A butterfly in the Chinese Gardens on Rivington Pike
Camera habbits
I wanted to have a brief forage into three dimensional data visualisation. The photos on this website provided me with a quick way to build a dataset: digital cameras store plenty of metadata in each photo, in addition to the image itself.
I put together a little PHP script that reads the “camera settings” data from every photo on this site and collates it into a flat database. An R script then takes two columns from the database and produces 2D density plots, (no longer) shown below. An initial attempt to produce full 3D animations using R was hampered by a resource leak in the RGL graphics package. This was resolved by having the R script render only one frame rather than the whole animation. A separate BASH script calls the R script repeatedly to render each frame of the animation, and then to coalesce the frames.
This visualisation allowed me to see what camera configurations I tend to use the most, information which has no real value to me besides curiosity at the moment. It has also persuaded me to move away from using R for analysis, it is such a painful environment for doing anything remotely graphical…
- PHP script: Collate EXIF data => database: collate-stats.php
- R script: Plot 2D heatmaps from database: plot-stats.r
- R script: Plot 3D frame of animation: plot-3d.r
- BASH script: Use plot-3d.r to create full animation: plot-3d.sh
The faster shutter speeds are enabled by the reasonable sharpness offered by my 35mm prime at its open end, while the blob around f/4 to f/5 is due to the widest ends of my Sigma 150-500mm, Sigma 10-20mm and (now sold) Nikon 55-300mm. The blobs centered at 3″/f10 are probably from waterfall long-exposures, jupiter and the slower shutter speeds around the f/1.8 aperture region will be from fibre-optic art. The cluster from f5/150mm-f6.3/500mm is from using the big Sigma wide open, with the cluster around 500mm being mostly from low-budget astrophotography with the same lens. It’s interesting how easily trends can be visualised with just a little bit of crude scripting.
The end result of all this is that I abuse the open end of my f/1.8 prime far too much, when I could probably get sharper, less hazy photos by resorting to a slightly slower shutter instead…
Snowdon / Yr Wyddfa
Skip reading the write-up and just enjoy the lovely scenery in the photographs!
In contrast with my time on Ben Nevis, I had more than 10ft of visibility while on Snowdon – which allowed me to enjoy the Snowdonia scenery. I can now really appreciate why 35mm full-frame landscape photographers worship the 50mm prime lens – I used a Nikkor 35mm DX (~50mm full-frame equivalent) for the entire day, and really enjoyed the results!
Click to enlarge
A “small” mountain
A very brief clear sky
Long-ish exposure over water
???
A friend who is just getting into the world of digital photography used a 18-105mm Nikkor to capture the next set of photos.
Click to enlarge
…And here’s a load of mine through the 35mm/1.8 prime.
Click an image for slideshow
Concave, glacial mountains ahead, but a flat plane behind!
A thin band of rain across Llanberis
Curvy glacial landscape
Beautiful blue sky behind, no sky ahead
Thin mist and clear sky
Shame about the mound in the bottom-left, but if I’d gone any higher then I’d have been engulfed by clouds
Reduced visibility near the top – but at least I can see my own feet this time!
A lot of contrast boosting was used here to cut through the thick mist.
The top of the miner’s track
Prime lenses seem to be a bit of a grey area with some beginners, due to the absence of a zoom wheel on the lens. Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to zoom* while using a prime: walk forwards to zoom in, walk backwards to zoom out. A bonus of this is that “zooming” a prime preserves the perspective of the scene… but with the slight downside that you may accidentally walk into a pond while you’re busy “zooming”. During my walk, I was eyeing up the scenery and deciding in advance where the “ideal” locations on my route would be for me to stop and take photos.
Sunset from Llanberis
35mm, wide open. Thin depth-of-field and sharp spider webs in the focal plane!
Off-shore wind farm near Conwy