Photography – Page 35 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

A Walk in the Dark

Tonight I took a walk with Josh over to the campus where he goes to school, just a few blocks from our house. As it has been raining the past few days, it was really nice to be outside and smell all the damp night scents – earth, leaf mould, cement. The sky is foggy, with the moon appearing and disappearing. I took the Lumix ZS5 with me, and did everything on manual settings, just to see what I would get. Altogether, I was amazingly pleased with the results!

The above exposures are what I think I did – I could look at the EXIF if I wanted to, but it is a bit late in the evening for me! So, I’ll finish with a couple of shots I took as I walked back home.

This last one is looking over the fence into the back yard of my house. As I was setting this one up, a car drove by . . . I wonder what they thought if they saw me skulking along the fence in the dark!

Anyway, all the photos from tonight are on Flickr if you want to see them. Some I converted to black and white, and others I putzed with using Photoscape and Elements 9.

Sparkles

I am a magpie at heart – I love shiny objects. As a kid, I used to drive my mother nuts because I liked rhinestone buttons on my dresses and gaudy costume jewelry. These days, I am more conservative, or at least demonstrate better taste, than I did when I was five years old as far as clothing. But, I am still irresistibly drawn to sparkles – splashes in water – spider webs in the morning light – flickery sun in dark shadow.

Today, I returned to the local botanical gardens. Autumn is settling in. The sky has a different quality of blue, the light is cool and intense. The scent of pine needles rises up with the heat of the day. With me came my Lumix ZS5, and the Canon QL17 GIII. I took a few pictures with the Canon, and oodles with the Lumix. This is the luxury of digital – 60 pictures without the cost for processing.

The path I took this morning was one I haven’t taken before. I always head uphill for some reason, but today I deliberately went downhill. Here, the garden is more of a woodland, with large California oaks mixed in with other native plants. The colors are more brown and green in the woodland area of the garden than up the hill, but there are little bright spots here and there of sunshine and shadow, along with lingering flowers and autumnal berries.

What I looked for today, very deliberately, was the contrast of light and dark, of sun and shadow. I stopped the camera down to -1/3 EV, to keep the camera from making all the light areas washed out. In the shadows, this creates a bit of drama with contrast. Compositional elements were a bit more studiously considered as well, such as movement of a tree branch across the picture, a pathway, a stairway. Some shots I framed with foliage, others I attempted to focus on a specific part, such as a tree leaf, and open the f/stop as much as possible with this camera (which is not more than f/3.3 manual), to blur out the background.

The set on Flickr for today contains images as they came from the camera. Most of them need some help, I think, but a few of the ones of the oaks are interesting and successful as they stand, I think. The one below has been cropped.

I am always in conflict about post-processing images, yet it has been done since the early days of photography. Images have been manipulated by time and f/stop, airbrushing out of unwanted characters who have lost political importance, handpainting. Processing of film images also influences the final product.

Why should digital images be any different?

Arrival

Canon Canonet QL17 GIII with Canonlite Flash

Fresh from Sunday night’s purchase from Bob Wood (mercantile47 on eBay), this really clean Canonet QL17 GIII arrived in today’s post. His pictures are really beautiful – the camera looks just like its photos. In real life, the camera appears to have been well treated, seems to work perfectly, and is totally confusing! A manual camera? Setting up film, f stops, shutter speeds? Add to that getting to understand how a rangefinder lens works and actually having the visual acuity to see it? Yeah, it really is a mind tweaker. I get digital really well, but this is an altogether new kettle of fish. I am really eager to see my first roll of film, which I expect will be total crap because I am lost, there could be light leaks, there will definitely be user errors.

Resurrection

The other day my photo buddy and I got together. He just acquired a Nikon D200 DSLR for a song, and in a fit of generosity (as well as a ploy to convert me to a Nikon fan!), has offered me the use of his Nikon D70 DSLR for play. Isn’t that great? And I admit, I am really excited about the idea of being able to use a DSLR with interchangeable lenses. All my digital cameras have had fixed lenses.

I’ve also been on the hunt for a rangefinder camera as I have never used one, and am looking at several on eBay. I don’t want to spend a fortune, so I have been doing a lot of research. It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn while looking! There are so many rangefinder cameras out there – some more popular than others, some with an interesting history, some for pennies, others for thousands of dollars. To me, what is the most fascinating idea of all, is their supposed portability compared to SLRs. I’m no expert, but my impression is that the plane of focus can be very narrow, and this gives pictures taken with rangefinders some of their charm – blurred foreground and distance, with razor sharp images in the middle. As well as this, brilliantly detailed landscapes.

And if I do this – I need to get the pictures developed. My scanner has an attachment for digitizing film negatives. But! I have no negatives that I can find to try it. Solution? Dig out my old, and only, SLR – a Canon A-1.

Tragically, I never really learned to use this camera. My cheapskate side hates spending thousands of dollars on snapshots which I don’t like. However, with the idea of being able to digitize snapshots, I decided to pull it off the shelf where it has been sitting for too many years. It has seen better days. It has been dropped fairly hard, to the point the enamel is down to the metal underbody, and the ISO dial is reluctant to move. The lens has a haze filter on it, but the entire camera was swathed in dust. The lens itself was jammed, and a button to release it from “A” for the automatic modes popped out when I tried to move the lens to an F stop.

As you can see, this poor thing has been really neglected. I got most of the dust off, but this shows you just how much more needs to be done. Despite this, I went out and got a new battery and the only package of film (Fuji 400 Superia) in the drugstore, downloaded and printed out a manual, which I don’t think I ever even read when I got this camera nearly 30 years ago. I read the manual front to back.

I pulled out my tripod and set up a few shots, using only the manual elements to do some close-ups of an orchid in the yard, and the dying hop plant. I tried to do shots with the largest F stop – f/3.5 with the 28 mm macro, and some with f/11 for detail and depth. I have no idea how they will turn out, but recorded them in a notebook. It will be interesting to see what they look like. Hopefully not like snapshots!

It’s pretty amusing to think I used my digital camera (Lumix DMC ZS5) to take these pictures. If I find myself wanting to use this Canon, we are very fortunate to have a camera repair place here in town that has an excellent reputation.

Time was when one used to be able to buy film in drugstores and grocery stores, but not now. Online seems to be the place, and camera stores. The varieties are still myriad, but local availability has dwindled. Forget having black and white processed at a local lab – it needs to be sent out while color processing stays somewhat local. It may be worthwhile looking into processing at home or finding a local members-only lab, but that is a bit down the line, and only if I get into it.

How times have changed!

Singing the Blues

Having become a bit more serious about photography, doing “themes” seems to be a good way to focus on something, rather than randomly shooting all and anything. And just getting out with the conscious intent to take a picture in theme is proving to be a challenge, a bit of a laugh, as well as tapping into what I would consider as design elements in a painting now being used in a sentence.

The set to the right, What Color is Blue?, are some of the ones I did yesterday morning in a local park. None have been retouched, but a few have been cropped. The most interesting thing to note was how the color shifted with a longer exposure. The benches are a rather nice blue, very clear, but become more turquoise with more light exposure, either with the f-stop or the time.

The above photo is a detail of one of the bench shots I did. I rather like the composition of lines in different directions. However, dead center is a bit of blob between the blue uprights . . . I will try to remove this with some software and see the results. No wonder people edit digital pictures! They can become much more interesting when cleaned up a bit.