Melbourne dusk, a photo by GRehmet on Flickr.

The days might be getting shorter, but the opportunities for photos during my commute are improving again!

It’s Autumn.  That means Winter is on its way.  That also means calm mornings and sunrise on my ride to work.

Autumn also means that it is much more worthwhile carrying a camera while on my bike on the way to work!  That means the anticipation of spectacular sunrises and sunsets.

Friday 8 April 2011, in the vicinity of Flinders Street Station.

We needed to make it to Hosier lane by 6pm, and I had a bit of time to shoot a few frames on the way.

Facebook integration for a blog tends no longer to be an option – it is a necessity now. One of the aspects of this is getting the correct thumbnail image to display when sharing a post to Facebook.  Getting it working properly has frustrated me no end.  I am in good company, as can be seen by doing a Google search such as “facebook wordpress image_src“.  There is a relatively simple solution, however.

WordPress already has the ability to include a thumbnail for social media sites, known as a Featured Image.  Depending on the theme you are using, you may need to enable this functionality.  This can be done by editing the functions.php in your theme.  To enable Featured Images, add the following lines:

// Add support for Featured Images

if (function_exists('add_theme_support')) {

    add_theme_support('post-thumbnails');

    add_image_size('index-categories', 150, 150, true);

    add_image_size('page-single', 350, 350, true);

}

This will now provide you with a “Featured Image” box in the sidebar when editing a post or a page – something like this:

There is just one more step to make sure that WordPress adds the correct tags to the header of your posts to tell Facebook where to find your featured image.  There are a few plugins that can do this for you.  I chose the “FetenWeb image_src Metatag” plugin.

Once that is done, when you, or somebody else, shares one of your pages or posts on Facebook, your featured image will be used as the thumbnail for the post in their feed.  One more useful tool while you are setting things up is the Facebook URL linter, which will help you check that Facebook is correctly selecting the featured image from your posts.

It’s Friday, and on the way home I had ten minutes to spare before my train departed.

The entrance to Flinders street station never disappoints with interesting people and sights.  Fortunately I had slipped a camera into my bag this morning before I left home.

I have found street photography a challenge.  It is an art of capturing a moment, usually without any interaction with your subject.  In order to succeed, as a general rule, you do not want to draw attention to yourself.  You need to get the shot before your subject has the opportunity to focus on you.

There is also no chance to “direct your models”.  You need to capture the moments as they happen.  There is no second chance.

So often, we typecast commuters and city folk as faceless masses.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  In fact, that view denies our own humanity.  Capturing the happenings on the street, you can’t but notice the uniqueness of each person.  You also can’t help but wonder about their story.  Does the concerned expression mean that a loved one is late?  Is the train about to depart?  Will she miss the train?

As a photographic genre, street photography is beginning to hold more and more interest for me.  Not only is there the challenge of capturing the moment.  The photos present a different view to the typical images we see of sweeping streetscapes, but focus rather on the people who inhabit them.

I am a keen follower of David Hobby’s strobist blog.  One of the shots that he described, which probably impressed me the most was his levitating compact fluorescent light bulb.  So much so, that I could not resist remaking the shot.

Before going into some of the detail, I will do exactly like David, and point out that this shot comes with a health warning!  Setting this shot up involves working with live, uninsulated electrical contacts.  Mains voltage can kill you.  Do not attempt this at home unless you are comfortable with all the precautions you need to take when working with electricity.  If not, for your own sake, please do not try this.

My second point, which do I prefer, David’s shot, or mine?  David’s is much “grittier” and dramatic.  Mine is more clinical.  I did the shot not having looked at David’s for a couple of months, so I couldn’t remember exactly what his looked like.  In the end, I think I like David’s better, because it is more dramatic.

Now, here goes for the detail on the setup of the shot.  It is basically the same as David’s, but the equipment I used was slightly different.  (I have skimped a bit on the detail.  For a more detailed description of the setup, read David’s original post.)

A big part of the preparation was first to get the light bulb ready to be “levitated” in front of the camera.  This involves soldering wires to the contacts of the bulb, and attaching it to a dowel rod so that it can be held in front of the backdrop, which in my case was also a black piece of card.  In my case I carefully drilled the base of the light bulb so that the dowel could be inserted into it.  (Two bulbs were destroyed in that process.)  My first attempt at switching on the light bulb was done outside on the patio.  No matter how careful I knew I was being, I still had a sense of apprehension that something could “blow up” on me.

Next, the task of setting up the shot began.

Apart from the intriguing nature of the photo, what draws me to this shot is the fact that it acts as a very good illustration of a lot of principles of controlling light, and mixing the light from flashguns with an “ambient” source.  In this case, the shoot was done with a Canon EOS 5DmkII, using a Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens, zoomed to 105mm.

The first stage was to get the exposure of the CFL bulb itself right.  I opted for an exposure that just started to show a yellow tinge to the light from the bulb.

At this point, the base of the bulb is totally dark.  The next step was to add light to the base of the bulb, starting first from the right.

My initial shot was a bit overexposed, and I didn’t bother taking another one just with the light from camera right.  I adjusted it, and went on to add more light from camera left.

The finishing touch of course is to light up the backdrop (black posterboard) with a gelled flash.  It was interesting to experiment with a number of colours, but blue seemed to provide the best effect.  I tried putting a grid on the gelled flash, but the backdrop was just eating up too much light to allow that.

Here is the final result again, but this time using a green gel:

Essentially, in execution, the technique is the same as used by David Hobby on the strobist blog.  The exposure, and the interpretation are different, however.  The equipment used is also essentially the same, with a few small differences.  The main difference being that, instead of cardboard snoots for the flashguns illuminating the base of the light bulb, I used pieces of black foam rubber – an idea that many photographers will be familiar with from Neil van Niekerk’s blog as the “black foamie thingy“.

The resulting final setup is shown below:

The equipment list used to do the shot is quite impressive:

• 1 x Canon EOS 5DmkII
• 1 x Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS USM
• 3 x tripods – 1 for the camera, 2 for speedlites
• 3 x light stands – 1 to hold a speedlite, 1 for holding the dowel of the light bulb (in the brolly holder), 1 with a reflector arm to hold the posterboard (don’t forget the sandbag on that light stand)
• 3 x speedlites – 1 x 580EXII, 1 x 430EX, 1 x 430EZ (yes, it is still in going strong)
• 2 x 2.4GHz flash triggers and transmitter
• 1 x optical slave unit
• 2 x “black foamie thingy”
• 1 x gel holder and coloured gel
• 1 x 14W CFL light bulb
• 1 x length of electrical cord
• 1 x electrical plug (d’uh!)
• 1 x 6mm dowel rod
• a few pieces of gaffer tape
• 1 x piece of black posterboard
• 2 x clamps to hold the posterboard on the reflector arm

Not actually part of the setup for the shot, but still essential are of course a soldering iron and screw drivers and a knife to cut the hole in the posterboard to fit the dowel and wire through.

Update: 19 Feb 2011

After using the floating light bulb as a desktop background, all the little issues with the shot – like a little bit of light from the flashes illuminating the base of the bulb spilling onto the tube – were irritating me no end.  So I reshot it.  This time, using an EOS 7D allowed me flash sync speeds up to 1/250s, which gave me a little more flexibility to control the exposure of the light from the tube.  The shot at the top of this post is now one of the ones shot in the second round with the 7D.

For the record: I never get on my bike without my helmet.

This picture would be all wrong though if these two were wearing helmets.  While I might benefit from a skid lid if I were to hit the tarmac at 40km/h, these two would hardly benefit from brain buckets while tootling along at 15 to 20 km/h.

I’m all for safety, don’t get me wrong, but I do think whether or not you wear a helmet should be your own choice, not something that is dictated by laws, drawn up by politicians who probably seldom ever get on a bike!

Infrared photography is a relatively new pursuit that I have been dabbling with.  In fact, it is about six months ago that I had my old Canon Powershot G5 modified to shoot near infrared photos.

I have found shooting infrared to be a totally different experience.  It has been a very rewarding one.

Now I have selected a gallery of some of my favourite shots, which can be found at http://www.rehmet.alt.za/photos/infrared.

Black and white infrared photography lends itself either to reproduction of very strong contrasts, or to very dreamy landscapes.  I tend to find myself favouring the former.  Since most haze is in the blue section of the light spectrum, shooting in infrared also tends to cut out a lot of undesirable haze.

Now all I need is to modify a SLR for infrared use.  That will probably have to wait.

Probably the most rewarding time to take photos while commuting by bike is on the way home in the evenings in winter.  The light of dusk especially creates some of the most magical scenes.  When summer arrives and it is light until late, I sometimes miss the early dusk and the magical light of winter.  The 3rd set of images from my collection of photos from my bicycle commuting route is now available at http://www.rehmet.alt.za/photos/2-wheels.