Felix and the technicolor dream coat

Staff. Sgt. Israel Pou with the 402nd Civil Affairs Battalion checks his map in the dark during the Night Land Navigation portion of the Best Warrior Competition at NAS Pensacola on March 23, 2011. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

I can't for the life of me find the original of this image and the metadata has been stripped out of the copy I do have. Conspiracy? You be the judge.

   Regardless, this photo I like. No, it's not perfect but the colors I love. I know I just talked about how night time is a great time to use flash. And it is. But lets say you don't have a flash, what do you do then? Well, be lucky!

   Okay, well that's not entirely true. In this instance you can see my subject had a few sources of light, a fairly bright light from a near by parking lot, a yellow/orange light from a nearby building, and his big red flashlight.

Note 1: His red light is a great example of how light accumulates on a sensor/film.

His flashlight produces only red light, not white, or yellow or orange, just red.

   Why so many colors? Because as the light accumulates on your sensor or film it will eventually turn white. There is more light in the center of his beam and less light as you go outwards. So here, the colors represent brightness as well as color temperature.

Note 2: Do you see the purples and the blues? You can almost see where the light from the parking lamp (which produces cool blue light) mixes with the red light, making purple. Neat huh? I thought so.

Note 3: Do you see some yellow tint around to top part of the photo, top part of the solider and some of the grass area? That light came from a nearby building

Okay, so now that we know how we got all those neat colors lets talk about some technical aspects about this photograph. 

   I used a tripod to keep camera shake on my end out of the equation. However, as we discussed yesterday, if the subject moves we would get blur. I had to stay around the building/parking lot because as my major source of light (I didn't have a flash with me) I simply wasn't able to get any photos outside of that area that weren't nearly black.

   I wish I could tell you exactly how long I had the shutter open, but unfortunately I can't tell you how long this exposure lasted. I would guess it was longer than 1/2 second, you can see some motion were his head was moving but you'll notice it ends up just looking like a blur/smudge.

   I also wish I could tell you what my ISO was at, but it was probably over 400. How can I tell? Well even the sharp parts of this photo aren't very sharp, if you zoom way in you'll see noise [off color pixels]

Note 3: With film as you increase your ISO you increase your grain. Grain in film is like adding texture, which is different from noise which are digital aberrations. In digital  as you increase your ISO you'll produce noise, random colors appearing as tiny pixels. More noise, more random colored pixels.

Grain is kind of like having a sore throat. Noise is like losing your voice.

Example: My voice is raspy and has texture, its certainly not normal, but it's not terrible and some people might prefer it [that's another topic] Noise is like losing your voice. Every so often I squeak or go silent, there just isn't any consistency to it, that's similar noise.

So, back to this photo, I like it. It's not technically perfect but I enjoy the colors. Do I wish it was sharper? Yes. Do I wish I would have used Flash? Yes. But that is why we take pictures and look at them with a critical eye, to see how we can improve our technique.