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Having Fun with Custom BOKEH 2 (Mindil Fireworks)
In my previous post about Custom Bokeh, I mentioned about how to create custom shaped bokeh for still photography. On Thursday, I visited the opening season of Mindil Beach Markets in Darwin with fireworks and I practice the custom bokeh for that. The result was pretty entertaining and colorful, I couldnt stop myself watching them and here it is the video:
Custom Bokeh Video of Mindil Beach Markets Opening Season 2012 by Irawan
Reverse Lens Macro Photography
Doing macro photography could be very fun as you can create a photo that your eyes wont see in everyday life or bare eyes. It requires a special lens to capture tiny object as a close up in details. But I just learned recently that you can do a macro photography without a special pricy lenses and get a way around it. One of my photographer friends mentioned to me the other week that we can do a macro photography with reversed lens. I was not sure what he meant at that time but he said its literally just reversing your lens back to front.
Not going to elaborate the science of how the reverse lens work but its pretty cool (you can see the science here: http://stephenelliot.com/2007/05/15/reverse-lens-macro-photography-tutorial/) . You can just hold your lens back to front against the camera or buy a special reverse lens mount.
So then I did an experiment on it and the result is surprised me, better than I thought. This experiment I used a standard cheap lens kit EFS 18-55mm, I dont have any insect or something more exciting to capture so I just took whatever I have in the office :
Expreiment I:
Experiment II:
Having Fun with Custom BOKEH
Bokeh is originally a Japanese word meaning ‘blur’ or ‘haze’ (Wikipedia). So, in photography, bokeh is used when you take a photo with a very shallow focus (big aperture), the area that are out of focus will be blurry. Bokeh is mostly used for night photography where the light is out of focus and blurry and give it a bit of artistic feeling on it. Recently, I made an experiment with custom bokeh shapes with Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens.
How?
Basically, all we need to do is just covering the lens with shaped filter in black. I use lens cup with whole on it and put my custom shaped filter behind it: simple and save place in your camera bag. Another way is you could make a filter that you can put on top of your lens like most tutorial on youtube do. Or you can buy factory made custom bokeh filters, neatness guarantee but at the moment, I’m showing you my DIY filters.
Here are what I did, would be more shopisticated when the lights are more colorful and make it in video with movements. Will wait til the wet season gone and can not wait for Mindil Beach opening or Territory Day with lots of fireworks:) :
Here are the results:
And this is what the filter looks like:
On iPhoto for iPad 2
I watched the keynote presentation from apple.com for the new iPad and conclude that if you have got iPad 2 already, not really urgent for upgrading it to the new iPad. Different story if you havent got one but planning to buy one, stupid not to choose the new one unless your budget is $100 short. Anyway, from the presentation, I gather that the only interesting thing for me was iPhoto for iPad, other than that are screen resolution and games which I’m not really in to.
Now, I did some testing with iPhoto for iPad 2, which requires iOS 5.1 and you just needed to update the iOS for free, and some silly pixelated result appeared. I published it on facebook and icloud journal, both are the same. With mozaic like pixelated result so you can not even see the photo properly. I’m not sure if I missed something here or it was just the internet connectivity thing, I don’t know. The image was not that big in size, only 2 something MB downloaded from facebook. This problem is also happening when you share it to ‘Camera Roll’ too.
Here’s the comparison between the result in iPad and published on the internet/share in camera roll.
On iPad 2:
And then i published it on internet/online,same thing when I shared it on facebook:
If you happen to know the solution for this, please do drop a line on comment below.
Lytro Light Field Camera
Have you ever been disappointed by your camera, or more to yourself for taking a rare opportunity photo but out of focus? I have :D. No software can fix that problem at the moment until recently new invention came up with LYTRO.
Its a light field camera that can be used by anyone and no need to worry about the focus. Simple words, shoot now focus later. They just started shipping the new product to their first buyers on 29 February 2012. This brilliant invention captures a photo with a large depth of focus so with only using their software, we can choose or change the focus as we please. By uploading to their gallery, we can even play around with the focus by clicking the point where you want it to be focused. I can imagine now the problem like my picture above will be gone soon with DSLRs applying this technology.
Here are some photos that you can play around with the focus. The picture is not live in this blog because wordpress.com doesn’t allow iframe embedding, but if you click below images and go to the link, you can play around with it and see what I mean.
Trip 2012 | New Zealand and Sydney
First time in NZ and we traveled around in South Island driving from Christchurch toward North and stayed overnight or two in Kaikoura, Nelson, Hikitika, Queenstown, Lake Tekapo and back to Christchurch before flying to Sydney. All footages and photos taken by Irawan during trip February 2012.
Thoughts come clearly while one walks. ~Thomas Mann
Sydney and Manly Timelapse Video
Lake Tekapo old church timelapse
Pocket camera on window mount suction pod. Driving from Christchurch to somewhere around Greta Valley South Island.
More videos to come…
10 Inspiring Travel Videos
As I’m now starting to get in to videography, and I myself enjoy traveling (who wouldn’t?), here are some amazing and inspiring travel video. I kinda like to go to vimeo.com than youtube because you find lots of craps in youtube and vimeo are more selected and arty video. Very easy to find a quality video for reference and the forum makes it good place to learn. Anyway, this shouldnt be a comparison between two but about travel photography.
I guess to have a good travel video most of the one I like use tripod and wide angle lenses with big aperture. Timelipse is popular for travel videography and the result could be amazing, taken from different angles and with a bit of panning too. Thing is, when you travel, are you going to take all of your photography gear or just basic stuff? Well, if you call yourself enthusiast you should. GoPro camera would put your travel video more lively and increasingly very popular.
Here are some videos that I like:
1. The Longest Way 1.0 | One year walk/beard grow time lapse
This guy is pretty inspiring, he did a walking trip and went for 4500km trough China and Gobi Desert and even tough he never finished his goal to Germany, still pretty awesome. He took a photos his face everyday and see how he doesnt look like he did. Not surprised if this video won so many short film festivals.
2. Eat, Move and Learn
Thats what we do on our travel. Rick Mereki did an awesome job on doing the video:
3. Time is Nothing (Kien Lam)
He decided to quit his job to travel and took timelapse videos around the world and this is what he achieved 17 countries later. This video has been featured in mainstream medias. Wish I could take that decision….
4. Lost in Tokyo (Mark Blamley)
10,000 photos in 2 days in Tokyo. Inspiring timelapse of Tokyo.
5. Water&Rocks, New Zealand
This is more like tourism video than a travel video but still very enjoyable to watch.
6. Many Steps (Takayuki Akachi)
This is another unique idea that he traveled the world and filmed some daily life and corners of places he visited. Awesome!
7. 5 Minutes of Syria (Ruslan Fedolov)
Great videography by Ruslan Fedolov.
8. Venezia
This video has shown how powerful DSLR cameras are for making video and movie and 5D Mark II is the king as to Michael Jackson to pop music.
9. Postcard from Bali (Stephen Kot)
Beautifully done this video is. With Canon EOS 5D Mark II and shallow depth of focus with 50mm f1.4 made this video so elegant and gave it a warm feeling to watch.
10. Toy Thailand
Great combination between tilt shift and timelapse makes the objects look small like toys.
….
Jeezz,, how could I miss Where The Hell is Matt?
2011 | A Year in My Camera View
2011 had been an interesting year for my photo journey. We went to the Philippines for the first time, that was exciting and beautiful, went back to Indonesia to visit families and had a chance to go to Sulawesi and dive in Bunaken, something that I’ve always wanted as it was apparently one of the best diving spots in Indonesia.
The highlight was when we were about to go home to Darwin and visited my aunt in Denpasar and was looking for a taxi and then someone with his motorbike grabbed my EOS camera and ran away, but then the insurance were easy enough to cover the lost and with the same price as the lost camera I bought, I could upgrade to a better one. Altough, I still cant forgive myself for not backing up the photos from that holiday.
And the other highlight is I made some of my shots in to the local newspapers, and one of them, which was the Cyclone Carlos, was at the front page.
Anyway busway, :D, here are some photos from 2011 that I like, should’ve been more with the lost one:
Ultra Slow Motion Video with Twixtor
I am obsessed with slow motion video with Twixtor, it makes your slow motion video smooth. What it does is it fills the gap between your frames so there will be no rough movement on your slow motion. It can enhance your video that was taken in 50fps or 60fps to 1000fps or more. Its a dear software but cool. Wonder if there’s an open source version of it 😀
Here are some interesting examples:
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