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).

Midweek Macro #7 – something mysterious, almost

Something mysterious, almost. Like the capital on the swing ride at the small town carnival that rolled into town last week, or looking through a clear umbrella at an evil-looking fog, maybe.

I played with this one a long time, adding grain, darkening the vignette, playing with split toning, but ended up with something somewhat closer to the original, as the original had plenty of spook to it.

D7000. Vivitar 50mm f/1.8 (Cosina), reversed. ISO800, 1/160th (Ap mode), f/4, -1EV. About 3 minutes of slider play in Lightroom.

7/52-12 subtle and/or vibrant

Seeing that it’s Springtime in North Texas, the week started warm-ish and cloudy, and ended cold and rainy… In between, though, the sky was blue, the birds were chirping, and there was color everywhere!

Come Wednesday, I still hadn’t come up with a theme for the week, so I took a look in the cameras to see what I had shot. In the phone, I found 130-odd pictures I took to test out the Plastica app (there may or may not be a review in the works… depends on if and to what extent I continue to play with it), but not much else. In the D7000, there was nothing to find, as it had not been powered up all week. And in the LX-7, I found four pictures of the subtle blue and red color in the clouds from last Sunday.

Then, on my way out to the car that afternoon, the sky was vibrant, and the yellow-green of the trees was super-saturated, so out came the LX-7 and I had a theme! GoGo.

Not much else to say.

Everything was shot with the LX-7, mostly at 35 or 50mm (with one 28mm and one 90mm thrown in for good measure), all but one wide open (the clouds at 28mm were at f/2), and everything on Aperture Priority  mode. Pictures were processed in Lightroom, for maybe 30 seconds each, mostly to get the RAW files back to what they looked like in the jpeg preview on the back of the camera, which pretty much means I should probably start shooting that camera in jpeg or jpeg/RAW mode.