Playing with DistressedFX

I don’t much go for distressed filters these days, but I quite like Distressed FX.

Distressed FX offers 19 color/treatment filters (plus Birds!) and 17 scratch layers (plus the ability to create custom scratch designs), and the ability to tune the intensity of the filters.

It’s also possible to make simple tweaks to color, brightness, and contrast.

It saves images to a maximum dimension of 2048 (2048×2048 for square images; 2048×1536 for 4×3 images from the iPhone camera), and this is plenty for social media.

Other
Fun times.

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7/52-32 Holga!

*when reading the above title, it may be helpful to imagine Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

A week with the Holga 60mm f/8 has been on my list for quite some time, and I finally did it. With some more time, I think this cheap hunk of plastic has some possibilities, but I think I’ll go back to conventional (or conventional-ish) lenses for awhile.

To be honest, the 7/52 was mostly an afterthought this week. I’m very busy with work and life, but neither are any real excuse. If I really wanted to be serious about this shooting thing, I would’ve found the time, but to be honest, I might have only gained maybe 30 minutes the entire week. I’m just very busy.

One indication of this lack of real effort is the inclusion of no less than 3 (three!) pictures of cats. For shame, for shame.

Is it time to publicize all the busy-ness? or shall I wait until the big things have already happened… I don’t know.

D7000. Holga 60mm f/8. All shot in Aperture Priority mode; EXIF should be in the lightbox if you care. Processing in Lightroom 5 was minimal.

7/52-31 exposing to the right

How many times have I tried to shoot at night for this project? And how many times did I shoot at night during 2012’s 365 project? In any of those times, did I ever try to find a manual setting that would capture color and light the way I saw it? Of course not.

So Monday morning, I got in the car, pulled out the camera, and started firing test shots of the dark parking lot. The Sunny 16 Rule says, for a day with bright sun and some clouds, set your ISO as low as it goes (for the D7000, this would be 100), set your shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO (1/100), and set the aperture to f/16, and you’ll have a decent-enough exposure. If it’s darker, open your aperture. If it’s brighter close your aperture. Alternately, you could raise or lower your shutter speed.

Someone with some maths could probably calculate where I need to be for near pitch-black (or as dark as it gets in downtown Dallas), but that person isn’t me.

I knew I didn’t want to go above ISO800, so I set the camera for ISO800. If my maths are correct, this would indicate a shutter speed 1/800th of a second (100 to 800 is 3 stops, and 100 to 800 is 3 stops… :facepalm: reciprocal of the ISO, jerk) in bright sun at f/16. I didn’t have bright sun and was happy to have the 3 stops, but I don’t quite know how many stops it is from bright sun to 5am in Dallas, so I opened the aperture to f/4. This should give a total of 7 stops, if my maths are correct (3 from the ISO, and f/16 to f/4 is 4: 3 + 4 = 7).

I fired off a test shot:

Black Frame.

I can handhold the 30mm at 1/15th (1/10th if I haven’t had any coffee and am fairly relaxed), but I was going to be in a moving vehicle, and so I wanted to keep it up as high as possible. I dropped to 1/50th (1 stop), and opened the aperture to f/2 (2 stops), for a total of 10 stops.

I fired off a test shot:

Close, but way too dark, no detail at all in any but the lightest shadow areas.

Luckily, the Sigma goes another stop to f/1.4, so I gave myself another stop from Aperture and another stop from Shutter Speed (f/1.4 and 1/25th), for a total of 12 stops.

I fired off a test shot:

Very close, but a bit hot for my liking, so I dropped the shutter speed back 1/3 stop, and everything was bang-on.

GoGo. I now had a manual setting for the rest of the week, and all that was left was to shoot, and therein lies the problem. Between work and all the other fun stuff I have going on—I should really write something about all this… Soon, perhaps—I don’t make much time to shoot, especially when it’s dark outside.

But I did it, sort of. I like the colors of the various light sources in and around my neighborhood, the way the light bounces off buildings and the different shadows it casts, but I couldn’t capture it properly from a moving vehicle, and have significant trouble convincing myself to stop the car and wander around for 5 minutes.

The shots I’m happiest with were all shot from a standstill, and they’re mostly sharp and clear, so at least I know a good manual starting point to shoot handheld at night in the city (rather, near the city). And that’s GoGo, methinks.

Everything was shot with the D7000 and Sigma 30mm f/1.4, ISO800, f/1.4, and a range of shutter speeds from 1/25th to 1/50th, and they received minimal post processing (slight tweaks to exposure/contrast/etc., mild (and in one case, extreme) cropping, and the like). Why the range of shutter speeds? The shutter speed dial is right by my thumb, and I tweaked it from time to time…

7/52-30 Fold(s)

I downloaded VSCOcam in early July, but hadn’t taken it for a proper test yet: one of those (many) impulse camera app purchases/downloads that I only rarely regret, as most are worth the free or $0.99 cost. I read that it was nice, simple, and powerful, and thought it might be a fun addition to my app arsenal, so I hadn’t put it in a folder, and instead, I made room for it on the photo app screen. (If I recall, it replaced the excellent Mextures app, which should really come out of the folder where it might have a chance of seeing some use…) I was all set to use it, I just hadn’t.

Then, maybe a week after I downloaded it, I read the 50 Things I Have Learned about Mobile Photography (and iPhone Photography) by Misho Baranovic (instagram @mishobaranovic) on the procamera blog. #35 stuck with me in ways others didn’t. Not that many of the others weren’t useful, it’s just that #35 was different somehow.

So fast-forward a couple of weeks to last Monday evening. I was chilling on the sofa, watching a lecture on Surah Fatiha, if I recall, and playing with the phone (gogo multitasking), when I spotted the app icon and thought “VSCO Cam is the new Hipstamatic.”

The photo above was the result, and it set off the week.

This isn’t a review of VSCOcam, really, and it isn’t a replacement for Hipstamatic, not in my world anyway. But it is a nice addition to the app arsenal, what with it’s Free price and nice collection of filters (and if you like the 5 or so free ones that come with the app, go ahead and drop the $6.00 to get the others: you likely won’t be disappointed, but you might be a bit overwhelmed (and the $5.99 for all the filter packs is on for a limited time… not sure how limited: it was limited on July 5 when I first looked at the app, and I bought the pack on July 20-somethingth, and it was still limited then, and it’s still limited as of this morning… maybe it’s going to go away in early August? Who knows.)). Plus, its camera module has separate focus and exposure controls, plus a white balance lock, and its editing screens allow control over exposure, white balance, contrast, rotate, and crop (and a host of others I found just now by scrolling to the right… sheesh… even more powerful than I thought).

Anyway. Everything was shot with the iPhone 5 via VSCOcam, and edited and processed in VSCOcam. Much of the EXIF is in the lightbox, but the preset filters are sadly missing. Perhaps they’ll appear in an update sometime. For reference, here are the filters I used, in order… S2, B4, C3, S6, F2, P4, F2… interesting that I used that F2 twice… wish I’d seen that before, I might’ve switched it up some.

You can find VSCOcam in the App Store. It’s worth the Free (and the extra filters are a nice addition, if a bit overwhelming at first, and you can probably get similar results out of the host of editing settings, and $6.00 isn’t nothing in the way that $0.99 is…).

Also: the title of this week’s 7/52 comes from a mis-remembered discussion of a portion of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque that we read in Performance Theory class… something about folding, enfolding, unfolding and identity… I don’t recall all the specifics, but after looking at that chapter again, I sorta want to read the whole book…