Nine Stones Close

Jan 29, 2008 Alun Life, The Past 1 Comment Archaeology, Photos, Prehistoric

I vis­ited Nine Stones Close on Hart­hill Moor this past week­end to exper­i­ment with my cam­era. I was sur­prised how suc­cess­ful some of the pho­tos were. Ini­tially I used the Aper­ture Pri­or­ity set­ting on the cam­era, because I wanted plenty of depth of field. The cam­era was designed by many clever boffins, so I assumed it could do a bet­ter job with the shut­ter speed and expos­ure than I could. I know Aydin had said to use the Manual set­ting, but bal­an­cing aper­ture and shut­ter speed is a com­plete mys­tery to me.

I obvi­ously haven’t grasped the basics of the digital revolu­tion. I switched to Manual later on to give it a go and took some awful over and under exposed photos.

What I hadn’t really grasped is that if you set the aper­ture for the depth of field you want then, with a digital cam­era, you can home in on the right expos­ure by trial and error if you have to. Addi­tion­ally I had the auto-bracket fea­ture on. This was tak­ing a photo slightly above and below the set­tings I was at, which increased my chances of get­ting a good photo.

It’s also tak­ing me time to get my head around a very dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about pho­to­graphy. When I try and take a pho­to­graph I try and take the best one I can. I sus­pect that exper­i­ment­ing more and resign­ing myself to the fact that one good photo will mean there’s ten bad ones will push up the total num­ber of good pho­tos that I take. The idea of a method that you know will pro­duce quite a lot of rub­bish is strange to me. I prefer to pro­duce moun­tains of rub­bish through nat­ural incompetence.

I have a mixed view of HDR. I’m still not get­ting col­our HDR how I want it. That’s a mat­ter of prac­tice, I think I’ve still got the col­ours over-saturated. I’m a lot hap­pier with the photo on the right, because it appears to dis­tort the col­our less, but still makes the shad­owed sides of the stones more vis­ible than the ori­ginal. It’s not a major issue. If I can take pho­tos like the one at the top on a single expos­ure that’s not a prob­lem. It also improves the look of the tex­ture of the stones over the ori­ginal. Still, at the moment wouldn’t be happy put­ting a col­our HDR photo into a piece of work yet. On the other hand I have no qualms about black and white HDR.

I’d be quite happy using the photo above, des­pite put­ting more work into devel­op­ing that than I am with col­our HDR. I think it’s the fact it’s black and white that makes it clear that the image is not inten­ded as a 100% accur­ate depic­tion of real­ity. If that’s the case though then I’m still fall­ing into the sub­con­scious trap that think­ing col­our pho­tos are object­ive records. The photo above is still HDR, because I’ve over­laid three dif­fer­ent expos­ures, and whacked up the micro-contrast to bring out detail in the photo. For com­par­ison see the photo below which is simply a col­our photo rendered into monochrome.

Used right I think that HDR could be a use­ful tech­nique rather than a gim­mick — espe­cially if the pho­tos are mono­chrome. Non­ethe­less it would prob­ably be best to label these pho­tos if I use them in a pub­lic­a­tion. Done prop­erly, it’s not put­ting any­thing into the photo that a pho­to­grapher couldn’t do with a decent light­ing rig. On the other hand I don’t know many archae­olo­gists who wander around with a massive num­ber of lamps, so it could still be con­sidered cheating.