Photography: 13 Days of Unusual Shots with Vintage Glass

Trying to expand my photographic range over thirteen days.

As part of a project to force myself to expand my artistic horizons (as well as my technical competence) in the field of photography, I’m forcing myself to try to use one of my vintage manual lenses – without the aid of focus assist or peaking of any sort – to take pictures which are out of my standard comfort zone*, and to get at least one “keeper” shot to exhibit for each day, starting on the Fourth of July. I am updating this post with both copies of the photos, as well as meta-data and links to the originals on Flickr.

* “Out of my standard comfort zone” is a subjective measurement. Hopefully these captures won’t be subjects or framings which I’ve heavily relied upon in the past, but as everything is derivative in some sense, I guarantee nothing.

Exploiting Flaws in Vintage Glass

Learning to use the characteristics of vintage glass for fun and (hopefully) profit.

Modern lenses (glass) have been manufactured in an increasingly flawless way, attempting to achieve optical perfection. I’d like to delve into the potential of using older “vintage” glass specifically to exploit the inherent imperfections present in those lenses.

Opensource Contact Sheets for Photographers

Creating contacts sheets using opensource software

One of the disadvantages to being a pretty active photographer is trying to handle archiving old shoots and being able to quickly locate a certain shot amongst thousands of directories of RAW stills, which may not be present on your local media. Enter the humble contact sheet.

Backing up Footage and Digital Negatives using Cheap Cloud Storage

Cheap backups for footage and digital negatives

If you’re like me, you churn out a pretty hefty load of both digital film negatives (camera RAW images) and film footage (RAW or ProRes for me, but you may use a different format). This has always posed an issue for backing up original footage and photographs.

The Fine Line Between Confidence and Hubris

The contradiction inherent in artistic self-assessment

I’ve been trying to make sense of two necessarily contrary positions in regard to skill, art, and aesthetics. This is something of which I’ve been trying to make sense for quite some time.

The danger of the shortcut mentality

Why you shouldn't always be looking for the easiest solution.

In “Skill in the Age of Instagram”, I had opined about the lost value of skill sets, and how the modern approach to skills is to “approximate” them with shortcuts like Instagram, Autotune, and Photoshop.

Even though these tools offer the quickest and shortest “path” to the immediate goal, being your current project, they retard your potential growth by limiting your skills and knowledge about what you’re doing. If the pseudo-magic time-saving software is taken away (or encounters a limitation), how will you continue to be able to function without it?

The Importance of Failure

Failures are as important, if not more important, than successes.

Failing is a terrible thing, we are taught. As a result of inherent cognitive biases and our own illusory superiority (look up the Dunning-Kruger effect, if you’re curious about this), we believe that we are right the majority of times, that we are more skilled than those around us, and that we have nothing of import to learn from not succeeding.

Dynamic range

Dynamic range, both as a literal and figurative concept.

As a photographer or cinematographer, I’m sure you’ve come into contact with limitations in dynamic range. I have run into limitations with dynamic range in both the visual and audio field, since anything that involves “real world” signals is going to potentially run up against the ability of the digital mediums on which we rely to properly store the entire gamut of available analog data that we are able to perceive with our eyes and ears.

Signal to noise ratio

To quote the venerable Wikipedia: Signal-to-noise ratio (often abbreviated SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. This has a number of applications in engineering, but it also nicely encapsulates a basic truth of dealing with equipment, people, and works – there is always a certain amount of background noise. (For more information on the concept, check out this article.

Preparing for and recovering from disaster

When things go wrong...

One of the greatest nightmares associated with digital cinematography and photography is that of the specter of data loss. The very notion that your carefully planned shots or footage could disappear in a single instant can be Earth-shattering, since it may not be possible to reshoot (or may be prohibitively expensive). The best defense is to be prepared, not only for the possibility that you may lose data, but also to safeguard against that possibility through preventitive measures.

To post or not to post

Even though a good portion of the work has been completed when you press the shutter button, or stop rolling, since all of your planning and execution has been completed, there’s still a final step (or series of steps) to bring that artistic effort to a presentable format. Many people shoot with default (or very close to default) settings on their camera or videocamera, and do simple “post production” by simply cropping or cutting whatever comes out of their camera body.

Gear vs Skill

I remember a conversation I had with my brother, a few years back. He was talking about the amount of photographic equipment which he had been dumping money into purchasing, in the hopes of improving the output from his camera. After months, if not years, of ordering and collecting equipment, he thought that one more thing would make some difference. He then had an epiphany, after viewing a photo of a sunset taken with a $12 disposable camera.

Succumbing to the Camera Phone

I do not like camera phones in the same way that I don’t particularly care for flash photography; you can produce good results (or at least passable results) with either, but the majority of stuff that comes out of it is just pure crap. I recently moved to one of Sprint’s CDMA Android offerings, the HTC Hero. I just finished the flashing/rooting process, since I don’t particularly care for devices that try to lock me out of their own functionality.

Front page fail

One of my pictures made it to the front page of the infamous “failblog“, consisting of a picture of a very disreputable looking van with “Little Angels Program” spraypainted on the side. I had caught that image earlier in 2008 in Willimantic, CT while I was walking through the hill section. It’s not Life or the New York Times or anything, but I’ll take what I can get. Probably should have color corrected that one before I sent it in …

First stopmotion test

Our first few stopmotion animation tests were successful. As per everything else we do, everything was done with Linux and freely available opensource software. In this case, gphoto2, imagemagick and mplayer (with ffmpeg thrown in for the .flv conversion for Gootube. We used my Canon 350D mounted on a tripod with Adam’s fixed focal length 135mm lens, with fixed lighting and a green background for eventual chromakeying. There was a quick hack involved getting gphoto2 to immediately spit out a photo, instead of trying to logically process it, which was solved with:

Stan at the Lake

I took Stan up to Crystal Lake, where he had a great time swimming and doing whatever it is that dogs do. Some pictures:

Straight from the horse’s … eyes?

Tasha and I went down to a horse farm in Hebron, CT, and took a bunch of pictures. I’m trying to get her to open her own flickr account… It was a good day, all in all, even though a few of the horse riders there got a little antsy with us taking their pictures.

Shutterbug Fever

Finally got my camera in the mail, and now all I seem to be doing is taking pictures of *everything*. As soon as I get back into the swing of taking pictures with a decent camera, I’ll post some more pictures to the photography section…