times. Curious to see your line of thought on this kind of photo.

I hope that you've enjoyed this behind the camera post. Till the #collection post, where I'll show a bit of Brazilian history.

Peace.

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~Love ya all,

Disclaimer: The author of this post is a convict broke backpacker, who has travelled more than 10.000 km hitchhiking and more than 5.000 km cycling. Following him may cause severe problems of wanderlust and inquietud. You've been warned.