The dome of the sky

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I'm reminded of that verse from the Rubaiyat, "And that inverted bowl we call the sky,/ Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die,/ Lift not thy hands to it for help,/ For it rolls on impotently, as thou or I." A glass sky -- glass dome. Marvelous "vanishing-point" perspective, and such color saturation. In fact, it's the Madagascar house at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens! The shot was easy to capture ... if you don't count the panting and perspiring! It's HOT and HUMID in there ... the plants love it. Every life form inside is from equatorial Africa. Photo by Mel, 2009.

Fossils, front and center!

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Palaeontology week at the South Australian Museum of Natural History offered some fantastic opportunities to pit oneself against a slippery opponent: glass. The exhibits are all behind (or under) glass, of course ... and it's daylight, which means that trying to get a good photo of an amazing fossil entails finding some way to get the "glare" out of the shot! You can find yourself taking an excellent portrait -- of the photographer, reflected in the glass. There's no real trick to it, but there's a few guidelines to follow, if you're wondering how in the world to get a usable shot. First: observe. Use your eyes. Don't let your brain merely "tune out" the reflections -- see them! Second: use your feet and knees. Move around and duck down, till the reflections are either minimal, or gone. The camera might try to focus on the glass itself, so be vigilant ... make sure it focuses where you want it to. Lastly, the light levels will be low, so set your virtual film speed at 800 or higher, if you're working in Manual mode; and if you're working in Auto mode, take a great number of shots till the camera gives you exactly what you want -- and erase the dross! Photo by Mel, 2009. (Palaeontology Week, late March 2009; in the foyer of the SA Museum. The major skull in the case is Protoceratops.)

Aspects of the Journey

"Inward, Looking Outward" could have been the title of this post. This was one of a batch of frames I took late one evening in November, 2007, at Heathrow Airport, London, while waiting for my outbound flight, a Qantas Boeing 747-600, the Longreach, named for the original headquarters of the company in Queensland. It was delayed four hours due to weather on the flightpath, a great many disgruntled people could only sit around and wait. At least I had photography to help pass the time! Had lighting been less bright maybe shots through the plate glass could have been managed to create an outside perspective such as with my shots at Newcastle Airport earlier the same evening, but that was never going to be possible here, and this time the reflections tell their own story: two images, superimposed, the travellers in the lounge and the plane they are about to board, interleaved, thus two aspects of the journey. Sharpened and colour-saturated for publication; Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic exposure. Image by Mike.

Cavernous Architecture

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I was heading down a people-mover from the local-line platform to the gigantic national line terminal at the Manchester Piccadily complex in November 2006, and the symmetry of the stone and steel in this gigantic structure just begged to be shot. The high perspective brought out the marching line of Romanesque arches that echo 19th century civic structures--columns with ancient Corinthian capitals-- and the spiderweb of trusses supporting the roof, while the line of the people-mover itself is a mechanistic adverse feature as its own axis is at odds with the rest of the image. The shot was not difficult, automatic exposure and a simple framing. The floorway moved smoothly so there was no jostling for which to compensate, simply the challenge of shooting straight while toting your baggage. Enhancement is the usual round of subtle tweaks of sharpness, contrast and colour. Fuji FinePix S5600; image by Mike.

As through a glass...

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Reflection fascinates me: a world contained within a world, with the possibilily of "infinite regression" between two mirror-like surfaces. Images framed within images. The slight bevel in some of the panes of glass in this window prevent the illusion from being absolutely arresting, but you still get the "portal" effect that's so common a theme in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Imagine that you could step through the mirror...! The shot was easy to get; it was actually photographed through another pane of glass, from inside a bistro. Because of the second layer of glass between camera and subject, a little enhancement was done at the software level. Don't forget that every layer of glass stops about 15% of the light, so adjustments must be made. Fortunately, in digital photography this is so easy. Photo by Mel, 2007.

A World of Glass

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Glass... The transparent solid composed of silicon and oxygen... Silicone dioxide, in fact. It's a shot like this that reminds you how much we depend on it. There's glass in the camera lens -- the advent of digital recording and video imaging changed nothing about the fact that optics require lenses, and they are made of glass. There's glass in the architecture, huge amounts of it. And it was shot through glass: note the reflections, including the photographer's hand at far left. This frame was captured through the upper windows of a double-decker London bus on a chilly afternoon in early December, 2006, somewhere between Victoria Station and Westminster, on the way to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Fuji FinePix S5600, on auto. Image by Mike.