Memorial Day
May 26th, 2014
I took some photos of the Rhododendron in front of our house this weekend. So here is one of those shots to mark this holiday. I don’t usually have anything to say about this holiday, except sometimes to rant a bit about the apparent inability of most people to distinguish between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. But today a great writer up in Cleveland, Erin O’Brien, posted an excellent essay on her blog that does a very good job of expressing some of my feelings about this day. I suggest you go read it.
http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/2014/05/memorial-day.html
Getting back to photography, I took that photo while playing around with my Panasonic G5 and the 45-200mm lens that my lovely wife got me for Christmas. I was just seeing what it would do, and challenged its limits a bit with how I shot this photo. I hand held it and cranked it all the way out to 200mm (that’s 400mm in “full frame” terms). The exposure was f/10 at 1/160 using the in-lens image stabilization. And the ISO was set automatically at 1600. I shot it as a jpeg to let the camera do its thing with the file.
I uploaded a full-size file if you are curious. To get to it you need to right click and select open in a new tab. At least that’s what works with Chrome. I’m pretty amazed with the quality under those parameters.
And, just for fun, I processed the file in ACDSee Pro 7, which I just upgraded to. I’ve used one variation or another of ACDSee since I started doing digital photography. It was around providing an excellent tool long before Light Room came along. I was a beta tester for the original Light Room, but I’ve never seen a reason to buy it instead of ACDSee. This time I got a deal on a new package they call their Family Pack. It includes a bunch of programs and allows each of them to be installed and used by three users. And you don’t have to “rent” the software and pay for it over and over again. One hell of a lot better deal than what Adobe is doing to us these days. Check it out. And, no, they aren’t paying me to say this. I just think it’s a great program and a great bargain. I pay the same for it as you. The Family Pack was just too good a deal to pass up. It even includes a Mac version for those of you in that camp.
The new Pro 7 version has added a lot of RAW control and kept all the good stuff from earlier versions. I’d been using version 5, not being one to upgrade every time a new version comes out. (Are you listening Adobe?) It looks like I might be doing a lot more image processing with ACDSee and moving more and more away from PhotoShop. I used the sharpening and noise reduction tools of ACDSee on this file, just keeping them at the default settings to see how it worked. I’m very impressed. The G5 doesn’t really have much noise at 1600 ISO (that in itself is a pretty amazing fact for someone who used to develop Tri-X in Acufine in a never-really-successful attempt to get 1600 ISO) but after the noise reduction in ACDSee, there’s really no noise left at all, and it didn’t seem to hurt the sharpness.
The tools we have today are pretty amazing. It’s a good time to be a photographer, if what you care about is making photos, not making a living.
Nina in the Sun
May 24th, 2014
I hope you are all enjoying your Memorial Day weekend. Please take a moment to remember what the holiday is about.
I’m still working my way slowly through my backlog of shoots. I’m in June of last year now. That was when I went to Philadelphia to testify in the trial for the lawsuit to have the laws commonly known as 2257 and 2257A declared to be unconstitutional. I’m one of the named plaintiffs in that lawsuit. We did not get the result we were seeking at the trial, though it actually went better than we had expected. We are now in the process of appealing that decision. Eventually we expect this suit to make its way to the Supreme Court. But that’s probably years away.
Meanwhile, some very nice things have come of my involvement in that lawsuit. One of them was meeting a wonderful woman whose professional name is Nina Hartley. She is also a named plaintiff in the 2257 lawsuit. She testified on the same day that I did. We had lunch and dinner together along with the other plaintiffs and some reporters who were covering the trial. Nina and I kind of hit it off and ended up doing a little quick photo shoot in my hotel room in the afternoon. I posted one of those photos back at the time after a real quick look at the files. Today you get to see a few more shots.
I know that “striped light” has been done a lot, including by me. But this was a quick, spur-of-the-moment shoot and the hotel room we were working in was less than ideal. So we made do with what we had.
The room was decorated in an art deco style, so I did take advantage of that and played around with something just a bit warped using this big mirror.
OK, now you can all get back to your barbecue.
Blooming Kelsey
May 19th, 2014
It was a beautiful sunny day when Kelsey and I were shooting at this lovely location. And it really is a great place with beautiful rock formations and all sorts of plants. Of course, I worked with the “real” lenses for my Nikon in addition to playing with the soft-focus lens that I used for the photos in the last post.
And everything was in bloom. So, despite fighting the blazing sun, it was still possible to get some fun photos. After playing around with the colorful rocks and moss it seemed to be mandatory to pay some attention to all the flowers that were everywhere.
Thanks to Kelsey for showing me this great place and for doing your usual fantastic job of modeling in it.
Soft Kelsey
May 16th, 2014
I often take models to my favorite, most beautiful locations for our shoots. But for these photos Kelsey took me to one of her favorite places, a preserve in southeast Ohio. This was more than a year ago, in the spring of 2013. Kelsey knows many great places because she spends a lot of her time in the great outdoors studying plants.
Unfortunately, on the day we had to work at this great spot it was very sunny. What I call “challenging light.” There are a lot of ways to deal with this kind of contrasty light. One of them is to use a soft lens. I happen to own an old, single-element soft focus lens…an optical design like many lenses of a century and a half ago…in a mount for my Nikons. I decided to put it on for a few shots this day.
One of the things about this lens that makes it fun for sunny days is the way it treats highlights. It blurs them into the surrounding tones in a way that can’t really be duplicated by any other method. This gives photos a lovely glow.
Because of this characteristic of the lens it is sometimes fun to take it a little further and overexpose in order to blow out the highlights and magnify the effect. That’s what I did in this last photo.
Of course, I also did some photos with my regular lens. I’ll post a few of those next time.
Ayn Indoors
May 13th, 2014
In my on-going effort to catch up with my backlog of editing, here are a few photos of Ayn from more than a year ago. Ayn came by the studio last April to help do some lighting tests. It’s been so long I don’t really remember now what it was I was testing for. But we got some fun photos anyway and here they are for you to enjoy.
By the way, Ayn has recently updated her Model Mayhem page and added some new photos, so you might want to click that link and go check it out.
Ayn All Wet
May 10th, 2014
I keep trying to catch up on all the shoots that I haven’t edited. I’m more than a year behind now. And I’ll get back to work on the backlog soon. But, yesterday I did a shoot with Ayn at a couple of my favorite local waterfalls. It went so well that I couldn’t resist going ahead and showing them now.
Ayn had been bugging me for a while to shoot her at some waterfalls. Of course we did the frozen waterfalls back in the winter, but she wanted some photos with the waterfalls actually flowing. Well, Spring is the time for that. And I do love it when a model bugs me to do a shoot.
So, we picked a day and really lucked out with the weather for a change. It was overcast with rain forecast. In other words, great light. The rain didn’t start until after we had finished. And the waterfalls were flowing well. In a month one of these waterfalls will be dry except right after a big rain. And it was nicely warm, so Ayn didn’t suffer too much, even when she insisted on getting into the waterfall. The water was cold, but the air was pretty comfortable.
Ayn as usual did a great job. She’s become a good friend as well as a great model. I really enjoy working with her. I think you can see why.
Finding Vivian Maier
May 5th, 2014
I saw the documentary film, “Finding Vivian Maier” this weekend. I highly recommend the movie. If you are at all interested in photography it is important to learn about Vivian Maier. She was one of the best photographers of the 20th Century and was totally unknown until after her death. Her story is a fascinating mystery that will never be solved. But she left behind an incredible collection of wonderful photographs.
Her work is now owned by two different people/organizations…whatever…it’s split into two groups with both groups producing books and movies. I recommend getting one or more of the books of her work as well as seeing the movies. You can see some of her work on these web sites:
Check out the fantastic photography of Vivian Maier. And, really, see the film, “Finding Vivian Maier.”
The photo with this post is a self-portrait by Vivian Maier. It’s the “cover photo” for the movie. She took many self-portraits. One of the books that has been published of her work is all self-portraits. I own that book and it is wonderful.
Another Show
May 2nd, 2014
This has been a very good week for my work getting some attention. This photo of Kelsey in my studio window was chosen by the juror for the show, Hue, at the Darkroom Gallery in Essex Junction, Vermont. You can see the entire show at the link. And if you are in Vermont you should go by and see the show in person. Darkroom Gallery is a great place. I love their shows.
Thanks Kelsey!
Pinhole Fame
April 29th, 2014
That pinhole picture I took Sunday and uploaded to the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day site was chosen by the Nick Kirkpatrick of the Washington Post as one of the illustrations for a story he did on the WPPD.
Needless to say, I’m quite pleased.
Planets, Pencils, and Pasties
April 28th, 2014
I’ve just returned from a trip to Chicago. I went up there to attend an opening at the gallery there that represents me, Gallery Provocateur. That’s gallery owner Veronika standing in the middle of her lovely gallery in the calm before the opening turned into the spectacular event that her openings always are. Veronika had asked me to do a photo of her and the gallery with my fisheye lens, so I took it along and did a few shots for her.
And here’s the gallery from the other direction and Veronika with her partner, Simon.
This is what it looks like after things get going:
The entertainment for the evening included performances by a burlesque troupe:
I was pleased to be able to meet Michael O at the opening. His work was my favorite in this show. Really strong, beautiful work using PhotoShop to drastically alter photographs. The work has strong emotional content and clear purpose and message. It was also nice that he included the original photographs that he started his work from on the info cards for his pictures. That was fun to see. Here he is with his work on the wall behind him:
I didn’t have any of my work in this show, but Veronika did have one of my calendars hanging in the gallery where everyone could see it, so I went around pointing that out to everyone I talked to.
Here’s another photo of the lovely Veronika talking with guests at the opening:
And it wouldn’t be an opening at Gallery Provocateur without this famous Chicago photographer, Joe Weinshenker, documenting the event with…yes, children, that’s right…a Nikon F2 and that funny smelling stuff known in the olden days as film. He keeps telling me that he is going to buy an Nikon D800, but he is always there with that venerable F2.
