In my earlier post, I asked “Would you trade your SLR for a smartphone?” The question was tongue-in-cheek, albeit substantiated by reports that, thanks to their connectivity and relentlessly improving image quality, smartphones have not only trampled the compact camera marked, but also started edging out dSLRs in some use cases.
Well, that was then and this is now. And now my iPhone is capable of 240fps slow motion video. And I couldn’t trade that up for a dSLR, because NO dSLR available today – NONE – is capable of capturing 240 frames per second at 720p or better. The cheapest camera capable of the feat is a SONY NEX-FS700 costing $5K (body only).
Here’s how a high frame rate, such as 240 frames per second, becomes slow motion:
You shoot your action at 240fps instead of the normal cinematic 24fps.
When editing your video, you interpret the footage you’ve captured at the regular 24 frames per second. When you do that, because there are 10x as many frames, the footage becomes 10x longer and plays at 1/10th the speed.
If you took a regular 24fps footage and slowed it down 10x, it would become very choppy and blurry – but not if your camera, set to 240fps, shot 10x as many frames to begin with. The added bonus of slow motion is that it slows down any camera shake along with the action, so even handheld footage looks quite smooth.
There are a couple of reasons it is very hard for the manufacturers to enable a camera to shoot at 240fps:
Each of those frames becomes 10x shorter in duration. That means, the camera’s image sensor only gets 1/10th the light, and the less light the more difficult it is to capture a high quality image.
The camera’s processor has to work 10x faster to process and save all those frames.
That’s why it is astounding that the little iPhone 6 is capable of this, well ahead of even professional grade dSLR cameras in their video mode.
So what does iPhone 6 slow-mo look like in the real world? I shot this at night on NYC subway and edited on the phone too (iMovie). Handheld, available light, no processing outside the phone.
A little about the film E Insomnia: NYC subway’s E train propels its riders through the city that never sleeps. Late at night, however, it also dissects the city’s social fabric, showing New Yorkers at their most vulnerable. I am writing a script for the film, and will direct it.
Like many kids born in the USSR, my sister Polina and I loved our toy kaleidoscopes we had growing up. To our surprise, they were never as popular in the U.S., although there is now a growing interest among the aficionados.
After much searching, Polina was able to get herself this artisan kaleidoscope. That thing is really tiny and the stained glass beads are fused to two wheels – meaning the patterns repeat themselves; it’s not an infinite set of combinations which could never be repeated that was part of the charm of the `scopes Polina and I had grown up with:
I got this kaleidoscope on eBay. Its shape and size are similar to the Russian ones. It is made by Corning, a high end glass manufacturer. To my surprise and dismay, it turned out to be far inferior to the Soviet toy kaleidoscopes. Instead of the silvered glass mirrors (yes, as a kid, I took my toy `scope apart – obviously) there was a folded sheet of sort-of-polished metal, and the pieces of colored glass were painted on one side (with the paint flaking off) instead of being real stained glass.
On the internet I’ve found out that indeed, Russian and Italian kaleidoscopes are among the best. Well, I’m Russian, so I decided to make a proper kaleidoscope for my sister’s birthday.
Opulence… I haz it!
Have you ever heard of a kaleidoscope that had not mere stained glass, but actual gemstones? Neither have I, so I was going to make one.
Clockwise from the top, I got the following stones for the kaleidoscope:
Ruby, heart cut (2 sizes)
Amethyst, trillion cut
Sapphire, marquise cut (2 sizes)
Sapphire, baguette cut
Emerald, marquise cut
The main optical component is the glass prism (or three narrow mirrors arranged in the same way). I wanted to make a full-size kaleidoscope, so the prism had to be a monster size. When it arrived, I was dismayed that its two triangular faces were matte. You wouldn’t be able to see any gemstones through them.
I was out of time and budget to order a different prism from China, and a crystal restoration shop wanted $120 per face to polish the two faces. Fortunately, I had polishing disks in Poconos.
The problem with hand-polishing is the surface wants to take on a rounded shape – it is actually pretty hard to keep it flat.
Fortunately, I ended up with only a little bit of roundness around the edges, well within the void size that the optical cement would be able to fill.
The optical cement I got, Dymax OP-4-20632, is able to cure in a strong sunlight, but it cures much better in a UV light. Here, I am taking advantage of the latter, emitting from the monster black light lamp Polina got for the party in Poconos:
My idea was to bond both faces of the prism to 52mm clear photographic filters, whose metal rings perfectly fit the copper pipe I got for the main housing, thus centering the prism inside.
Here are some of the miscellaneous parts and tools used in the assembly:
This is the main housing, a piece of 2″ DWV copper pipe (outer diameter 2.125”, wall thickness 0.042”):
If you’re stuck on a deserted island and need to blacken a copper pipe, you can use hard-boiled eggs. Rub the yolks on the copper, wrap it air-tightly (you will know why), and after a while it will blacken.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work perfectly, so I had to fall back on spray paint. Oh, and cleaning the dried rotten egg yolk stuck to the outside AND inside of the copper pipe is hard.
This took five minutes. There’s a lesson in there somewhere:
Rebecca from The Engraving Place in Brooklyn is holding up the casing she has just finished engraving for me:
The casing (upper left) goes over the Prism Assembly and is capped by the capsule with the gemstones on the one end and a +2 close-up lens and step-down cover on the other.
The close-up lens helps focusing the eyesight on the view without eyestrain.
Another view of the same components:Having previewed the kaleidoscope action, I’ve shattered an empty bottle of red wine and added a few pieces of olive-colored glass from it to the capsule to help space out and shuffle the gemstones.
Pro tip: always have a bottle of red wine on hand when making kaleidoscopes.
The larger ruby was too deep to fit in the capsule, so I decided to grind down its base somewhat, encouraged by how well my effort polishing the glass prism ends had turned out. Not so fast! It took me (and dad, whom I eventually asked to help out with this) a half day of sanding, using frightening grits of sandpaper on a belt sander, to do it! I suspected ruby would be harder than glass, but I could never imagine it would be harder this many times over. Still, managed to do it. You can make out the large red stone’s now-flat backside on this photo.
The kaleidoscope is assembled and duly entered into the database of my work:Having reviewed the kaleidoscope action, I’ve shattered an empty bottle of white wine and added a few pieces of clear glass from it to the capsule for a more balanced and refined view.
Pro tip: always have a bottle of white wine on hand when making kaleidoscopes.
The view from the other end.Gift inscription for my sister:The capsule is able to rotate vs. the main body of the kaleidoscope, as I’m using a rotating mechanism from a 52mm polarizing filter.
Polina’s first look through:
What it looks like (the view is infinite – this picture is constrained by the camera’s angle of view):
Due to the prism having rounded corners for safe handling, you can see the three transluscent pillars raising from the view. Otherwise, thanks to the fairly high grade prism surface, it is very difficult to tell the direct view from its reflections – which is one of the metrics of a decent `scope.
Lizard seems happy with her new toy. Happy Birthday, sister!
Here’s a very nice view Polina sent me:
I like the interlocking red and yellow rings and blue triangles with emerald tips. A part of the charm is, you can now spin this kaleidoscope more times than there are atoms in the observable universe, and you’ll never get the same view again.
Manhattanhenge, as seen from across the East River. Click to see the larger version in a slide show.
A term coined by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Manhattanhenge is a twice-yearly event when a sunset lines up with the Manhattan street grid, around 8PM on May 29/30 and July 12/13.
The idea to put Manhattanhenge in the broader space-time context (as a part of the sweeping Midtown skyline, and sandwiched between the before and after shots of same) was born out of my desire to differentiate from the common portrayal of this phenomenon, which is a closeup view of the setting sun’s disc, flanked by a pair (or more) of Manhattan buildings silhouetted by the sun’s overpowering rays.
I used a 12-24mm lens set to 12mm f/10 on a full-frame dslr. To get the building detail together with the sunset, I took a series of six bracketed exposures two f-stops apart from each other, at varying shutter speeds. These were HDR-processed into the final image.
A diagonal dash light spot directly above the Empire State Building is planet Venus. From my vantage point, Venus was in that position at 9PM. The length of the dash is the amount of the Earth’s rotation during my 30-second exposure.
You can now buy a variety of things with this image, ranging from a sleek acrylic print to a classic framed one, or even a duvet cover! In doing so, you will be supporting my photographic work.
What happens when you give a seven-year-old girl a full-frame camera that weighs a kilogram?
As the wedding I was shooting was wrapping up, a restless flower girl seven years of age (we’ll call her Jess) and her friend were increasingly pestering me with questions about how I take pictures and how my cameras worked. Rather than ignoring them or asking the parents to rein them in (hopeless endeavors both, what with all the guests, lights, music, and desserts), I handed Jess my backup camera and with a straight face tasked her with taking additional pictures of everybody, together with her friend.
The camera I handed Jess (a SONY A900 full frame DSLR) was insured, but it would have been impossible to find a brand new replacement lens, a magnificent Minolta 28mm f/2.0. Still, the girls were curious and excited about this, as was I, and since neither of them has handled a DSLR before, these are the five things I’ve told them:
Don’t walk when looking through the camera’s lens. Watch your step.
Get close. When you think you are close enough, get a little closer still.
Talk to everyone. Tell them you will take a photo of them that’s different and special.
Don’t put the faces in the middle.
Hold the camera steady, like this, and press the shutter button slowly.
It was quite dark, with intense colors and spotlights, so I set the camera to ISO5000, f/2.0 aperture priority, wide AF area, and wished the girls good luck. Here are a few of Jess’s photos.
Following the girls around would have affected people’s reactions, likely stifling the entire thing – not to mention that the whole point initially was to get them to leave me to my work. But I’ve taken a couple of shots of Jess in action just to capture the experiment and to show her parents.
Needless to say, I love her pix. There are a few lessons in them that we can all heed:
Be simple
Be approachable
Be unexpected
Get your subjects to do something different, outside of their comfort zone
Get close
And last but not least: we are born creative, but over the courses of our lives, a lot of that creativity may slip away if we’re not defending it.
P.S. If you can afford to give your kid a good camera, do it! When I was this girl’s age, my father did give me a simple but good quality camera, although it didn’t fare very well.
Having previewed the kaleidoscope action, I’ve shattered an empty bottle of red wine and added a few pieces of olive-colored glass from it to the capsule to help space out and shuffle the gemstones.
Having reviewed the kaleidoscope action, I’ve shattered an empty bottle of white wine and added a few pieces of clear glass from it to the capsule for a more balanced and refined view.
Gift inscription for my sister:
The capsule is able to rotate vs. the main body of the kaleidoscope, as I’m using a rotating mechanism from a 52mm polarizing filter.
