guess the tv theme

Not sure why I woke up thinking of this TV show theme song.

…

There's a change in the status quo.
Gonna need all the help that we can get.

According to our new arrival,
Life is more than mere survival.
And we just might live the good life yet.

Now you probably have it stuck in your head too.

camera repair in DC

For several years now, I've been trying to find a camera shop in DC to clean my old Canon Elan IIe 35mm film camera. After checking the lenses and the camera body myself and having multiple shops look at it, I couldn't determine why there was a small vertical line appearing at the top of every picture. Click on the photo below to enlarge it and find the hairline in the top center.


Photo by Jessica Hang
Taken with a 50mm/1.8 lens on a Canon Elan IIe

The local camera retailers were willing to take it for a thorough cleaning, but it would cost about $150 and take up to six weeks to clean it because they would have to ship it off to an expert to clean it. I tried calling Canon too, and their deal was similar: ship the camera to a service center to be checked and cleaned for a similar price and length of time. At that price, it's almost easier to get a new film camera body—they run about $300 these days.

One of the last local options I tried in DC was Strauss Photo Technical Service. It's not too far from Gallaudet University in Northeast. Not the prettiest of storefronts, but the people inside were great. Unlike the other camera retailers I tried in the past, they actually knew what they were talking about from the start of our conversation. I brought in a print that had the hairline in it along with my camera and showed the technician at the counter. He took my camera into the back room for about five minutes and came back saying that he found the tiny piece of hair (it was actually an artifact from one of the light seals) and got rid of it.

He reminded me of what I had forgotten since college physics. In the optics chapter, it describes how the image behind a lens is inverted top-to-bottom and left-to-right. When one sees something at the top of a print, it means that behind the lens, it's really appearing at the bottom of the frame. All the people who looked at the camera before were looking at the top of the frame instead of the bottom.

When I offered to pay, he said it was so simple that there would be no charge. The rest of the camera was still clean and in great working condition, so there wasn't any need for a full cleaning. I couldn't have left the shop any happier. After several years, my problem was fixed (subsequent rolls of film don't have the hairline in it) and I didn't have to shell out $150 to do it. There's no question that if I ever have a camera issue again, I'll be going back to Strauss, even if it will end up costing $150. I haven't found another shop in DC where the people are so qualified (it's hard to find people who do old camera repairs these days) and the service was good (camera retailers tend to be on the pretentious side at times).

So yeah, if you have an old camera that needs repair in DC, I whole-heartedly recommend Strauss.

website redesign

The few regular readers out there might have noticed a change to my website design last week or so. Changes are still in progress as I am working to get the page and type design the way I want it to. A summary of what I am trying to do:

• change from a dark color scheme to a neutral color scheme to make things easier to read and to make it easier to discern color in the photographs
• changing the typeface of the blog post from the sans-serif Trebuchet font to the serif Georgia font and increasing the type size to make it easier to read, particularly the occasional Chinese characters I put in the posts
• widening the body of the posts to balance it out with the larger type size
• moving the right-hand sidebar out of the way to allow for page-width size content like side-by-side comparisons of photos or posting of more detailed sketches and diagrams (in progress)
• providing for a index of all my posts so I (and readers) can find things I've written about in the past (in progress)
• making room for more permanent content I want to provide, like articles, how-tos, and eventually book chapters (in progress)

I'm trying to go for a simpler, cleaner design, while making the information on the page a little more dense. I'm treating it as an exercise in information design, while following the tenets of software engineering: incremental improvement, always having a working system. The author is appreciative of readers' patience during this design upgrade and welcomes feedback on the new design as it develops :)

third semester kickoff

I'll be starting my third semester this week in my Master of Software Engineering program. I'll be taking Software Systems Development and Software Design and Implementation. So, here starts another 14 weeks of homework and occasionally a blog post on what I'm learning :)

headshot: my first production photo project

The following post is a compilation of notes from my first production photography project. The goal was to take a headshot, appropriate for a reporter, but without access to either a studio or a light kit.

Not having access to a studio and never doing a headshot before, I turned to the web to do some research on what I could do. Photo.net had a good article on portrait photography, particularly the section on Stealing a Location.

What if you don't have a big open space with diffuse light and a neutral background? Steal one. If you live in the United States, a vast open space with light pouring in from expensive skylights is as close as your nearest art museum or university. With a 200mm lens set to f/2.8, the background will be thrown out of focus.

Unfortunately, most of the museums in DC do not have windows at all -- neo-Classical architecture is all about columns. There is one Modernist museum in DC though, I.M. Pei's East Building of the National Gallery of Art. The East Building has an atrium with pink marble walls (really a light gray limestone with a warm hue) and is topped with pyramidal glass skylights, which are screened by aluminum rods to reduce the sunlight. The photo below is a picture of the wall with light projected from the skylight, with shadows from the screen of aluminum rods appearing as fine vertical lines.



Cool light pattern on the walls -- I'm guessing that was an intentional effect by the designer. My intent however was to blur the walls by setting the camera to a wide aperture (smaller f-number) so the patterns in the stone, the joints, and the light patterns become non-discernible and non-distracting but provide some variation in the background so that it's not just flat gray. Something like in the following photo.



The shoot was scheduled for a sunny afternoon to get the most light coming through the skylights. I arrived early to take some test shots on my own to check the light levels at specific locations in the atrium. I found the best lighting was not on the ground floor lobby, but rather on the highest bridge across the atrium. The bridges blocked some of the light from reaching the ground floor, so it appeared slightly darker compared to being on the bridge where it was as close to the skylights as we could get. Plus, the highest bridge in the atrium led to an empty/closed exhibit space so there was no foot traffic at all on it.

I put so much energy into light, background, and color that the camera settings seemed relatively simple. I used a 50-150mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom lens on my Canon Digital Rebel XT (equivalent to a 70-200mm on a full frame camera). Using the longer focal length of a telephoto lens results in flatter perspective, which generally results in more flattering portraits and better background blurring. I set the camera to ISO 200, evaluative metering, aperture priority mode, and set the aperture at f/3.5. The shutter speeds the camera was choosing (around 1/500 sec) seemed to make sense and the test shots looked fine. Lastly, I put the camera in continuous shooting mode so the camera would keep snapping for as long as I held the shutter release button down. I like snapping three or so photos at a time to account for changing facial expressions.

After meeting up with J, we started with a session of about 50 photos. I was fortunate that she handled all the things I knew nothing about: hair, wardrobe, and makeup. In addition, she had a good vision of what she wanted. I had a good general idea of what a headshot for a reporter should look like, but I didn't know how to direct the poses to get to that point, so one could say J self-directed her poses. After the 50 photos, I fired up the laptop to start looking at what we had. (The camera's LCD screen is just way too small to tell if the focus and details are correct.) After narrowing the choices down and seeing any quick improvements we could make, we went back out on to the atrium bridge and shot about another 50 frames. Back at the laptop, we found one that stood out from the rest and it ended up being our final selection. All in all, it took about an hour -- much faster than I originally thought it would take.

Later back at home, I tried a few crops and decided on a square crop. I experimented with adjusting some of the levels and the contrast/brightness, but I found that I was happy with the original exposure and that the image looked best without any additional post-processing. The below photo is the final result.


83mm focal length (133mm equivalent on a full frame)
f/3.5, 1/400 sec, ISO 200, handheld, no flash

Lessons I learned from this project: (1) light and background are the dominating issues when taking portraits outside of a studio, (2) I need to pay more attention to poses and expressions to eventually get better at directing, and (3) bringing a laptop to location is a great way to check results and make sure everyone is happy before leaving.

In a broader sense, I'm realizing that photography is very much about proper planning and attention to detail. The smallest shadows make a huge difference in the end result, but one has to be able to recognize issues and then plan and/or react accordingly to resolve them. Strangely enough, I'm carrying lessons from software engineering (my day job) into photography. Sort of makes sense as the smallest of software bugs can create the largest problems. Pay attention to the user/customer's needs, address the greatest risks first by experimenting/prototyping to understand them well enough to mitigate them, plan on at least two iterations to end up at the final product, while re-evaluating after each iteration. Thankfully, digital photography lends itself well for quick feedback, making iteration feasible :)

non-square format

Ok, so not everyone likes the square format. I'm not saying that the square format is better than other formats, I'm just saying the square format is novel and it works well in certain circumstances. Below are five more photos from Arlington Neighborhood Day in the more traditional 3:2 format, something you'd normally see on a 4 by 6 inch print.


Carrying the flag, 30mm, f/8, 1/160 sec, ISO 200


Organically grown, 30mm, f/8, 1/250 sec, ISO 200


Leading the troupe, 30mm, f/5.6, 1/500 sec, ISO 200


Two kids in parade, 30mm, f/5.6, 1/500 sec, ISO 200


Every parade needs a fire truck :) 30mm, f/5.6, 1/500 sec, ISO 200

square format

Most digital photos are taken at a 3:2 width to height ratio, same as on a 35mm camera. However, some cameras such as the medium format Rolleiflex and Hasselblad (used by Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Diane Arbus, among many others), as well as the old consumer Polaroid produced a square image. I find the square image pretty novel, but I can't plunk down the insane amount of cash for a square format camera, so I've been emulating it by using a square crop on my 3:2 originals. The square format seems to have a few advantages: (1) it never needs to be rotated 90 degrees, (2) it works really well for portraits, and (3) it surprisingly captures background really well.

Below are some of my square crops from Arlington Neighborhood Day 2007. Click on the photos to leave comments if you'd like. The rest of the photos, square or not, are in my Neighborhood Day Parade photo set.


30mm, 1/160 sec, f/8, ISO 200, aperture priority mode


30mm, 1/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual


30mm, 1/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual


30mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual


30mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual (the top of this photo is slightly overexposed)


30mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual


30mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual


30mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual


30mm, 1/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, manual

I didn't have a zoom lens with me, so the crops were almost a necessity to get better aesthetics. Being able to clip away most of the overexposed sky in these square crops also helped to save/improve a number of the photos in the set. In afternoon sun, it's easy to end up either with an overexposed sky or an underexposed subject. Some more research is in order to find out how to get it right.

my new circa 1977 camera

I received my new (to me) Canon Canonet G-III QL17 today, a small 35mm rangefinder camera manufactured and sold from 1972 to 1982.


My new camera (actual photo).

This should be a fun camera for me to experiment and learn on. It has a 40mm f/1.7 lens, great for working in low light. From what I've seen people have been able to get some great images from this camera. Heather Champ, flickr community manager, manager of the Mirror Project, and JPG magazine co-founder/editor, uses one (along with three other cameras) and posts photos from her Canonet. There's a whole Canonet group and photo pool on flickr too.

Now I need to go find some film.

a reason not to use the flash

Let's take a look at two photos and compare.


My photo, victim to another camera's flash. Notice the performer wincing away from the flash as well.


My photo as I intended it, illuminated by firelight.

The electronic flash does have its place though. Counterintuitive as it may be, the best time to use the built-in flash on a camera is during the middle of the sunny afternoon. The flash works well to fill in shadows under a subject's eyes or a shadow cast on a subject's face by their hat.

As always, there are no hard and fast rules. Sometimes the flash is the only option at night when there is no other light source but you need/want to take a photo of something directly (up to about 10 feet) in front of you. Better to have the photo and have it look a little odd then not to have the photo at all.