I’m at OSCON this week. Come say hi and talk Drizzle, Rackspace, cloud, photography, vegan food or brewing.
Posts Tagged ‘photography’
At OSCON
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010Dynamic Range Theory
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010A great video podcast is Meet the GIMP. It’s quite accessible and has some useful information. The recent(ish) episode on Dynamic Range Theory is useful if you’re wondering why images look different through your eyes, on an LCD and on paper (and what the hell the difference between RAW and JPEG is).
Kodak Ektar 100 – fun with colour negative film
Friday, July 9th, 2010I’ve been writing a bit about my adventures with Black & White film and developing myself. I haven’t (yet) developed my own colour negative (C41 process) film. I do hope to do so at some point in the future – even though I can get the local lab to do it for $4 a roll, it’s nice to be able to do this yourself.
When I was young, I also took photos. I still use that camera sometimes too. Recently I’ve been scanning in the first ever slide film I shot – a roll of Kodachrome when I was 8 years old. I do like the look of Kodachrome, and am sad that it’s going away.
Last year, when I was in the US for Burning Man, I got introduced to Kodak Ektar 100. With the promise of colours that remind you of Kodachrome, I grabbed a bunch and headed to San Francisco and then Burning Man.
I liked the look of a bunch of stuff I shot. For example:
Recently, on my trip to Hong Kong, I shot some too. The above was all shot with an old Ricoh SLR, when I was in Hong Kong I used my Nikon F80 and the 50mm f1.8 lens.
One of my favourites was of this little statue:
In Hong Kong a lot of buildings are interconnected so you can walk between them without having to go outside (where it’s hot and humid). There are bits of sculpture in the buildings around the Rackspace office. This is one near the hotel I was staying with. During the morning and afternoons, these walkways are filled with people, exactly like streets…. but a floor above and indoors.
I’m adding more shots from Hong Kong to my Flickr Photstream as the days go on.
I really like this film. I even don’t mind it for people… the first was the test shot (have I loaded correctly, things winding, wonder if this shot will work) in the hotel lobby in San Francisco. Leah:
I should learn to scan better (I have since, this was probably the first image I scanned using my scanner, certainly the first Ektar frame). Another two people images I like on Ektar are:
Dare I say that I always seem to find the Ektar colours to be relaxed? I like it. The blues really shine through. Reds are also really nice (heck, I even love the yellow), and I plan to go and investigate how I can combine these colours in interesting ways on film.
Reciprocity failure
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010“As the light level decreases out of the reciprocity range, the increase in duration, and hence of total exposure, required to produce an equivalent response becomes higher than the formula states” (see Wikipedia entry).
Those of us coming from having shot a lot of digital, especially when you’re experience of low light photography is entirely with digital are going to get a bit of a shock at some point. Why didn’t this image work exactly as I wanted it to? Why isn’t there as much.. well.. image!
You’ll probably read things like “you don’t need to worry about it until you’re into really long exposures” or maybe you’ll start reading the manufacturers documents on the properties of the film and just go “whatever”.
Ilford Delta 3200 Professional is one of the films where you have to start caring about it pretty quickly. Basically, you need to overexpose once you start getting exposures greater than ~1second.
In decent light, handheld with a pretty quick exposure, things look great:
But whack things on a Tripod and have a bit of a longer exposure you’re going to start failing a bit. Even though I like this shot, I find that it’s just not quite got everything I would have liked to capture. Just exposing a bit more I think would have done it. I had to do too much in scanning and the GIMP…
So I learnt something with this roll, which is always good.
Playing with multiple exposure
Sunday, February 28th, 2010So, I discovered that my D200 had a built in “multiple exposure” option. While you can do exactly the same thing in GIMP (or Photoshop I guess) a whole lot easier (for one, you get to see what’s gonig on), we had been discussing Holga earlier in the night… so I felt it kind of appropriate to not really see what I was doing.
Leah playing guitar hero, me sitting across the room only slightly distracting her with a camera.
Maybe I will end up getting a Holga one of these days… being restricted can be fun.
First roll through the Nikon F80
Monday, February 22nd, 2010A little while ago I bit the bullet and bought a Nikon film body – a F80. May as well have a film body that’s a bit automatic and takes the same lens mount as my digital.
So, I got it and thought “hrrm… I better run a roll of film through it to make sure it works”. Off to the fridge i went to find the cheapest, shittiest roll of film possible… I found “Walgreens” brand film. Manufactured by one of many, bought for cheap, and run through the F80.
Some shots turned out pretty good. I have the full set (most of the roll) up on flickr. A few choice ones are:
Which due to some nice accident of lighting, turned out pretty good. IIRC this was pretty late at night and I was editing photos as Michael came over (bringing much needed beer).
Slides and beer, do you need anything else? I just like this because it’s a snapshot of what I was working on (well, kinda, I was mostly just manipulating digital images).
Leah and I went bushwalking… so had to snap a shot of her. I do like the Nikon 50mm as a portrait lens. The film… well… it was cheap, but not too bad actually.
A shallow depth of field can be a lot of fun. Although not entirely sure how I feel about the bokeh….
Which has some odd colours. Nice, but odd.
I like my “new” body. It’ll be fun.
Photos of Burning Man: Getting to Black Rock City
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009This year was my first burn. More amazing than I could have imagined. I think it was day two when Brian caught me saying “so, next year what we’re going to do…”
Due to the harsh environmental conditions, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of taking my digital gear (it ain’t cheap) and had the idea of handing cameras to people and having a kind of communal photo album (planning for a larger scale implementation of this next year). So… I went purely film. Several older and smaller compact 35mm cameras that I picked up either for nothing or next to (no loss if lost or dead!) plus a Ricoh SLR was my arsenal.
Now… that means I need film.
I mainly shot the new Kodak Ektar 100 and a Kodak Ektachrome E100VS. For the smaller, cheap 35mm ones, I just used some Fuji Superia.
Trees in Portland
Firstly though, there was a stop in Portland to a) recover from jetlag and b) hang out with Eric, Wendy and their dogs. I do like Portland, quite a lot actually. While there, managed to get some work done, fiddle with some SPARC hardware that Eric has, enjoy excellent vegan ice cream, enjoy awesome vegan food (both at home and out) and walk around both downtown and up in the hills. Portland (and Oregon) is certainly pretty.
Trees in Seattle
Before heading to Burning Man, I was in Seattle, where Leah joined me to prep for (and then go to) Burning man.
Then Leah and I were in San Francisco for a day. This is when I started shooting exclusively film for the first time in… well.. Since 2002 (I got my first digital camera for linux.conf.au in 2003)
Leah enjoying going around San Francisco
We actually did some touristy things… so I saw a bit more of San Francisco than I have before. One issue with mostly being around San Francisco just before/after the MySQL Users Conference is a severe lack of time/energy to go for much exploring. Preparing is exhausting, and afterwards I just want to really chill out – usually heading out to some forest or down to Santa Cruz or just hanging out with cool people.
Going over the Golden Gate Bridge
One of the most surprising things was running into David while just walking down the street. Although knew he was in town, and we’d planned to all go down to Burning Man together, actually running into somebody in the street always surprises me.
I’m pretty sure this was the first time that I went across the Golden Gate Bridge. Seen it, taken photos of it, used said photos as my desktop background, but this was the first time going across it and looking back on the city. Manual focus, moving bus: epic amounts of fun… I’d kinda forgotten how much fun this could be.
Sun going down in San Francisco
There are things I like about San Francisco, but if I had to call somewhere in the US home, Seattle and Portland are both much higher on the list. Maybe it’s because of the wonderful coffee of Seattle, or the laid backness and awesome vegan food of Portland or if I’m just delusional and think it’d be possible to catch a Nirvana gig in Seattle.
In the evening in San Francisco we met up with David again and went down to the beach. It was pretty. Somehow, I deluded myself into thinking “ISO 100 Film, no tripod, cold, sunset…. Photo time!” I did get one I quite like too:
The Sun setting over the water, San Francisco
After what can only be described as a “I love side impact airbags” car crash on the way back to the Hotel (everybody okay: shaken, not stirred. also not our fault), headed back for a stiff drink, some sleep and eagerly awaiting the drive to Reno and then Black Rock City.
Waiting in line to get into Black Rock City (for many, many hours)
It was not a short wait once we got to the gate. We did, however, not too long after sunrise, make it to camp. I have no idea where I shot this from… but it was before we got to camp (or at least the first photo of us helping to set up):
People arriving at Black Rock City: first thing in the morning
More to come… including setup of Pi Camp!