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.

Farmer’s Market Photowalk

The Dallas Photo Walk MeetUp Group (now defunct) met up at the Dallas Farmer’s Market yesterday. I wasn’t really feeling it, I didn’t think, but I ended up getting a couple of shots that I’m really happy with.

The older gentleman with the cane is the first successful from-the-hip shot I’ve made. I loved the color of his coat and pants, and the sheen that they gave off in the morning sun.

And the girder and vine and nice blue sky is one of the first straight-out-of-camera pictures I’ve shared since switching to Lightroom and calibrating my monitor. I don’t quite know what it is, but everything just seems to work in it.

Anyways. Farmer’s Market security was out in force, and apparently a Dallas Police Officer told some fellow photowalkers that amateur photographers must have a permit—and could and would be given citations for shooting in the Market without a permit—despite Farmer’s Market website policy that invites all shooters of any skill level to shoot at will throughout the market (this policy has since been taken down), so I expect 1) that there will be some emails and phone calls made to various official-types and 2) that I personally will never again visit the Market, with deepest apologies to the vendors. I myself was asked if I planned to make any pictures or video in one of the market stalls by a security guard, to which I replied “Only if I see something worth making a picture of.” She didn’t find that amusing and so I told her thanks very much, but I would be taking my camera and money elsewhere. She also did not find that amusing, and invited me to stick around and spend money, as long as I didn’t make any pictures. I laughed sarcastically, walked off, chatted with another MeetUper—who had a run-in with the same guard—and we both agreed it was time to go-and-never-return, and so we both left for greener pastures.

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, various shutter speeds (AP mode), f/1.4, -1EV. Most received less than 1 minute of slider play in Lightroom 4.

The McKinney Scavenger Hunt

Yesterday morning, I met up with some fellow members of the North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group for a Scavenger Hunt around downtown McKinney, Tx.

The light was abysmal, foggy, lacking any sort of punch, and I used the old Nikon 36-72mm E-Series, which is one of the least contrasty or saturated lenses in my arsenal, so these took quite a bit of massaging in Lightroom.

The Scavenger Hunt list was as follows:
1) Macro/closeup
2) Street Portrait
3) Vibrant
4) Decay
5) Magical
6) Scale
7) Faux animal
8) Strength
9) Curve, i.e circle, arch, prefer not an s-curve but…
10) The letter “P”

I’m missing one, and I’m not going to tell you which was which, but have a guess if you like.

D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E Series. ISOs varied between 100 and 1600, focal lengths varied between 36 and 72mm (54-108 on the crop sensor), and I shot in Aperture Priority mode, mostly at f/3.5, but with some f/8s and f/11s tossed in for good measure. Much of this may or may not be in the exif.

And apologies for the lack of sharp focus on many of these. The 36-72 is full manual, I wear glasses, and I did a bunch of focus-and-recompose, after which I moved the focus ring inadvertently… I really should invest in a decent walkaround autofocus zoom lens one of these days.

7/52-04 a week with Incredibooth

Last Sunday, I heard the birds chirping outside, and ran out with the camera to try my hand at some birding. I got a few decent shots, but most of it was mediocre. All of my long lenses are fully manual, and while the Vivitar 70-210 is diamond-slicing sharp, my ability to focus in on fluttering and twittering birds is sadly lacking.

I planned to try some more, and maybe work on the capturing the various Fauna around the new digs for this week’s 7/52.

But then I read an article over on LifeInLoFi about alternate uses for the Incredibooth app, and decided to give the app another try.

Incredibooth was one of the first apps I bought when I got an iPhone, and I played around with it some, but didn’t really give it much thought. After this week, I think I’ve rectified that, and while Incredibooth likely won’t make it out of a folder, it’ll probably stay on the phone for awhile.

One problem I ran into was the lag between tripping the shutter and the app beginning its firing sequence. As the app is modelled after a coin-operated photo booth, there is a 5 second delay between tripping the shutter and the firing sequence. The delay was most noticeable in walking sequences, but close examination—which you won’t be able to do unless I upload full-res images somewhere—reveals gaps in driving sequences as well.

All in all, though, this was a fun experiment, and you may see more of these from me at some point. (As an aside, I have a crazy idea to create some sort of photomontage from sets of these. I’m not quite sure how I’d do it, yet, as the logistical planning seems rather complex, but with the right planning, it might be fun.)

iPhone 5, Incredibooth app. 4 images per strip, 6-36 strips per finished image, combined in Photoshop CS6.

7/52-03 Looking Up

The full title of this week’s 7/52 is “(Things are) Looking Up (I hope).” Of course, given my rather melancholic disposition, I fully expect it all to come crashing down at any moment (whatever I mean by ‘Things’ and ‘all’), despite and because of the fact that things have been on a rather steady upward trend—despite numerous hiccoughs, potholes, detours, and complete changes of direction—for roughly 10 years now, and despite not yet being the person I want to be (and never expecting, really, to become that person anyway, since the description changes regularly such that if I went back and met the James from 5 or 10 or even 2 years ago, he would likely be rather pleased with the person he’s become, though the James from 5 minutes ago would chortle and say “still? Jeez, me, grow up” or somesuch: I expect many of us humans are like this…), and despite the fact that I’ve been sick all week and so only really got out to shoot 3 days—though I did whip the phone out a few times and even included one of those shots here, as a sort of bonus (guess which one without looking at the exif)—I managed to make not just 7, but 8 pictures that I’m rather happy with.

Does that make sense? I like run-on-type sentences, filled with non-sequiturs and digressions, but understand that they can be difficult to follow.

If it’s unclear, try reading it again, slowly, outloud if possible, or just take a gander at the pictures, below, and go on your merry way.

The pictures, by the way, were all take—with the exception of one, shot with the iPhone 5 built-in camera in HDR mode and processed in the phone with Filterstorm, then tweaked very slightly and cropped to match its relatives in Lightroom—the D7000 and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G, at ISOs from 100-800, in Aperture Priority mode at Apertures from 1.8-4, and processed with a variety of techniques in Lightroom. The entire process of uploading, culling and processing took a grand total of 95 minutes, including two round-trips to Photoshop for some quick and simple HDRing of two images, and trips to the restroom, coffee breaks, and some playing with the cats.

By the way, I’m really enjoying this 7/52, and feel I’m learning a great deal more with this project than I did with the 365. I’m able to focus more on composition in camera, recognizing and correcting errors quickly, deleting mis-fires and trying again immediately, and the weekly theme helps concentrate my focus and eye throughout the week.

7/52-02 the Castillian’s Flora

I intended to shoot the fora and fauna around the new apartment (the Castillian is the name of these apartments), but managed to be outside without a suitable camera (read: not a phone) all three times that I saw the opossum, and the numerous times I saw squirrels, birds, and various other critters.

So it’s just the flora instead.

I must admit that this is a rather weak showing. I’m not sure what happened. I shot every day; I had a theme before I even started & so knew what I was looking for; I was careful with my framing and composition. I just didn’t capture much that I really like. (One exception being the featured image here, which I like quite a bit.)

Part of the problem: I started the theme intending to shoot from within the confines of the apartment, through the windows, or from my half of the shared front/rear porches. Alas, I quickly ran out of stuff to shoot from those vantages: the rear porch looks out onto the parking lot (and the fence in shots 2-4); the front windows and porch overlook a small yard with few plants and bad light most of the time. So I had to whip out the Zomb-E and go down by the pool, where there is a bit more of interest.

I wonder also if there isn’t a flaw in the conception of the 7/52, or perhaps I’m not taking it seriously enough. This will require some thought.

I’ll try to do better this week, as soon as I get over this slight sickness I have: the first in several years, probably owing to the vast swings in temperature over the last few days (Thursday morning: mid 50s, rain; Thursday afternoon, mid 60s; Friday morning: upper 30s; Friday afternoon over 70; Saturday morning: mid 60s; Saturday afternoon: low 40s, heavy rain; this morning: upper 30s), but diet and lingering moving stresses likely contributed. I should get over it in a day or so, thanks to a return to my usual diet and (hopefully) some relaxation. Fingers crossed.

These were made with the Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron, maybe) (first 4) and the Nikon 75-150 f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. Everything was in Aperture priority, at ISOs from 100-800. Processing took place in Lightroom 4, with a couple of trips into Photoshop CS6 to remove some perspective distortion, and took roughly 2 hours, including time to select the 7, fetch coffee, play with cats, etc.