Photographing kites

My wife and youngest daughter went to the annual Kite Festival in Arlington, Texas, today, with my brother-in-law, his wife and their daughter. Of course, I took a few photos. I don't think I've ever photographed kites flying before. It's harder than it looks.

Think about it. What's the photo here, that is, what will you be trying to include in the frame? The easiest and perhaps safest photo, is one of the kite in the hands of the person who is about to fly it. No problems of scale or perspective here.

But the thing about kites is that they go up into the air. Now, as photographic subjects, kites are more like hot-air balloons than, say, birds. But, again, as photographic subjects, kites differ from hot-air balloons in several ways. For starters, kites are much smaller than balloons. A hot-air balloon in the sky may still be a pretty good-sized target. I was shooting with a Pentax 18-250 zoom lens, but even at 250mm (=357mm full-frame equivalent), it's hard to get a kite to fill the frame, after it's in the air. And worse, it's hard sometimes to guess the size of a kite in the air. A hot-air balloon has a basket with people in it, and you may be able to see the people. So you can tell how big the balloon is and perhaps even how far away it is, just from the size of the basket. Not so easy with a kite. In this picture, the traditional blue kite on the right helps the viewer get a sense of the size of the less-traditional kite on the left.

Another problem with kites, from the photographer's perspective, is that the most interesting thing about the kite is that it is linked to the ground. But the string is hard to see—in the photo above it's barely visible. And it's even harder to show the kite and the ground together. Well, you can do this:

But now both the person and the kite are too small to be recognizable and interesting. You can emphasize the person, and put the kite in the background. But to do this, you probably have to stand behind the person, and people's backs are not so interesting.

And that only works if the kite is low in the air; otherwise, you have to take the following perspective.

I guess that's kind of fun, but, well, remember, the kite is really the thing of interest here and it's nearly invisible. Now that I think of it, the ideal perspective from which to photograph a flying kite, would be from the basket of a hot air balloon floating a little above the kite. Then you could have the kite in the foreground, and the person on the ground in the distance.

I didn't have a hot-air balloon handy. The best I could do was suggest perspective by getting the tops of trees into the photo.

You can't see the strings, but the tree tops establish the connection to earth. I think this was my best shot from the day.

The tree-tops provide perspective, and it was luckily emphasized here by the somewhat narrower depth of field (that is, by the fact that the trees are blurred). It's a bit of luck that you can see the string here (exiting the frame lower right corner). And it also helps that this was one of the more interesting kites in the air today.

Larger images here.

Lake panorama, with cyclists

Grabbed a couple cameras, a couple lenses (Pentax 40 f/2.4 and Sigma 105 f/2.8) and headed over to the lake to do some experimental photography. I wanted to get a photo of the lake at rest with runners and cyclists appearing to move past the camera lens in a blur, suggesting the passage of time to which the lake is relatively indifferent. OK, perhaps that's jumping to meaning before I've got a form. What I wanted to do was photograph the lake, with some ghosts in it.

By ghosts, I just mean deliberately blurred people. The blur is produced by having a person move through the scene while the camera's shutter stays open longer than usual. For a while I've been intrigued by the "ghosts" in some of the great Eugene Atget's photos of Paris. Atget was forced to use very long shutters in the range of a couple seconds. Although he seems to have shot very early in the morning when there were few people about, occasionally, his photos have a blur in them where a person wandered on the to the scene during the exposure. I'm not sure if Atget liked it or not, but many people since have found it quite an evocative effect; I certainly do. But I wasn't trying to imitate Atget precisely here. If I'd kept my shutter open for 2 whole seconds, my ghosts would have been barely imperceptible. Since my ghosts were going to be riding bikes or jogging, I had to speed the shutter up a little to catch them. Most of these were shot around 1/20th sec. (Other technical info: Apertures in all these shots between f/8 and f/9.5. ISO between 160 and 400.)

Catching ghosts was harder than I thought and I wasn't very successful.

This first shot shows one problem. This father and son, who had parked near where my tripod was standing, had just one moment earlier gotten on their bikes to the left of the tree and begun cycling to the right. I turned the camera at the last second and didn't have time to think hard. As it happens, although I had my shutter set pretty slow—1/20th sec—they were moving so slowly that they didn't blur very much. Still, there is an element of interest in this photo, I think: the beautiful sharp and well-defined tree trunk. I also like the fact that, shooting at an angle like this, the level horizontal line of the far shore is not parallel to the line of the near shore, as it is in all the following shots. This would have been my best shot of the day, if I'd use a slower shutter. Sigh.

In the following photo, I captured several passers-by at once:

I like this photo for that reason, and yet, it doesn't quite click. I am not sure why. Perhaps there are too many ghosts. I also tried a different treatment on this photo. I didn't convert it all the way to black and white; I simply desaturated it about 80%. Notice that you can still see some of the green in the grass on the near bank and red in the building across the lake. The idea here was that, at sundown, things naturally get less saturated. That is true. But I'm not sure the treatment works. Perhaps the treatment doesn't work because the composition isn't perfect. As I said, I'm not sure.


In the next shot, I think the cyclist's posture is almost perfect:

The way he is learning forward emphasizes the impression of movement, which I wanted. I got lucky there. Note that I've cropped that photo to its original aspect ratio (2x3), while most of the others here have been cropped to 1x2, an aspect ratio that emphasizes the horizontal axis of the scene by cutting out a lot of relatively meaningless sky. Sometimes it seems to me that this photo is weakened by the fact that there is simply too much lake in the middle; at other times, I think perhaps the lake (occupying about two-fifths of the vertical space) is balanced by the sky (occupying also about two-fifths of the vertical space) and that this shot is not too bad.

On the effect of cropping, compare this image:

Here I've cropped to 1x2, and the ghost cyclist also has worked out pretty well, indeed, except for his posture, perhaps even better than in the previous photo. I think cutting out some of the sky emphasizes the emptiness of the lake in the middle.

It took me a while to realize that this was a problem. Finally, I lowered my tripod very considerably, so the camera was less than 2 ft off the ground. Because the lake is lower than the grass from which I was shooting, lowering the tripod doesn't change my perspective on the lake much; as you can see in the photo, there's about as much lake as there was before. But it makes the cyclist's head move up on the horizon.

This, I think, is the most successful photo of the group, or rather, the one that is least unsuccessful. I wish the cyclist had been moving a little faster. But this time, I got the top of his head almost to touch the far shore— thus "filling in" the lake. And the fact that this cyclist wasn't at all colorful prompted me to give this a full black and white treatment, which I rather like.

But then again, perhaps the problem with these shots has nothing to do with the cyclists or the amount of empty lake. Maybe the problem was simply that the sunset—which was taking place directly across the lake in all of these photos—was hidden behind a rather boring cloud formation. I just wasn't lucky that day. It always helps to be lucky.

Portraiture at the Dallas Arboretum

I'll be back at the Dallas Arboretum on Mothers Day weekend in May (May 8-9, 2010) to take portraits for Arboretum guests as part of the annual May Flowers event. It's a fun assignment, and really lets me flex my portraiture muscles, since I typically end up shooting 40-50 portraits in two days. Not sure what fee the Arboretum will set this year but it's been $15 in the past, which is a fraction of my normal fee for a personal portrait session at the Arboretum. And you get a 4"x6" print mailed to you as part of the deal. Can't beat it with a stick, as they say.

It's a lot of fun for me—but it's hard work, too, and a real photographic challenge. Where's the challenge? Well, for starters, the Arboretum asks me to be there when most of their guests are there, which means afternoon. When I shoot personal portraits at the Arboretum, I'm usually out there when they open at 9am and always wish I could get out there earlier. The afternoon light can be harsh. Depending on where they place me, I may have mottled shade and light filtering through tree branches overhead. And depending on where they place me, the light may be coming from the wrong direction. And of course, it changes constantly throughout the afternoon, so I have to stay on top of my exposures.

Still, it's possible to get some really nice photos. Here's one from a couple of years ago that I pulled out almost by random:

During these quick sessions, I try to be less formal. This is easier to do with children than with adults, who invariably want to pose for me.

Another problem that I solve shot by shot is, how close should I get? Or rather, how much of the background should I include in the photo? There is usually some sort of fantastic house built of flowers serving as a background for my sitting area. You might think that I'd want to include it, as I did in the shot above. But as I've done more and more photos there, it seems to me enough to have just a hint of the background, and to focus in on people's faces.

This isn't how I shot this beautiful mother and daughter originally. The original shot includes a lot of background, as in the shot of the little girls above. But I like this crop. This year, I think I'll be shooting tight like this to start with. And call me perverse, but I like even better this treatment of the same photo:

Yes, mother and daughter have beautiful red hair. But, well, it's possible to have too much color. All that color in the clothing, in the flowers in the background, it confuses the issue. The black and white (well, duo-toned) treatment, by muting the colors, removes anything distracting from their faces and the play of light in the photo.