7/52-17 Cats! (and not cats…)

AKA One of these is not like the other

Another week of not-really-focusing-on-shooting, and with very, very good reason that I’ll share sooner or later.

I did manage to break off an hour or so on Wednesday, and another 15 minutes yesterday in order to make some pictures, and I’m thankful I got 7 that I found interesting enough to share. It  would perhaps be better if there was a continuous theme (ie just cats, with no ‘not cats’ or, conversely, ‘not cats’ with no cats), but it is what it is.

Not much else to say, and I’m running a bit behind this morning, so…

D7000. Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron, maybe). EXIF in the lightbox (too lazy to look it up…). Mild-to-nonexistent post work in Lightroom.

7/52-16 a day with the Vivitar 50mm f/1.8

Well, I definitely broke a cardinal rule of the 7/52 this week… I only shot for the project on one day. I could make excuses—and the ones I have would be convincing and you would likely give me a pass, given the terrifyingly fabulous week  I had—but I won’t. Suffice it to say, I was simply lazy and allowed other thoughts to crowd my mind, and allowed this crowding to occupy most of my time.

Anyway.

I strapped the Vivitar 50mm f/1.8 (Cosina-made) onto the D7000 via a reversing ring late on Sunday, and then didn’t take the camera out of the bag until Wednesday afternoon, in an attempt to shed some of my worry and relax for a bit. I wandered around the apartment complex grounds, kneeling, stooping, and crawling on the ground, looking for various bugs. I didn’t find the expected ones, and so switched to flowers, but continued to keep an eye out for bugs.

Most of these received very mild adjustments in Lightroom, or a slight crop. The square-cropped one took the most abuse, but even it saw less than 2 minutes of slider play.

D7000. Vivitar 50mm f/1.8 (Cosina). ISO800, various shutter speeds (AP mode), all f/3.5ish (I think: ignore the exif on this, as the D7000 couldn’t see or feel the aperture, given the reversed nature of the lens, and anyway it’s an M43 mount lens).

7/52-15 LensBaby Week!!!1!

So I was pondering a theme for the week, couldn’t come up with anything better, so I decided it would be LensBaby Week. Yay.

The LensBaby is a sort of toy tilt-shift lens with a pronounced sweet-spot (area of acceptable focus) and distinctive blur to everything else. I have the Muse with the plastic optic (no longer produced: current models have a double glass optic that is sharper with less distortion)… there are fancier ones, with larger sweet spots, the ability to lock focus etc., but the Muse does some things the others simply can’t do.*

With the Muse, you focus by squeezing and twisting the lens. The slightest change in lens position causes a vast change in focus.

For most applications, a normal-type lens—one with an aperture and the usual twist-ring focus (or auto-focus) and numerous glass lenses with fancy coatings and specific curvatures—is preferred. In fact, I found myself rather frustrated with the LensBaby on more than one occasion this week. I probably need to limit myself more, as I think this frustration showed a lack of creative intent and suggests that a certain amount of decadent complacence has crept into my photographic practice.

Anyway. If you look back into my archive, you’ll find a few other examples of the sorts of things the LensBaby is great at (in my hands, anyway). In more capable paws, it’s likely the Muse would be capable of greatness.

D7000. LensBaby Muse (plastic optic). Various ISOs (1@100, 3@200, 3@800), various A-mode-provided shutter speeds, wide open (f/2) for the first part of the week, with drop-in apertures of f/4 and maybe f/8 employed, but I’ll challenge you to find them, since the EXIF reports f/2 only. Very slight changes to saturation and contrast on one, and a slight bump-up in shadow detail on another in Lightroom.

*see, for example, the LensBaby Bubble, day 216 of my 365 project

7/52-14 April Showers…

True to myth, April has been fairly rainy thus far, or was for two or three days this week. It’s a blessing here in North Texas, where we’re enduring a lengthy and moderate-to-severe (according to the National Drought Mitigation Center) drought, a curse to commuters, and a delight to my senses: the smell of ozone intoxicates, the cool drops tingle, the pitter-pat relaxes, and the light and color gleam.*

I love rain.

The first two days of the week were spent at Medicine Mound—pictures to follow, whenever I get around to editing the pictures: I’m trying to limit the time I spend at the desk. After 3 years of 40+ hour weeks at a desk job, plus the innumerable hours I spend surfing the internets, editing pictures, and researching at home, my arms and hands and back are beginning to show signs of decay, and I need to give them a break. I’ll continue the 7/52, but other posts will come about whenever I feel the body can afford another hour or three or ten at the desk, or perhaps from the phone.

These were taken Tuesday and Wednesday (April 2 and 3) with the D7000 and Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron, perhaps), mostly at ISO800, a variety of AP-determined shutter speeds, and all wide open and mostly at 210mm. Selection and editing took less than 20 minutes in Lightroom.

*I avoid tasting rain around here, due to the vast quantities of pollutants in the atmosphere, but assume it would bring a similar delight.

7/52-13 from where I sit (Hipstamatic vs. Plastica)

For this week’s 7/52, I decided to pit two toy camera apps against one another: Plastica, the relative newcomer, vs. the venerable Hipstamatic.

For the most part, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves and leave a proper review of Plastica for a time when I have more time to devote to it.

First, though, here’s the setup I used.

  1. I sat down somewhere, or found something to lean against.
  2. I opened Hipstamatic, with the ‘shake to randomize’ function turned on, and took 10 (more or less) shots with random settings.
  3. I switched to Plastica and also shot 10 frames, changing lenses & films between shots, and wishing it too had a shake-to-randomize feature. (That said, the way lenses and films are stored in Plastica—a drawer metaphor—makes switching much faster than Hipstamatic, but I doubt I was as random as Hipstamatic’s shake-to function.)

I did not use any of Plastica’s fancy features—the separate exposure/focus in full-screen mode, the tilt-shift effect, the zoom, or the import—to make things a bit more even.

I’ll try to work up a review of Plastica, but in the mean time, Life in Lo-Fi some good coverage of the original version and the much-improved 2.0 release, if you’re interested. (I used the 2.0 and only picked up the app after the second review came out.)

If you want to try to guess which app made which picture, the answer will be in the exif.

And I intended to share 14 pictures—2 each of 7 scenes—but failed to sit somewhere with an interesting-enough scene for long enough before I left for vacation. Shame on me.

Plastica and Hipstamatic are available in the App Store. Both have in-app purchases of lens/film combinations. Hipstamatic runs $1.99, Plastica is currently free (but will likely be in the $.99 to $1.99 range at some point).