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…

365.250 Ohne Titel (something suggestive)

This was made for +Macro Monday, curated by Kerry Murphy, Jennifer Eden, and Kelli Seeger Kim, over at Google+. Today’s theme-within-a-theme is ‘Abstract.’ And I submitted this picture even though this is quite obviously a picture of something, rather than a ‘true’ abstraction. However, given that this ‘object’ (the photograph) is a collection of 1’s and 0’s graphically displayed on a screen that captures a moment in time so brief as to be virtually nonexistent (in human terms) and rather unintelligible, and is not the actual object itself: even if this were truly a picture of something—a flower, say, or a bee—it would always already be an abstraction by virtue its representational character.

/pseudo-aesthetico-philosophical rant

So what should the subtitle be? I think it should be something that suggests both a relaxing trip through a hot tub and a medieval punishment of some sort, maybe. Or something like ‘laborious labor day luncheon,’ or something that reflects the violence displayed by water when it is boiled in a nonstick pot.

If you’ve never noticed, water boils far more vigorously in nonstick pots than in stainless or aluminum varieties. I grew up with stainless pots and pans and boiled countless iterations of macaroni & cheese/some other sort of accompaniment, and I’ve boiled so infrequently since, that this uber-rapid boiling action looks very foreign to me. The bubbles created by the boiling are much smaller, and thus the undulations of the surface are much finer.

Is this due to something in the nonstick coating changing something in the water? Is it due to a new additive in city water supplies since ~2003 or so when I first started using nonstick cookware? If it’s the former, I’m scared: given that all cooking is a form of chemistry, what is the nonstick coating changing in the water, and what is the ingestion of same changing in me? If it’s the latter, I’m scared for a different reason: what sorts of mind control drugs have they started putting in the water, and to what end?

The first is question/fear is somewhat legitimate, and likely has an answer.

The second is very likely nonsense, given that I’ve seen this phenomenon in multiple cities throughout the southern, central, and northeastern United States.

And there are likely other, more reasonable explanations.

In fact, I expect the answer has to do with surface tension: the surface of the water that touches the bottom of the pot is broken by the convection currents created by heat, thereby creating bubbles and undulations. In a stainless pot, the bubbles of steam(?) grow much larger because the water is able to form something of a bond with the pot. With nonstick pots, this bond is far weaker due to the coating, and so the bubbles of gas never grow very large.

If I’m way off here, I hope someone will let me know. After all, I’m an Art Historian, not a chemist, and not even a chef. After all, I’m cooking ramen noodles here, and I added to the drained noodles one premade veggie burger patty that took a couple of trips through the toaster…

In any case, GoGo Science!

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm, f/3.5 Zomb-E Series (a zoom lens with a broken focus action that now functions only when reversed and provides a reproduction ratio of roughly 1:1.75), at maximum magnification. ISO100, 1/250th, f/16. SB700 at 1/32nd and zoomed to 105mm hard camera right, triggered via a set of Cactus v5 triggers. About 15 minutes of slider play in Aperture to bring out some colors, textures, and to create a mood, though I’m not sure what sort of mood it creates…

The Impromptu PhotoWalk

Well. I went on an impromptu photowalk with the leader of the North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group.

We met up shortly after 2, and wandered around for an hour or two.

Given that this took place in Dallas, on September 2, during the part of the day where the heat really gets going, on mostly unshaded, mostly white concrete roads/sidewalks/paths…

It was HOT.

And I didn’t bring any water.

Luckily, there are some waterfountains on the Katy Trail, otherwise it would’ve gotten ugly.

All in all, a good time, if a bit flipping HOT.

Everything was shot on a D7000 with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G in APMode, somewhere between f/4.5 and f/8, and be aware: there are no real masterpieces here…

365.249 reflections/clear blue sky

I went on an impromptu photowalk this afternoon (more pictures to follow), and got some pretty OK results, I think.

I’ll tell more of a story when I post the full album here in a few minutes.

In the mean time…

D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. ISO100, 1/1000th (ApMode), f/4.5. Some straightening, and a tiny bit of cropping off the top and right edge (to remove a shadow from the central-ish support column), but otherwise straight out of the Aperture RAW conversion.

365.248 disoriented

I got some nice pictures of some cat toys, but the cats decided to hide instead of play, again, so no cat pictures for caturday…

Scaredy Cats.

So I shot some pictures of the wires behind the computer, and liked this one, with no identifiable structures or forms much better…

GoGo, I guess?

D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. ISO100, 1/10th (APmode), f/1.8. About 2 minutes of slider play in Aperture, exported, then I started over again and tortured pixels for about an hour before deciding I liked this one… of course, I’ve lost the version information… Oh well, it’s a throwaway anyway.

365.247 tilt-a…

So the North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group and the Dallas Photography MeetUp Group met up for a joint MeetUp tonight to shoot streaking taillights, ’cause everybody needs a streaky taillight shot, right? Right?!? Right?!?!?!?!?

Indeed.

So this is the most disorienting one I made.

I wish I’d taken the 10-24. But last weekend at the skyline shoot, I didn’t use the 10-24, so I only took the 24mm (and the Tokina 35-200 with the mold in it…).

Those extra 14mm (and the range from 10-24) would’ve made for some fun, mindbending streakings.

What was also tough: by the time the sun went all the way down, traffic had died down considerably… I’ll have to try this again in November or December or January…

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI. ISO100, 15 seconds, f/11. Minimal processing in Aperture.

 

I’ll share a few more tomorrow, maybe.

365.246 dream of flight

So I shot a bit on the way home today. I didn’t get anything good, except for this shot, which isn’t particularly brilliant or anything, but appeared to have some possibilities, so I started playing around.

If you look closely, there’s a strange sort of border or frame around this. This comes courtesy of a group of adjustment brushes/sliders that I found in Aperture: iPhoto Effects. I had no idea this existed, and everything is way overdone (the edge blur effect, seen here, is at ~15%), but they add a nice change from my usual mix of standard sliders, and the edge blur is rather effective here, I think.

It may not be great, but at least it’s not another #$*%&^@ macro abstraction.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai. ISO100, 1/5000th (APmode), f/2.8. About 25 minutes worth of slider play in Aperture, plus some fiddling with Topaz Labs Adjust 5 (didn’t find anything), and a perhaps final attempt to get photomerge or merge to HDR pro working in CS6 (both fail, still: must research).