Quick Post
June 9th, 2012
I had planned a much more extensive post for today, but I’m having computer problems and it has kept me from working on this all evening. So, here are a couple photos from one of my shoots in Savannah back in March. The model is Dyaphanye. She is lovely and quite an accomplished artist herself, so it is a very interesting experience to work with her. She’s someone who brings a lot more than a nude body to the shoot. I hope to work with her again in Maine this summer.
More about this and another shoot down in sunny Savannah when I have more time and can provide a few more details on all the fun that happened when I was down there.
I guess I should mention that these were shot with my trusty old single element soft focus lens. So, yes, I meant them to look like that.
Camera Porn
June 5th, 2012
It’s Kirk Tuck’s fault. He wrote this post on his blog a while back. I wasn’t planning, and had no desire, to buy another camera. But at $150 for a 12 mp camera, how could I resist? (I see the price has gone up to $170 as I’m typing this…still one hell of a bargain.)
But it wasn’t the camera that really hooked me. It was the availability of adapters to mount just about any lens ever made on the thing. I thought about my old Leica lenses sitting in the equipment cabinet beside my old M2, unused for years. And then there are all those old Nikon manual focus lenses, some that never got converted to “AI” so I can’t even mount them on my new Nikons, let alone focus them with the new clear screens.
So I ordered the camera and adapters for Leica M and Nikon F mount lenses.
And boy am I happy I did. I’m having a ball with my old lenses. They work well with this camera. Aperture priority provides auto exposure that is dead on. The lenses stop down to the shooting aperture all the time, but the screen on the back of the camera is bright and it’s easy to focus using the magnifier that instantly pops up a highly enlarged spot…it’s like putting a loupe on the ground glass of a view camera.
Sure, it isn’t fast. But I’m not going to try to shoot basketball with this setup. What I am going to do is use a bunch of my old lenses and have fun. The 2x factor of the micro 4/3 sensor is making some interesting things possible.
So, here are some photos of the camera with some of my old lenses, just so you can see what it looks like:
35mm Canon f/2 rangefinder lens. This was my favorite lens when I was using the Leicas every day when I worked as a newspaper photographer. It’s a bit strange that from being a beautiful moderate wide-angle lens, it is now effectively a 70mm…a nice portrait focal length:
Here it is with the Elmar 90mm f/4, a lens so sharp you have to be careful not to cut yourself:
And the old 200mm f/4 Nikkor…it never got the AI conversion because I had an 80-200 f/2.8. But it’s a good, sharp lens, despite the front element looking like someone cleaned it with sandpaper. And, on this camera it’s effectively a 400mm f/4:
I didn’t even think about this lens when I was thinking about what I’d do with this camera. But I should have. This was my primary lens for more than 20 years on my trusty old FE. It’s a Tokina 28-70 zoom. It’s sharp. It’s small and light. It’s a perfect match for this Olympus. It’s clearly going to be the lens I use on it the most:
Here’s a shot I took with that zoom when I was out hiking a few days ago. It has a very nice macro ability. These flowers are about an inch across:
My 50mm f/1.4 is a newer autofocus lens, but it’s fun on the Olympus. Effectively 100mm f/1.4 = fun with portraits:
My 85mm f/1.8 was another favorite lens from the manual focus days. Nice to be able to play with it again:
It’s been a long time since I used my old 24mm f/2.8. Now it’s a “normal” lens on the Olympus:
My 8mm fisheye might be fun on this camera. It’ll be easier to focus, if nothing else:
Here’s a fisheye shot done with the Olympus:
I’m not much of a long telephoto shooter, so I never used this old 60-300 Tamron lens much. But it might get a workout now…effective 600mm can be fun to play with. I never had a reason to buy a lens that long:
Here’s a shot across the street with the 60-300 at 60 (effectively 120). They are installing new gas lines in my neighborhood so the place has been torn up and full of trucks and backhoes and such for a long time:
Here’s what 300mm looks like from the same spot:
The photos of the camera and lenses were shot quick and dirty with available overcast light on my front porch using my D7000 and 18-200 lens. They were processed quick and dirty in ACDSee Pro5.
The photos shot with the Olympus I left as they came out of the camera. The only adjustment was to reduce the size of the file for web use. They could clearly be improved with a few quick levels adjustments, but I thought you might like to see what they looked like with no post work done on them. They were shot using Aperture priority auto exposure with no compensation in camera.
I’m impressed with this little camera and happy to be playing with my old lenses. I might even have to spring for a lens that is made for the camera so I can use it with all its features like auto focus. And, of course, the eye-level finder would be nice…but I think I’m going to have a hard time convincing myself to buy an Electronic Viewfinder that costs almost twice what I paid for the camera I’d mount it on.
Oh, and yes, you can select from several formats for your photos on this camera. So I set it to square just because I could…and it took me back to my square format medium format days. (And, besides, this little camera is a little hard to hold in the vertical position.)
Naked In Pittsburgh
May 31st, 2012
I have work in this show opening tomorrow night in Pittsburgh. It looks to be a fine show with a lot of excellent work. I won’t be able to make it over for the opening this time, but I hope those of you in the Pittsburgh area will go by and see the show.
So, I guess we’ll have Charlye Raine beat the drums for that show…here are a few more photos from my day of shooting Charlye at Mike Elsass‘ studio:
Looks a little fishy…
Dabbling in Paint
May 27th, 2012
As I continue to work my way through my backlog of shoots, I’ve now reached the end of February. Slow but steady progress. This was a fun shoot…as I’m sure you can see. There’s a painter who has his studio in the same building as mine. Mike Elsass also has a gallery in the Oregon District in Dayton where he shows his work and also the work of some other fine artists from around the country.
Mike asked me to bring a nude model in to hang around his studio while he paints. Might sound a little weird, but it really isn’t. I did this once before with Mike and it was a great day. I knew this would be a lot of fun for the model and that Mike would capture the energy of the day in the work he was doing.
To make the day even better, I got an old friend who has modeled for me in the past, but not recently, to come in for this. I hadn’t shot with Charlye Raine for quite a while…but when we were working together regularly she was a favorite model who helped me produce some of my favorite photos. So this was a great chance to work with her again.
We hung around Mike’s studio for several hours. Charlye helped with the painting. Mike worked on his paintings which are done on rusted steel panels. It was a lot of fun for everyone and even resulted in some fun photos.
And, another technical note. These are all available light, which is probably obvious. But I processed the files differently this time. I decided to try working them all the way through using ACDSee Pro 5. That program has some very useful editing tools that I wanted to play with. I’m very happy with the results. I’ll probably still buy PhotoShop CS6…but I’m really wondering if I need it…
Ayn in Other Light
May 23rd, 2012
Here are a couple different photos of Ayn shot in the studio at another time from the earlier photos I’ve posted recently. I was experimenting with other kinds of lighting when I did these photos. I’d tell you about these lighting setups, but I didn’t take notes and now I have no idea what I did when I shot these. I’m really bad about taking notes. When I was younger I could usually remember stuff like that, but times, and my calcified brain, have changed and that’s no longer the case. I know this and know I should take better notes…but I keep forgetting. So it goes.
But, nevertheless, Ayn is beautiful and talented and was having some fun trying different things when we shot these. I’m looking forward to doing more work with her outdoors now that summer is here. And, even though it is technically still spring, when I see temperatures in the upper 90s in the forecast, I consider summer to have arrived.
Ayn’s Front
May 18th, 2012
Here are some more photos of Ayn from my test of the lighting technique shared with me by MC Grain. Ayn looks great from pretty much any angle, and I’m really enjoying what this light does with her figure. I’ll be doing some more work with this light. And I’m looking forward very much to doing a lot more work with Ayn in the coming months.
I tried a different workflow for my editing of these three photos. I did the conversion from RAW in Nikon View NX2. But then, instead of opening the files in PhotoShop, I worked with them first in ACDSee Pro 5, which is the program I usually use for viewing and selecting photos. I’m experimenting with the fairly sophisticated image editing capabilities in that program. I may be using it more in the future, once I get through the learning curve and get comfortable with the many options it offers for selective control of the editing process. I’ll let you know what I think as I experiment more with it.
But I have a very busy weekend coming up, with a very important family event. Next week I’ll be getting back to work on photo stuff. Meanwhile, enjoy Ayn.
Ayn’s Back
May 15th, 2012
Yes, Ayn is back with some more photos from my test shoot with this new lighting style. And, of course, that is Ayn’s back in the photos. I’ll be working more with this light from time to time. Thanks again to MC Grain for freely sharing this technique with me.
For those who care about the technical stuff, these were all shot with my 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens. The top shot is wide open at 1.4. For the other two I stopped down a bit, to 2.8. They were all shot at 1600 ISO with my Nikon D7000. As I’ve said, the quality is so good with this camera that I use ISO 100 to 1600 as just ways to set exposure. None of these have any noise reduction used on them. When I shoot dance performances I go up as high as 6400 ISO and still the noise or grain is much better than I could get with Tri-X in Acufine back in the old days of film, so I’m completely happy with the results…still with no need for noise reduction to my eye.
And, in other technical stuff, I’m pretty settled now on shooting RAW and processing the files in Nikon View NX2. For these photos I pretty much nailed exactly what I was after in the camera, so all I did in View was convert the files. A few slight tweaks to the tonal relationships in PhotoShop and I was finished. I didn’t even sharpen these in PhotoShop since I liked the slight softness of the files as they were.
Light and Dark
May 11th, 2012
It’s fun to play around with different kinds of light. In the winter when I can’t work outside with nude models because they seem to always complain too much about the cold, I often find myself experimenting with lighting methods in the studio. That’s what I was doing when I shot these photos of Ayn.
I first saw this style of lighting when photographer MC Grain shot my friend and favorite model, Brooke. Usually when I see a different lighting method I’m able to figure out how it was done by studying the photos. But MC’s photos of Brooke had me mystified. So I contacted him and he very generously shared what he was doing with me. That told me he is a photographer I can respect, not one of the fools who think they have a secret that they must guard to keep anyone else from using it.
So I set up a variation on the lighting he was using and set out to see what I could do with the method. That’s the point…I wasn’t interested in copying what MC had done, but rather seeing what I could do that reflected my own vision in that style of light. These are some of the first results from that test.
I plan to do more with this light when I find the right place to use it. I have a shoot planned in NYC next month where I will use it. In addition to this lighting style I’m also using my 50mm f/1.4 and fairly high ISOs. For these photos I used the lens wide open. At my next shoot with this light I’m going to stop down a stop or two and see how that changes the results.
Thanks Ayn, for being my test subject for this technique. We did very well with this shoot and you’ll be seeing more over the next few posts.
More Angie
May 7th, 2012
Here are a couple more photos of Angie. Taken the same day as the other photos featuring her baby bump. But I felt like trying to get a couple portraits of Angie to show what a really sweet, wonderful person she is. And she did have a bit of that “pregnant glow” going on that day, even though you can’t really tell she is pregnant in these photos.
I was also playing around with my 50mm f/1.4 lens, throwing the background out of focus. I stopped down a couple stops from wide-open for these shots. At that point this lens gets really sharp if you nail the focus. I was mixing the modeling lights from my studio strobe system with the street light outside coming through the studio window and lighting the background. These were shot with my D7000 at 1600 ISO. I’ve pretty much decided that with this camera I can work at any ISO up to 1600 without worrying about noise being an issue in the photos. So I treat ISO as just another way to adjust exposure to give me the aperture/shutter speed combination I want to use.
In other news I’ve just finished framing my print for the Seattle Erotic Art Festival. I need to wait a couple weeks before I ship it, or it will arrive too early, but I like to have these things taken care of early so I don’t have rush at the last minute. Doing this early gives me recovery time if a disaster of any type happens during the preparation work. It all went together well, though, so I’m all set to box it up and ship it off. But first I need to assemble a collection of smaller prints that will go out to the store that is part of the festival. I’ll have that done by the end of this week and will get it all boxed up together next week. So, if you make to SEAF this year, please look around for my work. I won’t be able to attend again this year. The timing is just wrong with other things going on, but I still hope to make it to the festival someday. Maybe next year.
Angie and Son
May 3rd, 2012
If you’ve followed my blog for any time at all you’ll know that my favorite local model for some time has been Angie. And you might have wondered why you haven’t seen her on the blog for a while.
Well, Angie has been involved for the past year or so in another, non-modeling project. In January I got her into the studio for a few photos to illustrate what she has been up to. She had her baby boy last month and both mother and son are doing well.
Now I’m trying to get her to bring the baby to the studio so I can do some portraits of the two of them.
In other news, my friends at the beautiful magazine L’Allure des Mots have published a new issue. Go to that link to view it. And be sure to read the short story by another of my favorite models, Kat, at the end of the magazine. That lovely lady is far more than a pretty face and fantastic body.
