The Selfie Challenge

For a compilation of the morning walk images, click here.

Covid-Era Selfie. August 10, 2020. 25mm F 1.8 lens.

I find selfies to be an amusing way to view the effects of lighting, both indoors and out. Since I have temporarily eschewed the convenience of auto-focusing lenses in favor of the strict regimen required for manually focused lenses, capturing in-focus selfies has proven difficult.

The origins of this system date back to the early days of photography. Way back when, a photographer had only a distance scale on the lens barrel and the ability to accurately judge distance to achieve "sharp focus". I use this term literally, since so many photos taken with folding cameras seldom displayed the sharpness that many of those cameras, despite their relative simplicity, were capable of producing. The savvy photographer would keep a tape measure handy for measuring that critical subject to film-plane distance.

While on my morning walk, I came up with a simple technique that addressed nearly all of the problems associated with manually focused selfies. It dawned on me that if I could consistently position the camera at a distance matching the distance on the lens barrel, I could make reasonably sharp selfies.

To start, let's use a measuring device you probably already  have: your neck strap. 

In this photo, I've hooked the strap on a convenient screw I found in a nearby apartment building. Pulling the strap tight (not taught), I focused on the screw. This will establish critical focus for this specific subject-to-camera distance, which can easily be duplicated. Here's how I did it.

In the left hand photo, I used my right hand to position the neck strap just below my eye and then moved the camera away from my face until all of the slack from the strap was removed. Finally, I dropped the strap from my face and made the exposure with the camera held in my left hand. With practice, you too can portray yourself as the dour curmudgeon of a photographer as seen on the right. Incidentally, I made the shot in aperture priority mode with an ISO of 1600, and as small an aperture as I could get away with. 

While you may not wish to make selfies in this manner, it's a technique that could possibly come in handy. If there is somebody out there using a manual focus film camera who desperately needs to make a selfie, this might just be the ticket.

Reflections Redoux

For a compilation of the morning walk images, click here.

12mm F 2.0 Samyang lens. No adjustments made in post processing.

Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan

"...He tasks me. And I shall have him!" Thus Khan, seeking revenge on James T. Kirk in Star Trek The Wrath Of Khan. Like Khan, I too was tasked, but by the imaginary bar patron from the last post, who started me thinking: Why were the reflections so difficult to minimize? I had assumed it was because I couldn't use the front bezel of the lens a a light shield. I decided that a second shot, made with a different lens, might eliminate the offending reflections.

Buy yours here.

I decided on a re-shoot using a Samyang 12mm F 2.0 lens instead of the more compact  7artisans I used for my first attempt. he Samyang was actually my first manual focus lens for my Fuji system, which I purchased in the hope it would be compact enough to carry in my bag as an emergency super-wide lens. Unfortunately, it was not as compact as I had hoped, being equivalent in size to to my Zeiss 12mm Touit. However, the Samyang has proven itself to be a significantly sharper than the 7artisans. 

The Samyang does have one major advantage:  The lens hood is removable, allowing the user to attach any 67mm filter or accessory one might wish to use. I could now create nearly identical "with hood" and "without hood" photos for comparison.

The photo at the top of the post was my first attempt. It was made with the four petals of the lens hood touching the glass. If you look closely, you can see my double reflection surrounding a centered region of relative clarity. 

For my second attempt, I removed the lens hood and positioned the camera to achieve full contact with the flat surface of the lens bevel (right). As you can see, all reflections should have been eliminated. To the good, the lens plane is now in perfect parallel alignment with the back wall. This would eliminate any perspective distortion, but interferes with my ability to make any off-axis adjustments. 

This image was closer to what I had in mind, but I was still puzzled by the fact that my reflection still surrounded the properly rendered central region. 

It was then that I realized that the window I was photographing through was double-paned. I had successfully eliminated the reflections on the first plane, but had yet to correct for those on the second. You can clearly see the knuckles of my left and at the right edge of the photo (above).

I made this photo as an illustration of the multiple reflections I had to deal with (left). Each of the two arrows points to one of the offending reflections. Pressing the camera up to the window only eliminated the first reflection. The second would require a bit more effort.

For the eagle-eyed among you, there is a hint of  some additional reflections in the photo. Each air-to-glass surface has the potential to create its own reflection, so in reality, I'm dealing with four, not just two. 

Taking a page from the Edward Weston/View Camera playbook, I removed my jacket and draped it over my head while using my hands to spread it over as much of the frame as possible. Since I needed full use of my right hand to extend this improvised drape, I held the camera in my left and tripped the shutter using the self timer. I lacked Mr. Weston's dignity when I made the shot. Were it not so early, I'm sure the whole neighborhood would have stared.

This the is the final image. All of the reflections on the left half of the frame have been eliminated, while a hint of a "ghost" appears on the right.

It appears that I managed to eliminate all of the reflections that so irritated me when I published the image. However, whatever I may have gained technically was lost in the absence of spontaneity, that singular source of joy that has kept this daily project going. Sure, I learned a lot about reflections from this exercise, But that first image, as imperfect as it was, proved far more satisfying.