Final Prep for Eclipse Project

In the end our modest Kickstarter campaign for the quest to capture the glory of the May 2012 eclipse didn't get funded.  Wrapping in a tough year personally and professionally undercuts the resolve to make this happen.

Indeed, a variety of lesser goals have been shelved for the time being, but this one... its not something you elect to pursue later.  You either shoot it when the opportunity presents itself, or you don't.  Its the same reasoning that convinced me to go for it in the first place.  This is here, and this is now.  If you don't feel like it.  If you don't have the funds.  If your resources and process are strained to the breaking point.  In the end, if you don't do it, you don't get a do-over when things come together.  They MUST come together when the cosmos says so, or the opportunity to make a statement is gone, period.

So we're going anyway.  Its not the same team, but the shot is the same.  And the results, for better or worse, will be the same.

Final Preparations

An itinerary of what we're doing next weekend has been drafted -- a long day of location scouting on Saturday; final supplies and tweaks adjusted on Sunday.  A last minute scramble for a local model and a bevy of backups because prudence demands it, just like a prime location and a slew of backups.

My recurring anxiety is the premise of showing up to a pre-selected spot of suitably desolate landscape only to find a flash mob of eclipse groupies wandering through my field of view.  There is 600 feet of scrub brush between the end of my lens and the model and all it takes is for one groupie's head to block my view, let alone hundreds of them.

Weather too weighs in the back of my mind as a factor out of my control.  Wouldn't it be lovely if it rained or was overcast during the 4 minutes I have to shoot.

For these issues, I am at the mercy of good fortune.  For all others, I have my logistical background as a former engineer to lean on for all manner of contingency planning.

Among the Critical Tools -- the Lowly Paperclip

The idea to capture a shot of grandeur is to put the model inside the eclipse.  Anyone who's ever tried to shoot someone in context to the moon or a sunset knows how small these titan celestial bodies are in relation to a person.  Just a small glowing bubble the size of a balloon, at best.  But for a truly eye-popping shot, it needs to be HUGE.  The trick is not to make the moon bigger, because you can't.  Instead, you push the person further away -- much further.  600 feet further in fact.  And without a tape measure it can be kind of hard to know how far that is.

Except if you use a standard office paperclip.  It turns out the moon fits in the end of a paperclip held at arm's length.  That's how big the eclipse will be.  And that's how big a person needs to be to be the size of the moon.  So you hold the paperclip out and keep walking away until they're just that small.  A good 600 feet as it turns out.

And once you do that, you understand why such a gargantuan lens is needed to get anything more than a tiny spec in the distance.

Only a week away at this point.  Woohoo.

Dario
SolArt Project
INFINI Boudoir

Size DOES Matter

Have you ever been to a place that had a fun and interesting landmark and wanted to get a picture of yourself with it only to find that the object is so large it dwarfs you?  You are lost in its hugeness and the shot is fun but is kind of lacking from a "good" shot perspective?

Its all about proportionality.  As humans, we have a fairly well defined size range.  Its relatively easy to shoot people with people -- we're all similar in size, give or take.  But it can be challenging sometimes to shoot people in relation to something really big, like say the Eiffel Tower, or a jumbo jet.  Those objects are so big its easy to lose people in their presence.

Objects in Mirror may be Larger than they Appear

It turns out you can resize objects to be more in proportion to each other.  Its similar to the side view mirror effect where large vehicles can appear smaller than they actually are.  There's some visual trickery there that you can use to your advantage.

It's a common human experience that the further something is from you, the smaller it appears.  You usually have some control over how far things are from you -- you can stand as far as you like from the Eiffel Tower for example.  As well, you can control how far from you the person you're shooting is.  By controlling how far the tower and the person are from you, you can control their relative sizes.  The closer the object, the bigger they are.  Since the person is much smaller than the tower, to get them to be at least reasonably close in size to each other, the tower has to be much farther away than the person.

By bringing the person up ridiculously close and being very far away from the tower you can even make the tower seem insignificantly small by comparison.

Notice how the size of the relatively similar sized planes can be controlled in the above shots by where the person is standing relative to them.  In the left hand photo, the plane is very large because the person is right next to it -- most of it doesnt even fit in the shot.  In the right hand photo, the person is much closer to the camera than the plane.  The plane's size has been "resized" so as to be in proportion to the man.

To be sure, the shot on the left is certainly a professional, well shot image.  But the shot on the right gives a more complete shot of the plane.  The left side shot uses the plane as an impression, the shot on the right is more of a documentation.

SolArt Project 2012

So how then to address the solar eclipse that we will be shooting in May.  We are familiar with the moon as being a rather smallish object in the sky.  In actuality of course the moon is a massive object.  Shooting a person in relation to such an enormous object as the moon would ordinarily be nearly impossible -- you simply couldn't get far enough away from it to be able to comparably size it and a person together.  Instead, the moon has somewhat taken care of the problem for us by being so far away, appearing relatively small and almost manageable.

We end up having the opposite problem.  Its so far away, its a bit small and when shooting a person at normal distances, the moon shrinks to an insignificant size.

Since the majority of us are not able to get any closer to the moon than we are, we are left with positioning the person much further away making them much smaller and more similar in size to the moon.  It is at this great distance that a person can be seen to be near, or surrounded by, an enormous moon.

And since the moon and person are so far away at this point, you have to zoom in... a lot... to be able to get a decent shot of the pair.

Hence this rented behemoth.

If you haven't already, please check out our site for more information on this interesting and challenging project!

INFINI Boudoir

800-941-6640