Photography in Embers of Dawn - The lens, by dwabi

Why a camera

A camera that reads, as well as sees.

Explorer 62 is here for the Survey, and the Survey wants to know what lives on this world. So the tool she carries most is the spectrograph. It looks like a camera and works like one. Hold it on an animal for long enough, though, and it also reads the creature’s biology, along with the faint trace of the Umbra working on it.

When we redesigned the lens this autumn, the brief opened with one line: the camera is entirely fundamental to the gameplay loop. Your photographs pay for your gear and open up the higher valley. In the end they carry the story, too.

Two Mossback Grazers among misty pines, seen through the slate lens, the violet focus box locked on one of them — Through the slate lens: a Mossback in the rain, focus locked, the reading filling in.

“Readings tell Home what an animal is; plates show how it lives.”From the Embers of Dawn lore bible

The loop

From a print in the mud to a plate sent home.

Here’s how a photograph comes together, start to finish. It’s the thing you’ll do most in Embers, so we’ve spent a lot of time on every part of it.

Find it.Herds walk their own trails and leave signs along the way. The rarer animals keep their own hours, and one only shows itself in the rain. Nib often spots something before you do.
Get close.Click an animal and she creeps towards it, crouched, swinging wide so the wind doesn’t carry her scent. She stops just short of where it would notice her.
Frame it.Raise the lens. The focus hunts, then locks. The light sets your shutter speed, and at dusk that means holding very still.
Take the shot.You only find out how you did after the shutter. She gives it a score and stars, adds any stamps it earned, and tells you what went wrong.
Read the plate.Back at camp, the plate reader confirms each shot and sends it home. Until then, any grade is only provisional.
Learn from it.Read plates earn Research. Spend enough on cold gear, for instance, and you can finally reach Glacier Lake.

The slate lens

It behaves like a real lens.

The zoom runs from a wide 60 degrees down to a tight 12. Crouch and her eye drops from 1.55 metres to 0.9, which happens to be where the skinks live.

Focus pulls to whatever sits in the middle of the frame. Swing to something much nearer or further away and it hunts for a moment before it settles. Zoom right in and the depth of field gets shallow, so you need to be precise.

The light is the part we’re proudest of. The shutter speed comes from the actual light in the scene, from 1/500 of a second in full sun down to half a second in the dark. A slow shutter forgives less, so a grazing Mossback can blur at dusk. The glow of a night form counts as light, which helps after dark. Set up the tripod and you can hold the shutter open for 1, 4 or 15 seconds, long enough for the stars to draw trails.

When everything is technically right, the focus box closes in and glows violet. That’s all it tells you. Whether the moment is worth taking is up to you.

From the workshop. Our first light meter was far too gloomy. It wanted 1/8 of a second on an ordinary rainy afternoon, so we changed how it measures the light.

A Mossback seen soft and out of focus through the slate lens, the focus scale still moving — Swung down from the sky, and the focus still catching up.

Three lenses, one winner. Before building it we mocked up a heavy alloy bezel, a round eyepiece and a sheet of projected glass. The glass won. We kept the bezel’s clearer controls and put the readings in a strip along the bottom, the same way the rest of her slate works.

After the shutter

Then you find out how you did.

Each shot is scored out of 100. These are the weights, and they’re the same for every animal in the valley. Landscapes are judged on their own terms, further down.

Framing: 30How much of the frame it fills, and how well it’s centred.
Behaviour: 25A display or a flight scores highest. Fleeing scores lowest.
Sharpness: 20Your stillness, its stillness and the focus.
Pose: 15Head-on or side-on. A rear view scores very little.
Company: 10Two or more of the same kind in frame.

35 earns a star, 60 earns two and 82 earns three. Below 35 it’s a blur, and she’ll tell you so.

Stamps add a few bonus points on top, up to 15 per shot:

Golden hour +6
Night glow +3
Under the aurora +8
In the snow +5
In the rain +4
Eye contact +4
Rule of thirds +5
In flight +4
Locked horns +8
Home again +8
The song +8
The catch +8
Blue hour +6
A mirror +5
Two kinds
A pair
The herd
Pin-sharp
Horizon on a third
A leading line
A foreground

The grade card after a shot of a resting Mossback: 73 points, two stars, stamps for rain, the herd and pin-sharp focus, and twenty Research once the plate is read — A real verdict: 73 and two stars, three stamps, and 20 Research waiting at the plate reader.

Her note picks out the single thing that cost you the most, in plain words. Something like “It moved: 1/15 s is too slow for that.” And if you fire at an empty frame, you don’t lose the plate.

You carry twelve plates on an expedition, or sixteen once you’ve built a plate box. They refill at any camp.

Getting close

Most good shots start with waiting.

Every animal can see, hear and smell you, and it reacts to whichever one catches you first. Crouching makes you harder to see and a lot quieter. Standing still helps even more. Trees and rocks will hide you, and running will undo all of it.

Scent is the one you can’t do anything about. It drifts downwind whatever you do, so the wind decides your approach. The ring at her feet turns from green to amber to red as an animal grows uneasy. If it bolts, any reading you had going is lost.

Some species won’t come down from the trees while anything moves below. For those you build a hide, a low screen of cut boughs, and wait.

Night changes the rules. Night forms notice you sooner and a few will charge a short way. On the other hand, the spectrograph reads half as far again in the dark.

The explorer on a grassy ledge above the cliffs beside a low hide of cut boughs — A hide on a ledge above the meadow.

Seen from above in the rain, the explorer crouched inside an amber ring — Amber: something has noticed her.

Prize shots

Sixty-seven pictures worth going out of your way for.

Each species has three or four prize shots, and each comes with a hint. Twenty-six are of animals and twenty-two are of the sky and the valley’s rare events, from the aurora to frozen waterfalls. The newest ones ask more of you: two kinds of animal meeting in one frame, a long exposure from the tripod, a night shot from a camera trap you left behind, a wader coming up with a fish, or a flock of finches lifting all at once. Four more are of the animals’ homes: a burrow, a roost pine, a frost bed and a nest. Take one at two stars or better and it goes in your album.

The mantle liftedThe eldest Mossback lifts its moss to settle the herd.
The vigilAt night the herd stands in a ring, faces out.
Eye to eyeA skink looking straight down the lens. Be very still.
Mid-glideA glider between the trunks, taken from a hide.
The sleeperA drake asleep by day, curled in the frost it melts. Don’t wake it.
Locked hornsTwo Ramdrakes clashing on a ledge. It happens when it happens.
Noon starsOnce, the large moon crosses the sun at midday.
The breathing iceOn some still, cold nights, the lake ice sings.

Home’s science desk asks for a few of these by name. Send one back and they’ll write to you about it.

The album page of prize shots, a box for each species with pencil hints for the shots not yet taken — The album. Until you take a prize, its card shows only the hint.

Green aurora over a snowy ridge seen through an early version of the lens, marked as a prize shot — The aurora, one of the sky prizes, through an earlier version of the lens.

Views

Some pictures are of the place itself.

Twelve spots in the valley are worth a photograph on their own, and each one has its own light. Stand at one for the first time and the slate sketches it in pencil, then keeps it on a Views page until you come back at the right hour.

Glacier Lake perfectly still, the crags, a waterfall and the peaks reflected in it — The mirror. On the stillest mornings Glacier Lake holds the crags twice.

Mountains glowing pink and orange above dark pines after sunset — **Alpenglow**When the sun has left the valley, the high snow keeps it a while.

A lone old pine standing above a pale band of dawn mist — **The old pine in the mist**Some still, clear dawns the hollows fill, and the old pine stands above them.

A tall waterfall blurred smooth by a long exposure against dark cliffs — **Silk water**Water this tall turns to silk if the slate stays open long enough.

The rising sun framed inside a tall natural stone arch — **Sun through the Eye**Some mornings the sun comes up through the Eye.

A rock spire catching first light above shadowed terraces — **First light on the Needle**The Needle catches the sun before anything below it does.

A lake shore and river delta below cliffs in warm evening light — **The delta at sundown**The last sun turns the delta’s fans to gold.

A bright moon rising between two dark standing stones with glowing rings — **Moonrise in the Ring**They left a gap in the Ring for a reason.

The lake hollow under a light dusting of fresh snow — **The first snow**The first snow doesn’t lie for long.

Judged on their own terms.

A view isn’t scored like an animal. Composition and light count for 30 points each, sharpness and the condition of the moment for 20 each: how deep the mist is, how strong the glow, how fresh the snow. Three new stamps reward a horizon on a third, a leading line and a good foreground.

Views earn no Research. They’re there because they’re lovely, and each one adds to how well you understand the valley.

New ground to stand on.

We made new landforms for them: a 32-metre spire called the Needle, a stone arch called the Eye, a high tarn with its own stream and delta, a ribbon of a waterfall dropping thirty metres, and an old pine standing alone above the hollows.

The sun’s path drifts a little each day, so around day nineteen it rises straight through the Eye. We cut a notch in the ridge to make that line up. The moon gets the same treatment, rising through a gap in the Ring.

A page of pencil sketches of the valley’s views drawn by the slate — The slate’s pencil sketches, one for each view you’ve found.

Why it matters

Your plates move the whole game forward.

To study a species fully you need four things from it: a photograph by day, a reading by day, a photograph by night and a reading by night. Most of the game hangs off that.

Research

The only currency

Every new species on film earns Research, and so does every prize shot. Finishing all four parts of a species pays best of all. Your photos are never sold. Research is all they earn you.

Gear

New ground

Research buys blueprints. Cold gear gets you to Glacier Lake, a longer line takes you up into the High Crags, and summit gear gets you to the top.

Understanding

How well you know it

One figure, from 0 to 100%. Half of it is the life of the valley: what you’ve seen, what you’ve photographed by day and night, behaviour caught on film, and prize shots.

The story

The last photograph

To finish, she has to photograph the Frostcrest at night while it sings on the summit. Back home, her photographs end up on the corridor walls.

The slate's Survey page, showing 6% understood, its four strands, and pencil drawings of a Mossback by day and by night — The Survey page on her slate, early on: 6% understood, and a long way still to go.

Keep exploring

There’s more to the valley.

The living valleyA world that keeps happeningWeather, wildlife and the twenty-seven rare sights you might catch on a plate. Embers of DawnBack to the gameThe story, Nib, the field guide and the artbook.