Nutmeg - the spice of life.

The nutmeg fruit; photographed in Fiji.

A little over a year ago my wife and I embarked on a remarkable cruise which was an amazing adventure.  We visited many exotic locations, Fiji being one of them.  While there we explored a wonderful farm appropriately called a spice garden.  As you can imagine, there was a large variety of plants.  We were fortunate in that many of them were fruit-bearing at the time and ready to be harvested.

One that particularly caught my eye was the nutmeg fruit.  The outer flesh is edible and may be used to produce jams and chutneys.  The inner seed contains the main commercial interest though.  It has three distinctive layers.  The outer layer is a vibrant red and is used to make mace.  The shell lies beneath that which contains the seed; it is the source of the spice nutmeg.

Nutmeg was originally cultivated in the Spice Islands and was kept under strict management to facilitate a monopoly.  The entire seed was popular in Europe and England for both its flavour and many of the mystic properties it allegedly held.  Some of beliefs included its ability to attract admirers, increase virility, ward off evil, and protect against a host of ailments.  With so many benefits and such limited stock the spice became very expensive; a pound of it could buy several beasts of burden.  At one point it was more valuable than gold.

Today we value the spice itself and the mace which encases the nutmeg's shell.  Not only are they popular in culinary circles, they both are important components of stomach and intestinal medicines and are used to treat a host of other medical conditions ranging from insomnia to cancer.  

It is clear that, both historically and currently, that the nutmeg plant produces a valuable commodity with remarkable properties.  Nutmeg truly is the spice of life.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com

Depth of field is affected by image size.

As an image gets larger, out of focus areas become more apparent.

Depth of field is a cardinal concept in photography.  The main aspects of controlling depth of field include focal length, aperture, and point of focus.  An often overlooked aspect relates to the size that the image is to be viewed at. 

Consider this scenario.  You are photographing something and check the image on your rear LCD display to make sure it looks good.  Yes, everything seems great, including the focus.  All the stuff you wanted to be in focus seems to be.  You take the image home and view your creation on the computer.  The now much larger image wasn't what you expected.  There are blurry areas before and after the subject.  Zoom in a bit and it gets even worse!  How could you have missed that?

It happened because depth of field is based on a number of criteria, including size of the final image.  As the photograph gets larger areas that originally appeared in focus become progressively more blurry.  This seems like an enormous problem, but only counts based on another factor; proximity of viewer.

Have a look at the images above.  The top one seems fine with everything nicely in focus.  It would have looked fine on the camera's LCD screen.  As you view following enlargements it becomes apparent that the focus wasn't quite what it could have been.  However, an important consideration has been overlooked. 

Move further away from your viewing surface, whether it is laptop, desktop monitor, cellphone, or tablet.  As you get farther away the enlarged components of the photo see less blurry than they were.  This is why you can enlarge a photo to fit a highway billboard sign and it seem all in focus.  Chances are that, as you get closer to it, parts of it may start to look a little fuzzy.

Enlargement size and viewing distance go hand in hand.  It turns out the real factor affecting whether something is in focus or not is based upon the image falling upon your retina.  By managing the amount of enlargement, including cropping, and the viewing distance, you can alter depth of field to some extent.  It is not the main method of course, but it is something to consider.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com

Reflection on a pond, compensating in manual exposure mode.

Reflection of the shoreline on a pond; exposure was way off.

Although I am a big fan of aperture priority exposure mode (the "A" selection in the PSAM group) for many of the situations I find myself in, my second most common choice is manual.  In this mode the camera reads light coming into the camera and compares it to the current exposure and ISO settings.  If everything is bang-on, the meter will show that a "correct exposure" is possible in the viewfinder and/or on other camera mounted LCD displays. 

The reason "correct exposure" is in quotation marks is because the camera may just be mistaken.  In the situation above, my first image proved to be an overexposure.  It turns out there are a lot of dark areas in the scene.  The camera's meter read the situation as there wasn't too much light available and so suggested a longer shutter speed.  The resulting image was clearly off by quite a bit.  My solution was to change the shutter speed by letting less light in than what the camera suggested.

In an automatic mode this is done by using either exposure compensation or exposure lock.  In manual mode the command dial controlling shutter speed is rotated.  Alternatively, you can also change the aperture value, the ISO, or a combination of all three.  For the most part though I opt to change shutter speed as I want depth of field to remained unchanged.  With vibration control technology being so common and good, this often is not an issue.  In this case it was even less so, because I actually had to increase the shutter speed to let less light in.

I decreased the light by 4/3 of a stop (1.3 stops for those with a fraction phobia) and shot again.  The result was much better, rendering the dark areas dark and the bright areas properly exposed.  The nice thing about shooting in manual exposure mode is that, once you have figured out the correct settings, you can continue to use them if the light remains the same.  Areas of shadow and backlighting may occur, but I find previously used manual exposure settings will often be correct.

I used a polarizer in this situation as well which helped remove unwanted glare from the water and deepened the already very blue sky.  The shutter speed was 1/50th of a second at an ISO of 200 and an aperture of f/7.1.  I used a 28 mm focal length on a full-frame camera.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com