7/52-10 the Castillian at Night

This was an interesting and rather difficult 7/52.

Sunday came and went with no thought at all for the week’s project. Monday came and went with no thought at all for the week’s project. Tuesday found me wide awake at 2am; up, showered, dressed for work, and sipping coffee by 3:45, with nowhere to go until 5:00.*

Now. If I were more self-disciplined, I would’ve spent the time working on this website rebuilding business… Alas (or, rather, fortunately), I spent the free time surfing Google+ and my Feedly stream instead. Over on G+, I found The Nifty 50 Galore page/group, and decided straight away to shoot with the Nikkor 50mm 1.8G all week, so as to do a bit more participation-type stuff on the G+. So I pulled out the camera (for the first time all week), strapped on the 50, and then shoved the camera back into the bag with a nagging feeling of guilt/shame for not taking any time to work on the 7/52 yet.

On Feedly, I read some stuff about banksters and their pets and I read some stuff about corporations skirting taxes before turning over to the photography section…
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Phoneography Friday #4

For Photojojo University, class #1 An iPhone Camera Primer. The assignment: “Misuse the HDR setting on purpose. Shake your camera mid-shot while using HDR to get a sweet double-exposure effect.” Note: this is an outtake. You can follow my #PJUniversity coursework on Instagram @jamescockroft (note, however, that my profile is set to Private, so I’ll need to add you, but I approve every add request, eventually…).

7/52-09 reflections

It started when I noticed some leaves reflected in the window of the open door. Out came the LX7, which captured the scene nicely-enough, but I wanted to shoot the D7000 and some manual lenses, so back went the LX7, and out came the D7000 and Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5.

The interaction between the eye/brain and the world vs the interaction between the lens/recording-surface and the world is quite interesting.

In the aforementioned leaves-in-the-window scene, my eyes saw leaves, stretched, smeared, distorted; the LX7 saw pretty much what my eyes saw; the Vivitar/D7000 saw only the smear.

At first, I suspected this was because the lens was much closer to the reflection than my eyes, so I moved around, crawled into the hatch, tried various angles, but was unable to capture with the big camera what my eyes saw, or what the LX7 recorded. (It’s ok: I like the D7000 result better than what I saw, and if I was smart, I would’ve saved one of the images from the LX7 for comparison. Alas, they’re lost to card-formatting.)

Anyway. I spent the rest of the week looking for interestingly-distorted reflections.

One of these is not like the others, in that the reflected surface was in motion, and I vacillated between including it over an image shot into the roof of my car, but it looks too much like a painting for me to pass up.

The others were shot in car windows or body-panels, refrigerator and oven doors, and a computer screen.

EXIF data is included in the lighbox, so I won’t bother with it here, but everything was shot (as mentioned above) with the D7000 and Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 (Kiron, perhaps), and processed rather quickly and simply in Lightroom.

Phoneography Friday #3

Olive AbstractI had an idea to create a process post, with examples from every stage of a few minutes of app play, but then I ended up liking the original image far more than anything that came after… Maybe next week.

Cortex Camera takes a dozen or so images and smashes them down into a single shot. I don’t recall all of the details, so I won’t make this a review or anything, but I think it’s intended to reduce noise while preserving detail. If you wave the phone around while it’s exposing, though, you can end up with some interesting shots, like this one of Olive. If you want more information, clicky the link above.

 

Midweek Macro #3

mm|3|©JamesECockroft-20130227

So. I left the macro shot for pretty much the last minute, and guess what? I’m not happy with it. I would go into my archives and pull one, but I’m in a really foul mood just now, so I won’t.

I took this with the LX7, AP mode, f/1.4, 1/60th, ISO400, and gave it some heavy processing in Lightroom. Seeing as my monitor calibration is hosed and I have no idea why, I converted to b/w.

7/52-08 Macrobstractions

Well, I suppose I was a bit lazy this week, but I did want to shoot some Macro Abstractions again—it has been awhile, after all—and I am in the middle of building my own WordPress theme and doing some site optimization, so my shooting time was a bit limited.

It was mostly laziness, though.

At least it’s not a group of cat pictures, I suppose… maybe next week. HA!*

I used the D7000 and either the Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai or the Vivitar 50mm f/1.8 (Cosina), reverse-mounted directly to the body via a reversing ring. ISOs were in 800-1600 range, shutter speeds were camera-controlled via Aperture Priority mode, and apertures were wide open. Most of these received less than a minute of slider play in Lightroom.

*note: there is nothing wrong with a few cat pictures… After all, there are a bunch on this site.