On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

In the Flickr “Welcome to Oz” group, Vincent Versace invited us to try an exercise he uses in workshops. And as it turns out, personally.

The game is to go out for an hour and shoot the forms of the alphabet. No printed letters or visual puns allowed.

I put the 105mm f/2.8 Micro on the D300 and shot for about 45 minutes. The result is here:
Suburban Alphabet May 2208.

It was difficult using the prime because I sometimes couldn’t get the angle or distance to isolate the form and, as Versace says, “own the frame”. This image, T, was one example where it did work out well.

Vincent commented that he had never had anyone try it with a prime, much less a macro. I told him I didn’t know any better. Although that’s only partly true, because as I was facing the challenges, I realized that a midrange zoom would make the task much easier in giving me shot to shot flexibility in framing. It actually was something of a breakthrough moment for me as it turned around my thinking.

Generally my eye is attracted by some visual effect. Light, form or perhaps color. I approach, put the camera to my eye and move around until I see a picture in the viewfinder. It’s one reason why I generally don’t crop my images. I’m creating the composition by positioning the camera. I’ve tended not to like zooms because I don’t know what to do with the extra degree of freedom they provide.

But if one’s visualization is one step back, as in “That wagon handle looks like a ‘T’. How do I frame it? What’s the best focal length to isolate or or show the environment?” then the FOV becomes another part of the choice and pre-visualization.

Net result is that I’ve taken Vincent’s advice and bought a midrange zoom from KEH. A 24-120mm VR f/3.5-5.6 which is his favorite walking around lens. It arrived yesterday and have already started shooting with it.

I’m back from a relatively short trip to London. I was faced, as always, with the decision of what gear to bring. I’ve been using the Sigma DP1 on recent trips of course, but I had a series in London using the Leica M6ttl and black and white film.

In the end, I took both. The weather was not conducive to shooting. Drizzle intermittently changing to rain. Fogged and wet lenses. I was able to capture just a dozen images one afternoon. I chose the DP1 because I knew I’d have so little time that I didn’t want to carry the Leica around. I’ll convert these to monochrome as part of the series.

It will be a few days before I have the Ilford XP2 rolls developed, scanned and post-processed.

Here’s another distracted pedestrian trying to figure out where that guy is pointing the camera.

In the original capture, the light was uninspiring and local contrast effects just weren’t moving the image into anything interesting looking. I pulled down my copy of Versace’s “Welcome to Oz”, reduced the image to 8 bit, and fired up Photoshop’s Filter:Render:Lighting Effects filter which Vincent uses in the book.

I created some stage-lit hotspot effects in the image which creates more visual interest. Once you know they’re there, its a little too obvious for my taste, but I’ve found that it’s part of my learning curve for these cinematic images. I push things beyond where they really ought to be to stay believable and then pull them back enough so that they are present but less obvious.

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This image isn’t really a “Flickr” image. It doesn’t read well to me at small size with it’s compressed value. In the print, the vibrant red plays off well against the black and the small illuminated area at the center.

If the image isn’t suitable for Flickr, why post it? My Flickr stream is a diary for me. I can look over my output over time to learn quickly about where I’m moving as a photographer. And I’m very grateful for the audience that a public diary brings. The feedback from individuals and from the view flow is useful in context.

While I’ve been comparison shopping and comparing the iTunes music store with Amazon’s MP3 downloads, I discovered that the old ECM catalog is mostly available on Amazon now. These have been some of my favorite LPs and at 7 or 8 dollars, makes downloading attractive.

Glad I skipped the CD era on these recordings.

With a group of nice images from Geneva in Aperture, I can recover a bit. I probably should be out taking pictures every day, but the light has not been very cooperative back here in Baltimore.

I should learn though, that even though I was disappointed with Geneva’s weather during my visit, my yield of interesting images with the DP1 was higher than I expected while I was shooting.

This image was a difficult capture, with these wilting plants in an old storefront. It was only after I was back that I was able to pick the best of the attempts and create this.

I was listening to an inteview with Joel Meyerowitz posted on the net at The Candid Frame that got me thinking again about this medium of digital photography. At the very end, Meyerowitz recommends looking at the work of early American photographers William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan because they were inventing the new medium as they went along.

We’re inventing a new medium once again and these are very exciting times. The tools are changing quickly, allowing creation of images that could never before be created. It inspired me to take the D300 and my SB800 flash out into the yard and create some images that depend on two new innovations: wireless off camera flash and the rapid review of digital images. Together they allow a rapid experimentation where natural and artificial light are mixed.

In this image, I would have shot the grass and foliage against the light, but the tree would have been dark, a looming silhouette. By using the wireless flash, I was able to create an entirely impossible counter-illumination of the tree, picking out the detail in the bark very dramatically.

I’ve been pushing images in this direction in post processing, but using real light starts the image much closer to where I wanted it to finish. by taking the exposure of the ambient light way down, I was able to get the drama of the light coming toward the camera. I then independently lit the tree.

There are lots of digital photographers experimenting with these off camera flash approaches, mostly in portraiture. I like the idea that the tree here is my main character, the subject of the landscape.

I’ve had my iPhone now for about 8 or 9 months. It’s been my first camera phone and for most of that time, I tend to forget that I always have a camera with me. Mostly I’ve used the camera either to record information (snapping an image of a parking space number rather than writing it down) or very informal family shots.

I happened to be walking out of my front door the other day and liked the light on the plastic. My phone was in my hand, so I grabbed a quick shot.

The weather is warmer and I have the Sigma DP1 to carry everywhere. The Nikon D300 sits on my desk like a brick. It waits.

I’m finding it easier and easier to use the DP1 to capture images, knowing what I’ll be able to do in post processing. The sharpness of the lens and film-like qualit of the images is leading me to a more intimate portrayal of the Suburban Landscape than I was pursuing through the Fall and Winter.

I can get these glowingly lit shots easily with the DP1, so I imagine I’ll be mining this vein for a few weeks at least.