Camera Tricks

Tomorrow (Tuesday that is, July 30th) I will be engaged in a battle of cameras. The rules are simple:

No post-processing

No cropping

No adjustments of any kind.

Three shot maximum.

One location, limited time frame.

In short, straight from the camera.

The winner gets bragging rights, and the adulation of millions of people.

Well, maybe not the last part, but I am determined to win this.

So in order to shoot something worthwhile, I needed to practice, and enlisted the aid of a close friend of mine to model. I don't normally do glamour photography, I simply don't know enough about it, but this time around I didn't want to do any landscape shots. So tonight she was kind enough to let me practice. The image you see here is straight from my Nikon D2x, in Black and White mode, with a 135mm f/2.8 manual focus lens.

The soft patterning you see is not from photoshop, or lightroom, or anything of that sort, but a black silk stocking attached on the end of the lens (the part that goes into the camera, not the other end)

AS you can see, it softens everything and gives you the soft Hollywood glow from times gone by, which was exactly the effect I was looking for.

I hope the judges like the shot (I will have to replicate it tomorrow, but I am confident I can) and I hope you do too. Drop me a line and let me know what you think.

What July 4th Would Be Complete Without Fireworks?

Taken on our Nation's Independence Day, July 3rd of course.

Wait...what?

Yeah apparently there are two different fireworks companies in town, and rather than competing, they are running on different days. So the set you see here were taken last night (July 3rd)

Here is your classic fireworks shot, taken with an f/stop of f16, and 4 seconds to get the right amount of streaming. No adjustments, this is straight form the camera. In fact, all the shots you will see of fireworks are as-is.

I've said it before, and some readers have said it more eloquently as well, I'm a purist, what you see is what I took, nothing added or taken away. I will crop from time to time, but the original source remains unmodified.

More purist in me

Much of the glamour photography out there is PhotoShopped heavily (just do a search for Madonna before and after shots if you want to see just how much) and that does sort of give me license to go nuts with PhotoShop, but then again, just because everyone else does it, doesn't mean I have to.

Case in point here, again straight from the camera. Some other pics I did adjust in PS (aiming for a specific look), but if I post them, I will tell you what I did.

I recall once going by a portrait photographer in a mall, his images were stunning and I told him so. His comment to me was (and I'm quoting) "I'm not a photographer, I'm a PhotoShopper" which left me disillusioned.

I'm only an amateur (and an uneven one at that) but I've always felt that the more you get right in the camera, the less you have to fake later.

I'm proud to say I'm a purist.

Pretty in Purple

More from my friend L. She'd been kind enough to track down some translucent netting. I was hoping for some linen, but that stuff is very expensive (by the yard) and the stuff she found turned out to be a better choice anyway, so kudos to her on that.

Once again, work straight from the camera. One of my strobe lights has a broken strobe controller (thanks cheap stuff made in China!) but what it's done is force me to work with a limitation, and I'm finding more and more I like the look/effect of only one working strobe, using the other as a pure hotlight.

Adds greatly to shadows and textures, as can be seen here.

More

My camera has been lying to me. Well, not my camera exactly, but my light meter. This is an image from my vintage Yashica-D of course (of course!) and being that it's a totally manual camera, no light meter is included. I thought it would be odd to buy a modern light meter to use with a camera built in the 60s/70s, so I found one from around the same time frame. Call it the purist (or idiot, I think they rhyme) in me.

In any event, using the light meter outside it worked fine, but when I started to use it indoors, the meter was *way* off (like 4 stops off kind of off.) I thought something was funny about the readings it would give me, but I'm not a pro, so I was trusting in my equipment, not my instincts. Turns out, of couse, the pics were horribly underexposed. It's a credit to the camera (and film, Kodak TMax 100) that it was able to capture as much as it did, giving the incorrect readings.

Needless to say (well I'm saying it anyway) this photo is heavily processed, but I think it came out rather well, given the circumstances. In addition, lesson learned, buy the right equipment for the job.

Fanaticism

This is what I mean about Italian cars. This symbol is quite old and damaged, yet look at the attention to detail Pininfarina put into it. All the Italian car companies do this. Attention to beauty in their design and an uncompromising attitude towards the performance of the car is just one more thing I love about Italian cars.

Curve

This one was hard to capture. It's the light well detail from an Alfa Romeo Spyder. Along with the blood line, it is the most gorgeous part of the car, and the most easily damaged. The Alfa Spyder was designed and built long before computers came into play. The famous designer Pininfarina, scuplted this by hand. No mean feat in the 60s. And from day one, he nailed it out of the park. One look at the subtle curves and I think you will agree.

Living

This is a detail of the Weber carb linkage on a race-prepped Fiat. Of al lthe images I have taken recently, this is my favourite. Knowing that virtually all Italian cars of the past were hand built by artists that devoted every waking moment to their passion, sends chills down my spine. Their desire, their lust, to create a living being encased in metal and fibreglas, that exists for only one purpose, is unparalleled in history. To drive an Italian sports car, is to know you are taming a wild soul, and in every detail, every nuance of the car, you feel this. To live, to be truly alive, one must hear the engine's siren song at redline, to hear the Webers gulp air, to feel the gears whirring in harmony, to feel the blood pumping through the chassis, it's a wonder people drive anything else at all.

Photography

Well here is another picture. This one has been edited, using a dynamic range tonality package. Basically, you take multiple pics of the same subject, using differing f.stops, and the software integrates all the tonal ranges, resulting in deep, rich pictures. That's the theory anyway.

I'm of two minds regarding "photo-manipulation." On one hand, I think it's cheating. You are not showing what you see, but rather what you wish to see. That falls dangerously close to painting, and not photography, in my book. The whole point of photography, in my point of view, is to capture the beauty of the surroundings. If we start "adjusting" the pics, then it's not really what was there now is it?

On the other hand (besides having different fingers) it is a way to being artistic. In other words, starting with a blank canvas (the picture) and creating spark, flare, richness (the end result.)

As a result of my internal struggle between the purist in me and the artist in me, I'm making adjustments, but slowly and slightly.