365.257 Grand Opening

Well, I had an idea to write up a long thing about finding some stills from a newsreel in some boxes and discovering some footage of the grand opening celebrations for the Chrysler building or something, but I decided that would be sorta lame.

So I’ll be straight with you instead.

This is a guitar in desperate need of a good smashing cleaning.

My Grandfather (I think) bought this for my mom in the late 1960s from the Sears and Roebuck, or maybe from the Montgomery Ward’s.

It’s a Norma acoustic and at last check it would fetch about $0 on ebay.

The neck is warped (and probably was before I was born), and I have doubts that any amount of truss rod tweaking will ever pull it straight, if it even has a truss rod.

Plus, it’s twisted too…

The action is “finger-shredding high,” which is likely why no one has played it seriously since I was born.

But it has floated around Momma’s house and now my apartment for all this time.

If the apocalypse or revolution or end of days or somesuch comes, it’ll make for some nice firewood… and in the mean time it would probably be put to best use as decoration in one of those family restaurants with “a whole lotta crazy crap on the walls,” to borrow a phrase from Moe.

It makes a nice picture, though…

D7000. Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron), in Macro Mode. ISO800, 1/25th (APmode), f/3.5. About 4 minutes of slider play in Aperture to give it a bit of age, like a hand-tinted newsreel.

365.256 (wish I could) turn this sometimes

After coming across several beautiful pictures by Gheorghe Chesler—shot with various Nikons and featuring his Sigma 150mm f/2.8 Macro—over on Google Plus yesterday evening, I found myself lusting after a proper macro lens… But I reminded myself: no new gear until I finish the 365.

So I looked over the gear I do have, and pulled out the Vivitar 70-210, which is the closest thing to a 150mm macro that I have, despite being not particularly close, given that it’s a fully manual zoom lens, without OS or fancy 21st century coatings, that gets to 1:2.2 at best.

But the Vivitar is a fabulous performer, especially since it cost me a whopping $36, shipped, and I don’t use it near enough. Sure, it’s heavy (but ~250g lighter than the Sigma 150). Sure, the focus is backwards (I get used to it after about 3 minutes, once I remember that it’s backwards…). But it’s sharp (not that you can tell from this, as it’s defocused deliberately), and has good color rendition and contrast, with a warmth or something that seems to be missing from many modern lenses with their fancy coatings and all.

So here we have the strangely dented doorknob to the apartment’s front door, showing the fantastic color rendition and brilliant bokeh provided by the Vivitar, the rather nice grain from the D7000, and my ability to handhold long, heavy lenses…

D7000. Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron), in Macro Mode, at pretty close to maximum. ISO1600, 1/40th (APmode), f/3.5. Post processing included Aperture’s built-in RAW conversion and a resize/export to jpeg, so this is not quite Comin’ Straight Outta Camera, but pretty much as close as I’m going to get.

^and I do get out some, but never without a purpose: going to work, going to the grocer, going to visit someone, etc., and I really want to work on breaking this anxiety I feel about venturing out into the world without an explicit reason or purpose. I’m not sure why I can’t just go for a walk, but I can’t, unless I have a buddy (and then there’s a purpose: going for a walk with a buddy). I doubt this makes much sense to you; it makes no sense to me.

365.255 there ain’t no flare like some iPhone flare

The title pretty much says it all. After pretty much surfing the interwebs all day, I shot this in Momma’s backyard while waiting to take her for a cheap dinner. I wanted to play with the tiny focal length and try to get some weird blurring, but ended up being focused on (and exposing for) strange spots due to being out fo practice. Maybe I should take one or two days a week to be iPhone days…

iPhone4. ProCamera. Exposed for a spot that was some leaves when I selected that point, but was roofline when I triggered the ‘shutter.’ Minor straightening and a bit of processing to bring out the brilliant rainbow flare.

365.254 Abstraktes Bild

Well, I spent 2.5 hours playing with the zoomy flashy thingy, but didn’t get anything worth sharing, and didn’t find anything new, so I whipped out the old standby: the Abstract Picture.

Woo.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO100, 1 second (APmode), f/3.5. About 2 minutes of slider play in Aperture to bring out some definition and add darken it up a bit.

365.253 keep playing

So today I tried to combine the zoomy-flashy thing with multiple exposures…

It didn’t work. Or, rather, it only worked once as far as I can tell.

The process is something like playing a very complex, mallet-based instrument, or performing as a percussionist with several shakers/rattley things/tinkley bells/etc. to shake, rattle, or tinkle all in the span of a couple of seconds.

At first, it was just zooming in and out, and letting the pop-up do its thing.

Then, I switched to the SB-700 and radio triggers. This failed completely. I think the wireless trigger caused the multiple-exposure setting to reset, or perhaps overrode something.

So I switched to pop-up as commander, but forgot to get the sb-7000 to line of sight for the first couple of attempts, and then realized that I was only one of the zoomy-flashy operations in the multiple exposure, and was also only getting a single exposure, despite tripping the shutter multiple times.

I think it worked in this one, as you can clearly se three kickstands receding, and this came during the first part of the sequence, before I really started to branch out and get crazy with things. If you look closely, there are three little mouse toys, three bigger rat toys, three rear tires, three rope things, etc., all lit by flash pops from the pop-up.

I didn’t achieve the effect I was hoping for, though I suppose I really had no expectation, but thought it would be different, with more blur to the transitions, and etc.

So this is shaping up to be a week of experimentation, which is fine with me, I suppose. At least it’s not more macro abstractions…

D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E-Series. Triple exposure, each one at ISO100, f/8, 6 seconds, with the pop-up in TTL mode and rear-curtain sync. About 10 minutes of slider play in Aperture, mostly to bring out various details.

365.252 something of interest…

So I played around with the zoomy-flashy thing again today. It was in large part an exercise in meh, but there remains something of interest about it.

In this example, we have Ivan, who is likely looking at his sister or his food or, perhaps, a bug.

But if you look very closely, there are two Ivans here: one, very small and very black inside of the larger, redder one. Believe me: it’s the same Ivan, mostly.

I like the double exposure type effect going on here. And I like that there are some interesting things going on in this otherwise very dull and uninteresting photo.

Anyway, like Double Exposure, I think the technique may require a plan to be taken to the fullest.

Either way, I think I’ll keep trying for a bit.

D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E-Series. ISO100, 1 second, f/8. A tap of the ‘auto-prettify’ button, and maybe 30 seconds of levels/definition/vibrancy slider play, but only after making multiple attempts to crop and trying multiple by-hand tweaks to bring up the wider, fainter, parts of the shot.

365.251 Ohne Titel (a happy discovery)

So I was pacing around looking for something to shoot, and decided to shoot Ivan, who was looking suspiciously at me (as usual) from his perch atop the cat tree.

But what lens to use? The 24mm f/2.8 AI is nice and on the camera, but too wide. The 50mm f/1.8G is brilliant, but in heavy rotation of late. !!Aha!!! the Holga 60mm f/8!

Of course, such a lens pretty much requires a flash indoors, so I popped up the pop-up for some cheesy on-camera stuff.

And, of course, indoors, with only one 100w lamp at about 20ft., APmode Shutter Speeds were clocking in at 6 seconds: far too long for handholding. So I tried some creative blurry stuff, and then decided to change over to the 36-72mm f/3.5 E-Series.

This scared Ivan terribly, and he fled under the sofa.

So I laid down on the floor and shot a few of him cowering, still with the flash on, and still in APmode, and then I remembered the old zoomy flashy trick, where you take a longish exposure, trip the shutter, zoomy in or out, and pop the flash at some point…

It didn’t work with Ivan, so I spun around, and poked the lens at the front door, with the trees beyond.

The shutter speeds in AP mode went a bit too quickly for decent zooming (it’s fairly impossible to rack a zoom from one end to the other in 1/1000th of a second, even a paltry 2x mid-range zoom like the 36-72).

So I flipped over to Manual, and tried various settings till I got something I liked, and here we have the result.

It’s resolutely not what I was looking for, but I really ended up liking this quite a bit, what with the obviously zoomed trees (though not a full 36-72, obviously), with the reasonably sharp frame over top, and the shadows that make it look almost like one of those divided picture frame things…

I think I might play with this a bit more in the coming days or months: good times.

D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E-Series. ISO100, 1/10th, f/22. Pop-Up Flash in TTL mode. Very minimal processing—about 5 seconds of slider play in the Levels only, plus a bit of straightening and very slight cropping—but only after I hemmed and hawed over this one or that one or the other one no wait that other one there maybe…