Illusion Part 1

Merritt competitions seem to come round much faster every year it seems, or maybe every year I say I'm gonna be prepared and I'm not.

This year our merit competition themes are Illusion, Song title & Narrative.

Illusion was a tricky one. I like to shoot fresh stuff and try not to rehash stuff, but if I haven’t got the time and I can make something fit I will in a pinch.

Illusion was one of them.

Many ideas come through, as always I started with a brainstorm on paper.

Words associated with Illusion, I looked up different definitions and I google image searched as many words as I could..

Illusion lead me to magic

Magic trick lead me to deception which lead me to trick

perception lead me to forced perception

optical illusion, false idea.

These were just some of the words and ideas I had

I liked the idea of magic. Magic is a massive illusion. The skill some of these magicians have. The acts they do, the rope, the rings, the cards.

…Cards.

Cards are great, they are universal. Everyone all around the world knows about cards. Card games, card tricks, card art.

The skill some of these people show when moving cards. If you’ve ever seen Now you see me you’ll know what i mean. The first minute of that film Daniel Atlas the great magician does what I can only describe as a beautiful shuffle. He cuts the cards 3 times so he’s spinning 4 little handfuls of cards around like they are nothing.

I decided I needed someone with that sort of skill, that sort of confidence. Someone who could do the beautiful shuffle.

In my mind it was going to be better to find a magician who would let me take their pic over a model who could learn cards.

I met and spoke to a magician but availability and geographical limitations meant it wasn’t to be.

Maybe an idea for another day.

I still needed 4 pictures. Two prints and two PDI’s

I was playing with an emulator machine one day and am scrolling through games. Mario no, tetris no, donkey kong no, am just not in the mood for any of these games.

…..illusion of time on super Nintendo?

Never heard of that game before.

Can an image be allowed into a merit on title alone?

How would you shoot an illusion of time? The same scene in different seasons merged together? Don’t have the time or prep to do something grand like that.

Time, time, time. What do we use to measure time? Clocks, the sun, watches.

If you don’t know, I love collecting watches. I don’t know the exact amount I have but I know it’s over 200. I don’t class myself as a snob or anything. I collect anything I like. Some of my watches are £4 some are £400. I don’t have 1 particular make or anything. I will literally buy any watch I like for whatever reason I like. Nice shape, color, feature, material.

A nice watch shot could work. The illusion of time. A nice big watch, heavily zoomed, great detail.

I don’t have much experience with macro. I have one macro lens but it’s not the best. My Tamron 70-300 is a macro lens from 180 to 300mm. The ratios/markings on the lens confuse me to be honest. There is a gold band around parts of the lens, with what I think are ratios listed (1.5, 1.3, 1.1, 1.0) . I have had some success with this lens but nothing spectacular.

Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro 1:2

Gear

I Have never tried extension tubes or bellows. No guts no glory they always say. I found a set of bellows online for relatively cheap money (£29.95) Placed my order and then started researching how to use them. Being fully manual I knew they would be very technique based. Once they arrived I put the bellows together. These bellows were designed for an old style film camera. So when I put them together the camera wouldn’t fit. The bulk of the bottom of my camera prevented it from getting close enough to the mount. I took the mounts off each end of the camera and reversed them. So the body is mounted at the lens end and the lens at the body end. In my eyes bellows are effectively empty space so this didn't seem to affect anything so ran with it. I decided to go with my old Pentax 50mm F1.4 for this shoot. This is an old fashioned film lens that still fits Pentax today as they haven’t changed the lens mount since the K mount was bought out.

Pentax 50mm f/1.4 SMC P-FA

I decided to set up on the dining room table, knowing I'd need a decent work space. One thing to mention if you ever want to try shooting with bellows is.

A) you need decent space

B) the adjustment you need to make are micro, 2 or 3 millimeters make all the difference in these situations.

C) if you get close you don’t want to move anything. The amount of times I moved something too much and had to spend minutes resetting it up to get it back in focus was WAY too high.

D) using live view (easiest for me) for this sort of work is very draining on batteries.

I know I'm going to have to be close to the subject to get the amazing macro look I'm after. I felt I needed to select the right watch. Something analogue, nice sweeping hands, big, metal, high quality. I had an Invicta recently and thought this could work. Gun metal grey, heavy, high quality (in my opinion.) I set about the watch in front of the lens, using placemats and various things from the table to match the levels of the watch and the end of the lens.

Getting the lens only a few inches from the watch I got the face dead center. The bellows were compressed, being at their smallest distance. I slowly would the rear half of the bellows back. As I would the bellows back the image in the camera became bigger and bigger. Before the bellows hit maximum enlargement the edges of the watch were lost. Having no experience I tried a few test shots. The shots were really really dark. I want to keep the quality in the image so I kept the ISO low (100). Since bellows are manual the Aperture is set on the lens not the camera like it is today. From watching a few videos I knew that depth of field is minimized so I set it to F22 (highest lens would go)

I decided to play with the exposure. A short one 1/250 was way too dark. A 10 second one was way too bright. I started at 10 seconds and came down. At 3 seconds the hand swept beautifully, the face still nice and sharpish. The image was still a little bit dark so I had to use the light from my phone to illuminate the face.

After trying various ways of shooting this I decided to call it a day. Pulling all of them into photoshop I realized the images looked very different from the back of the camera. I don’t have the best photoshop knowledge/experience/skill. The face on the watch is grey, black, blue and white.

Invicta Reserve Speedway Ocean Reef II

I decided to turn the image black and white, however using a mask I bought the color back to the hands. In keeping the color in the hands it really pulls the eyes of the viewer towards them. The 3 second exposure really exaggerates the movement and pushes the idea of the image.

Final Image

The Illusion OF Time

Pentax K-1, Pentax 50mm F1,4

3 Seconds, F22, ISO 100