Eden At The Lake
June 29th, 2022
If you are a regular reader you will likely recognize the photo above as my photo from two years ago for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. It’s the one that was also featured in the journal of the Royal Photographic Society in England.
Well, that wasn’t the only photo I took that day. I also did a few photos using a “real” lens. I thought you might like to see a few of those.
The model is the lovely and wonderful Eden who has been doing a lot of great work with me for the past couple years.
Museum Show
June 27th, 2022
The Springfield Museum of Art has chosen this photo of the wonderful model, Carrie Turner, for their annual members’ show. It is, of course, another in my Brigman/White series, a tribute to the pioneering photography of Anne Brigman and Clarence H. White, Sr. from more than a century ago.
The show will run from July 30 to October 2.
Memories of a Tremendous Loss
June 24th, 2022
These are some photos I made with Carrie Turner and Jenny Anne Rose from a shoot in 2021. At the time Carrie had a studio in the Masonic Temple in Zanesville, Ohio. It was a beautiful, majestic old building that was a lovely treasure. I saw was, because not that long after we did this shoot, this happened:
I don’t have the details to credit that photo, which I did not take, but I wanted to show the horror of what happened. The wonderful old building was totally destroyed. The many artists and craftspeople, including Carrie, who had rooms there lost everything. And Zanesville lost an iconic part of its downtown.
Carrie’s neighbor to her studio had a large room that she used for yoga classes. Carrie got us permission to photograph in there, so I have these photos, above and below, that give a little more of a feeling for this great building.
So this post is just a small memorial to what was lost on that fiery night. Saying goodbye and remembering what was lost forever.
“Wonderful” Gallery Show
June 15th, 2022
This photo, which I recently shot on the coast of Maine, has been chosen for a gallery show at the LightBox Photo Gallery in Astoria, Oregon. The model is the amazing Rachel.
Rachel modeled for me 20 years ago at this same location. That was when I had a eureka moment and realized that the figure in nature was my natural subject matter. Last month I returned to Maine to mark that 20th anniversary and Rachel agreed to model for me again. There are many fine photographs from that shoot, but this is the first of them to find its way into a gallery show.
Those of you who have been following me here for a while will certainly recognize that this photo is one that is being added to my Brigman/White Project in homage to the wonderful work a century ago by Anne Brigman and Clarence H. White, Sr.
The jury process for this show was unusual. All the photographers who entered the show were also the jurors. A “jury of your peers” as the gallery said.
Here’s the link for the show on the theme, “Wonderful.”
And at this link you can see all the photographs that were selected for the show.
Looks like a good show to me. If you are out there in the Pacific Northwest it might be worth checking out. The show runs June 15 through July 6.
Dogwood
June 10th, 2022
More flowers. The late-blooming Dogwood in front of our house is in full bloom now.
So, I couldn’t resist pointing the new Nikon Z7II at it for a few snaps.
Wildflowers
June 5th, 2022
I’ve stopped mowing a part of our too-large lawn and planted trees and wildflowers. This is the first year that the wildflowers are showing up.
So I took the new Nikon Z7II out and did a few flower photos.
I’t’s been said that there is no reason for anyone to ever take another photo of a flower. But I did it anyway.
It was really the light from the setting sun that drew me to bring the camera out.
The new Nikon does a pretty good job with whatever I point it at.
Nikon Z7II and 24-120 f/4 lens: Sorry, I was wrong.
June 1st, 2022
I was wrong in my earlier post about diffraction causing unsharp results with the 24-120 lens. The test I did was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was shooting indoors with limited light. I, of course, needed to change something to keep the exposures consistent as I ran the apertures from f/4 to f/22. I was afraid if I reduced the shutter speed it might introduce unsharpness caused by camera shake. So I elected to allow the ISO (set on auto) to run up to keep the exposures the same. This was a mistake. The Z7II has, to my eye, spectacular performance at high ISOs. But in this case there was enough noise to make the f/16 and f/22 exposures appear to be soft.
So, I did another test. I took a magazine outside and ran through the apertures changing the shutter speed to maintain exposure and holding the ISO at 400. You can see the f/4 shot above and the f22 shot below.
Here’s a closer look:
To my eye there isn’t a significant difference between f/4 and f/22. The remarkable thing about that is that this lens seems to maintain pretty much the same level of sharpness at every aperture, including the largest aperture, f/4. I find that pretty amazing. I hope you can see that in these jpegs, despite the compression. They will enlarge a bit if you click on them.
By the way, that magazine spread from Rider Magazine is from a story my best friend, Ken Frick, wrote about our many years of traveling the country together on our motorcycles. He wrote about and photographed our trips through all those years for various motorcycle magazines. I was often the model, so I ended up in a lot of magazines, including a cover or two. Check out Ken’s website for a bunch of very fine photographs, including many things in addition to motorcycle photos.
Remembering
May 30th, 2022
It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. So we went to the local cemetery this afternoon and I took a few photos. So many flags…
Blog Post About A Blog Post
May 27th, 2022
That’s a portrait of me by Mike Johnston. Mike took it when I stopped to visit him earlier this week when I was driving back from a few days of photographing on the Maine coast. Mike did a blog post about our visit on his very popular blog, The Online Photographer. If you are a photographer you should be reading his blog.
Thanks to that post I see a lot of folks are visiting my blog here. Thanks for that Mike. I hope you new visitors find something of interest here and that you’ll come back. I’m happy to have you stopping by.
Here’s a cell phone shot I did of Mike when we were at dinner while he was checking out my new Nikon Z7ii.
I’ve been having problems with this website so, together with doing a little traveling, I haven’t been able to add new posts for a while. Some of the problems seem to be fixed now, so I’ll try to get back to posting more.
Thanks for reading…
New Lens
May 11th, 2022
I told you about my new camera, a Nikon Z7ii. I’ve had it a while, but I didn’t have a Z-mount lens because the one I wanted was on back order…for months. Well, the lens arrived yesterday. It’s a Nikkor Z 24-120 f/4. I’m not planning to buy a bunch of lenses for this camera and that one seemed to offer just what I need. That focal range will cover 90-95 percent of the photos I take.
But, just how good is this lens? Is it up to the high resolution sensor in the camera. Some of my friends have suggested that it is too long a focal range for the high quality I’m looking for to be there. So, today with the help of a wonderful model who just recently contacted me about us working together, I was able to make my first test of the lens. Thanks to Erin Hinkle for being especially beautiful in front of the camera and for being patient while I went through a series of test settings.
I found some interesting things…some of which will require more testing to fully understand. First, as you can see from the first photo above, the lens is excellent. Very sharp. Almost too sharp for portraits. But that means it’s perfect for the documentary project I bought it for.
But, here’s something of interest. Below is a shot at f/5.6.
And here is an extreme crop of that photo so you can see just how sharp and detailed files from this lens and camera are:
And here’s where it gets a little interesting. Below is a photo shot in the same place at f/22:
Let’s see how that one looks in an extreme crop:
I hope in these jpegs you can see how much less sharp the f/22 frame is. Of course I know about diffraction at small apertures, but this is the most extreme example of it that I’ve seen in my own photos. More testing is going to be required to fully understand what’s going on, but it’s looking like I’ll need to be careful to always shoot at f/11 or wider if I want to maintain optimal sharpness.
Another thing I wondered about was flare. Back in days of olde flare was one of the reasons we didn’t use zoom lenses for many years. That’s mostly fixed in modern lenses, but I wondered how this specific lens would perform in that aspect. Well, take a look at the photo below:
I’d say, based on this test, that flare is pretty much non-existent with this lens.
So, I’m very happy with my new camera and lens. Ready to put them to use on some new projects. I’m also very happy with my new model, Erin. I hope I’ll be shooting a lot more with her in the near future.
