7/52-34 Costa Rica!
So the week of August 18 found me in Costa Rica… a business trip to train some new team members. It was quite exciting for two reasons: 1) it was my first time to Costa Rica (or anywhere south of the Rio Grande); 2) it was my first business trip.
Guess what? The second first largely cancelled out the first first, but it was still very enjoyable.
The weather? Beautiful. It’s winter in Costa Rica, their rainy season. It rained just before I got there, then was upper 60s to lower 80s, then rained a tiny bit high in the mountains on the way to see the volcano and the waterfall park on our last day.
The food? Magnificent. I went off my vegetarian diet for the entirety of the trip, and feasted on seafood: salmon, sea bass, tilapia, mussels, oysters, clams, lobster, shrimp, octopus, and maybe more. And that in addition to mountains of fresh, tropical fruits and delicious vegetables. One of my favorites: stewed sweet plantains from the Equifax cafeteria, and tamarind refrescos naturales (aka ‘aguas frescas’ in Mexican Spanish) (and pardon my spelling, por favor).
The people? Friendly, cheerful, helpful, and considerate, and the new team members are smart and eager.
Alas, I was busy working and didn’t get out much to shoot, so most of the 7/52 this week is from the airplane or at the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, a sort of zoo/nature park thing. We did take the last half day off, and Willis (the team leader down there) drove us up to see the La Poás volcano and aforementioned waterfall park. I ran the camera and the phone out of batteries before really getting to the end of the hike, and got very little worth sharing.
Sadly, for some reason, the LX7 decided to overexpose everything by about 3 stops, despite being set to -1 EV. I’m not sure what went wrong… probably my failure to adjust the aperture or turn on the ND filter…
And I have to say, my heart wasn’t really in it… I’m getting married this coming Thursday (!!!!!!!),* trying to find a place to live for the fiancé/wife and I, trying to get the new work process set and all the people trained, and I’m sure I’m forgetting about 57 things… Life is so wonderfully busy right now that I really don’t have much time for or interest in shooting. In fact, given all the stuff going on at work, I should be working or at least cleaing the apartment right now instead of blathering on…
Everything was shot with the LX7 or iPhone. I did shoot some Hipstamatic down there, but those are in separate posts. Most of the LX7 shots got some amount of post work; most of the iPhone pics didn’t. EXIF is in the lightbox, if you care.
*You’re probably asking yourself why I waited so long to mention it… Well. I don’t really have an answer at present. I’m working on a short story or book about the whole thing, so maybe an answer will come out there… maybe I’ll blog it in episodes or something.
Anyway, thanks in advance for your congratulations! Pics of the wedding and bride and more details will be forthcoming.
7/52-33 Oh! Baby give me one more chance!
The poor old Tokina AT-X 35-200mm f/3.5-4.5 has been languishing on a shelf, staring forlornly out at me and begging for just one more chance since I finished shooting for that review I wrote back in November 2012. Given that I didn’t really have much of a clue what to shoot this week, no ideas or plans, no desire to get to work on any of the ideas I’ve had stashed away, I decided to give the old Toki a chance to shine.
And—believe it or not—shine it did!
Mostly.
Given the Tokina’s failure to transmit much in the way of contrast or sharpness or color, it really likes flat light, like that found during a mostly overcast and raining day, like those we had here in North Texas several times this week.
Two shots of puddles got the most work (probably 4 minutes of slider play); two shots of that flower got a bit less (less than a minute each, I think); the others are straight from Lightroom’s RAW processor.
So GoGo, Tokina! I don’t think it’ll make it into regular rotation—everything is still backwards and the range is still rather limited (~52-300 in 35mm terms) on a crop sensor—but it might not go into the Goodwill pile when I move next…
D7000. Tokina AT-X 35-200 f/3.5-4.5. Remarkably little post-work in Lightroom, given the quality of this particular lens… EXIF is in the lightbox, if you care.
PS… Yes, there are 9 pictures… No, I didn’t miscount. Pick two and consider them a bonus.
PPS… when reading the title, please think of the hook on this classic song. (And remember the dancing and singing with some fondness. RIP.)
Playing with DistressedFX
I don’t much go for distressed filters these days, but I quite like Distressed FX.
Distressed FX offers 19 color/treatment filters (plus Birds!) and 17 scratch layers (plus the ability to create custom scratch designs), and the ability to tune the intensity of the filters.
It’s also possible to make simple tweaks to color, brightness, and contrast.
It saves images to a maximum dimension of 2048 (2048×2048 for square images; 2048×1536 for 4×3 images from the iPhone camera), and this is plenty for social media.
Other
Fun times.
7/52-32 Holga!
*when reading the above title, it may be helpful to imagine Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
A week with the Holga 60mm f/8 has been on my list for quite some time, and I finally did it. With some more time, I think this cheap hunk of plastic has some possibilities, but I think I’ll go back to conventional (or conventional-ish) lenses for awhile.
To be honest, the 7/52 was mostly an afterthought this week. I’m very busy with work and life, but neither are any real excuse. If I really wanted to be serious about this shooting thing, I would’ve found the time, but to be honest, I might have only gained maybe 30 minutes the entire week. I’m just very busy.
One indication of this lack of real effort is the inclusion of no less than 3 (three!) pictures of cats. For shame, for shame.
Is it time to publicize all the busy-ness? or shall I wait until the big things have already happened… I don’t know.
D7000. Holga 60mm f/8. All shot in Aperture Priority mode; EXIF should be in the lightbox if you care. Processing in Lightroom 5 was minimal.
7/52-31 exposing to the right
How many times have I tried to shoot at night for this project? And how many times did I shoot at night during 2012’s 365 project? In any of those times, did I ever try to find a manual setting that would capture color and light the way I saw it? Of course not.
So Monday morning, I got in the car, pulled out the camera, and started firing test shots of the dark parking lot. The Sunny 16 Rule says, for a day with bright sun and some clouds, set your ISO as low as it goes (for the D7000, this would be 100), set your shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO (1/100), and set the aperture to f/16, and you’ll have a decent-enough exposure. If it’s darker, open your aperture. If it’s brighter close your aperture. Alternately, you could raise or lower your shutter speed.
Someone with some maths could probably calculate where I need to be for near pitch-black (or as dark as it gets in downtown Dallas), but that person isn’t me.
I knew I didn’t want to go above ISO800, so I set the camera for ISO800. If my maths are correct, this would indicate a shutter speed 1/800th of a second (100 to 800 is 3 stops, and 100 to 800 is 3 stops… :facepalm: reciprocal of the ISO, jerk) in bright sun at f/16. I didn’t have bright sun and was happy to have the 3 stops, but I don’t quite know how many stops it is from bright sun to 5am in Dallas, so I opened the aperture to f/4. This should give a total of 7 stops, if my maths are correct (3 from the ISO, and f/16 to f/4 is 4: 3 + 4 = 7).
I fired off a test shot:
Black Frame.
I can handhold the 30mm at 1/15th (1/10th if I haven’t had any coffee and am fairly relaxed), but I was going to be in a moving vehicle, and so I wanted to keep it up as high as possible. I dropped to 1/50th (1 stop), and opened the aperture to f/2 (2 stops), for a total of 10 stops.
I fired off a test shot:
Close, but way too dark, no detail at all in any but the lightest shadow areas.
Luckily, the Sigma goes another stop to f/1.4, so I gave myself another stop from Aperture and another stop from Shutter Speed (f/1.4 and 1/25th), for a total of 12 stops.
I fired off a test shot:
Very close, but a bit hot for my liking, so I dropped the shutter speed back 1/3 stop, and everything was bang-on.
GoGo. I now had a manual setting for the rest of the week, and all that was left was to shoot, and therein lies the problem. Between work and all the other fun stuff I have going on—I should really write something about all this… Soon, perhaps—I don’t make much time to shoot, especially when it’s dark outside.
But I did it, sort of. I like the colors of the various light sources in and around my neighborhood, the way the light bounces off buildings and the different shadows it casts, but I couldn’t capture it properly from a moving vehicle, and have significant trouble convincing myself to stop the car and wander around for 5 minutes.
The shots I’m happiest with were all shot from a standstill, and they’re mostly sharp and clear, so at least I know a good manual starting point to shoot handheld at night in the city (rather, near the city). And that’s GoGo, methinks.
Everything was shot with the D7000 and Sigma 30mm f/1.4, ISO800, f/1.4, and a range of shutter speeds from 1/25th to 1/50th, and they received minimal post processing (slight tweaks to exposure/contrast/etc., mild (and in one case, extreme) cropping, and the like). Why the range of shutter speeds? The shutter speed dial is right by my thumb, and I tweaked it from time to time…
7/52-30 Fold(s)
I downloaded VSCOcam in early July, but hadn’t taken it for a proper test yet: one of those (many) impulse camera app purchases/downloads that I only rarely regret, as most are worth the free or $0.99 cost. I read that it was nice, simple, and powerful, and thought it might be a fun addition to my app arsenal, so I hadn’t put it in a folder, and instead, I made room for it on the photo app screen. (If I recall, it replaced the excellent Mextures app, which should really come out of the folder where it might have a chance of seeing some use…) I was all set to use it, I just hadn’t.
Then, maybe a week after I downloaded it, I read the 50 Things I Have Learned about Mobile Photography (and iPhone Photography) by Misho Baranovic (instagram @mishobaranovic) on the procamera blog. #35 stuck with me in ways others didn’t. Not that many of the others weren’t useful, it’s just that #35 was different somehow.
So fast-forward a couple of weeks to last Monday evening. I was chilling on the sofa, watching a lecture on Surah Fatiha, if I recall, and playing with the phone (gogo multitasking), when I spotted the app icon and thought “VSCO Cam is the new Hipstamatic.”
The photo above was the result, and it set off the week.
This isn’t a review of VSCOcam, really, and it isn’t a replacement for Hipstamatic, not in my world anyway. But it is a nice addition to the app arsenal, what with it’s Free price and nice collection of filters (and if you like the 5 or so free ones that come with the app, go ahead and drop the $6.00 to get the others: you likely won’t be disappointed, but you might be a bit overwhelmed (and the $5.99 for all the filter packs is on for a limited time… not sure how limited: it was limited on July 5 when I first looked at the app, and I bought the pack on July 20-somethingth, and it was still limited then, and it’s still limited as of this morning… maybe it’s going to go away in early August? Who knows.)). Plus, its camera module has separate focus and exposure controls, plus a white balance lock, and its editing screens allow control over exposure, white balance, contrast, rotate, and crop (and a host of others I found just now by scrolling to the right… sheesh… even more powerful than I thought).
Anyway. Everything was shot with the iPhone 5 via VSCOcam, and edited and processed in VSCOcam. Much of the EXIF is in the lightbox, but the preset filters are sadly missing. Perhaps they’ll appear in an update sometime. For reference, here are the filters I used, in order… S2, B4, C3, S6, F2, P4, F2… interesting that I used that F2 twice… wish I’d seen that before, I might’ve switched it up some.
You can find VSCOcam in the App Store. It’s worth the Free (and the extra filters are a nice addition, if a bit overwhelming at first, and you can probably get similar results out of the host of editing settings, and $6.00 isn’t nothing in the way that $0.99 is…).
Also: the title of this week’s 7/52 comes from a mis-remembered discussion of a portion of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque that we read in Performance Theory class… something about folding, enfolding, unfolding and identity… I don’t recall all the specifics, but after looking at that chapter again, I sorta want to read the whole book…
