Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
My desire to own a camera has been growing slowly over the last several years, and so last weekend, after a push from two of my friends who themselves have got into photography, I went to an little camera shop on the Strand and bought myself a Nikon D3200. Its a compact "simple" DSLR camera but nevertheless contains all the core features you would expect. Over the last week I've been going out to take photographs whenever I have time, trying out a shallow but broad range of the various photographical disciplines on offer. In my mind these core disciplines are: landscape photography, portrait photography, macrophotography and night photography, and as I found out, vary massively in both the technical skills and artistic vision required to create a good image.
The simplest is landscape photography, and its what most people would see as the classic form of the art. This includes both literal landscape scenes, but also scenes in urban or more enclosed settings. The subject doesn't move (much) and so you have as long as you want to adjust the settings on your machine to get the perfect shot. I am but an apprentice obviously, but to me there are five key dimensions to these settings; focus, zoom, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. To quickly describe these things and their effect on the image:
^A classic landscape photograph. Note how the sky is a little overexposed, I don't know how to fix this yet.
^This also counts as a landscape photograph, despite not being a landscape. Note the short focal range making the trees in the background blurry.
Portrait photography comes with the massive difficulty of dealing with humans, giving you the massive handicap of only having a couple attempts to get the shot right before they get bored and wander off. You have a lot more to consider with the settings here too. Is the subject moving? How far away are they? Do you want the background in focus or blurred out? What is the light-level like? (especially important indoors). I'd have to give it more of a go to give any recommendations, but my best advice is to adjust the settings for the place you are in prior to asking someone to take a photo of them: makes things much less awkward. I went to London Comicon to try out some portrait photography there, and this turned out to be a bit of a trial by fire. Most of my photos ended up being blurry or too dark, but its was a great place to have hundreds of subjects ready and willing to be photographed.
^There were a lot of Marcilles this year. But that's okay!
^My inaugural maid photograph. The lighting was weird here so its both over and under exposed: just bad composition on my part.
Macrophotography is the photography of objects that are very close to the lens. Often this is nature-focused, but still-lifes (still-lives??) of inanimate objects obviously make things easier. Here getting the technical parametres right is essential to getting a half-decent image, giving me much more respect towards those nature photographers who take such great pictures of little critters in the mere seconds they have before it runs away. Really you need a special "macrolens" to take good macrophotographs, but I managed a few decent ones in my back garden.
^Autumn mushrooms. You can see the massive effect focusing on close-by objects makes to the focal range.
^My cat angry because I woke her up to take photos of her.
Finally is night photography, which is really a meta-category. Night photography is just taking photos in low-light, whether than be landscape, portrait or even macro. Obviously the trick here is to let in as much light as possible into the camera without compromising on all the other aspects of the photo. It's really hard. Even light levels our eyes easily adjust too like inside on a cloudy afternoon will severely curtail your image quality if you don't compensate with the various settings available. This is where ISO really comes into play, and its an area where I still have a long way to go to take anything decent. On the extreme end of night photography is astrophotography: taking pictures of the night sky. Basically you need a really high ISO and a really long shutter speed (often in the minutes long), I did try my hand at it one night, but every image I took just came up black except for this one.
^I have no idea why this was the only attempt that worked. Just a fluke.
Overall photography is a really interesting hobby that makes you think about the way light works in a different way. I've only really gone over the technical aspects here but the other side to it is the composition side: what to photograph and how to make it look interesting. I've read a few things on the topic, but in my mind this is best left to be explored individually and is where the real fun of photography lies.
