So I got up at my usual (ungodly) hour, let the cats out of bed, made coffee, took out cat droppings, laid out my clothes, took a shower, brushed teeth, dried off, and was absentmindedly pulling on my trousers when I saw it.
I didn’t know whether to scream like a little girl or fall on the ground and praise [insert deity here], so I ran into the living room and grabbed the camera…
D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai. ISO1600, 1/10th (AP mode), f/2.8.
New graffiti popped up on the old building I pass on the way home almost every day… And it’s pretty nice, too.
Or, rather, some street art-type-stuff popped up on the groovy building I pass every day. Unlike the usual tags and throw-ups I see there, this little stencil is sweet and friendly and (mostly) nonthreatening… This is not to say that the usual tags and throw-ups are threatening, at least not to me anyway.
I’ve had fantasies of buying this building and turning it into an art gallery (downstairs) and residence (upstairs). I know it would be a total money pit, but I really like this old fellow, and hope someone finds a way to do something with it.
iPhone 4. Built-in camera app. Shot from across the street, from the car window, with traffic streaming by, and straightened in Photoshop. If I make the time this evening, I’ll go shoot it properly, though I’m largely fine with this as it is.
But I couldn’t come up with a better one, and I only decided to abandon it after I’d already uploaded and titled it in Picasa, and it’s too much trouble to delete and start again, so I’m kinda stuck.
Oh well.
D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8, reversed. ISO400, 1/50th, f/2.8. Adujstments in Aperture were so slight as to not be worth mentioning.
…what folding space looked like.
Well, maybe not always, but for quite some time. And I’m sure it looks nothing like that strange-honking scene in that awful Dune movie…
Or maybe this is a Base Ship in orbit above Caprica…
Or it could be something else, something of the actual world, which wouldn’t surprise me much, as this place is fantastic and wondrous as often as not.
Anyway. Enough hypothesizing. It’s really a test to see how the LensBaby performs when stacked on 100mm worth of extension tubes… As expected, it’s not sharp, has no depth of field to speak of, and produces the usual dreamy, blurry stuff for which this model is known.
Good times.
D7000. LensBaby Muse (plastic), stacked on 100mm extension. ISO100, 1.3 seconds (APmode), f/2.0. Quite a bit of adjustment in Aperture to bring out various details.
Not much to say about this one.
It took a long time, largely because I kept looking for a narrative photo, rather than looking for one that I enjoyed looking at. I knew—but didn’t really consider—that I would need to find the narrative and then make the photo, rather than the other way around, and if I’m going to illustrate a novel, I need to read the novel first, make notes, convert those notes into a shot list, and then get to work.
So this took a lot longer than it should’ve, and required many more lens-changes than would’ve been otherwise necessary. In fact, I ended up playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe to pick the one I ended up using.
Oh well.
D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4, reversed, on ~100mm extension. ISO100, 1/4 (AP mode), f/1.4, -2EV. Minor processing in Aperture.
Edit: and I feel that I cheated a bit on this one, since it’s relevantly similar to 365.125 Chrysalis, but not nearly as good. Oh well.
If not for that bit of lens flare in the lower right, this could quite easily be a painting, or even a pastel sketch… Granted, this isn’t straight out of the camera, but it’s not very heavily processed either:
Aperture’s built-in RAW conversion
Exposure +.44
Black Point +2.43
Brightness +.06
Contrast +.12
Definition +.57
Saturation +.04
Vibrancy +.28
and some rather minor adjustments to levels.
So nothing crazy, no outside image editors, no plugins, nothing. Just pure, unadulterated digital macro photography. But peep the delicate handling of the colors, the soft feathering of edges, the texture that seems to lie under everything.
Fun stuff.
And speaking of fun, two things: 1) I’m reading Dune (thanks to 365.126) and thoroughly enjoying both it and the act of just simply sitting and reading fiction, something I haven’t done in quite some time. I’m afraid I’ve lost some patience and focus, what with all the internet usage I’ve been into for the past years, and I hope some simple reading will help me regain some of that. And 2) Yesterday, I mentioned fantasizing about creating book covers or something. Late last night, I had a though: why not illustrate an entire book? I haven’t started yet, but I think that this idea might form the basis for a long-term photographic project.
Good times.
D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5, reversed. ISO100, 1/4 sec., f/3.5, -1EV. (further adjustments noted above).
I gave up on trying to create a panorama out of images like this… The 2009 13″ mbp is just not up to the task of creating 19,000×13,000px images. Actually, it will create the empty file with relative ease, but each image takes about 4 minutes of frozen computer to appear in the file, and just forget about moving them around at all.
I could probably convert to jpg and shrink down in Aperture, but I want to be able to do some post work after I assemble the panorama… maybe convert to tiff and shrink to 25% or something. I guess I’ll try that.
In the mean time, enjoy this one.
D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G, reversed and stacked on ~100mm extension. ISO100, 1/160, f/1.8, SB-700 at 1/64th hard camera right, about 1 inch from the subject, and triggered via a pair of Cactus v5 triggers.
