365.123 emerges from the grey of night…

Not much to say about this one. I planned to go for a walk down to pay the rent, but then realized I needed (soy) milk and so took out recycling and goodwill donations along with the rent instead of walking. GoGo me for recycling and donating, and maybe I’ll still make it out to walk the streets of Old East Dallas, but I might just watch movies instead, even though I should really try to get some exercise of some sort today (and every day, for sure).

If I do go out walking, and if I do some shooting, and if I get anything worth sharing, I will… but in the mean time, maybe you’ll enjoy this one…

In other news, I’ve been craving meat today, specifically some crunchy barbacoa… I have no idea what that means, but I tend to only crave things that my body needs, so maybe I should pay attention and roll down to the tacqueria, though if I eat a bunch of greasy beef, I know it’ll be several days before I get a good night’s sleep… Should I pay attention to what the body is telling me, or try to find something to eat that agrees with my diet and hope the craving passes? I’ll likely do the latter, and if the craving persists, I’ll hit up the tacqueria in a day or two.

D7000. Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron), in Macro Mode, and deliberately defocused. ISO800, 1/25th (AP Mode), f/3.5, converted to b/w with Aperture.

Actually, it just dawned on me: I tried this shot with the iPhone, the 24mm, the 50mm, the Tokina 35-200 (straight and in macro mode), and the Vivitar (also straight and in macro) before finding that this defocused one worked the best. All in all, it took a couple of hours, lots of varied attempts to adjust the pixels into submission, and about 30 shots before I got to this, and the whole time I kept thinking “I should just grab the iPhone and go for a walk… I bet there are (comparatively) loads of people on the streets today, and it would really behove me to get some exercise and try to shoot some candid street stuff.”

Oh well.

365.122 645 PRO tiff test

645 PRO is an iPhone camera app that can be set up to save a tiff file with no compression instead of—or addition to—the jpegs it makes with various film styles and whatnot. I made this picture this morning, while waiting to help a friend help a buddy move (that’s right… I helped a friend help a buddy move. that’s just the sort of person I am…) and the tiff did indeed have quite a bit more information to play with than the jpg, and I was able to pull some detail and color out that should’ve been lost forever.

The app features a great ‘night’ mode, that slows the shutter speed (thereby forcing the ISO down). I use this mode almost exclusively, and plan on trying to make some interesting, iPhone-based impressionist photography with it.

The app has quite a few fancy tricks up its sleeve, including a live histogram and the aforementioned film effects, but the tiff-file save is brilliant (though you have to download it through iTunes, as these files aren’t saved to the camera roll).

Here’s the jpeg that the app produced in addition to the tiff that became today’s 365 image. I used the H5 b/w film stock setting.365.122 645 PRO tiff test
In case you’re interested, 645 PRO is available on the App Store for $2.99, and it’s worth it: believe. Visit the developer’s website if you’d like to learn more, and no, I’m not in any way affiliated with jag.gr, I just really like this app: best camera-replacement app EVAR, pretty much.

In other news, I went to the (rather distant) local camera shop to play around with the X10 and X100 and G1x and P7000, as I have designs on getting a smaller ‘carry everywhere’ sort of camera, something more robust than the iPhone, but more discrete, smaller and quieter than the D7000. I was more impressed with two of them than I expected to be, found one to be about what I expected, and was rather less impressed than I expected to be with one of them. Can you guess which ones and why (hint: cost is not a determining factor). I didn’t return with a new camera today—and probably wouldn’t buy from them anyway, as the guy gave off a vibe that made me think he’d rather a daft amateur like me not buy anything from him or his employer: surely I mistook this, right?—and may or may not buy one any time soon, as the iPhone really is a decent camera, and I wasn’t impressed enough with any of the cameras I played with to part with the cash just now.

iPhone 4. 645 PRO app. ISO80, 1/129th, f2.8 (all determined by the app); tiff file processed with a rather heavy hand in Aperture.

365.121 Abstraktes Bild (In the Belly of the…)

Not much to say about this. I intended to go to a photowalk tonight, but the only way to get there involves tollroads and Friday night traffic, so I backed out at the last minute. This was a safety shot I made in case I didn’t get on the walk, but since I’m not going on the walk, I guess it’s a good thing I made it, huh.

I might yet get out and walk some, down to the landlord’s and pay the rent early, or I might just have some dinner and stare blankly at the tele… we’ll see.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 (@2.8), reversed, and stacked on the Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1, in its 4:1 macro mode and at 3.5. ISO100, 4 seconds, lighting provided by a mini mag lite.

365.120 The New Super Macro Bros.

I was saving this one for a day when I couldn’t make it outside due to inclement weather or other factors. Guess what? Other factors…

But this here represents something greater than 12:1. The white smudges are mm hash marks in a metal ruler, and the stuff at the top is the edge of that ruler

Come to think of it, I have a shot of the edge of the ruler all by itself:365.120 The New Super Macro Bros.

That’s the edge of the ruler, which might be 4mm deep… so the depth of field is around 2mm: that wavy blown focus stuff is the back half of the edge of the ruler… Jeez.

Anyway.

The New Super Macro Bros. reproduce one full mm and somewhere around .5mm, maybe .75mm, for a grand total of, say, 1.6mm.

The sensor on the D7000 is 23.6mm wide. 23.6/1.6=16.625, which makes my estimate rather way off…

16.625:1

yep.

16.625 to 1

Insane.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f.2.8 (at 2.8), reversed, mounted on the Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron) (at 210mm and f/3.5) via a set of step-down rings and a 52-52mm coupling ring, and all of that stacked on 104mm of extension tubes. ISO100, 1/4sec.

That is one dark setup, believe. I had to focus using 3 flashlights and a lamp, and take the shot with the SB700 at 1/2 power. (Look close, and you’ll see that I got close with the focusing, but not quite right…) Sheer craziness.
I wish I’d gone out walking instead, or stopped downtown on my way home and tried to try some street shooting, but I didn’t. I could blame work, which kept me an hour late. And I could blame the chores and phone calls I needed to make when I got home. And I could even blame traffic. But I won’t, because I can only blame my fear and my fear of changing my routine. Silliness.

365.119 Moving? or Recycling? or just picking?

While speeding down the highway on my way home after a longer-than-it-shoudl’ve-been type of shift,  I spotted this truck, loaded to the brim (and beyond) with all manner of bric-a-brac, and decided to snap a couple of shots of it through the window.

I didn’t want to slow down, and it took me a minute to get the camera out of the bag, take the lens cap off, and turn it on, so I missed the bulging rear end of this apparently well balanced pile of metal and plastic. It was really just a throwaway shot, something to add to an archive of images I created many years ago on long drives back and forth from Springfield, IL to Dallas of strange loads that the semis carry back and forth on 40.

But then I started looking at it, and decided that I liked the way the light was working, and I liked the relative sharpness of things next to the motion-blurred highway and whatnot.

And I didn’t make it out to shoot any street stuff, but decided that this sortof qualified: maybe a new genre… highway photography: capturing the strange and fleeting—the decisive moments—of human person and cargo transport.

Silly, I know, but at least I’ll have a reason to carry the camera back and fort to work every day.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8. ISO100, 1/125 (AP mode), f/11.

365.118 Kaleidoscopic

Well… I tried, but I got about half a block from the apartment and realized that I was trying to practice my street photography in a rough-ish neighborhood where most everyone is mostly suspicious of most everyone else, which wouldn’t be so bad except it was just after school let out so the only people wandering the streets were little kids in school uniforms and creepers like me, so I came back home, fully intending to wait an hour or so and then go back out. After all, it’s more likely that there will be non-child people wandering the streets after 5pm or so. But 5pm is my dinner time, and who knows if I’d get a shot at all and then what would I do about my 365 for today and so I shot the kaleidoscope I got for my birthday a couple weeks ago. Thing is, I drove through downtown to get home today instead of skirting it like I always do, with the specific intent of pulling over, tossing a couple of quarters in the meter, and wandering around for an hour or so, but I just kept driving. And then I was going to stop in the sort of grungy club district (as opposed to the pretty club district on the other side of the highway), but there wasn’t anybody walking around, except for the attractive punk couple who were having a bit of a spat that I would’ve walked right past had I parked a couple of blocks ago like I planned but didn’t, and so I drove on home with the intent of walking, which, if you read all that, you’ll remember that I failed at, and so you get this picture of the Collier Kaleidoscope in action instead.

tl;dr—title should read “Kaleidoscopic Failure” I suppose.

And I will try again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and again and again until I get some control over—and then let go of—my fears.

D7000. Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron), reversed and in macro mode (fyi: it makes no difference that I could tell). ISO100, 8 seconds, f/8.

365.117 Catfish, Livers

This is my first real attempt at a street photograph.

I’ve been wanting to try some street shooting in hopes of using the long walks and (weak) interactions with strangers to help me get over some of my fears and get a bit of exercise. Today, I succeeded, partly.

I walked down Gaston to Munger, up past Swiss, back down Sycamore to Moreland, to Swiss, and back to the apartment via the Annex side. I studiously avoided shooting the mostly downtrodden cast of characters I passed, but did snap this no-look shot—held the camera up to the middle of my chest and snap!—on the first leg of the walk.

FYI: if you’re ever in Old East Dallas, and have a hankering’ for some good fried chicken, don’t hesitate to pop in to the Chicken House. Be sure to get a fried pie to go along with your chicken and okra: they’re fried in the same grease as the chicken, and take on a brilliant salty, chicken flavor… If I wasn’t vegetarian, I’d be walking over there right now…

So how did the D7000 perform? Well, it’s large, loud, and pretty obvious that it’s a camera. A guy told me to “watch out that you don’t get that camera stolen walking around here” from 25 feet away… Otherwise, it performed as well as it usually does, image quality wise, when combined with the 24mm ai.

So how well does this work as a street photograph? Not particularly well, but better than I expected. I can’t go back and reshoot it (though I can go out walking again, and plan to tomorrow), but I could change up the post processing a bit—if you can’t tell, I processed this with a rather heavy hand…

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai. ISO400, 1/800th (AP mode), f/8. Big push to contrast and definition, nudges to exposure, black point, brightness, vibrancy, saturation, and Idon’trememberwhatelse.