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.

Sunrise at White Rock Lake

The North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group met up at the White Rock dog park for some sunrise shooting and general photowalking last Saturday. It was cold, and I lost my mojo by about 7:30, and I tried a sort of experiment that largely failed, but I had a good time and ended up with 2 or 3 pretty good shots (and 3 or 4 other decent-enough-to-share-but-not-in-any-way-portfolio-worthy ones: see below).

The experiment: stacked .6 and .9 ND filters, mostly handheld, in the early morning hours. Guess what? The D7000/Sigma 30mm f/1.4 don’t particularly care to focus on anything (save infinity) with this set-up, though they’ll flash the green dot at whatever you decide to point at, and make you think the intended subject is in focus, when in fact the only in focus bit is the distant shoreline or featureless sky, ie the very things you don’t much care about being in focus or not.

Oh well. It’s a good-enough lesson to learn, I guess, though I would’ve been much happier if 4 or 5 of the other 358 shots I took had been even remotely in focus…

Oh well. It was a good time, anyway, as it always is with the MeetUp groups of which I’m a part. I met a couple of new people, and got to try out the Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8 (thanks, Brian Eppink!), which is far superior to the 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 DX lens that I use—to great effect, generally—for Real Estate shooting. Alas, I had to give it back, but if I had $2000 beyond what I needed for the Sigma 150mm f/2.8 Macro, and the walkaround zoom I want to find, and the full-frame 12-16 megapixel camera I’d love Nikon to build, I’d probably jump on it…

Alas, none of the dozen or so shots I took with it amounted to anything.

So it was just the D7000 and Sigma 30mm f/1.4 combo, mostly at 1.4 (except for the #hdrfornogoodreason shot, at f/11), all at ISO100, various shutter speeds, and EV values of -3 to -1 (save the HDR, which was effectively -4, -2, 0). It took about 2 hours to whittle the 350 shots down to 50 that I wanted to take a closer look at, and another hour to realize why nothing was in focus, and another maybe 5 minutes to spot the 2 or 3 winners, and another maybe 2 hours to find 3 or 4 others to share, and then only about 20 minutes total to get the six processed to something I can live with.

A couple of these (read: the good ones) look like pictures someone else would make, and I think would make decent postcards or calendar shots, perhaps.

Note: as part of my new posting strategy, Photowalk write-ups will appear on Monday mornings. Photos will be posted to the MeetUp site earlier, and maybe to G+ too, depending on how lazy I feel. It’s probably silly to put stuff anywhere before I put it here, so maybe I’ll wait… I dunno.