The Personal Journal of James Vornov
I put an Apple Airtag on my Leica M11 Monochrome so that if I leave my house without the camera, my phone nags me about leaving the camera at home. Best strategy I’ve found to make sure I take it along when out for a while. And then of course I look for images since I have a camera.
“Variation IS change.†-Frederick Sommer
I’ve been consistent with capturing images on a near daily basis, mostly in “Sniff and Shoot” mode, just carrying a camera when out in the back with the puppy. While casual photography is clearly where we are today, capturing in the camera with with an expressive exposure only gets the image 80% there. And some of my adjusted photos capture the scene, but just don’t have that dramatic, cincematic quality that I picked up from Vincent Versace’s Oz books. For the techniques, the color book Welcome to Oz 2.0 is all you need. It’s out of print, but there are used copies on Amazon.
This week I reviewed the two Oz books, taking notes on the techniques, which I can now distill way better than I could when I started down the path a bit more than 10 years ago. Hopefully, with a deeper understanding, speed and facility will follow. Sadly, two of his important tools, FocalPoint is no longer supported by its developers and the Lighting Effects filter in Photoshop has been abandoned. So we need to use alternative means to introduce lens blur and selective lighting. So far, not too much of a problem.
At least I have a few hundred captures this year, so some nice pixels to work on.
I’ve been so caught up in reading and note taking activities that the image making has taken a back seat. I fired up some processing apps today and made sure I had a camera or two fully charged with an empty capture card.
Based on my careful tracking, my reading tilts way toward the fictional side which seems a bit lopsided for my long term goals. So I’m resolved to do more leisure non-fiction reading and make sure that my focused note taking gets some daily attention.
Leica Q2 Monochom
Dallas Texas
A new photographic workflow. I let the puppy, now 3 months old, wander about the yard, sniffing at all of the wonderous aspects of her world while I wander about the yard, enjoying my own visual feast of form and texture. If I remember to bring a camera out with me, I capture some images.
Not a puppy
I’ve gotten my big autofocus Leica SL2 out of the cabinet to photograph my little friend here. Just too hard to grab focus with my M11’s manual focus rangefinder. Classic Lab.
Deep Fall
Leica Q2 Monochrom
