365.42 Ohne Titel

I sorta ran myself out of time, what with a mid-week grocery run, fetching diesel for Hank the Golf, paying off bills, and other Wednesday inanity, so I went back to macro…

But I wanted to switch it up this time, so I pulled out the magnifying glass (from day 26), the 36-72 E Series, the macro reverse ring, the 49mm worth of extension tubes, and the cat toy that is partly visible in day 7, and started shooting.

I got some pretty good shots through the magnifying glass, uploaded them to the computer, and started to take everything down, when I decided to take a shot without the magnifying glass.

365.42 Ohne Titel
Same set-up as the 365 shot, above, but with a large magnifying glass in between the lens and the subject.

Ends up, the magnifying glass only blurred the image! It didn’t magnify anything! (I think this is because of the distance between the lens and the subject—about 5 inches—but that’s just a guess). If you have a better idea, please pass it along!

This was the D7000, Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E Series, reversed, on 49mm of extension tubes, ISO100, 6 seconds, f/16.

The 5 Elements of Photography – tl;dr version

Ok. Let’s make this quick.

There are 5 things that go into any and every photograph.

In order of importance, these 5 Elements of Photography are:

  1. The Light
  2. The Photographer
  3. The Subject
  4. The Lens
  5. The Camera

All of these terms are broader than you probably think:

  • ‘Light,’ here, includes the entire spectrum of light, from radio waves through gamma radiation, and is in no way limited to the visible forms with which we’re mostly familiar.
  • ‘The Photographer’ is a human decision-maker, but may or may not actually operate the camera directly.
  • ‘The Subject’ is just whatever is captured and transferred to film/paper or 1s & 0s, but may be extended, depending on the emotional, aesthetic, intellectual, and other qualities of the image.
  • ‘The Lens’ can be anything from a hole in a piece of tin to a $11,000 Leica Noctilux-M 50 mm f/0.95 ASPH thing, or even the light collecting parts of a massive, multi-billion dollar radiation-collecting satellite; its job is to gather light and transport it to the camera.
  • ‘The Camera’ can be pretty much anything, from a coffee can, to the fanciest Leica or Phase One or the recording parts of the aforementioned satellite: all of these ‘capture’ the light and fix it in an image.

More thoughts are available in the articles linked above, and I make no claims to be an authority on any of this. I am merely (and only recently) a geek whose current focus is on photography, and I am constantly learning new things and coming up with new ideas.

365.41 Maneki Neko

I started out today’s 365 time with plans on doing some more multiple exposure experiments, intending to try to make this little Maneki Neko figure look as if it was lit by multiple strobes, even though I have only the one SB-700.

I took about 20 multiple exposures (60 shots) holding the SB-700 with a small snoot on the end, zoomed to 85, and varying power from from 1/4 – 1/16 within each multiple exposure (1/4 for the key & 1/16 for the fill, for example).

That got old with a quickness, and took a long time, and I couldn’t seem to strike a balance between blocking out the ambient light and blowing out the highlights.

So I abandoned the multiple exposure test, and went to playing with the flash and waiting for the screensaver to look just right…

After about 45 minutes: success! And with some evidence of Maneki Neko’s waving hand to top it all off! GoGo!

D7000 with Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series at 150mm; ISO100, 1/4th sec., f/3.5. SB-700 at 1/16th power, handheld, triggered by a Cactus V5, bounced into a $4 car window reflector at lower camera right, and reflected off of a second $4 car window reflector to the left of the subject.

365.40 Multeh Bokeh

On with my experiments in multiple exposure. This time: testing what happens when multiple exposures meet shallow depth of field.

I started out with a still life of sorts, but quickly noticed that these beads made some great bokeh, so I got rid of everything else and focused on the beads.

Or, rather, focused on different sections of beads.

And then I ran out of light, so out came the SB-700 and the CerealBox StripBox(tm).

This shot was the result of an accident.

First shot (without flash, due to my failure to remember to wake up the Cactus V5s), focused on the far end of the beads, ISO100, ~1/4, f/1.8.

Second shot (with the flash this time, 1/4 power, through the stripbox with its diffuser in place), focused on the same spot, ISO100, 1/4, f/1.8.

Third shot, focused on the beads in the near ground, with the flash (same as above) and the same settings as above (if I recall: I once again forgot to write stuff down… for shame).

All shot with the 50mm 1.8G: great lens, fyi.

This makes a nice, dreamy effect, much like I imagine wiping vaseline on the lens would do, but with some planes in reasonably sharp focus, while others are totally blown out.

All in all: Good Times!

Obey Dallas

DJ Shepard Fairey (!) performed at the Dallas Contemporary last night (despite my interest in graffiti and street art, I didn’t attend…), and his crew (or perhaps Shep himself) did a bit of wheatpasting during the week last week. I tracked these few down today, and may go hunting for some more during the week on my way home from work, though I likely will have better things to do.


If you’re interested in taking a look, there are three in a group on Singleton Boulevard at McPherson, and one outside the Contemporary on Glass Street (near where Riverfront bisects and becomes Market Center and Irving Boulevard). I expect there are a few more around (the Contemporary claims “more than 12 murals throughout the city with a focus on West Dallas”), wherever the folks at the Contemporary could secure permission for some street art. One would hope that Shep would go and reclaim some of his spots around Deep Ellum and downtown, but given his celebrity that seems a bit doubtful. His Obey Hope print hangs in the Smithsonian, after all.

This may or may not serve as my 365for the day. I’m a bit tired from cleaning all morning, and I really don’t feel like tracking down something to shoot, but I’m not sure that I want to give even 1/365th of my 365 project to Shep (if you’ve read my thesis, you might gather that I’m not the biggest fan of Mr. Fairey). We’ll see.

Downtown McKinney Photo Walk

When I uploaded and started looking at the photos from today’s photowalk in McKinney, TX with the Dallas Photo Walk MeetUp group, I realized two things: 1) I’m getting a bit better, but not much, and 2) my photos from photowalks all pretty much look the same.

So I need to do something to shake things up. But what? Shoot in full manual instead of Aperture priority? Tried that in the Worldwide PhotoWalk a few months back, and may try it again, but don’t really know what that would help. Pick a focus to stick to, say ‘textures’ or ‘shapes’ or somesuch? This might help, if I went on photowalks more often than once a month or so, but the occasional-ness of the walks means that any lessons I learn from one walk are largely forgotten by the time the next walk rolls around, especially since the rest of my photographic work is done mostly from the safety of the apartment. I want to get better at making pictures, and these walks are good as they get me out of the house and shooting with people, but if I keep going this way, I’ll keep coasting along with this part of my photographic practice.

Enough of that.

I took the Ricoh 35-ZF along with me today, and used the D7000 to calculate exposures. This meant that I spent a lot of time shooting at ISO400 instead of my usual 100, so the shutter speeds on the digital side were insanely high most of the day. On the film side, I was mostly at 1/250th or 1/500th (the max for the Ricoh), and at f/11 or f/16. I tried to underexpose from what the D7000 told me, but 1/500th at f/16 is the fastest and smallest the Ricoh will go, so I don’t really know what to expect from the film side.

I shot roughly half a roll of Fuji PRO 400 H color film, and it’ll be awhile before I get the rest of the roll shot and processed. But it was nice to have something else to play with, if it did start to become a bother to have two cameras to mess with all morning. I’m glad I took it, though, and I look forward to comparing the shots from the 45 year old Ricoh with the shots from a year-old D7000…

All in all, the walk was good times, and about a dozen of us (or maybe 16?) went out to lunch afterwords, which was quite nice.

tl;dr: if I want to grow photographically, I need to do many more of these, and I should probably shoot more film.