Posts tagged ‘40D’
Just like old times . . .
Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 Beta
Rummaging through my old images from the time when I lived 20 minutes from this beautiful Arizona landmark, played with some Nik tools to get this image. The JPEG has the shadows at thew bottom of the frame pretty blocked up, but the original file isn’t nearly as bad.
Captured with my wife’s 40D, a lovely camera.
Kodachrome
Got an email today from Dwayne’s, who informed me that the roll of kodachrome I shot during Christmas had been processed and was on its way to me in the mail. Maybe early next week!
Random Excellence
Hunting late in the day
One of the blogs I read every day is The Online Photographer. It is sort of a famous photo blog, and I assume that everyone who comes here probably goes there. Anyhow, for a while now I’ve been a fan of Cheryl Nicolai’s work, recently Mike highlighted her in a post he does once in a while called ‘Random Excellence.’ He linked to a blog entry she had made on her blog, and I just wanted anyone who comes here and hasn’t been there to go visit this entry for yourself.
Check Cheryl’s blog entry giving advice to photographers here. Or you can go visit Mike’s site and read it there.
A word about the image: Peg and I wandered over to the lake near our house the other day because they are draining the lake in preparation for dredging it. Peg got come great shots of the exposed lake bottom before she spotted this Falcon perched on the top of what I assume is the pump house. I borrowed the 40D from her to grab a couple images of the beautiful bird before I handed it back to her.
From My Mesa Balcony
Looking west from my apartment in Mesa
When I had the apartment in Mesa, the balcony off the kitchen looked west towards the sunset. Next door was a grammar school (the buildings in front) and beyond that towards the horizon was downtown Phoenix. This was a stormy night, and because of the clouds, a mixture of dark and light. I don’t remember now, but I bet I saw the clouds on my way home, ran into the apartment, grabbed the camera, and took a couple images before it all faded.
The Fall
Peg is known as the one interested in macro photography, but . . .
As I may have mentioned some time in the past, I capture images very instinctively. I don’t have much experience in classic ‘set up’ photography (formal portraits, still-life, product photography) and I don’t know whether I’d be any good at it. If I have any skill at this photography thing at all, it’s in my ability to see an image and grab it. This applies whether I’m street shooting from the hip or using the tripod, it’s always that my eye catches something, I’m attracted to it, and I try to capture it. When Peg and I were walking through the park last weekend, I was stopping every 15 feet or so, because something just called out to me.
That’s also why I don’t think so much about ‘putting the camera in an unusual place’ as followers of Joe McNally talk about. I don’t think about that much because I didn’t see it from there originally. It might indeed be a better image from someplace else, but I didn’t originally see it from anywhere else.
As I think about it, this might be a real flaw, but I digress.
As I was walking Omega the other morning, I saw a leaf hanging from a neighbor’s tree, and it just called out to me as the first real leaf of autumn. It isn’t of course, many trees around us have begun to turn, but something about this leaf just caught my eye. I really wanted to get close to this leaf, and I really wanted it in color, and I really wanted to post it soon after I had captured it.
So I borrowed Peg’s 40D with the 50mm macro lens after I returned to the house and walked back out and grabbed the image
Nothing special about the processing, just some tweaks in Lightroom, but I wanted to share.
And now I’m a little interested in this macro thing.
A Walk in the Park
Captured by Peg with her new tripod
Peg used her 40D (a wonderful camera) and I used my Canon FTb loaded with Ilford Pan F, which I intend to develop with Rodinal in honor of my friend Paul Lester who swears by that combination. The image above was also put through Nik Silver Efex, and I thought the look was very nice. One obvious advantage of digital is that we can enjoy this image she captured now, while my images from that walk are still in the camera, undeveloped.
I’ve always enjoyed using a tripod. While yes, you do have to lug it around a bit, these new tripods (Manfrotto 055XPros) were a joy to work with and were tall enough for both of us. My old Gitzo, while light and it certainly gave me years of great service, never got very high and I was always bending over. The image above was on a small rise above the trail we were walking, and it was such a joy to just aim the camera up and stand at our full height to futz with the shot. Some people would never want to carry around a tripod; I can certainly understand why. But there’s a thought process and a rhythm you get into with a tripod that works for me, especially when we’re walking through woods like this. For me, it’s very meditative.
Tomorrow it will be September 21st, and fall is most assuredly in the air here in Pittsburgh. It’s not especially cool yet, but the angle of the sun and the lack of rainfall really combine to spell out ‘fall.’ I have an order prepped to send off to Freestyle to get some Velvia for capturing the fall colors. In a couple weeks that season will begin and I’m sure that Peg and I will be out trying to capture the changing of the leaves.
Speaking of Sept. 21st, it’s been a full month since I sent back the Mamiya 645e that I bought used from Adorama. I don’t mean to call them out here in this blog, but, honestly, how long does it take for them to fix the thing they shipped to me broken in the first place?
Every day that passes I miss my Nikon scanner. I reached the point of impatience on Saturday when I sent off seven undeveloped rolls of b&w to North Coast to develop and scan. At least that way I can look at this work and share the best (or maybe the worst) with you when I get it back from them.
Here’s another image from the group Peg captured yesterday:
Also tweaked in Nik
Portrait
Not much touch up, just enough
Yesterday I did a short portrait session for a colleague. She had been asked to speak at a conference in Korea, and they wanted a picture of her for the program. The last portrait she had done was years ago, and she knew I was a photographer. She asked me earlier in the week if I’d ever done portraits, and I replied as how I used to make extra money while in college shooting actor’s head shots. Not quite the same thing, but enough similarity that I felt confident that I could pull it off.
I’d always liked high-key portraits and wanted to try that setup. There is a video studio that we had available to us, so I borrowed it for an hour and did a quick lighting setup there. I wished I had flash units, all I had were the studio lights. I discovered quickly that I didn’t have as much light as I wished. In high-key, you want an incident reading at the white wall to be one whole stop brighter than a reading at the subject. Ideally, 1/125th at f/11 at the wall, and 1/125th at f/8 at the subject. Both readings at ISO 100. With flash equipment, that would be easy to achieve. But these lights just weren’t that bright. They were incandescent-temperature fluorescent fixtures, and a bit unwieldy to boot (clamps and sand bags, etc).
They were made for film shooting I guess (30 fps at f/5.6 is three stops dimmer than 1/125th at f/11). This image was exposed at 1/60th at f/6.7 at ISO 400, which works out to 3 1/3 stops dimmer than the ideal 1/125th at f/8 at ISO 100. And in post-processing I had to increase the Exposure by a half a stop to really balance the image.
I used my wife’s 50mm f/2.5 Canon Macro (a very sharp lens) which with the 1.6 crop factor, is like an 80mm. I also tried a 75-300 Canon zoom (at 75mm) but I felt like I had to move too far away from the subject (so as to frame properly) to keep a proper connection with her.
I shot about 100 frames in 15 minutes or so. Picked one that looked scholarly enough, got the client’s okay, then softened the focus a bit, cleanup up some imperfections, punched up the eyes a smidge, and sent it off. In that short time I really developed sympathy for photographers who do portraits or fashion shoots for a living. Getting the image is just the start of the process.
I also did a B&W version in Nik Silver Efex, which I included below.
I don’t think I was quite as relaxed as I would like. I was too fussy, too unsure of the light and the equipment. The client has talked about a more casual portrait she wants done. I’d like to do that after I get all my equipment back. I’d like to use available light for that one, maybe just some reflectors.
All in all, I was pretty happy with the overall work. Wish I had my strobe units, though.
Nik Silver Efex to the rescue
Both these images appear courtesy of the client. Thanks, Brenda.
Seeing things anew
Sometimes the simplest thing can catch my eye.
I’m in the midst of adjusting to my new world. Pittsburgh is very different than Phoenix. I think even people who haven’t been to either location could conjure that difference in their mind’s eye. For me it’s been a kind of a visual jolt that I don’t think I’ve totally adjusted to quite yet. It isn’t as simple as, say, color, or architecture, either. Pittsburgh, especially in the summer has color. It’s just mostly GREEN. The tans and browns and such of the desert southwest are almost entirely non-existent.
The architecture is way more interesting, certainly. I really have to think about how to work with that, as architecture in Phoenix never really interested me.
But the biggest different is the quality of light. It is so much softer here. Partly because of the ever-present cloud cover (for those that don’t know, Pittsburgh has less days of sunshine than Seattle). So the light is almost always soft and almost always leaning towards the blue end of the spectrum.
There is a ton I want to capture. Images may come slowly, but they will come.
It’s August 9th, and you can already see signs of the area prepping for fall. Fall will truly start to arrive by Labor Day. I’m gonna start stocking up on Ektar and hopefully capture images on film this fall as well as digital.
A Fleeting Glimpse
Here but a brief moment of time . . .
One morning this past week my wife came in just as she was leaving to tell me that mushrooms had grown in a flower pot we have on the front porch. Before I left that morning, I took a couple images of those mushrooms. By that night, they had gone.
It gave my pause to think. Everything is relative, of course, in terms of time (if, indeed, time exists at all). I’m one of those souls who believes that everything living has a form of consciousness. It may be a form that we humans do not understand yet, but I believe everything is ‘aware’ on some level.
Humans tend to parse out our lives into ‘sections’ and give them names. ‘Teenage,’ ‘Middle Age,’ and so forth. We look at our expected time here and think about what phase we’re in.
This thought is not original, by any stretch, but this mushroom probably didn’t worry about any such nonsense. It just ‘bloomed’ (or whatever mushrooms do when they grow rapidly like this) and then, when its time was done, faded.
I guess maybe I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Lester’s work these days and it’s made me very contemplative.
Or, possibly, I realize that I’m in an in-between phase in my life and I’m sorta waiting for the next phase to start.
Or something.
Anyhoo, getting back to a topic that I mentioned in last week’s post, my wife looked pretty high and low for the card reader and came up empty. We went to the store last night and bought a reader, so my images taken over the last couple weeks are now on an external drive. I’ll be posting more frequently as I have more access to images.
North Park Path
Just up the path from the signpost a couple of posts back. Except it's now spring, not still winter.
While I was home in Pittsburgh, I got to shoot a little bit with my wife’s 40D. Gotta say, I really like that camera. I’ve certainly taken any number of good images with the 10D, no complaints. But the controls, the flexibility, and the image quality of the 40D really impressed me. If Canon ever issues the equivalent of Nikon’s D700 (12MP, full-frame) with a 40D control set, frame rate, etc for around $1500, I’d be sorely temped.
Tomorrow I’m goimg to talk about a book I purchased which, for me, was the best photo how-to book of 2009 so far. Very impressed. It even (sigh) got me thinking about diving into Photoshop.
Superstition Storm Color
Yes, it looked like this
A request came in to post a color picture of that storm by Superstition Mountain, so here it is. Thew story behind this shoot is simple: it was 3:15 on a Sunday November afternoon here in Mesa, and I knew that a storm was coming in from the East (I checked the weather channel). The mountain is 30 minutes from the apartment, so I packed up my medium format gear, threw the digital 40D in the bag (to use as a light meter, just FYI) and quickly grabbed the Bessa as I ran out the door. Got to the park and the sky was astounding. The color and tones above are a pretty accurate representation of that sunset (the sun is behind my right shoulder as I shot this image). The day got more interesting as I shot and the sun dropped in the sky. While it has obviously rained before I got there, it didn’t rain while I was there.
This is not an HDR image. It was just that the light was very special.
I used the Mamiya as the main camera that day, setting it up on the tripod. I obviously shot some FP4 with the Bessa, but that honestly was an after-thought. I used the 40D as a light meter, never intending to actually use those shots, as they were framed hurriedly and I thought I’d be throwing them away. I off-loaded them from the card, and saw images like this one. I was pretty astounded.
Final word: the Provia I shot that day has yet to be developed. I guess I should send it off, eh?
