80/365: Good Year.
A close-up of one of the tires on my bus. Lit with one 580 ExII in a Lumiquest III softbox, wired to the hotshoe with a TTL cord and held right above the tire. I'm going to get a few more new shots of Rockell, our bus, up on here this week. Till then,
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79/365: Bus Pyramid.
I know, I missed my first day yesterday. Went to Wilmington and didn't bring my computer. Oh well. I'm posting two shots tonight to catch up.
Drink in hand, I was wandering around the party at my buddy's house in Wilmington. I rounded the corner, and see this. A host of basketball onlookers using my bus as their bleachers. The scene was too awesome not to photograph.
Had one friend handhold a bare 580 EXII flash in wireless slave mode, camera left, triggered by on-camera 580EXII.
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78/365: Supper Club (Lite)
A decent portion of the Most Venerable Supper Club, walking off three Pepper's Pizzas. We'll take the Pepsi Challenge with any other supper club out there.
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77/365: Thru the Looking Glass.
Staring at the lights in my bathroom whilst, uh, hanging out in the bathroom, I thought they might make a good pic. Tried a few uninspired angles, then put the camera right underneath the lights, against the mirror. That was cool, but I had to take it a bit further in photoshop...
Because I can.
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76/365: Happy Saint Patrick's Day.
Leon goes outside looking for a four-leaf clover. Leon spends ten minutes looking, gets frustrated, gives up. Leon asks his wife, who he suspects has a knack for such things, to look for him. She goes outside, comes back in one minute, with four-leaf clover.
Leon is happy, and wants to take picture, but takes nap instead. Clover dries out. Later, Leon sends wife out again to find more, which she does, two more, bigger, in 5 minutes. Leon takes picture this time, with a shot of Jameson.
Normally I stick to whiskey from the nearest island, Scotland, but it's St. Patrick's Day.
This shot is dedicated to all my Chimmy Chummy Gentleman Supper Club Whiskey Drinkers. You know who you are. And if you don't, I've assembled your mug shots:
75/365: Dramatic Spiderman.
Feeling sick tonight, in a feverish haze I let Spiderman show his dramatic side. ACTING!
Lit from camera left and right, with 2 580 EXIIs in speedgrids, aimed directly at Peter Parker, left one is a little behind subject, right is slightly in front, relative to camera. Using a fast shutter speed and middle of the road aperture allowed me to negate all the ambient light (the kitchen lights were on), and record only the speedlights.
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74/365: Massey-Ferguson.
That which gets stuck in the mud, can be pulled out...with the help of the right tools. This is one of those tools.
My friend Joe got a shot of this same tractor earlier this year. His blog is primarily about food, on the road, but his photos are great as well. Some are drool-inducing.
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73/365: Rusty Gate Tate.
Spent the weekend at Rusty Gate Farm, the most awesomest chunk of land in Granville County, with the most awesomest group of friends in NC. The whole weekend will get a lengthy post soon, but right now I'm exhausted, so it's just one of my favorites from today.
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Out of the office today, helping some friends on their farm. Bringing way too much camera gear, like I'm going to do something with it...Well, now that I've said that, I have to I guess.
Couple semi-archival shots here today, from one of the HDR days last month. Did all the processing in color, and made them black and white right at the end. Even black and white HDR has the hyper-real texture and tone, but it doens't suffer from unnatural colors; that is, no more unnatural than the total absence of color. Which is funny, because some people tend to associate black and white with documentary photography (since color didn't really come into it's own till the later half of the 20th century, ALL photography was black and white for a long time). Somehow they claim that black and white is more real, more objective...uh...not sure I'm buying that one either.
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71/365: De Vermis Mysteriis.
"We are all a part of the same compost heap." - Tyler Durden, aka Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Mysteries of the Worm. Sorry if the pic is gross to some, but I love my worms. They eat just about all the table scraps and refuse a Vegetarian (the wife) and an At-Home Vegetarian (me) can generate, and turn it into Black Gold (aka, Worm Shit). This in turn goes into the house plants and fertilizes the seeds we start in the house for the garden, plus a little bit goes into the ground when we transfer the starters into the beds. We've been maintaining this flock for a few seasons now, and they are having a BANNER year. I opened the lid today to check on them and ran away for a few minutes, I was scared they might gang up and eat me.
They live in a worm bin (how fitting), designed to give them room to do their thing when not eating the top layers of food I put in. 'Their thing' would be, presumably, mating. As they consume the food on top and turn it into what is basically mud (doesn't smell bad at all), they move upwards out of the sanctuary of their own castings (that's a polite way of saying shit) and spend more time in the upper levels, and I can remove the bottom layer of Black Gold and use it for all the aforementioned, organic hippie gardening I want (note: I am not a hippie. Call me a hippie again and get cut). They also generate some liquid in the process, and the bin has a collection tub at the bottom and a valve to drain it into your container of choice. This 'worm tea' is basically Liquid Black Gold and plants love its nitrogeny goodness. It's also good on cereal and in coffee. Well, not really, but in essence, I'll eventually be eating this shit, once it's been absorbed by the plants and turned into tomatoes, squash, peas, carrots. And, since it's not a figure of speech that we ARE what we eat (what else the hell is your body made out of?), I'm part Worm Shit. God has a sense of humor.
See, I just love compost. In the garden, the compost is my domain and responsibility. They say Compost Happens, true enough, but I prefer to add the human touch of carbon/nitrogen ratios and heat maintenance, as well as the shepherd-like benevolence with which I tend my flock of invertebrates. (And more than I knew of - look closely at these macro shots and you'll see some little bugs crawling on the worms, which I can't hardly see with my naked eye...oh well, everybody's gotta eat.) I get all sorts of compost going in the garden in spring and summer, but the worms deserve a good home and live, yes, in our kitchen. I'm telling you, they don't smell, and I promise, when you come over for dinner, I won't show them to you till AFTER dinner.
Lit with one speedlight in a Lumiquest Softbox III, fired manual via on shoe flash. Had to be quick, since they don't like light and immediately began to burrow deep into the bin as I shot. I think it may have even hurt them a bit...I'll be careful next time I open her up, lest they have mounted an insurrection against The Man. Good thing they can't bite the hand that feeds them...only digest it after I'm dead and part of the compost heap meself.
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70/365: The Light Goes Both Ways.
Trying to think of a shot today, I spied my old Yashica Mat, the busted one that doesn't work anymore, sitting on the table. Hmm. Thought I'd try something.
The Yashica is a TLR camera, Twin Lens Reflex. As a opposed to an SLR, which uses a mirror to show you what the one lens is seeing until you press the shutter, when the mirror flips up and lets the light pass straight from lens to film plane or sensor, the TLR uses one lens for the film, and one lens for the viewer. The top lens goes thru a prism or mirror to angle the image up 90 degrees, so you can hold the camera at your waist and see the image. Normally the light goes into the lens, but I thought it might be interesting to reverse the norm...
To get the light shining out of both lenses, I needed to light both, and that meant 2 speedlights. Had to open the camera as if I was loading film, and stick one speedlight up in there for the bottom lens. Then I balanced the second speedlight on a pocketwizard, on the open film back, to shine into the waist-level viewer. One final speedlight in a Lumiquest softbox III gave some definition to the camera surface, and I puffed some talcum powder up to add a bit of texture to the air. Gotta love the smell of Clubman.
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69/365: Here Come the 'Maters.
Spring is in the air. The temperature has been flirting with the 60's, and the frogs are sounding out all day around here, and frankly, they sound horny, and I don't mean like a toad.
And as per every Spring, the tomatoes and peppers are being born on our kitchen table. Not sure how many are volunteers, but apparently some tomatoes seeds made it into the worm bin, and in turn, the compost starter we use. Mystery Tomatoes!
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68/365: Lake Michael.
Another walk to Lake Michael, another set of pictures involving water, dead logs, and my dog, Rita. If I put her lease on and take her outside during daylight hours, she usually goes insane in anticipation of the potential romp through the woods (we take the leash off once we leave the road). I was trying to find some interesting photos, but this set of woods doesn't give them up often. Usually I end up shooting the dog, because, well, she's a spectacle.
Faster than a speeding, special-needs bullet, she is.
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67/365: Black and White.
After spending all day on my computer, I was starting to feel a little tweeked, and set off in my car to find a picture as the sun dipped to the horizon. I actually didn't think I would find anything to shoot on the backroads on which I like to ride my car, and bike, when it's warm. The sun was about done. I was a good ways in the country, on a section of road I don't think I've been on before, when I saw a spot in a field. I knew what it was...
I have never seen a skunk up close in the wild, before night. I've handled a pet skunk that had been de-glanded, or whatever they do, and I've looked upon skunk roadkill on my weekly bike ride and noted that even after 3 weeks, the buzzards hadn't touched the bloated carcass...but here was a little live black and white fellow burrowing around in a field. I walked out into said field with my 100-400mm zoom, and, still a 100 yards away, decided to snap a picture of the church on my left, because it could be a good photo, and could be my only shot from the day if my approach didn't go too well.
That done, I began approaching Pepé. Slowly, without being too sneaky, I kept getting closer, and kept grabbing frames. Cars were going by behind me, and I felt sort of stupid out there in the field with a massive lens and obvious idiotic intent. I'm surprised no one stopped to watch the dumbass photographer get sprayed.
Thankfully, there was no public spraying, or private for that matter. I got within about 50 ft (how far can they spray? I dunno. You go find out), and he still hadn't seemed to noticed me at all. So I began to call out, 'Hey! Skunk! Over here!' and...nothing. He kept digging and walking about. Deaf little bastard... I went in another 10 feet, and then I saw him looking at me, not moving. Okay, I think I'll stop now...I think he may have known I was there the whole time, but was relaxed because he's not really scared of being eaten...I'm not sure he's even in the food chain. Who the fuck wants to eat something that damn seasoned? I like gorgonzola as much as the next Frenchman, but we're talking about a pugentness that will haunt your olfactory nerves for a long, long time.
So that was good enough. Nat Geo isn't paying me to document the skunks of the Piedmont. We parted ways without any exchange of bodily fluid, the way it should be between new acquaintances.
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66/365: Stop Bothering Me.
My dog loves being my model. She's generally cooperative and receptive, but she seems to be getting annoyed here. Goldens have the best eyebrow expressions...
Got a couple of small softboxes that sit on the front of a hotshoe flash recently.. It's called the Lumiquest Softbox III, and it's big enough to create a softer quality of light, but small enought to still be a little hard. Here, the flash and softbox are at arm's length, in my hand, above Rita, connected to the camera via an ETTL sync cord.
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65/365: Liquid Light.
Today I set out to try some shots with my new(ish) 10-Stop ND filter. This filter basically blocks the light getting thru the lens, by a set amount, and 10 stops is a really large amount compared to most ND filters. ND stands for neutral density, which means the filter doesn't have any color to it, it basically blocks all the wavelengths of light evenly. Most ND filters that you can find at camera stores block between 1 to 3 stops of light (oh, by the by, a STOP is the unit by which exposure is measured in photography. The aperture and shutter speed and film speed are all measured in STOPS or fractions thereof). Why would one use a ND filter? Well, first let's get to the heart of the matter. Let's say I want to capture motion blur in my image. Waterfalls are the classic example of this. Glassy, silken streams of water cascading over rocks and moss...this is achieved thru a slow shutter speed, the amount of time that the sensor or film is exposed to light. As the water falls through the image, it blurs. Same thing happens when you try to take a picture in a dark situation without a flash...the long shutter speed causes blurring if the subject moves, or if your hand is shakey. Well, in a bright situation, like the middle of a sunny day, the camera has plenty of light to make a proper exposure with a motion-freezing shutter speed. Even if I make the lens aperture very small (letting in less light), I still have a fairly fast shutter speed. I can use a slower (ie, less sensitive) ISO or film speed, like 100 ISO, to get a slower shutter speed, but in full sun it would be approximately 1/100 of a sec at f/16 aperture. This may not be slow enough at a waterfall to capture the motion in a silky fashion; it may just freeze the water in midair. If I slowed the shutter speed, I would get the blur, but the shot would be overexposed...this is where the ND filter comes in. Blocking the light evenly, I can add 3 stops of shutter speed to the image with a 3 stop filter, and TEN stops with my 10 stopper. In the previous example, that'd be 1/13 of a second at f/16 for 3 stops, and 10 secs for the ten stop filter. If I stack the two filters (13 stops), I get an 80 second exposure, and if I then drop my ISO to 50, and stop my aperture down to f/22, I have a 5 minute, 20 second exposure to achieve what I get at 1/100 sec without my filters, in broad daylight. Bring a tripod people.
Ok, that was as photo-dorky as I'll get today.
The shots I had in mind didn't work out so good, but I can see some potential in the approach, so I'm going to continue trying to get something that works. The problem I had was my subject matter. When you shoot a 4-minute exposure, things like cars and people, moving relatively fast through the frame, don't stay in one place long enough to register in the exposure. You need something that moves, but moves in the same path the whole time, and is hopefully brighter than what it's in front of...like water. Moving water is always a good subject for long exposures, I'll show you again when I go to the beach in a few weeks. The length of the exposure also makes a big difference in how the water registers. For example, the posted shot above was a 4.5 minute exposure with the 10-stop filter. The shot below is the same fountain without the filter, 1/8 of a sec., and before I converted to black and white. Still getting some motion blur in the image, and it looks cool, but it doesn't have the silky, ethereal quality of the first shot. Neither is necessarily better than the other, it's just a matter of which way you want the picture to look.
Now, I need to figure out how to apply these techniques to human subjects...
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64/365: Happy Birthday Kun.
Kun had a birthday. We ate Thai food. A merry time was had by all. Shot 350 pictures over the course of the night. Plenty of keepers for photo albums and fond memories...but for a 365 project, how do you choose? I cruised around the country south of Carrboro looking for a shot...nothing. Went to graveyard in Durham, snapped a few shots, but wasn't feeling it. Nearly wrecked the car trying to drive and shoot the last light of sunset on the trees and buildings I was passing...nothing worth a damn. Got lots of shots at dinner, candids, cakes, and empty plates. Kept that up at the bar after dinner, and let the camera get passed around. My friends took better pictures than I did.
It was easier in the first month, when I set out to take one picture each day, with intention. Set up the lights, go through the whole process to get one shot of whatever I had dreamed up, even if that actually meant 50 pictures of testing and tweaking. The Decisive Moment is harder to come by, harder to capture. Black and White isn't a challenge in itself, but the broadness of the parameter is. I have to GO OUT into the WORLD to find interesting things. And then, a night of plenty. Plenty of fun shots. But only one can be The Posted. What do you go with? The Decisive Moment. The Crux of the Biscuit. Happy Birthday, Kun.
63/365: Near Empty Filler.
Today was another day of work and obligations pushing my daily photo to the wayside (Notice it's night, again). On top of a meeting, some editing, and working out, we had to drive two hours back home to Ayden, NC to load a 400 lb. woodstove into our trailer, then drive it two hours back to Mebane. Towing that big bastard really ate up the gas, and we cruised into the gas station at our exit with the 'FEED ME' light on and piercingly bright.
This image has been run through the Digital Darkroom, and given a treatment that supposedly mimics the look of a Lith print, which is a traditional darkroom technique that involves over-exposing the paper, then under-developing the print with a lith developer. Apparently the results vary, and no two prints come out alike. Having never done a real Lith print, I'm claiming no expertise on that, but I love grainy, diffuse images, and said effects can be achieved with just a few layers in Photoshop and some taste with the heaviness of the manipulation. Here's one of my favorites from the past that I used this treatment on, taken at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.
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62/365: At Day's End.
I'm happy to say I had this image in my head before we left the house to walk the dog. Late in the day, the light was just beginning to creep thru the clouds as the back of the Front passed over our town. Wifey turned toward the West...I snapped away.
I love the Canon 5D Mark II, can I just say that? Love/hate may be a better description, but for now I'll tell you why I love this camera. You can shoot at a high ISO (which is the digital equivalent of film speed, aka light sensitivity) and the digital noise that has plagued every other camera I've ever used is GONE. On my previous camera, you got a nasty digital noise in the underexposed areas at any ISO 800 or higher. Even looking at scientific tests, ISO 800 has almost the same noise as ISO 200 on this 5dmkII. And when you go high enough to start seeing it, it really looks a lot like the film grain that you got when shooting high speed black and white film, a 'salt and pepper' chemical grain that really looked damn good. Pop a 50mm 1.2 manual focus lens and set the camera to shoot in black and white, and go out in the dark. The pictures will be fine. Especially if you are totally OVER sharpness.
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61/365: Winter Continues.
It's snowing again here in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Not much accumulation, but it sure is pretty.
I've decided to make my next theme Black and White. No colors, except maybe some toning (adding one or two colors to the whole print after removing all the natural colors). Hopefully, this approach will force me to see both more graphically, and with an eye for tonality. Of course, I could just desaturate any old photo I take during the course of the day, and I'm sure that will happen a few times, but I'd like to feel my brain shift into another creative gear if possible.
I used to shoot a lot of black and white film and process/print it in this darkroom on campus. Nobody was ever in there, and I had to learn on my own, with the help of a 35mm book that had a darkroom chapter. It was a fun process, and I think I'd like to try it again sometime, but I can knock out a lot more photos editing digitally, without nearly as many toxic chemicals (except a bit of scotch), AND I have the benefit of the good ol' UNDO button. In other words, I'm a lot sloppier. But that's digital for you. You can see your mistakes immediately, and immediately try again, without any lost time invested. And so you may be able to learn faster, but you could also just NOT learn at all, without having that risk of investing hours of time and money to find out that you exposed a whole roll of film wrong. When you learn that way, you learn for real. The next time you shoot something similar, you are going to work to not repeat that mistake.
But trust me, I love digital. I never had the cash to really experiment when I shot film, and a digital SLR frees you from that constraint: pixels are free. So go out and shoot in the snowy night!
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