It was one of the last warm days of summer. The reeds and grasses in the bird sanctuary had started to go to seed and the light was getting lower and warmer earlier and earlier. We took the gear for a walk and I mounted the old Nikon 500mm mirror lens on my Canon to see what one lens could see.
Because the lens has a single aperture of f/8, it is not easy to compose or focus; because it predates digital, there is no hope of auto-focus and with my current eyesight and the lens’ narrow field of view, I had my work cut out. While working this shot of a seed head, I racked the focus all the way in on my way to finding sharpness and noticed that the individual seed spikes were each taking on the characteristic doughnut shape that the lens’s mirror creates. Since I was here, I shot several before attempting to get sharpness again.
Later, while editing this evening’s effort in Lightroom, I was surprised at how this out of focus rendition was so successful in conveying the way the moment felt: the late afternoon light on the seed heads moving slowly in the breeze and the lazy feeling of the last days of summer.
The photographers whose work I admire all say that one should play and experiment to see what types of effects one can get. If I had continued to struggle to get the image sharp, I would have missed this nice abstract rendition of an otherwise uninteresting weed.
- Published:
- February 18, 2010
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The winter in northern New Jersey this year is not motivating me to go out and photograph. The travel budget is depleted and household renovations have been keeping me close to the shop. During some clean up here, I re-discovered the box of black and white negatives that I’ve been carefully archiving on a shelf behind some old film editing equipment. At about the same time, I was having on online conversation with Terry, a recently reconnected high-school friend now living on the west coast of Florida (mmm, warm…). She and Jim were organizing and digitizing their photos and she commented that I must have an enormous pile to deal with. She was right about the enormous part, but I had not really given much thought to nor put any time into dealing with them. If there is a muse of photo restoration, her name is Theresa this week.
This image was taken at a carnival that set up outside Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, NJ sometime in the mid 60s. Roosevelt Stadium played a large part in our adolescent and teenage years. Skating rink in the winter, football games in the fall (I was in the band), learning to drive in the parking lot and the sometimes home of the Brooklyn Dodgers during 1956 and 1957 on their way to Los Angeles. While processing this and doing some close up retouching, I noticed that the two banners were signed by Snap Wyatt. I did some research on him and he is responsible for many of these side show banners but I have yet to see any reference to these two.
There are lots of impediments that have made it difficult to face my past via restoring these photos. Read More »
- Published:
- February 13, 2010
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A long time ago, in another life, I was a sailor. I was cruising the Mediterranean with a scraggly bunch of biker-pirates, stopping at ports, saying ‘Aaargh’ as much as we could and having a pretty swell time of it all. On a late December afternoon, I saw this great cloud formation to the north. At first it was just peeking over the horizon, but after a while, it revealed itself to me in full glory and I shot this picture. Then we realized that it was a fairly major thunderhead developing and heading right at us. Time to stow the camera and literally ‘batten down the hatches’ as well as mostly everything else. We shortened sail drastically and within a half hour were heeled over, rails in the water and hanging on for all that we were worth.
Good times, matey, good times… And just to put things into some chronological perspective, this is me at the helm of our gaff rigged ketch somewhere between Gibraltar and South Carolina after leaving the Mediterranean during the winter of 1975. These are scans from Ektachrome slides shot with a Nikonos camera. Waterproof came in really handy for this trip!
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- February 4, 2010
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We were walking in the tropical forest behind Anse Mamin in St. Lucia last summer when it started to rain. We took relative shelter under some dense foliage and shared some time with this beauty and its small attendant. Between the overcast sky and the shadow from the trees, there was not enough light for me to shoot this with a 100mm macro lens, hand held and with enough depth of field to make it work. We had carried a small flash with us (we were there for Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Lighting Workshop in Paradise Workshop) and a small modified LumiQuest on-flash softbox. We set it up and were able to get a reasonably soft light and could shoot at 1/200th @ f/8.
The surface of the unit is small, so the farther away from the subject, the harder the light and the larger the lit area would be . The closer the unit is to the subject, the greater the effect of fall-off (inverse square law) and so the light would not be quite as even across the flower. So, like everything else in photography (in life?), we compromised. Close enough to be sort of soft and concentrated on the subject, far enough to keep the lighting even. The results are pretty good for the ease and simplicity of the set up. Thanks Joe!
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- February 2, 2010
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