Sunrise at White Rock Lake

The North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group met up at the White Rock dog park for some sunrise shooting and general photowalking last Saturday. It was cold, and I lost my mojo by about 7:30, and I tried a sort of experiment that largely failed, but I had a good time and ended up with 2 or 3 pretty good shots (and 3 or 4 other decent-enough-to-share-but-not-in-any-way-portfolio-worthy ones: see below).

The experiment: stacked .6 and .9 ND filters, mostly handheld, in the early morning hours. Guess what? The D7000/Sigma 30mm f/1.4 don’t particularly care to focus on anything (save infinity) with this set-up, though they’ll flash the green dot at whatever you decide to point at, and make you think the intended subject is in focus, when in fact the only in focus bit is the distant shoreline or featureless sky, ie the very things you don’t much care about being in focus or not.

Oh well. It’s a good-enough lesson to learn, I guess, though I would’ve been much happier if 4 or 5 of the other 358 shots I took had been even remotely in focus…

Oh well. It was a good time, anyway, as it always is with the MeetUp groups of which I’m a part. I met a couple of new people, and got to try out the Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8 (thanks, Brian Eppink!), which is far superior to the 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 DX lens that I use—to great effect, generally—for Real Estate shooting. Alas, I had to give it back, but if I had $2000 beyond what I needed for the Sigma 150mm f/2.8 Macro, and the walkaround zoom I want to find, and the full-frame 12-16 megapixel camera I’d love Nikon to build, I’d probably jump on it…

Alas, none of the dozen or so shots I took with it amounted to anything.

So it was just the D7000 and Sigma 30mm f/1.4 combo, mostly at 1.4 (except for the #hdrfornogoodreason shot, at f/11), all at ISO100, various shutter speeds, and EV values of -3 to -1 (save the HDR, which was effectively -4, -2, 0). It took about 2 hours to whittle the 350 shots down to 50 that I wanted to take a closer look at, and another hour to realize why nothing was in focus, and another maybe 5 minutes to spot the 2 or 3 winners, and another maybe 2 hours to find 3 or 4 others to share, and then only about 20 minutes total to get the six processed to something I can live with.

A couple of these (read: the good ones) look like pictures someone else would make, and I think would make decent postcards or calendar shots, perhaps.

Note: as part of my new posting strategy, Photowalk write-ups will appear on Monday mornings. Photos will be posted to the MeetUp site earlier, and maybe to G+ too, depending on how lazy I feel. It’s probably silly to put stuff anywhere before I put it here, so maybe I’ll wait… I dunno. 

7/52-07 Pinholed

After reading a post on Google+, and checking out Robert Rath’s writeup of his Transit of Venus through-a-pinhole shot, I decided it was time to make a pinhole lens and see how the D7000 fared with an optic even more rudimentary than the Holga 60mm f/8.

Step one: procure supplies. In this case, supplies consisted of:

  • two heavy-duty aluminum cake pans from a local grocer (I went with some rather expensive, fancy ones, as they had the flattest bottom)
  • some black duct tape and/or black gaff tape
  • a 52-55mm extension tube (roughly 50mm long, Fuji branded, from a kit that allowed me to attach filters to a really shoddy bridge camera I bought back in 2003, and kept for some reason when I sold off the Fuji camera)
  • a 52mm Nikon-mount reversing ring
  • a #10 sewing needle.

Total cost: maybe $3. The pie pans were $5; the reversing ring was $7; a roll of duct tape runs $3; a big collection of needles goes for maybe $2; and 50mm+/- of light-tight tube is maybe $3 (think “PVC pipe, cut to size”). If, like me, you already have most of the supplies laying about, the cost will be minimal. (My total outlay was $5.23 for the cake pans, and I have one and a half of them left over for some other project, or perhaps some cake-baking. It seems strange that you can’t buy just one heavy-duty aluminum pie pan, but you can’t, not at Kroger, anyway.)

Step two: cut out a piece of cake pan from the bottom of the pan, and poke a tiny hole through it. This is where every bit of sharpness and/or image quality will come from, so care must be taken to achieve the cleanest hole possible. Given that I used a sewing needle—versus, say, a laser—there was no way to achieve a perfectly round, smooth hole, but I did spin the needle as I poked it through to the desired depth (about halfway to the widest point), and continued to spin and sorta wobble the needle for a bit to make every attempt to remove as many little abraded bits as possible.

Step three: lens construction. I used black duct tape to enlarge the pie pan piece and create a sort of cap for the extension tube, then gaff-taped it all together. If I was less frugal, I would’ve used gaff tape the entire time, but my roll of gaff tape is somewhat less than 1″ wide, versus the 2″ of the duct tape, and I’m fairly frugal about most things, so…

Step four: mount your new lens, and try to figure out how to compose with an extremely dark viewfinder. If my calculations are correct—and given my maths, assume I’m way off—my pinhole lens has an f-stop somewhere between f/128 and f/180, so the viewfinder is completely black.

I used a flash-shoe-mounted bubble level to make sure the camera was plumb and square, took test exposures, and made smaller and larger adjustments until  I found the composition. As the week went on, and I got some practice, this got easier.

Shutter speeds were in the 1/3 second range in full sun, and typically around 15 seconds for most shots. I held ISO at 100 for most of the week, but the pre-sunrise shots from yesterday morning’s Sunrise at White Rock Lake MeetUp photowalk (photos and a write-up to follow) required ISO1600. If I could’ve been bothered to pick up a fresh battery for the remote, I would’ve used bulb mode and and a two or three minute exposure for the “Knot’s Landing” sunrise picture, but, alas, I’m sometimes lazy about things like that.

I’d like to find a laser-cut piece of brass if I try this again, or maybe cough up the $50+ for a body-cap pinhole lens from Photojojo or somewhere. The latter is tempting, despite its expense, due to the ever-increasing dust-spot remediation I had to do on every picture: shots from the first day had no visible dust spots; shots from day 3 required maybe a minute of dust duty; shots from yesterday (not used) were given up on. Thankfully, my sensor cleaning operation is up and running, and it only took maybe 3 minutes to clean the dust off the sensor. In either case, some sort of manufactured hole will be required if I want results much sharper than these: I’m not sure that I do, to be honest, but I sorta do.

D7000. Homemade ~40mm f/128 pinhole lens. 5 shots at ISO100, 1 at 200, and one at 1600; speeds from .6 to 30 seconds. I increased contrast, boosted highlights, and messed around with shadows, whites and blacks, and increased clarity, saturation, and vibrancy on pretty much every shot in Lightroom. Total time from import to upload: less than an hour, including selection and processing, so maybe 2 minutes per image.

Phoneography Friday #1

In an ongoing attempt to get more content onto this blog in a more regular fashion, I present the first in what I hope will be a long series of Phoneography Fridays. (I wonder if that should be “Phoneography Phriday” or maybe “Foneography Friday”?)

I probably won’t say much about these shots, maybe describe the app-juggling process, or give little mini reviews of apps, or tips, or something; maybe not. Either way, I hope you enjoy!

iPhone 5. Built-in Camera app, in HDR mode. Resulting images combined/tweaked in TrueHDR, refined in FilterStorm, and cleaned up a bit in Lightroom.

 

Midweek Macro #1

In an attempt to get content onto the blog more regularly, I’ve decided to attempt a couple of personal themes, the first of which is Midweek Macro.

These are some little buds that are growing from a patch of moss in a flowerbed downstairs. I shot it with the LX7, manual focus, in AP mode, autoISO 320, 1/250th, f/1.4, -1 2/3 EV, and did some mild slider play in Lightroom 4.

The LX7’s macro focus is very handy, and the files are nice and crisp. The bokeh leaves something to be desired, but not much of a something, and the autofocus didn’t want to focus on the little flowers, hence the manual focusing, but I can’t express how handy it is to have a camera this tiny that can focus this closely and produce files of this quality.

Welcome to the future, James.

7/52-06 coming up squares

I struggled a bit for a theme early in the week, but remembered or read something about pre-visualizing aspect ratios (perhaps here) and decided to try pre-visualizing square crops from the 4×3 aspect ratio of the iPhone.

It proved remarkably easy to do, somehow. I expected it to be considerably harder.

But despite succeeding at this experiment, I feel a bit bad for having neglected the D7000 all week, like I took the easy way out, or cheated or something. Oh well.

Most of these were shot with the built-in Camera app, in HDR mode, and the resulting images combined & tweaked in the TrueHDR app, then cropped & tweaked in Filterstorm. Three were shot from the car window, one just before entering the car, two from the back patio, and one just after depositing the cat droppings in the dumpster, but that’s probably more information than you wanted…

Dallas Zoo Photowalk

A new toy arrived on Friday and—quite coincidentally—Saturday was the Penguin Days at the Dallas Zoo Photowalk with the Dallas Photo Walk MeetUp Group.

My first thought was to take the LX7 (with its 24-90mm zoom range) and the D7000 with the Vivitar 70-210 to have a nice range of coverage. Then I remembered I have about a half a roll of black & white film (I think) that I loaded for the West End Photowalk and Scavenger Hunt last November languishing in a Pentax K1000 on the shelf.

Before falling asleep Friday night, I pictured myself lumbering around the zoo, Tenba bag slung messenger-style around my rump, D7000 slung across my torso, and two cameras dangling from my neck…

In this mental picture, I looked ridiculous.

So I decided to use the photowalk as a learning/testing experience, and went armed with the LX7 alone.

As other members arrived carrying tripods and backpacks, sling-straps and shoulder harnesses, DSLRs and multiple lenses, filters and extra batteries, and etc. etc., I began to feel a bit under-accessorized, and looking back, I likely missed a bunch of shots that the D7000 and tele zoom would’ve captured with ease. And looking over the 250-odd photos I made, I sorta wish I’d taken the camera I knew along, rather than taking only the little point-and-shoot—as brilliant a little camera as it is—since a 1/1.7″ (7.44mm x 5.58mm) sensor quite simply can’t match the dynamic range or color reproduction of one roughly three times the size.

In the end, I deleted roughly 150 of the pictures I took straight away, found a couple of dozen worth looking at more closely, and ended up with only 5 worth sharing, and a couple of those are stretching it a bit.

Part of this was due to unavoidable lighting conditions yesterday (Dallas was completely covered in a thick blanket of clouds of a uniform, light grey color, and leading to generally low contrast and desaturated color in the natural environment), but most was due to my inexperience with the new toy.

Oh well.

I did learn some things about the little camera—the jpg preset called “natural,” for example, is desaturated and flat compared even to nature on a completely overcast day, and I’ll be shooting RAW only, or perhaps B/W and RAW from now on—and it’s going to be fun getting fully comfortable with it: I’ve wanted a discrete little camera with far more power than an iPhone for quite awhile now, and I hope to be more easily convinced to take myself on solo photowalks with the little guy.

Once I get comfortable with it, I’ll try to write up a decent, real-world, total amateur-usage-type review of it, as there don’t seem to be that many around, and most that are focus on one or two aspects of the camera (macro, for example) and fill most of the area with rehashing of the tech specs rather than any sort of actual usability-type statements.

Anyway. Below are the shots. And, by the way, I had a nice time on the photowalk, much of it spent with my photowalking buddy Judy, who you might recognize from previous photowalks, perhaps.

7/52-05 Zomb-E Week

It was a fairly grey and gloomy week here in North TX. Several grey days, a couple of rainy days, and a general sort of mental/emotional/physical malaise descended around me early on, and hasn’t really let up.

I expect the personal stuff is diet-related, as I’ve cut out out the sugar-and-junk-food binging I’d been enjoying since moving to the new place. It’s really amazing what sugar and fat do the body, and the effects removing those (or severely limiting their intake) do to the mind.

Anyway, I decided early on to make this the first Zomb-E week. (There may be others in the future, but I really have no idea what the future will bring, other than continued aging, hopefully new experiences, personal growth/regression cycles, and the like, but nothing so specific as what future themes will appear in this project.) I love that lens, despite it’s broken nature, chromatic aberration, near impossibility of achieving sharp focus at any apertures, etc. It has a character that no other lens even comes close to precisely because of its problems.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. Various ISOs and shutter speeds; perhaps some variation from f/3.5 in some shots, but exif is blind when an old manual lens is reversed, and memory fails. Most had 30 seconds-2 minutes of slider play in Lightroom.