365.287 mnomnomnoms

I did a bunch of processing on this, but like the original better.

There were sharper shots made of this pair of ________s (I know nothing about whatever these things are) made today, but none of them captured the melancholia I’m feeling in quite the same way as this one.

I don’t mind that the bugs are a bit soft, that the picture is underexposed, that the dynamic range isn’t all it could be.

I’m glad that I managed to take myself for a walk for the third day in a row. And I’m thankful I managed to click the shutter, because this is one of those days worth giving up on.

Something must be off in my diet or sleep schedule, but I don’t know what it could be. Maybe it’s the dreary day. Maybe its something else too personal to mention in this forum. I hope I can get back to even fairly soon, though, ’cause I’ve been bouncing back and forth for days and it’s wearing me out.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO100, 1/125th (APmode), f/3.5, -1EV. A slight crop to remove some dead space on the left and top edge. Otherwise, this is straight out of Aperture’s RAW processing.

365.286 the light, oh my the light

Well, this not quite the exact same subject as can be found in yesterday’s photo… but it’s maybe 6 inches to the right of that one, and taken with the lens that proves broken can be beautiful: the Zomb-E Series.

(In case you’ve forgotten, or weren’t around yet, or are checking out random posts on the blog here, the Zomb-E is a Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series that had its traditional focusing movement broken in a fall, and now functions only in reverse, and is one of my go-to lenses for making pictures that I like to look at.)

Again, probably not a great photo, but I love the Zomb-E bokeh, the spherical focus zone, the very special, super soft CA, and the warmth and general peace I feel when I look at it.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO400, 1/1600th (AP mode), f/3.5, -1EV. 1/2 stop of exposure added back, and no other processing in Aperture.

365.285 broken can be beautiful

I went over to momma’s for breakfast yesterday, and she handed off some camera gear that belonged to my Grandfather. A full Vivitar rig: 250/SI (with some mold in the eyepiece), Vivitar 50mm f/1.8 (Cosina-made, in the 30th week of 1975, or maybe 85, but everything else is from the mid 1970s, and it looks like a 70s lens), Montgomery Ward branded 28 f/2.8, JCPenny Diamatic branded 135mm f/2.8, and a Vivitar 2x teleconverter, plus a couple of weird-looking flashes with no settings, and a bunch of 49mm filters.

Since I have a 50 that I’m really happy with (the 1.8G Nikkor), and a fabulous 24mm f/2.8, I was particularly interested in the 135.

Slight problem: the lenses all feature an m42 screw mount. Luckily, so does the EL Nikkor 50mm, so I already had an adapter.

I took the 135 out briefly yesterday, with unsatisfactory results, and today I found out why: it’s broken. It focuses from ~8′ to about 30, but never reaches infinity, and you can unscrew and remove the front half of the lens.

I suppose the focus issue could be due to the retrofit, but the adapter adds negligible thickness to the mount.

In itself, this is not a big deal, for me. I probably wouldn’t want to use the lens for a tele anyway, given that I have the 70-210 Vivitar that absolutely rocks.

It’s the 8′ minimum focus distance that gets me.

However, if the Zomb-E series has taught me anything, broken can be beautiful.

Witness the nice background and very pleasant foreground blur here. The stems and flowers are between 6′ and 7.5′ away, and the bokeh on the group to the right is just my thing. I wish I could’ve gotten something in focus, but oh well.

D7000. JCPenny Diamatic 135mm f/2.8 (maybe Accura-made, maybe not). ISO400, 1/500th, f/2.8, -1EV. Very slight crop to bring the left edge to meet the branch on the left.

365.284 a slight emergence

My deepest apologies for the lateness of this post. I was out and about with a young woman last evening—if it was a date, it was the first one I’ve been on since 2005, and so I don’t really know if it was a date or not, so I won’t call it a date—when I shot this, and got home way past my bedtime.

And if I write a big long thing here, I’ll be late for work… Apologies.

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO400, 1/1000th (AP mode), f/1.4, -1EV. About 30 seconds of slider play in Aperture.

365.283 for lack

So I spent the whole day thinking about asking a woman I met last week to go do something friendly and nonthreatening (wander around a bookstore or something similar) with me this afternoon.

Needless to say, I just thought about it.

So about 3, after sitting pretty much in the same spot for roughly 11 hours—minus the 30 minutes it took me to drive to the pancake spot, see all the people milling about outside, and drive home; minus also the 40 minutes it took me to fetch groceries—I decided it was time to make the 365.

But what to shoot?

And what lens to use?

So I strapped on the Tokina—as the cheapest and most battered lens I own: it seemed like an obvious choice—and started shooting randomly.

I shot around, hither and yon (from the desk and its environs to the dining room, a distance of maybe 15 feet) and spotted some nice blurry shiny stuff: the comforter.

So I went into the bedroom and shot the comforter for awhile, with the camera on manual and the pop-up on ttl, and then had a flash of brilliance!

In 1955, Rober Rauschenberg made a rather famous combine painting called Bed. If you’re unfamiliar, go check it out. As I was shooting around my bed, this piece popped into my head (that MA in Art History & Criticism was worth something after all!), and I took a 15-shot panorama of the bed in all its unmade glory, in the dark, with the Tokina in macro mode and well defocused.

I loaded the entire bed-shooting series into Aperture, and spent the next 2 hours building—by hand, mostly—a massive panorama of my bed in Photoshop.

I twisted, stretched, blurred, distorted, and absolutely tortured the pixels. I created three versions, then ran them through Merge to HDR Pro, and then tortured pixels some more.

Every change I made took the piece closer to what I envisioned, but it all fell apart at some point (probably within the first 3 or 4 minutes), and all the torturing of pixels in the world wasn’t going to fix it: my photoshop kung-fu is laughable.

An interesting idea, perhaps, and I might go for it again some day. But not today.

And so I found this one. It’s pretty enough. It’s got something of the rule of thirds going on, and it has elements that move the eye around, but it’s not what I aimed for, due to a lack of technical skill to match up with my artistic vision, and the whole shooting session was not what I hoped for due to a lack of something else: call it guts or drive or verve or something, if you want, but it’s something else too.

So this shot all comes down to lack, is made of lack, by lack, and for lack.

It’s still pretty, though.

D7000. Tokina 35-200mm f/3.5-4.5 AT-X, in Macro Mode. ISO100, 1/1.3th, f/4. Pop-up flash in TTL at -1EV. About 35 seconds of processing in Aperture, after 2.5 hours of playing around with various failures in Photoshop.

365.282 it is (for Simon)

Truth be told, it’s a bit muggy for my taste, but whatever. And there was a neighbor or a friend of a neighbor that was out smoking, and that I didn’t notice until she started talking on the phone. I wonder if she wondered “what is that___ guy in 106 doing?” but bet she didn’t even look up from her phone.

Anyways. I shot a house today, and planned to give the realtor and owner a bit of free advertising, but I really didn’t feel like messing with those pics just now, so I made this one instead.

And making this one was quite a process…

D7000. LensBaby 50mm f/2 Muse (Plastic). ISO100; 1/640th, 1/160th, 1/40th; f/2. HDRified in Merge to HDR Pro, photo filters/levels adjustment/luminance layer (thanks to Chris Marquardt for the idea to clone the layer, convert to b/w, tune, then convert to a luminance layer. It added just a hint of Idon’tknowwhat that worked nicely here), then a vignette and tiny bit of slider play in Aperture.

365.281 (it looks so) nice out there

The fear has me today.

I would like to say “I’d like to go for a walk through the neighborhood, snap some pictures, maybe pop down to the park and shoot those strange, ingrown trees that I drive past every now and then” but, really, I have absolutely no desire to leave. The prospects are too scary.

No, I’ll likely not be harmed; neither is it likely that I’ll find myself in any trouble, or be asked any questions, or even be noticed by anyone.

A dog might bark at me, and I might be momentarily startled, but that’s not what bothers me.

I might be approached for some food money, or beer money, or directions, or by someone who sees something they want me to see too, and such encounters would likely go by without any great distress.

I know that if I pretend that I’m supposed to be doing whatever it is that I’m doing, and if I look like I’m supposed to be doing whatever it is that I’m doing (taking a walk), nobody will bother me about it, and it’s unlikely anyone will notice me at all.

These sorts of rationalizations are of no use whatsoever.

Correction: these sorts of rationalizations only serve to make me feel even more deficient.

I hoped this project would help me find some pathways out of the house, and I have ventured out a few times: the first was uneventful, save for a barking dog and some people who waved at me from their porch; during the second, some policemen were accosting a pair of African American gentlemen about my age, and as I approached one of the officers asked if I made the 911 call, and I felt angry and guilty and fraudulent, and moments later, a friendly latino gentleman warned me to ‘better watch that fancy camera around here’; the third time I turned the corner and ran into a pack of middle-school aged girls, walking home from school and you wouldn’t even believe the terror that gripped me as I walked past them and made the quickest possible return to the safety of my cave, while attempting to remain nonchalant.

As a result of that last outing, more recent excursions have been far closer to home: out into the courtyard, or maybe down the alley, but never anywhere where I might run into friendly people or laughing children.

It takes a funeral to get me out to see friends. Invitations to dinner or for drinks, going away parties, soandso’s back parties are all insufficient.

Going out to breakfast with my mother: by all appearances, I’m having a great time. Believe me, it’s a carefully constructed and controlled mask.

Photo Meetups are horrifying affairs, and I’ve arrived to more than one only to speed away when I saw the size of the crowd of friendly people with whom I share a hobby.

Introversion is one thing. I wonder if this isn’t something else. I should probably visit a doctor or find someone to help me, but that would require opening the door, and it’s assured that I would be discovered, found out, realized, and the prospect, the mere thought, is absolutely terrifying, beyond anything I can imagine. It’s the way I felt about deep, fast-moving water for several years after those lifeguards pulled me out of the river and I hacked up all that water. It’s the way I felt about roller coasters after I flipped that car. But it’s different in that it has no basis in reality, no ultimate event that I can point to and say “that. That right there. That’s why I am this way.”

I feel moderately better now that I’ve flung this out into the void. Thank you, void.

D7000. LensBaby 50mm f/2 Muse (Plastic). ISO100, 1/15th, f/2, -1EV. ~40 seconds of processing in Aperture.