Playing with the Fisheye
February 11th, 2011
It’s off to the Dirty Show tomorrow, but I’ve had time this week to do a quick shoot with Angele at the studio. As I’ve mentioned here before, I have a new lens, an 8mm fisheye. I have some specific things I want to use this lens for, but before I get to those I need to learn to use this new tool. So for now it is coming out during every shoot I do so I can learn what it does, how it behaves in different settings, and how I can use it to get the photos I want. I also have a nice little piece of software that straightens out the fisheye effect and in essence converts this lens into an ultrawideangle…as I’m learning, almost an instant panorama lens. So I’m starting to play with that software too, so I can learn how it works and understand how to use it to get what I want.
So, here’s a photo of Angele shot with the fisheye. I put her in front of that window for several reasons. I wanted to see how much flair I’d get with this lens when used with pretty extreme backlighting. I’m very pleased with what I find here on that score. This is a pretty damn good lens, optically, for the price. The other main reason was to see what it would do with all those straight lines from the window panes and then to see what the software did with it all when I did the conversion to remove the fisheye effect.
Here’s what happened to the photo when I ran the software:
Pretty extreme and pretty interesting. I’m not real pleased with what is happening to her feet here, but that’s a point of learning to work with in the future. But I’m very interested in the “instant panorama” sort of effect that is produced. In the right setting that could be very useful. With a little cropping this could work as an ultra-wide shot. And, wow, those lines are nice and straight. I may try later running it back through the same program to use another effect that it offers, to remove the lens tilt effect that is seen here and in any photo where you tip the camera up to include something like the top of a building. Lots of possibilities here. The software, in case you are wondering, is PTLens. It’s a download that is very reasonably priced. It works as a stand alone program and also as a filter in PhotoShop. And the correction on this photo was a simple one-click operation. There are controls to modify the extent of the transformation, but I just left it at the default settings for this trial.
I’m impressed. I’ll be playing with both the lens and the software for quite a while, so expect to see more about both of them here.
And I hope to see some of you at the Dirty Show tomorrow night.
Dirty Time
February 9th, 2011
It’s almost time for the Dirty Show. It opens Friday night. I’ll be there with some friends on Saturday night. They said they would give me a photographer pass this year, so I should have a Nikon around my neck and be working on doing a bunch of photos of the evening’s activities. Say hi if you are there.
Other than that all I have to say is that I’m totally done with this winter. It’s too damn cold. There’s too damn much snow and ice. We just got our first mail delivery in a week. The cold and ice and snow has just been exhausting me. I’ve done a little shooting in the studio and will be posting some new photos soon, but I just have not been able to get the editing done on them. I need the studio computer for some of the work I want to do, but today I’m stuck at home for the afternoon waiting for Fed-X to deliver an update for my van’s GPS system. The delivery requires a signature, and I want the update installed for the trip to Detroit this weekend, so I’m sitting at home waiting for them to deliver it “sometime before 7.”
So that’s all for today. Maybe it will warm up soon and my brain will thaw out.
Herb Ascherman At The Kinsey Institute
February 4th, 2011
Yesterday I drove over to Bloomington, IN, to meet Herb Ascherman and hear him give a talk at the Kinsey Institute. It was a great trip. Herb’s talk was supposed to have happened at the opening of the current show at the Kinsey Gallery, but these weekly blizzards forced him to postpone it when the snow closed the road as he was trying to get to Bloomington.
The show was curated by Herb and Jeannette Palsa and is all photos done using 19th Century photographic processes. Another photographer I’ve met, Charles West, had work included in the show. Herb’s lecture dealt with the history of erotic photography from the earliest days of the medium through the rest of the 19th Century. It was well researched and insightful as he reviewed the desires and the marketplace that produced the earliest photographic eroticism and the efforts to suppress it. Good background for the current struggles against censorship and government intrusions into the work of photographers.
I did this photo of Herb doing his lecture with my Canon S90. That was shot at 1250 ISO.
And, something completely different. My friend, Stephen Haynes, included a link to this work in his blog today. I almost didn’t take the time to look through it. I’m glad I changed my mind. This is one of the finest uses of the medium of photography that I’ve seen in a long time. There was a time when I aspired to do work along these lines. Life intervened and I was not able to take my work in that direction in any meaningful way. Darcy Padilla has certainly done a fantastic job in the finest traditions of documentary photography and in just being a feeling, caring human being. Look through the whole project. Look at her other work. This is as good and as important as photography can get. http://www.darcypadilla.com/thejulieproject/intro.html
Widening My View
February 2nd, 2011
Here’s Char Rose again wandering the halls in my building. I recently added a new lens to my kit and I’m just starting to figure out what I can do with it. It’s a fisheye. Fisheye lenses have very limited usefulness. I’ve often said that each photographer has only 6-10 fisheye photos that he or she can take in their lifetime. I’ve already used up a few of mine. But I have something specific in mind where I’m sure a fisheye will offer just what I need to make some special photos. So I decided to get one.
I actually already have one of those fisheye adapter lenses that screws onto the front of another lens. But the quality from it sucks big time. The price of the fisheye’s available, new or used, that actually say Nikkor on them…well, they just simply cost too much to be worth it for the limited amount of use I know I’ll get out of them. But, when I saw this lens and read the reports on it, I decided it had hit the sweet spot for price and quality: http://www.adorama.com/PRO835NK.html So now I have one. And I’m pleased with the results. You can see my first attempt to use it above. You’ll probably have to put up with lots more less than spectacular fisheye photos here for a while as I learn to use this new tool. Maybe I’ll actually get a few good ones along the way. You can see the fisheye effect in this photo. It will also give you a hint (though you can’t really tell in a small file like this on the internet) about the high ISO performance of my new D7000. I shot that at 3200 ISO.
Another factor in getting me to part with the money for this lens is that I have a little program that, with just one mouse click, will straighten out the curved lines in these fisheye photos. So, if that program does what I hope it will do, I’ll not only be able to do fisheye photos with this lens, but it will also double as an 8mm wide angle lens from time to time. I’d be trying it out now, but that program only lives on my studio computer and I’m at home because of the weather.
So, now I’ll rant about the weather. I guess this weird storm is affecting almost everybody in the eastern half of the U.S., so we can all commiserate about it. Here in central Ohio it has been the weirdest weather pattern that I’ve ever seen around here. Pretty much everything has been shut down for two days. Yesterday we had rain, freezing rain and sleet. There was about a half inch of ice on everything. The temperature throughout yesterday was in the low 20s. Then, overnight, the temperature rose to 40 in the middle of the night, with the rain continuing. After about 6 a.m. the temperature started dropping again, and winds picked up to above 50 mph. Of course, all the tree limbs and wires are now coated with a thick shroud of ice. The wind is causing all kinds of havoc with downed trees and power lines. And the temperature is supposed to reach single digits tonight. WTF? I put down about 100 pounds of ice melt stuff on my walks and my cousin’s (up hill) driveway this afternoon. Don’t know if that’s going to be enough.
But, it seems that the storm is about past us. I have plans to do some shooting at the studio tomorrow and expect to be able to get there. This will pass…but it can’t pass soon enough for me. I’ve had enough and I’m sure we aren’t done yet. At least the damn groundhog didn’t see his shadow this morning.
All New Except for the Old
January 29th, 2011
I finally got to do a shoot with my new Nikon D7000. And I ended up doing that shoot with a “new” model, at least new to me. Char Rose and I had been trying for a long time to set up a first “get acquainted” shoot, and finally managed to do that yesterday. Based on this shoot I’m willing to predict that you will be seeing Char here often in the future. We hit it off pretty well and have already scheduled another shoot.
This was really a learning time for me as I tried to get used to the new camera. Several of the controls are in different places from their location on my D200, so I found myself frequently, for example, activating the menu when I wanted to view the photo I had just taken. I also forgot what ISO I had set a couple times…it’s a shame they decided not to show the ISO setting in the viewfinder, since it has become one of the basic exposure controls on a camera like this where there is no significant difference in file quality between ISO 100 and ISO 1600.
But, give me a few more shoots where I stumble around and I’ll gradually start to know where the controls are and be able to use them without having to stop and think. It makes a big difference in a shoot if I know the camera controls without having to think about them…I can only think about one thing at a time and if it’s how the camera works, then it isn’t about what I’m trying to do with the content of the photo.
Despite my fumbling with the camera a lot, I still managed to get a few photos I’m happy with. Chalk that up to an excellent model who has a lot of patience and a great sense of humor.
But I have something else to rant about now. Adobe. I’m really very upset with them. I use Adobe PhotoShop CS4. That’s just one generation back from the current version, CS5. I find it hard to believe that Adobe is so disrespectful of their customers who pay serious bucks for their software that they are not supporting the next to current version of PhotoShop by adding new cameras to the RAW support. CS4 cannot open the RAW files from the D7000. There’s a workaround by using the free download Adobe Camera RAW in the latest version to open the D7000 RAW files and then save them in Adobe’s RAW format to get them into PhotoShop. But it is a major pain in the ass to go through all that.
I use ACDSee as my photo management program. I’ve been using it ever since I started doing my work with digital cameras back in the last century. It’s relatively inexpensive and does everything I need when it come to organizing and sorting my shoots. And a quick update was all it took for ACDSee to be able to handle the D7000 RAW files. Not so with PhotoShop.
I don’t upgrade every time a software company comes out with a new version of their software. I always skip at least one generation, just as I do with new digital cameras. I think it is offensively arrogant for Adobe to stop supporting a PhotoShop version just one version back from the current one. I has me upset enough to be thinking about other image editing options…although I have to admit that Adobe pretty much has a monopoly. And I guess since they have the best software out there they have come to feel that they can abuse their customers and try to force them to keep buying upgrades every time they come out with a new one.
Fortunately, I seldom shoot RAW files anyway. I find that just shooting jpeg’s gives me fine quality that produces prints I’m very happy with and that all RAW does is take up lots more storage space, require more and larger memory cards for the camera, and require a much larger workload on my part in post processing. But I use RAW now and then when I know it will give me an advantage or where there are issues in the situation I’m shooting that are beyond my control. So, it’s not a big show-stopper to not be able to open RAW files in PhotoShop. But it still pisses me off and greatly lowers my opinion of Adobe as a company.
Kat by the window
January 25th, 2011
Here’s another photo of Kat from her visit to Ohio. I love playing around with the window light in my studio at different times of day and with different cloud cover. And it always helps to have a beautiful nude model for the light to fall across.
My back is mostly better, though still not completely back to normal. I go back to the doctor on Friday to review how things are going. I’m thinking I may not have to do physical therapy, based on how I feel now. One plus from this experience is that the 800 strength Ibuprofen that I’ve been taking for the pain when I don’t want the more heavy-duty drugs to knock me out has also done a much better job of controlling the arthritis pain in my hands than the other heavy-duty drug that I’ve been taking for that. So I’ll be talking to the doctor about switching to Ibuprofen for the arthritis.
OK…I’m sure that’s more than you wanted to know about my health. Sorry.
I spent a fair amount of time yesterday working on my web site…specifically, trying to fix the problems with what was going on in the “Fine Art Nude” section of my portfolio there. I think I have it pretty much fixed now, and I added a bunch more photos while I was at it. So, if you are so inclined, take a look at that gallery and see what you think. Other sections of the site still need work and it’s looking like some of it will have to be done by my webmaster, since there were several things I tried to do that I couldn’t make happen. The “Dance” and the “Nature and Landscape” galleries need some work, but they are ok for now. The text parts of the site really just have place holder text right now…I really need to completely re-do the “About” and the “Statement” pages. Maybe next month.
I’ve also been busy with upcoming shows. I have the print for the Dirty Show framed and ready to go. I’m working on the selection of loose prints that I’ll take up for the Dirty Show Store. I think I’m going to offer those prints with a major discount this time, so if you think you’d like to own some of my photos and will be at the Dirty Show, this will be a chance to get a great deal. If there’s a particular photo you are interested in owning, let me know by using the contact page on this site. I can make sure it makes it to store, or we can work out a sale price if you won’t be able to attend in Detroit next month.
I still have not been able to set up a shoot to try my new D7000 out on a nude model, but there are shoots coming up in the next couple weeks, so I’ll soon have some photos shot with the new camera to post.
Shadowland
January 19th, 2011
With the next storm of the century of the week due to arrive here tomorrow I thought a photo from a warmer time might be in order. I shot this with Angie on a local farm last October. I just liked the way the shadows played on the old barn siding and on Angie’s smooth, curvy form.
A lot has been happening to keep me from being here updating. Not much involving photography, unfortunately. My pain after my dental work continued and eventually required a return trip to the dentist where they ground down the sharp places on my temporary crowns that were digging into my tongue. Got that done just in time for the drive down to Lexington for the opening of the show at the Lexington Art League.
The show in Lexington was good. I’m pleased to be a part of it, though I’ll admit to being totally at a loss as to why my photo was chosen now that I’ve seen the whole show. There were only a half dozen photos in the show of about 50 pieces of artwork. None of the other photos were in any way similar to mine. So, as usual, I have no idea what the judges were thinking or why they chose the photo they did. Still pleased to be included in such a prestigious show, though.
On Saturday after I got back from Lexington my back started hurting. It got steadily worse until I called my doctor and made an appointment to go in on Tuesday. By then I could barely walk. He gave me a shot and a bunch of serious drugs. Today I’m about 80 percent better. He suggested that driving to Bloomington, Indiana on Friday for the Kinsey Institute show that is opening that night might not be the best idea, but I’m going anyway. I just have to be careful which drugs I take when because some of them put me to sleep. If you’ve had back problems, you understand what this is like…if you haven’t experienced it yourself, you have no idea.
On Monday, with my back really killing me, I went to one of my regular eye doctor appointments. At the morning appointment my eye doctor said the pressure in my left eye was higher than the right. He had done laser surgery on the right eye last year and thought it was time to do the surgery on the left eye now. He said he was doing the surgeries that afternoon and if I wanted to come back after lunch he could do it then. So I went to lunch with some friends and went back. After that in addition to the extreme back pain I also had my left eye feeling like it had been poked with a stick. But after I got the good drugs for my back, they seemed to eliminate the eye pain too.
Because of all of that I have not been able to do any shooting with the new D7000, but I hope to take care of that soon and have something newer to post here. But first I’m looking forward to getting over to the Kinsey Institute to see the great show they are opening Friday night. If you are going to be there please say hello.
Whirling Kelsey
January 12th, 2011
When Kelsey came by the studio last month she brought along one of her hula hoops. She is a very accomplished hula hooper. One of her hoops is a fire hoop, but she didn’t have that one with her on this trip…but we plan to photograph it the next chance we get. This hoop has colored LEDs on it. So I turned off the lights, put the camera on a tripod and did some long exposures. I like how they came out. You’ll probably see some more here soon.
There are good reasons that I haven’t been posting much. Like three hours in the dentist’s chair on Monday, followed by an appointment with my insurance agent. There’s a day I’ll never get back, but would never want to repeat either. Then yesterday my best friend, Ken, came over for a visit. And, because of the blizzard of the century of the week, my wife got to come home early from work, so we spent the afternoon together. After that my daughter and grandson came over and we went out to dinner. I’m still in pain from the dentist, but it seems to be gradually subsiding. I’m hoping it will be gone by Friday when I’ll drive down to Lexington for the opening reception of the Lexington Art League Nude show. I hear it’s quite a party with lots of great food, so I hope to be able to enjoy it without wincing every time I take a bite of food.
On a happier note, I picked up a Nikon D7000 at the local camera shop yesterday and have started playing with it and getting it set up for my needs. I’m looking forward to shooting a dance concert in March with it and being able to shoot at 6400 ISO. It will change the way I approach shooting a concert and allow me much more flexibility. I’ll probably bring out the 35-70 f/2.8 zoom lens that I don’t use much anymore and see how it works with the new camera. My D200 never liked that lens and would often not autofocus well with it, so I’m hoping that won’t be a problem with the new camera.
I don’t buy every new model of a camera that comes on the market. I’ve decided to skip a generation as a general rule in the future. That’s what I did with this camera. I love my D200 and can still do fine work with it. The D300 is a nice camera and it was tempting, but now I’m glad I waited since the D7000 is even better at the things that matter to me. And the new camera is smaller and lighter too…a big plus when it goes in my backpack for a trek into the woods.
I hope to do some shooting with the new camera in the coming week, so I’ll let you know how it goes and show the results soon.
The Girl in the Window
January 6th, 2011
My studio is in a fun building. There are lots of other photographers and artists in the place and there’s always some interesting activity going on. And sometimes I’m the one making things interesting. This is Kelsey in my studio windows when she was here last month. I think I’m the only one who got to enjoy the view, but you never know around here.
I’m back from my trip to Vermont. I usually post something that I shoot while I’m up there, but it just wasn’t happening this year. I think I may be finished with my series of photos of a farmstead there…that means it may be time to figure out how I’m going to show that series. I’m thinking about mounting several of them in one frame and submitting it to some shows in galleries up there in Vermont. We’ll see.
I haven’t shot anything since I got back home, though I’ve been spending a fair amount of time at my studio working on stuff. My truck is in the body shop, so my transportation options are limited. I should get it back tomorrow, though, and be back in normal operation.
Lots of gallery shows coming up to get ready for. My print for the Lexington Art League is delivered and that opening is just a week away. The next week I’ve been invited to attend an opening at the Kinsey Institute. I’m not in that show, but I have some prints to drop off to them that they have requested for their permanent art collection, so I’m planning to go to the opening. There are a couple photographers I know in the show, so it will be fun to see their work and get to talk to at least one of them who I know will be there. The frame and matte are ordered for my print that will be in the Dirty Show. I ordered them from a new place on line that I’ve not dealt with before, so I’m waiting to see how they do with quality and speed of delivery. There’s time to recover if there are problems.
And I’ve been contacting models since I got back home to set up more shoots in the studio over the next couple months…so I’m staying busy. You should see some of the results here soon.
On A Roll
December 29th, 2010
Of course, Brooke is really on an upturned tree root system, not a roll, but the photo itself seems to be on something of a roll. I already told you that this photo was accepted into the highly respected and exclusive Lexington Art League Nude show, opening January 15. Now I’ve been informed that it was also accepted into the somewhat less respectable Dirty Show in Detroit in February. Two very different venues. I guess that says something about the photo and the range of appeal it possesses.
I plan to attend the Dirty Show on Saturday, February 12, so find me and say hello if you are going to be there that night.
I’m pleased that this photo is getting all this attention. First, simply because I love the photo. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be when I took it. But, beyond that, it is a great example of the collaborative relationship I have with my models, especially the truly great models like Brooke. Of course, it was sleeting and very windy when we took this photo. Brooke was suffering quite a bit doing this pose in those conditions. But we saw the setting and Brooke wanted to see what she could do posing on those roots. She worked at it for a while in those chilling conditions, trying to find the best way to pose and still be able to hang on. I made a few suggestions along the way to try to get the pose I envisioned. And, of course, Brooke pulled it off. And I was able to put together the composition I wanted. The awful weather conditions actually are a critical element of the photo. It wouldn’t have the power it has if it had been taken on a warm, sunny day.
It’s such a pleasure to work with fantastic models like Brooke (and make no mistake, Brooke is as good a model as there is anywhere) who understand how all these things work together and why it is important sometimes to work in bad weather. Add to that intelligence both Brooke’s great beauty and her amazing talent for posing and it should be no secret why she is my favorite model. Just look at that photo if you need any more evidence.
Thank you Brooke. You are the greatest.
