user_mobilelogo

Bio

Dan's mugshotDaniel H. Bennett was born in London in 1965 and lived in England until moving to the United States in 2000, settling in Northern Colorado.

His interest in vision and observation of the behavior of light has been life-long. On a trip to France as a young man his hosts called him “Monsieur Tête-en-l’air” (Mr. Head-in-the-air) due to his always watching for halos, rainbows, sun-dogs (parhelia), etc. He was particularly influenced by a book written in 1939 (published in English in 1954, Dover) by Professor M. Minnaert, called The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air. A Field Guide to Time-Varying Light Sources was conceived as a modern successor to that book, and adopts a similar approach, while revealing the secrets of modern light sources.

Daniel is married with four children, a motorcycle and two accordions.

Buy the book!

The Field Guide is available from Amazon and other outlets.

The book's front cover

ISBN-13: 978-069-236090-3

ISBN-10: 0-692-36090-5

LCCN: 2015900348

Purchase the book on Amazon!

The Blog

Here's my blog, where I'll write articles of interest, things I've learned, tutorials, suggestions for lights to go look at, musings, etc.

Monday, 26 October 2015 21:19

LG's G4 cellphone is (almost) perfect for TVL photography

Written by

I've just moved to the LG G4 phone, and was excited about its camera's manual mode. Tonight I had a chance to try it out. I photographed this restaurant, which has a line of white LEDs around its windows:

 Restaurant with white LED decoration around the windows

By using the camera's manual settings, I captured this image:

 Vertically swept photo of the restaurant

The time-varying behavior of these LEDs is very easy to see with the naked eye, and may well be one of the easiest subjects for vision jiggling.

To get this image, I selected the following settings:

  • Manual focus (so that it would not be trying to focus while taking the shot)
  • ISO 500 (to underexpose the image so that I get the lights, not the whole scene)
  • 1/8 second (to capture for long enough to give me plenty of dashes in the traces)

The primary weakness with the G4's camera is that there's an appreciable delay between pressing the button and the shot being taken, and since you have to keep the camera moving it's unpredictable what you'll capture. The solution is to take several shots until you get what you want. Aside from that, though, and the lack of optical zoom (which isn't too much of a problem for this type of photography), the G4 makes a great pocket tool for the photographer of time-varying light sources. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

Last modified on Tuesday, 27 October 2015 22:07

Site design

This site is powered by Joomla! CMS. The template is "Cast" from Joomlage, modified here and there. The gallery is powered by RokGallery. All design by Dan Bennett.

Copyright

All content on this website, including images, videos, text and material from "A Field Guide To Time-Varying Light Sources" is © 2023 Daniel H. Bennett / timevaryinglights.com / A Bear Peering Round A Rock, and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved to the extent of applicable law. Exceptions: third-party images, which are credited as applicable, third-party embedded videos and public domain images.