Tag: autumn

A Touch of Autumn

I just had to put this photo out there today.

I recently acquired a new-to-me Certo 6 camera, It has the legendary Carl Zeiss Tessar 80mm f2.8 lens.  The camera and lens date from around 1953 (give or take).  I shot this at f2.8 to check out the DOF and sharpness of the lens.  I’m amazed.  The Ektar 100 came through, too, with beautiful colors.

The Certo 6 is an odd folder in the sense that it has many features that other folding cameras (bellows cameras) of the same time era do not have.  Also, because current 120 film is thinner than that of the 50s, there is a potential for overlap of images – which I did not experience – and other quirks that need to be worked out.  I really like folders because they force you to slow down and think, as well as consider what you want to see on your film.

Square format is a compositional challenge as well.  As this is part of my first roll through the camera, composition was not of any real importance for me, but using the camera was.  For some reason I got only 9 out of 12 exposures on the film, but that is something I think I have figured out, and will run another roll of play film through the camera to check out my ideas . . . like I said, ya gotta think sometimes!

More to come.

Neighborhood Tree

By nature, I am quite impatient.  Maybe just not patient enough?  What I mean is that sometimes I work too fast, rather than thinking ahead.  In watercolor, timing is important, as is speed, but with patience thrown in.  If I look at what I am doing, some are tight-ass line drawings, and others are just messy and rather free form, without lines.  Here, I used a basic tree shape with cutouts to remind me where to not have leaves, so as to have room for sky and branches.  I also worked for shadows.

Altogether, I worked too fast.  I wanted to make some nice washes of the leaves, to show the color shifts from green to the glows of autumn.  I also need to test out colors on a piece of paper.  This is painted in a notebook, so the back of the previous page is a good place to do this (I keep trying to remind myself).   Accomplishment, though, is no mud.

Colors were fun to use, too.  I mixed together an especially interesting mix of Payne’s Grey, Carbazole Violet, and Burnt Sienna.  That is part of the pleasure of a sketch book – playtime and exploring.

I will be doing a lot of trees as I move along, but will need to do some stilllifes as well.