Yes I know, first I'm writing about the likelihood of contacting alien civilizations, then I'm talking about immortal humans who have sex for three days straight and write books in their sleep, and then about creepy flickrites, and now I am writing about watching ants.  You don't come here for consistency.

I was leaving my office around lunchtime the other day for a brief walk.  The front of the building has a raised garden with some azaleas and a really nice looking stone wall bordering it.  As I walked out I noticed the wall was swimming in tiny black ants.  Not the big ones you see wondering solo, but hordes of teensy ones.  Usually that means that a tasty food item has been discovered and the colony is out to disassemble it and carry it back.  I could see where the ants were clumped up, but didn't notice anything there that I recognized as anything ants would want to eat.  But I figured maybe somebody had spilled a soda and they were gobbling up dried sugars right off the rockface.  I went off to my walk and didn't think any more about it.

Later that night when I left work, I glanced at the wall and noticed the big cluster of ants was still there, but it had moved a few feet to the right.  Again no food was evident.  Just ants in a big tangled mass.  So I leaned close to peer at them and noticed that ants were bunching up around other ants, and apparently biting each other.  Other ants seemed to be carrying away dead (or dying ants).  I leaned back and noticed that unlike a typical feeding situation where you see a river of ants leading from the colony to the food and back, this was the meeting place of two rivers of ants.  One from one crevice about 5 feet to the left, and another from a crevice about 4 feet to the right.

That's when I realized I wasn't watching a feeding frenzy.  I was watching a war.  It was an epic battle between two colonies of ants that had both claimed this rock wall as their territory.  Thousands upon thousands of ants continually poured from both crevices, and converged in the center to engage in a massive melee.  It was mesmerizing to watch the supply lines bringing in fresh ants as the wounded or the dead were hauled away (presumably as food).  They moved in tides and complex whorling patterns as they made war... it was so intricate it was actually mesmerizing.  I checked my camera bag but I had neglected to bring ANY macro lenses with me that day, or I would have had pictures of all-out insect warfare and abject carnage to upload to my photostream.

It made me a little sad to think of these ants fighting for hours over a few feet of turf.  After 15 minutes I suddenly realized the time and made a mental note to bring my macro lens to work today.

But when I arrived this morning, the battle was over, and the battlefield had been swept clean.  Had I not noticed it, the day before, I never would have known it had happened.  In my inner thoughts I could not help but make the connection between the affairs of the ants and the affairs of humanity.  In 100,000 years, if humans are still here, what great battles and wretched suffering of ours will have passed into the unknown?  Will we forget World War 2?  Will we forget the Holocaust?  Will we repeat it?  Big thoughts from the tragic ant war of June 25, 2008.

What is it that prevents some people from realizing when they are being creepy?  I recently uploaded some photos to my flickr photostream from a birthday party I attended.  Then later I was tooling around in the Fitchburg Photo Pool and saw some cool architectural photos, so I left a comment telling the photographer I thought the shots were nice.

Within minutes I had three e-mails.  The first was flickr informing me that the photographer had added me as a contact.  The second seemed nice enough, the photographer wanted to talk about other landmarks that were good to shoot.  The third seemed a little peculiar and forward for someone who doesn't know me from dirt:

 "Hey how do you know that girl XXXXX in your photostream?  She's a real knockout!"

So I responded about Fitchburg landmarks, and on the second item, remarked just that she was a friend of a friend, and that she was very photogenic.

Within minutes, two more e-mails.  More chatting about landmarks and camera gear as well, and the second:

 "Man is she cute.  Hmm."

So I'm getting a little weirded out by this dude.  I mean, if you are friends with someone it's one thing to compliment someone they know once, but if you barely know a person it's kind of creepy to do it repeatedly.  So I decided I didn't really want to keep talking to this guy, and chose not to respond.

A few minutes later, another e-mail comes along:

 "Do you think she would let me take some shots of her sometime?"

Yeah.  That will happen.  She's going to pose for some stranger on the internet because a friend of a friend photographed her at a party.  Who asks a question like this of someone they barely know?  I have a terrible time just asking people I do know if they will pose for me.

Any way, I really didn't want to talk to creepy dude any more, I knew if I called him on it I'd get assured up and down that his request was completely innocent in nature.  As if it is quite normal to ask strangers on the internet if you can photograph their friends.  I mean seriously, if you are THAT desperate for models, there are places to go (http://www.modelmayhem.com/).  So I just blocked him... that will be the end of that, thanks.

I generally think it wise, when someone adds you as a contact on flickr, or favorites one of your photos, to check their profile and see what groups they subscribe to, and to also check their favorites.  It's usually quite clear when they are using flickr for something other than an appreciation of great (or even mediocre) photography.  If you see anything that looks creepy, it's probably a good idea to block them.

Creepy dude didn't have any bizarre group subscriptions or prurient favorites that I could see, but his behavior was enough to warrant the block IMHO.  The only thing his profile had to say about him other than a laundry list of his gear was that he was "Male and single".

Call me "Male and unsurprised".

Well, I spent my spare time last week working hard on the photos from the dance recital.  All in all I was happy although many of the images were too blurry to use.  The problem was my shutter speed, it just wasn't fast enough, but I am still learning.  On Saturday I shot a play in a dark restaurant and got much better looking images by pushing up the shutter speed.  Gotta get to work on those images next.  All unpaid work of course, but I continue to hold out hope that good things will happen if I keep trying and keep talking to people about what I do.

Never heard back from the director of the dance recital, but I'm not too surprised.  I don't think anyone has ever called me back after an initial contact.  I have gotten e-mails from some people to say they really like the photos I took for them (for free) but sometimes not even that.  People are busy, and I think most don't realize the amount of effort that goes into making a good photo.  Anyway, as I promised the director of the dance recital, I put together a set of discs containing the best images from the show and have sent those off to her today along with a letter requesting her permission to post them on my business website.  For the amount of work put into this production, I hope that she at least calls me back, even if it is only to say "no".  Click these thumbnails to see the letter and the CD's (dancers faces are obscured):

The problem here is that (for both the recital shoot and the play shoot and probably just in general) the groups that put on these productions already have a photographer.  From what I've seen so far though, these "staff photographers" shoot posed shots backstage, as opposed to shots of the actual performance--I suspect because it's hella easier to get a really nice shot in a controlled environment than it is actually during the performance.

After I shot the play this past weekend, one of the actors' parents caught a glimpse of some of the photos on my camera and immediately asked if she could buy a CD of the pictures... so hopefully something will come of that.  I also talked to the people who ran the play--they pretty much immediately told me they had a staff photographer, but when I showed them a few of the pictures in-camera they seemed really impressed.  So I'll spend another week churning through those pictures and hopefully something will come of that.  We'll see.  No expectations.

Street photography isn't really my thing, but I try to do it from time to time.  The problem I have is that I am very shy about taking pictures of people without their permission, even though by and in large, I have a right to do so in public.  I find if you get permission, the subject changes and loses the look that drew you to the photo in the first place.

This is why I am always amazed (or cringing) when I see real street photographers at work.  I am just not as brave as these guys:

(video) Joel Meyerowitz On Street Photography

(video) WNYC Streetshots: Bruce Gilden

My canoe outing pictures were apparently a huge hit.  I asked my wife to deliver the following message to the teacher: "I'm glad you like the pictures, and I would appreciate it if you could put in a good word with the principal about me making them available to the parents on my business website."  No further news on that front.

I shot another dance recital (this time at Dartmouth Middle School) last nite.  I really need to carry more CF cards, things got tight toward the end of the program.  Apparently 8 Gb of storage isn't enough for an intense 2-hour shoot.  Shooting was so-so--the auditorium had no photographer's booth and was pretty much wall to tall audience.  In addition the stage was low and the sound and light crew sitting in front of the stage had their heads blocking the view of the dancers.  The light stands stood in front of the stage, as did the speakers and floor lights.  All in all trying to shoot in the room was a nightmare.  I spent a solid two hours squatting in the aisle between the front row of seats and trying to dodge the optical obstacle course between me and the dancers.

So a lot of my shots were not keepers, but I did get some really nice shots and I think after the post processing I'll have 100 to 200 decent photos.  After the show I talked to the producer and she seemed (a) very friendly, (b) somewhat receptive, and (c) really busy.   But I managed to explain to her that I have a business website and would be willing to host my photos of the event so that parents could buy prints, and that I would be willing to give her copies of the pictures for free.  She didn't commit either way but did take my card and said she would contact me on Monday.  Hopefully I'll hear from her and maybe get my first gallery of photos for sale up on the Sagewood Site.

Other work - I was asked to shoot some staff photos for my employer.  Technically, I guess you could say this is paid work, since I am salaried, but I'm not choosing to call it that.  It was an opportunity though to test my mobile studio set up.  I pretty much had a conference room set up with standing lights and reflectors in about a half hour and then shot sporadically over the next 3 hours.  It was actually a pretty small shoot considering the number of employees who had to be photographed (about 20 or so), but the good side of it was a lot of my coworkers got to see me working and the equipment I was working with and it helped (I hope) to drill home the idea that this isn't just intended to be a hobby.

I do have one coworker who has asked me to shoot some family portraits for her (she's trying to work out a date) and others who have hinted that they might be interested.  We'll see if any of that pans out.

So yesterday I was photographing a first communion ceremony and passing out business cards.  On Thursday I photographed a school canoe outing.  Two more unpaid engagements under my belt.  I've been joking with Patty that I'm rapidly becoming an unpaid success.

But I need the experience so I don't mind so much, and I've been pretty much on my own trying to figure this all out.  I have been taking scads more pictures than I have actually uploaded to flickr, mostly because the people depicted haven't given permission for me to upload them, so what I can upload is limited.  The experience shooting and working with subjects has been great.  Now I'd like to experience getting paid.

For the short term (maybe the next couple years, maybe longer) I have decided to sign up for a turnkey service which will allow me to put my photos in web galleries where people can order prints.  Since these galleries can be password-protected for security, I'm currently negotiating with a local school who has had me in to shoot four of their events to let me put these events up in secure galleries so that parents can buy prints.

I chose Exposure Manager to be my turnkey service after comparing and contrasting several such services.  Since I'm kind of not feeling well today and wasn't going out anywhere, I finally signed up and then went back to beef up my languishing Sagewood Studios website.  It's still unfinished of course, but it looks better than it did.  Assuming people start hiring me for portraits and other work, I will be able to get a better handle on pricing and so forth and put more information up there.

There's a link there to a "test gallery".  Ultimately there will be links to real galleries, but you can click the link if you want to see what a typical Sagewood Studios gallery will look like (the password for this gallery is "test"--obviously not secure at all... I just chose that password so I can demonstrate how the security works).  The turnkey service automatically watermarks my photos to keep people from just copying them off the website, and lets me decide what products will be available, and how they will be priced.  The service will process the orders and handle the printing and shipping direct to the customer.  After the printing and shipping is paid for, they take a percentage of my profit in exchange for providing the service (plus an annual fee) and cut me a check at the beginning of each month.

If it works out, I may contact other local schools and see if they have any interest in having me photograph their events.  We'll see.  As far as being hired outright I have at least one serious lead from a coworker who wants me to do a family portrait for her and is willing to pay.  That's something at least.  Start small and all that.

Anyway, I'm staying positive and I'm loving the shooting.

So last night I went to bed with a "sippy bottle" of fruit punch on my bedside table.  Sometimes I wake up at night and my mouth is really dry and I like to take a sip of water or juice.  Also sitting on my beside table is a squeeze bottle of hand sanitizer.

You can already see where this is going can't you?

At about 4 AM this morning I went from "half asleep taking a drink" to "wide awake what the fuck is THIS".

What followed was a jog to the bathroom to spit out the small amount of purell that was in my mouth followed by extensive rinsing--that's some nasty stuff to have in your mouth.  Then I had to go downstairs and get on the 'net to find out if I was going to need to call poison control--I didn't really think I would need to but just in case.  Within 15 minutes I was back in bed, sipping fruit punch and going back to sleep.

And the hand sanitizer was moved far away from my drink and out of easy reach.

So for once in my life, I really was Mister Clean Mouth.

Of course I overslept this morning, and was late getting to work.  Had to order a birthday cake and call my Mom's financial advisor, as well as prepare for a shoot I have tonite--doing another school dance, again for no pay.  I'm rapidly becoming an unpaid success. :-/  Ah well, experience is good, and truth be told I really enjoy taking pictures.

So early this morning I couldn't sleep and I ended up writing an article on flickr in one of the many "what lens should I buy" discussions that goes on there.  I have noticed, in my days on flickr, that certain pieces of equipment and certain techniques have a following, and often get recommended simply because of the following rather than because the equipment/technique is actually suited to the purpose of the person asking.  In an effort to supply a counterbalancing opinion, I found myself in need of trigonometry.

The Argument

One such "cult" item is the "nifty fifty" (the EF 50mm f/1.8) lens made for Canon EOS cameras.  It is very sharp, very fast, and very cheap ($80).  If you are on a tight budget (or even if you aren't) it makes sense to have one for your EOS camera unless you have a better 50mm prime, or don't need a 50mm prime.

While I will not argue that it is probably one of the best value-for-money lenses, it is not versatile at all, and yet it seems to get hailed as a magic-bullet lens.  I regularly see people making claims like "it never comes off my camera".  And after having used it myself, I can only conclude that these people shoot one type of thing and one type of thing only, or it never comes off because they don't own any other lenses.

There is a certain love affair with the 50mm focal length because it was the standard focal length for 35mm film for decades.  But in the age of digital SLR cameras, things are different for the less expensive consumer DSLRs.  These DSLR's tend to use an image sensor that is smaller than 35mm film.  The APS-C style sensor, or crop sensor, does not render the entire image cast by a standard lens, but only a smaller piece in the center.  This results in an apparent magnification factor of 1.6.  Hence if you put a 50mm lens on a crop-sensor camera, it's like working with an 80mm lens (50 x 1.6 = 80).  The end result is a smaller-than-expected "field of view" (FOV).

On an old Canon 35mm film camera, a 50mm lens has a FOV of 46°.  But on a crop-sensor camera the FOV is a hair under 29°.  This loss of over a third of the FOV means that on crop-sensor cameras the EF 50mm f/1.8 lens has distinct limitations as to how much you can fit in the frame.

Fortunately, on my EOS 5D the 50mm behaves as expected. Because the 5D is a full frame camera, its sensor is the same size as a 35mm film frame.  So I get 46° out of my EF 50mm, just as nature intended.

The "nifty fifty" on crop-sensor cameras is often described as a "portrait lens".  With the crop factor, the 50mm lens behaves like an 80mm lens, and 80mm is ideal for portraits.  But if you want to shoot anything larger than a head-and-shoulders portrait with the EF 50 1.8 on your Rebel XT or 30D, you'd better have a lot of room behind you, because you are going to need to back up... a lot.

But how much?

The Trigonometry

Well that's where the trig comes in (you can skip this section if you don't want to see how I figured it out).  In order for me to say how much, I needed to be able to reliably compute the distance necessary to view an object of a given width.  But how?  I started by drawing a diagram like this one:

V is my viewing angle.  Okay it's not 29° (or 28.98333° which is the actual FOV of the nifty fifty on a crop sensor), but close enough.  The legs of the triangle extending out from V represent the edges of my FOV as the distance to the subject (marked by the dashed line, d) grows.  The base of the triangle (marked as w) is the width of the field of view at the distance d.  Basically this is a representation of the wedge or cone of that falls within a particular FOV, in this case 30°.

I can pick any distance I want for d, but what I really need is a way to say what d should be to accomodate a subject of a certain width.  In other words, to fit a subject 10 feet wide in my viewfinder, how far back do I need to stand with the nifty fifty on my EOS 30D camera? I supposed that given a formula for that, I could solve the formula for the width so that one could also compute the maximum width viewable given a distance.

The triangle depicted above is an isoceles triangle, as both the legs are the same length, and consequently the angles where the legs meet the base is also to the same.  I spent some time looking online for computations for isoceles triangles, but what I was looking for didn't appear (namely, given the length of the base, and the angle of the peak, what is the height or altitude of an isoceles triangle?)

I studied trig over 20 years ago so I remember very little of it, but I did remember there were a lot of simple equivalences for right triangles (that is, triangles where one of the angles is 90°).  And I realized while looking at my diagram that the line I had drawn to represent the distance, bisected V and split the triangle into 2 right triangles, each of which looked like this:

Bisecting V gives me a 15° angle (V'), and a base width exactly half of what it was before (w').  So if I could take a given distance d and come up with a formula for w', then I should be able to solve that formula for either d or w', keeping in mind that V' is V/2 and w' is w/2.

Doing a quick check online I found the two rudimentary trignometric equivalences for right triangles: for either of the angles other than the 90° one, the sin of that angle is equal to the length of the opposite side divided by the length of the hypoteneuse, and the cos of that angle is equal to the length of the adjacent side divided by the length of the hypoteneuse.  Here are those equivalences for the right triangle above:

Sin V' and cos V' I can get with a pocket calculator, and I'm going to pick a value for either d or w' and solve for the other.  I can solve the equation on the left for w' [w' = (sin V') * h] and I can solve the equation on the right for d [d = (cos V') * h], but both of these solutions require me to know what the hypoteneuse of this triangle is.

But in order to get w' from d or d from w' I need to do more work, mostly because I am not going to know what the hypoteneuse is.  I'm only going to be starting with either V' and w' or V' and d.  So what I need to do is solve one of the equations for h, and then plug that into the other equation.  That should give me a formula I that I can use to solve for either d in terms of w' and V' or w' in terms of d and V'.  So I picked the equation on the right.  Solving that for h gives h = d / (cos V').

So I should be able to substitute d / (cos V') in the equation on the left, like so:

Now I'm good.  I know what V' is, I can get sin V' or cos V' from my calculator, and I am going to pick either d or w'.  So now I can solve for either one, like so:

Done, right?  Well, yes, if I want to know what the appropriate distance is for half the width of my subject using a lens with half the field of view.  Now I want to substitute in the equivalences that w' = w/2 and V' = V/2.  In the equation on the right that will put w/2 on the left of the equal sign, so I will multiply both sides by 2 to solve the equation for w.  That gives me:

Okay they probably aren't the cleanest formulas in the world, but they work and let you get the height of an isoceles triangle from its base width and peak angle, or vice versa.  Using these formulas I could handily compute the needed distance for a given width in a given field of view, and this allowed me to present something more concrete than "gee whiz, that EF 50mm 1.8 is awfully confining on a crop sensor camera."

Back to the Argument

So how confining is that nifty fifty?

5 feet wide = 9.7 feet away
10 feet wide = 19.3 feet away
15 feet wide = 29 feet away
20 feet wide = 38.7 feet away
25 feet wide = 48.4 feet away

Pretty confining!  If you are trying to capture 3 people sitting on a couch which is 8 feet long all in one shot, you need to stand 15 feet 6 inches away.  Better have a big living room, or one where there isn't a TV 10 feet from the couch.  Or maybe if you moved the couch outside... that would be cool for an album cover, but for Aunt Bea, Uncle Joe, and Granny, it is probably less so.

Working with the EF 50mm f/1.8 is a good exercise though for learning how to push a lens to do what you need, and it's plain old good exercise, because you're going to be backing up a lot.  You can get that 8 foot couch in shot if you shoot from an angle, but then you will need to stop your aperture down to widen up the depth of field so that everyone will be in focus... which means you can't shoot low light anymore so you might need lamps or a flash.  Or you could give up on that shot and shoot the people individually.

Or, you could simply not get the EF 50mm 1.8 in the first place, if you are not planning to shoot primarily portraits.  If you want to consider the traditional FOV that the great 35mm film artists shot with, you need a lens that gives a FOV on a crop-sensor camera similar to a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera (i.e. 46°).  The closest bet would be a 28mm lens, like the EF 28mm f/1.8 or EF 28mm f/2.8.  These have a crop-sensor FOV of 47.25°.  With one of these lenses the width to distance figures look like this:

5 feet wide = 5.7 feet away
10 feet wide = 11.4 feet away
15 feet wide = 17.1 feet away
20 feet wide = 22.8 feet away
25 feet wide = 28.6 feet away

Much more reasonable.  And quite interesting how the distance to subject is almost the same as the width of the subject.  No surpise that the 50mm lens became the standard on the cameras of old.