Another year older

I had planned on not posting anything to the blog today, but seeing as it’s been a while since I had a 7-day blogging week, I decided to ditch that plan.  The reason I wasn’t going to post is that I turned a year older at about 3.20pm today and was inclined to give myself a day off, so you’ll forgive me if today’s post is short, and the image uninteresting.  At least I might get some credit for keeping it topical.

There’s not much photographically to say about the image, except that it is shot in ambient light in my living room with a high ISO and a slow shutter speed, but a reasonably narrow aperture.  I wanted to keep depth of field for the various cards in the shot, and the narrow aperture is one of two of the elements of taking the shot that help achieve this – the other is the shooting angle, which means all the cards are roughly the same distance from the camera, with roughly uniform depth of field for each card the result.  Effectively the shooting angle (and so the composition) gets me depth of field left-to-right, and the aperture gets me depth of field front-to-back.

While this shot was just a quickie to illustrate this post, that technique is quite relevant to copy photography, often used in museums, galleries and libraries where photographers would be hired to make digital replicas of two dimensional objects such as papers and paintings.  For this type of copy photography the camera will almost always be square with the object being photographed, and the depth of field kept large with a narrow aperture.  The differences with the technique I used for this shot are two-fold:  First, I paid no attention to the light (other than there being enough of it to make an exposure), whereas copy photography would aim to use soft even light from edge to edge of the frame, and use low ISOs and tripods to allow for slower shutter speeds.  Secondly I used a 24mm lens, although the final frame is a crop of what I shot, while copy photography would more likely be done with a 50mm macro lens.

Now that I’ve managed to say far more about this shot than I thought I would when I started this post, let me also mention that mine is not the only birthday around these parts in the next week.

Next Friday this blog will be 1 year old, and on Thursday I’ll be bringing my first year of blogging to a close with a look back over my favourite posts of the last 12 months, while on Friday, to mark the blog’s birthday, I’ll be posting the second in my “Flash-lit Friday” series, with a subject matter to suit the occasion.  More to come between now and then as always.