The Personal Journal of James Vornov
I’ve been capturing images over the past few days with the Sigma DP1. No very long sessions as the light seems to be disappearing on me. It must have to do with being post spring equinox and creeping up on the summer solstice. We have have harsher and less inviting Suburban Landscape now.
Or it could be that the look I was chasing has run it’s course. I seem to be producing these more intimate images now, pushing more subtle texture and illumination into the images.
This week was an R&R training week, so today I did the first CTS Field Test of the year. While the idea of period all out testing to track progress isn’t a Chris Carmichael invention, his test is very well suited to cyclists. I’ve written previously about the Cooper 12 minute run which is well established and even normed for age groups against VO2Max.
The CTS test for cyclists consists of a warm up, a three mile all out effort, a rest (returning to the start) and a second all out effort. The average heart rate that’s the higher of the two efforts is used to estimate Lactate Threshold Heart Rate and Anaerobic rate to construct training ranges. One of the nice aspects of the two trial test is that it gives one a chance to repeat if the first effort isn’t really maximal and it also provides insight into muscular endurance if the second effort falls short of the first. According to Carmichael, they should be pretty similar.
Subjectively it was interesting. On the first effort, my heart rate rose to about 167 BPM and just stayed there. I was breathing regularly and loudly but in a well controlled manner. My legs just didn’t seem capable of pushing the heart rate higher toward the end. My average HR 164 at an average speed of 17.7.
The second effort was much harder. My heart rate was pegged lower at about 164 and my legs just wouldn’t work hard enough to push my heart rate up any higher. I did get my breathing ragged toward the end, but overall I was breathing just a notch easier. My conclusion was that I didn’t have the muscular endurance to push as hard a second time. My speed on the second dropped to 17.4 and average heart rate was 161.
It’s interesting that the numbers- speed and heart rate seem relatively small compared to the big subjective difference I felt. It’s an indicator though that I probably can improve by working on muscular endurance.
And am I more fit than last year? Last year I tested a bit earlier- April 2. I only felt comfortable with a single effort. My average heart rate was 154.7- substantially below the first test this year. Average speed was 16.5 mph.
So training over a year allows me to work for longer periods at higher heart rates. I’m faster over the measured course. It’s nice that I’m actually better than I was at the last test which was Sept 18 last year, showing that I should be on track to be fitter than last year even looking out 6 months.
It’s now the end of April and I haven’t written here in the fitness category for some time.
Having the Garmin 305 creating a diary of time, distance and heart rate allows for easy tracking of training volume. SInce I started in Feb 2007, I now have 3 months of overlap. No surprise I guess that my monthly times are hovering around the same 16 to 20 hours per month. With work, travel and family obligations, I’m time constrained. I don’t expect that I’ll really be able to push the hours much higher than my current 200 or so hours a year.
I’m working harder than I was last year, in general. Those 20 minute intervals of 8 sec hard, 12 sec spin have now become on bicycle intervals. I did one 20 minute period, building to a similar intensity which was embedded in a ride of an hour and 20 minutes. I did two rides the next week with 3 x 10 minute intervals. I thought the latter was a better way to provide training load, so expect to resume next week, pushing time and possibly number of intervals. The indoor training was good preparation.
Am I more fit? I certainly am riding faster consistently compared to last April. It’s not a huge difference though, probably less than one mph. And working at higher intensity, one would expect some higher speeds. Matching ride to ride at similar average heartrates seems to show about the same speed difference.
Subjectively, I feel like I’m producing more power for a given heart rate. I’m pushing up hills in lower heart rate zones than I recall previously. My expectations are modest now that I understand where my VO2 max stands relative to the population. It will be interesting to see whether I can continuous build on this and be yet more fit next year.
Tomorrow or Friday, I’ll be doing the Carmichael Field Test. I haven’t done one since the fall, so I’ll get a direct comparison of whether I’m holding steady or doing any better.
Flickr has been been a great inspiration for me over the last year and a half- the time I’ve been photographing consistently. I have a venue to show my work, getting it in front of dozens of viewers daily- more than I would if I had a gallery, more perhaps than if my work were in a museum. Of course I’m giving the views away for free and am not selling the work, but then the purpose of the art is to help myself and others see the world more acutely, not to supplement my income. If I weren’t a highly paid professional, my attitude and thus my approach might be different.
I certainly am insulated from the art world as a Flickr exhibitor. My feedback is not sales or critical assessment but rather image views. Early on I realized that for some reason my images attract many more views than comments, but I hope that’s because they’re a notch more visually challenging that the average image. My subjects, as here, are generally unimportant.
The New York Times Magazine has an article on the elements of the Flickr style: “While pretty and even cute, these images are also often surreal and prurient, evoking the unsettling paintings of de Chirico and Balthus, in which individual parts are beautiful and formally rendered, but something is not quite right over all. “
I agree that we often don’t get it “right over all”. And I think the phrase “forcibly manipulated” captures well what is not quite right. As digital cameras have reached maturity in the last few years, the digital darkroom is being explored vigorously. Some of the efforts are pleasing, but are fantastic and for me, ultimately unrewarding. But there’s a middle ground where the darkroom effects illuminate vision rather than obscure it.
Last year I wasn’t quite satisfied with my high contrast, saturated renderings of the suburban landscape. This year, with better set of tools and more sensitivity to the rules of the visual world, I’m happier with where I’m working in that zone between the real, banal visual world and the elevated language we can achieve in art.
I was leaving my house a few nights ago and noticed how the white edges of these leaves seemed to be faintly glowing in the low light. I set the DP1 to ISO 800 with the aperture wide open at f/4.0 The indicated shutter speed was about 4 seconds, impossible to handhold and leading to a daylight looking shot even if I did put the camera on a tripod. So I cranked down the shutter speed until I could hand hold at about 1/2 a second. So maximal ISO, but 3 stops underexposed.
Converted to black and white, I was able to render what inspired me that night.
This afternoon we had a family outing to Harper’s Ferry, WV. Harper’s Ferry is a National Park at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. It’s a Civil War era town that been preserved, famous for being the site of John Brown’s abortive abolitionist rebellion.
As we were leaving the house, I started grabbing the Nikon D300 as I usually would, leaving with just the 24mm f/2.8. But since the purpose of the outing was not photography, I just slipped the Sigma DP1 into my back pocket. The sky was clear, it was midday and not the best time for photography anyway.
Once again I found myself adjusting to the camera, spending more time framing and waiting for the right moment to capture the image. With the 8 to 10 second lockup of the camera after capture, I’m generally compelled to move on to start framing another image. The Nikon allows so much more flow in approaching a subject and working it photographically.
Yet, with the compactness and the relatively high yield of images like this one, I keep reaching for the DP1.
I’ve been writing about the DP1 as a series of short thoughts based on the images I’ve post-processed. This image from Geneva reminds me of the invisibility one gains shooting with a compact camera.
A DSLR with large lens (like the 12-24mm f/4 Nikkor) is an imposing piece of technology. There are lots of folks out with their little compact digitals held out at arms length, squinting at the LCD.
The 28mm equivalent lens on the DP1 suits me. But to capture this image I had to be about 3 feet away from the man reading the paper. Right at the edge of the bench. So I’m kind of crouching, but I look like anyone else taking photographs of the church. But even though the church is a major part of the image, it’s the backdrop, not the subject.
The post processing of this image was not easy because the forground figure was relatively darker than the bus stop and church. I’ve picked out two figures with light and selective sharpening. These are cinematic techniques I’ve learned from Vincent Versace’s approach. No real camera would render those two points so sharp and bright compared to the rest of the scene. It’s remarkable though how the eye is fooled, following the will of the photographer.
Here’s a Nikon specialty. The 105mm VR Micro in my backyard handheld closeup. The character of the NIkon is seductive in an entirely different way than the DP1’s Foveon
At the end of my few hours in Geneva, it started raining again, this time with thunder. The sky darkened and night fell swiftly.
I set the DP1 to ISO 800, aperture wide open (f/4) and 1/25th second. For about half of the shots, this one included, I rested the camera on a railing for stability. There’s a clear difference in the clarity of the signs in those shots, so it made the difference between usable and worthless shots.
The noise across the sky was pretty bad. There was not only typical grain like noise, but also some splotchy magenta-green patches. NiK’s Dfine 2.0 did a good job of filtering at the “high noise” setting. Whereas the D300’s ISO 800 is clean, the DP1’s is not. Next time I may bring something like a gorilla pod for stability and stick to ISO 400 or less. I judge ISO 800 as barely usable and definitely to be avoided.
Here’s an image from last week that I needed to render in monochrome. The slowness of the DP1 image writing tended to push me to grab a single image and then move on. I shot this from across the street, but didn’t move in to isolate nor did I move into position to get a really squared up image. It ends up being not that well composed, but in monochrome some of those distractions are minimized.
