* * * * *
My Kit Porsche
[My Kit Porsche alá Lego] [1] (My Kit Porsche alá Lego) [2] Parking Spots [3]
(found via Jason Kottke [4]) is an interesting photographic site where you
take a picture of a toy car in such a way as to make it appear the site of a
real car. Since I didn't have a matchbox car, I decided to use one of the
Lego cars (My Kit Porsche alá Lego) [5] I had sitting around.
So there I am, outside, holding the car out at arms length and taking photos
of it against the other cars in the parking lot at the Facility in the Middle
of Nowhere and getting some rather strange looks from the kids running around
while I attempt to work my way around focal length problems.
It's not easy getting keeping an object in the near foreground and an object
in the far background both in focus—unless you have can have a high f/stop
(an f/stop is a ratio of the diameter of the apature to the focal length and
a stop is defined as the iris (or apature) opening which will allow twice or
half the light as the previous or next stop) you are going to have a problem
with the focus, and in order to get a small opening, you either need a lot of
light or a long exposure. But the problem with a long exposure is that any
movement of the camera will generate ghost images or an exremely blurry
picture.
[Kit Porsche with Blurry Background] [6] (Kit Porsche with Blurry Background)
[7][Sharp Background without a Kit Porsche] [8] (Sharp Background without a
Kit Porsche) [9] But we are now in the world of digital photography where we
can now compensate fairly easily this problem. After reviewing the pictures I
had (most with slightly blurry backgrounds) I decided to take two pictures—
one with the toy car (Kit Porsche with Blurry Background) [10] (and a blurry
background) and one without the toy car (Sharp Background without a Kit
Porche) [11] (of just the background, but a sharper background) and do some
post processing later—namely, cutting my hand with the car out of the first
photo and pasting it into the second photo, with some cropping (since I
didn't bother cutting my entire hand out).
The results weren't bad—a little jagged along the thumb side of my hand, but
I'm still getting used to doing the image cut-n-paste thing. I then sent the
resulting image off to Parking Spots [12] so it should show up in a day or
so.
Update later today
The entry I made bounced back since their mailbox had overfloweth. I'll have
to submit the entry later …
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/porsche.thumb.jpg
[2]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/porsche.jpg
[3]
http://dubster.com/cars/
[4]
http://www.kottke.org/
[5]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/porsche.jpg
[6]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/proto.1.thumb.jpg
[7]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/proto.1.jpg
[8]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/proto.2.thumb.jpg
[9]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/proto.2.jpg
[10]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/proto.1.jpg
[11]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2003/02/19/proto.2.jpg
[12]
http://dubster.com/cars/submit.asp
Email author at
[email protected]
