Les Jones

More photographers use right eye than left when taking pictures

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | Guns, Photos | Permalink | 3 Comments |

That’s from an online survey by Digital Photography School. The results were 57% right eye and 37% right eye, with another 7% looking through the viewfinder with both eyes (I assume they meant sometimes one and sometimes the other, but see below).

I know from shooting a gun that I’m right eye dominant. I’m lucky in that I’m also right handed.

When your eye dominance and hand dominance are different you have cross eye dominance, which can create some problems when shooting. For instance, if you mount a rifle so that you can pull the trigger with your right hand you’ll have a hard time craning your neck over far enough to look through the sights with your left eye. If you put the rifle in the other hand you can look through the sights, but may have trouble working the bolt and other controls with your off hand, even if the rifle is set up for a left handed shooter.

Some cross dominance shooters get around that by learning to shoot with both eyes open. For pistol shooting the isosceles stance bypasses the problem by putting the gun in the centerline of the body. Other tricks here.

Here’s a simple test to determine if you are right or left eye dominant. Until I read Wikipedia I didn’t know what it was called.

The Porta test. The observer extends one arm, then with both eyes open aligns the thumb or index finger with a distant object. The observer then alternates closing the eyes or slowly draws the thumb/finger back to the head to determine which eye is viewing the object (i.e. the dominant eye)

Tags: guns and cameras

Photographing inside gun barrels

Monday, June 29th, 2009 | Guns, Photos | Permalink | No Comments |

Vote for David has the how.

Tags: guns and cameras

Which 3 camera lenses?

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | Guns, Photos | Permalink | No Comments |

If you’re to be stranded on a desert island, which three camera lenses would you want to have? Thom Hogan gives his answers and his readers’ answers.

It’s interesting to see the range of choices and how they reflect different photography styles. Some people are more interested in telephoto, some wide angle, and some macro. Some are content with mostly consumer grade 3.5-5.6 apertures, while some demand 2.8 or faster apertures. Some people like zooms and others want their primes. A few people are very keen on a quality lens in the 85mm to 105mm range for portraits.

Me, I’m still working up my kit. I’d definitely want my 70-300mm telephoto for wildlife and portraits. Beyond that my choices are a  lot less certain.

I take most of my pictures with the 18-55mm kit lens that came with my camera because that focal range is so useful. With good light it works fine, but in poor light the exposure times go long and with no anti-shake technology like VR or IS the pictures get dark and/or blurry. I’m looking for a replacement or supplement that offers more range or a faster aperture.

I have the new Nikon 35mm 1.8 AF-S on order to take care of low light and shallow depth of field applications. I’m curious to see how much of my photography I can do with a prime. I’m a bit skeptical.

I have no experience with macro or ultrawide angle. Macro appeals to my inner natureboy, but it sounds time-consuming, what with the tripods and the rails and the bellows and the flavin! I’m leaning towards buying a close-up filter for the 70-300mm and going semi-macro for now. I’ll take up real macro when I have more time, like when  my pre-school kids learn to feed themselves, cook for themselves, buy their own groceries, and drive themselves to the grocery store with the money they earned from the good jobs they got after graduating college. So that might be a while.

Wide angle looks interesting, but a little pricey on the zoom side. I’m knocking around the idea of renting a Nikon 10-24 or 12-24 for our next vacation to make sure I like it, but I reckon I will.

P.S. Added a “guns and cameras” tag. The desert island hypothetical reminds me of the gun board scenarios like “which three guns” and “what if you could only have one handgun and one long gun?” I especially liked Kim du Toit’s Crossing America scenario.

Tags: guns and cameras

Guns and cameras, together again

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

Dr. Strangegun has an illustrated post on detail-stripping a 1911. The camera part is his light rig, which is amazingly practical. I think I have that same tripod (it’s a Sunpak, right?) and I have a basically similar clamp-on worklight I used in my pet scorpion’s aquarium. Looks danged handy.

P.S. Once upon a time I started a Guns and Cameras category, but it stalled out after a few posts and I nuked it. Now thanks to tags I can do something similar without committing to a new category. I’ve been having way too much fun playing with tags lately.

Tags: 1911, guns and cameras

Oleg’s tilt-shift photography

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 | Photos | Permalink | No Comments |

When I met Oleg Volk at the Manchester Appleseed shoot I noticed something funny about the lens on his Canon camera. It had a big squared-off area close to the camera body. I asked him if it was a PC (perspective control) and he answered in the affirmative, then explained why he used it.

Perspective control is also called tilt-shift. It allows you to alter the angle of the lens elements inside the lens body. The best-known use for tilt-shift photography is architecture. Using a tilt-shift allows you to keep the architectural lines straight, even when shooting tall buildings from the ground. (You can sort of fake correct perspective using Photoshop.

Oleg explained that he used tilt-shift because he often photographs rifles and shotguns for product literature and for his right to keep and bear arms work. To get the entire longarm in focus he has two options. One is to photograph the gun perpendicularly from the side so that the gun is in the same focal plane from one end to another.

That works, but it provides a boring perspective that’s visually unappealing. By using the tilt-shift lens Oleg can photograph the gun from an angle yet keep every part of the gun in focus. That’s how he made yesterday’s photograph.

Tags: guns and cameras

I Like Cameras. I Like Guns.

Friday, May 9th, 2008 | Guns, Photos | Permalink | 1 Comment |

But cameras that look like guns just seem like a bad idea. This one’s pretty nicely done, though:

Looks to be about a 400mm. You’d definitely want the recoil pad when you fired that sucker.

UPDATE: At first I thought it would be hard to mount this on your shoulder, look through the viewfinder, adjust focus and focal length, and press the shutter release. I just noticed there’s a remote shutter release on the forward stock. So you use one hand to fiddle with the lens and the other hand to hold the stock and fire the shutter. Pretty clever.

Via Breda via Xavier Breath.

Tags: guns and cameras