February 2021

If you are young there is still time to mis-spend your youth by frequently billiard parlours and learning to talk slang. If you are old you are going to have to draw upon knowledge already gained. In any case, you're going to be shooting for the angles. The Leica cabinet photos were taken straight-on. This was to preserve the beautiful lines of the cameras and show the straight ones to advantage. The 90º in and out of the light sometimes caught the lens of the taking camera and sometimes showed the surrounding cabinet's illuminations. This would also happen in a museum. If we are dealing with curvier subjects we can take them from more angular positions. This means that the entry and exit of light into and out of the cabinets may not trap other reflections. The white of the lens's front element engravings may never be seen - the room lights may add their lustre but not appear as ghosts in the frame. The flash power needed to do this, however, may be much more than with the straight shot - up...

That's a bit different from calling it Auto White Balance, but you can keep reading. It's all about what happens when you give the digital mule its head. The light meter on your digital camera ( the mule ) is a very smart part of the mechanism. It'll look at each scene you set before it and try to make it look good - decent exposure, no lost highlights or shadows, no noise. Frequently it will fail because you have overtaxed its capabilities...

When you get to a certain age you can expect to forget things. Like your trousers. The case comes up before the magistrate in a fortnight. In the meantime I visited Stirling Street shop and forgot to take my portable tabletop setup upon which to photograph new items. Rather than admit my folly, I set about using the resources that were already there - and this put me on an experimental track to resolve an unrelated photo problem. Have you ever been in a museum shop, or display area that had things in it which you wished to photograph? Things that were behind glass in cases, and that the staff weren't about to take out for you. This would be analogous to going into CE and not opening the cabinets. Display of valuable items can be well or poorly done, and the lighting is a lottery. Herewith some thoughts on the problem: a. You need permission to take the pictures. If they say say " No " you have to abide by the rules of the premises. Some places will allow photography as...