365.206 Some kind of change, some kind of Spinning Away

Well, I’m not satisfied with this one. I’m not satisfied with much of anything today, seeing as I spent the whole day effing with my website after a plugin update hosed everything, and the whole week trying to shoot “Don’t you wonder sometimes about Sound and Vision” and failing miserably due to lack of imagination.

But maybe I’m being overly critical.

Either way, I think it might be time to pony up the bucks for a proper macro lens… the Zomb-E series is a fabulous toy, but it breaks down a bit in cases like this. Of course, a proper macro lens would be of little help when the concept and execution are as poor as this. I’ll think on it a bit.

The lyric comes from “Spinning Away” by Brian Eno and John Cale, from their album Wrong Way Up. I can do without most of that record, as it sounds to my ear like bad 80s music for grown ups, but “Spinning Away” is pretty awesome, imo.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO100, 1/250th, f/11. SB-700, zoomed to 24mm, at 1/16th power, hard camera left, and triggered via a pair of Cactus V5 triggers. And the pixels were stretched to within an inch of their 1’s and 0’s in Aperture.

365.205 S/V#003 (Particle-like Wave)

I laid awake almost all night last night, not thinking about Sound & Vision, but something was bothering me…

Yesterday, I claimed that sound falls on the electromagnetic spectrum… Dumb@55.

Sound, in and of itself, while a wave, to be sure, is of a completely different order than light.

Light just moves, passes through all manner of vacuums and thin materials, and electromagnetism passes through pretty much everything.

Sound, on the other hand, does not exist in a vacuum, as it requires a medium. In fact, I might make the claim that there is no such thing as sound qua sound, but only the vibration of media.*

If I was a slightly different person, I would go back and edit yesterday’s post. But I’m not a different person, I’m always and only James, and I like to be wrong, mistaken, incorrect, because then I can learn something, be reminded of something, be shown another way.

So groovy…

Please pardon the out-of-focus droplet… If you’re really bothered by it, think of it as depicting the failure of this line of inquiry into Sound & Vision.

Rest assured that I’ll continue to “wonder sometimes, about Sound & Vision.”

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO100, 1/250th, f/11. SB-700, hard camera left, zoomed to 35mm, and at 1/4, fired via a pair of Cactus V5 triggers. Moderate processing in Aperture.

*Of course, I’m likely quite wrong about this too… but I think I’m closer.

365.204 S/V#002 (wave-like particle)

After much pondering, I noticed the wavy lines in the bottom of a pie pan reflector that I’ve never used, and remembered the wavelike particle-ness (and particle-like wave-ness) of water, and then remembered that sound is also a wave, and falls on the electromagnetic spectrum.

So I shot the pie pan: fail.

And then I had a flash of brilliance, and added a bit of water to it: still fail.

Then I added some agitation: better, but nope.

Then I added some flash: getting there, but not enough DoF.

So I cranked down the aperture, and Poof! Something that get’s a bit closer to ‘Don’t you wonder sometimes… about Sound & Vision!’ for the sliproject. We’ll see if it makes the cut.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E-Series. ISO100, 1/250th, f/8. SB-700, mounted on-camera, with diffusion flap down, zoomed to 11mm (automatically, I think), at 1/8th. Rather heavily processed in Aperture.

365.202 sorrow, sorrow. Oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, hoo-hoo

I wanted to make an ugly picture today, but my eyes fell across the wadded-up reflector, which was busily bouncing all sorts of colors all around, so this will just have to do, I guess.

And maybe it does sorta capture sorrow sorrow oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, ho-ho. Who knows.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO800, 1/4th (Apmode), f/3.5, -1EV, and deliberately defocused. Minimal processing in Aperture.

365.202 trip to heave and ho, up down to and fro’

Well, I was afraid of running out of time to try and play at photographing sound and vision, so I snapped a couple of quick early-morning highway driving shots on the way to work.

There’s a rather new apartment mid rise with these neon (probably led or something) lights on the edges that change color every few minutes. If I’m running on time, they change from blue to red as I go past. If I’m early (like today), they’re blue the whole time. I don’t know if they change to any other colors…

So I actually shot this with some intent: I knew the building would be there, I knew the camera had to be ready (and not endlessly writing some 18 second exposure to the cheap memory cards I have), and I knew I wanted to try and get it coming and going, just to see what that looked like, and this panning as I went around the curve on the highway resulted in the arc of oncoming headlights at the bottom.

I also knew that I would need to stop the exposure at some point, so after I passed the building, I pressed the front of the lens agains my slacks, which prevented a bunch of blow-out like I would normally get with this lens.

So I’m acting with more intent when I shoot while driving to work, and with all the pretty, swirling colors and other stuff going on, I’m really pleased with this shot.

Good times.

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 30sec. (AP mode), f/11, -1EV. Rather heavily processed, but not as much as you might think.

365.201 S/V#001 (Iron Man)

Head’s up: this week, I’ll be attempting to capture “Don’t you wonder sometimes about Sound & Vision,” a line from David Bowie’s ‘Sound and Vision’ from theLow album, for the sliproject.

I don’t expect to capture it properly, which is why I’ve given myself at least 998 more tries…

This is a desktop speaker with its cover off and 3 light sources battering it into beautiful submission. I hoped the speaker would vibrate noticeably: alas. Perhaps it was song choice? I played The Bad Plus’s cover of Iron Man (if you haven’t ever heard it, head to youtube… you can thank me later) at quite a high volume, and I could feel the air around the speaker vibrating, but couldn’t capture that vibration with the camera, so I focused on vision instead, and just made it sorta pretty.

I like that the circle with the two eyes sorta looks like a cheerful frog or something.

So this one was fail, but I’ll try again tomorrow. Whoo!

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO100, 15 seconds (ApMode), f/3.5, -1 EV. Mild-to-Medium processing in Aperture.

Oh… light provided by a large window, a tungsten bulb under a large yellow shade, and one of the LED Light Pipe things, hence the dark blue, golden yellow, and pale blue stripe on the left…

365.200 just a lazy Sunday

Not much to say here. I inherited a groovy old lamp from my stepdad, and I’ve been wanting to put its chrome spherical shade/cover to some photographic use, and I guess a selfy is as good a use as any.

Also, I feel like I should be doing something monumental for the 200th 365 shot, but I don’t really think 200 has much significance when the span is 1-365. I think the important numbers would be maybe 183 (halfway to 366), maybe 122 and 244 (1/3 and 2/3), maybe even 92 and 275 (roughly 1/4 and 3/4)… but 200? Nope: not special.

But it seems like it should be, yes? I don’t know.

Focusing was tricky, here, due to the spherical surface… so please to forgive my out-of-focus eyes.

D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. ISO100, 1/5th (APmode), f/2.2 (finger slip… I should switch the camera over to full stops only…), -1EV. Mild-to-moderate processing in Aperture.

Ok… off to swipe off the counters and sweep right quick, and then it’ll be back to being lazy. Hooray for Lazy Sundays!