Primary Colors, the making of...

[32BT]

Da Beat is very content with himself for once as he’s finally put in the effort needed to recreate one of his many crappy pictures to bring it to a higher level of standard. He was there at the right time & place, and managed to catch an unanticipated small window of opportunity, with the light a perfect gold, the pictorial elements in reasonable alignment, and the sky nearly perfectly clear. Anybody remotely familiar with the local climate would know that the latter alone would make this a coincidental experience of unprecedented serendipity.

But serendipity is Da Beats middle name, so he confidently set off for the shoot. In this thread he will describe his endeavour.

Firstly, he wants to present an interpretation, to explain why he likes this image and what sets it apart from merely being just a set of pretty colors, despite what its name suggests. He is reluctant to call it an artist’s statement, knowing full well the sentiments on this forum regarding the same. Feel free to skip the boring part to move on to the even more boring technicalities of the shoot.

[32BT]

Fear, Freedom, and Safety
We live in a relatively structured world. We generally want to structure the world because we tend to feel safe in a familiar environment. We fear we might get lost on unfamiliar territory,
Industry, science, and technology help us to structure our world. So much so, that it has become ingrained in our society as a dominant formfactor. Industry and technology however favor uniformity over pluriformity and instead of feeling safe and free, we feel a pressure to conform.

In a sense it seems we’ve introduced a technocratic uniformity as a barrier between us as individuals (in a relatively structured world), and our fear of getting lost. In doing so however we’ve also created a barrier between us and our sense of natural freedom. Apparently our desire for safety and structure needs to be balanced with our will to be free. They are complementary but opposing emotions.

Emotions of course are the colors of life, and given the allusion to primal emotions, it will be easy to understand how we come to the image name.

So, our sense of freedom (sky) apparently doesn’t outweigh our fear of getting lost (roof), and we’ve build a wall of uniformity in between as protective measure for the structured world (street) we inhabit as individuals (posts).

[32BT]

"You may be listening to Jimmy Hendrix, but you ain’t hearing him."
(From “White men can’t jump!”)

Abstraction
To better understand how Da Beat came to his interpretation, let’s sidetrack to another, more abstract image, and try to explain why it can still have universal applicability. This image strongly appeals to our sense of individuality, the round peg in a square hole, feeling misplaced in a uniform world, a sense of watching from the sidelines, sentiments we all may have experienced at some point in our lives, so it is fairly reasonable a person with normal experiences can relate to the image, even though it only depicts structure and geometry.

Because of this universal recognition, without direct representation of a facial expression for example, it becomes an abstraction of the concept. Similarly, the original image can be thought of as an abstraction of the concepts described earlier, it depicts after all, similar elements, but in different relational balance.

Before you go all in on the above drivel, please be aware that I’m trying to explicate the inexplicable. It is not meant as an exact description like exact science. It is about how emotions are evoked by certain elements and their placement in the image. By viewing this image long enough and often enough, Da Beat came to his insight of opposing sentiments, which in itself is a worthy existential merit for any image. It doesn’t mean anybody else might see the same abstraction, but with this explanation i’m sure you’ll be looking at this image just a little differently.

So, with the controversial part behind us, let’s move on to the even more boring technicalities.

[JNB_Rare]

Is there more to come? Apologies if I'm interrupting the flow.

For me, it's a wonderfully successful picture with or without the words. I know that some think an image must stand on its own (and this image does, IMO), and they are against an accompanying title or text. But I like titles, and I'm always interested in "the story" if it's available. While the story/context can't make a mediocre image into a great image, the appreciation of a great image can be further enhanced by story/context. In this regard, photography is no different than other forms visual arts, or music or literature.

[32BT]

Is there more to come? Apologies if I'm interrupting the flow.

Yes, there will be more. Need to scrape some illustrative images together and write some more text.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Thanks for elucidating. I was under the impression that the part you call "Uniformity" was actually Trump's Mexican wall.

[Rob C]

Thanks for elucidating. I was under the impression that the part you call "Uniformity" was actually Trump's Mexican wall.

Now I understand that, Eric: it's an existential situation for it at the moment, and much doubt lingers over its eventual paternity - if any. It could seen as a simple illustration of virgin birth, but on the mudane level... of course; some here will confuse that with party politics and tv reality, but we're used to that now, so little harm will come from it.

Unless, of course, it's a chequered wall. You need no advice or warning from me on what that will do for eyesight, especially in bright desert sunlight; of course, it could be a massive advertising scoop and marketing victory for RayBan. Such a wall could be seen from deeper space, offering stiff competition to the Chinese who really do need to spend something on R&D on that score. They are sticking with the same old same old iteration for far too long. (I won't even mention excuses about planning permission licences by canton - that's their problem.)

[Rob C]

Yes, there will be more. Need to scrape some illustrative images together and write some more text.

But Oscar, there's no need for illustrations: artist statements are always at loggerheads with the perceived reality of product, and there's as much merit to statements on their own as coupled. Indeed, there is often more art displayed in the statement than in the subject of the statement - free-flowing fantasy reigns supreme!

As Brian Duffy declared on-camera: don't believe anything an artist tells you - they are all liars! Now, what was his state of self-assesment on that score? To be or not to be (an artist)?

;-)

Rob

[32BT]

Equipment
Da Beat ran out of money at some point in his life. It’s not like he was spending copious amounts of “other people’s money” or anything, but owning a house with a mortgage is a little different in his locale from most other places. The banks here really like their moneys more than the real-estate that supposedly backs up their loan.

But that’s all irrelevant, we know how banks are, we didn’t manage to change anything fundamentally, so it will happen again to other people at some point, but Da Beat is no longer burdened by insolvability. It did require selling his hard earned Canon photographic equipment, including a perfect copy of the original 24-70mm and the fixed 200mm 2.8 which could cut holes in a sensor, so sharp it was, but at the same time could provide the most sumptuous backgroundblur ever.

After a year or so working a mind-numbing job in a cafetaria (yes, really Rob, and you thought a withering pension was bad), Da Beat managed to scrape some money together to purchase a pocketcam. After some deliberation he opted for the Sony WX350 and HX60, both purchased at a discount, and eventually hope to settle for one of them. Good value for the money if you think about it: 20 megapixels at 200euros, which translates to only 1 cent for a 1000 pixels, which unfortunately is exactly what you get: 20 million of the most dreadful pixels ever, the phrase “a dime a dozen” comes to mind, and that would be the most favorable thing to say.

What is great about those pocketcams is that you can really carry them everywhere and have a little more reach and control than with a mobilephone cam. The imagestabilisation really does help when it is needed, but it doesn’t help when it is not needed. These are the smallest sensors possible, so there is no controllable depth of field to speak of, which is great for architectural photography and the like, but you certainly wouldn’t want to use it for specialty portraitshots.

Furthermore, some of the lensartifacts are corrected in camera, so you get totally straight lines in the image, unfortunately, chromatic aberrations remain. I don’t quite get that.

Oh, and these cams do not do RAW.

What?

Yes, you heard that right. No RAW. It’s in-camera JPG. period.

Just goes to show that these cameras are meant for experts only, because you got to get it right in camera. Luckily, there is somewhat more control than would be noticeable at first sight, so even the WX350 can be adjusted to do something useful when desired.

But armed with his 8 year old laptop, Da Beat is not deterred at all. He remembers stacking images to great effect on similar excruciatingly dreadful pixels from an ipad, and so, stacking would be the route to go. Luckily, Da Beat still owns his old Manfrotto tripod, and these camera’s connect to mobile phones as a way of remote control, so he should be good to go. Of course, semi-auto-everything cams provide a few hurdles of their own.

Attached images show the camera on the scene. This was actually the day before when there was too much moisture in the sky which will turn white with the sun directly to the side. For reasons previously mentioned, a relatively constant blue sky was desired, although I figured that I could change that in post, if a new opportunity wouldn't present itself.

[32BT]

Since the weather here isn’t really cooperative if you desire sunlight, there was ample time to fiddle with some code on the laptop to create something resembling stacking software. Naive as Da Beat was, he figured he’d just have to stack images on top of eachother.

Not so.

There is something peculiar about these pocketcam stabilisations. They are always on, and somehow have intelligence build-in, in order to know when to be on or when to be off. If you mount the camera on a tripod it automagically goes off. It will show a small icon representing a tripod to confirm its findings, which seemed to provide a bit of confidence that it turned off.

But if you subsequently connect to a mobile phone for remote control purposes, it will only work in single shot mode and, more annoyingly, it forgets about its stabilisation setting. This obviously isn’t ideal if you want perfectly aligned pixels. We need to stack a lot of images to fight off the noise, so we really need to align the images. Additionally, the remote control method also makes the camera refocus each time, regardless of how it was set prior to connecting the remote.

I wasn’t planning on doing focus-stacking at all.

Burst Mode
The other option available is a continuous mode which will shoot a burst of 10 images (which works pretty good considering the amount of data to be stowed), but it only works with direct control, it is not available with a timer function. So, Da Beat’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, as I believe the saying goes: you either use a remote, shoot a single picture each time, and the imagestabiliser screws up alignment, or… you shoot a burst of 10, but your finger on the release will screw up alignment.

Still not deterred, Da Beat simply build an alignment option in his stacking solution. He was planning on trying to do some night-sky imaging soon, so he'd be needing software alignment anyway.

It works brilliantly, he can now shoot a burst of 10 images handholding the cam, and still get beautifully aligned, noise-reduced images. The imagestabilisation works well enough apparently to keep the burst of 10 images within reasonable limits.

Attached a single burst of 10 images with alignment offset, shot from the tripod. It is necessary to check individual images, as there is an off-chance that the sensor is actually moving while capturing. For the main image, i wanted to have at least 30 images to reduce noise and get something resembling actual texture.

[32BT]

Example of handheld burst shot noise reduction.

Notice that the noise has a reasonable look in light conditions, almost like texture, but that the same "texture" appears in the sky. Clearly, in the shadow areas, or the darkblue door, 10 shots helps a lot. Alignment is off by more than 20 pixels for some of the images. The software uses the most occurring fractional offset as zero-reference. This will reduce the amount of resampling necessary.

Notice the chromatic aberration around the handlebars...

[BobDavid]

huh?

[32BT]

Location
Why then was it such coincidence and serendipity? Well, the original shot was during early afternoon, the sun was well behind the camera, and the whole thing is equally lit, though of course the posts will then cast their shadow right up the wall creating unwanted shapes that attract unwanted attention.

The shoot therefore has to take place at a later time when the shadows will only be cast on the ground, but since the posts are pretty close to the wall, we can not be so late that the shadows have moved 90degrees perpendicular to the wall, as that will mean that we no longer have the wall properly lit.

Da Beat had already determined that the time between 16:30pm and 17:00pm would be correct, but he hadn’t figured how much change a day or two makes. And in addition, the clock had changed because of daylight savings. He did manage to arrive in time though, and had ample time to setup the camera in position.

At first he chose a position as far as possible from the wall, figuring that a telecentric perspective would require the least amount of lenscorrection and the straightest lines etc. The actual difference in position was not so great as to affect the distance-perception between the wall and the posts. The tripod is extended as high as possible to alleviate any perspective issues that might need correction in post.

Da Beat then waited for the shadows to move and started the burst shots with a couple of different settings. The sun moves quickly though, and for his own assurance he decided to move the camera forward and take another couple of burst shots. Da Beat ain’t very happy with the lack of a viewfinder, because his already severe tunnelvision is well saturated with information if it includes more than the picture at hand.

Of course, he’s glad he did change position, since that small difference changes the visibility of the backwall of the roof, and frankly he believes that makes or breakes the image, since it takes away from the black-hole feeling that the roof should exhibit.

[32BT]

The original shot, earlier in the day. Notice the relatively obtrusive shadows. This was also shot with the Sony in-camera NR stacking, which leaves some barely noticeable but undesirable residue in evenly colored areas like the sky for example.

[32BT]

Google position:
https://goo.gl/maps/fz6nQSuXzBk