The obligatory "first snowfall of the season" shot

Because the first snowfall of the season happened overnight and I needed a photo to post today. Taken with a rental Nikon D90 fitted with a 17-55mm f/2.8 lens. That lens alone is a honkin' big hunk of metal and glass about the size of my D60 and its kit 18-55 lens together. But it do take some sharp, purdy pitchers.

I'd love to have both items on a permanent basis, and I probably could if I could talk all of the companies I pay bills to each month into letting me go a month without sending them any money. Hey, I'm just one guy and they probably wouldn't even miss it.

"Worm's eye" photo taken by holding the camera an inch from the ground (even I'm not crazy enough to lay on my belly in the snow, even though I've done it before to get a picture). I let the D90's 11-point autofocus do its thing.

Let's see. Wireless flash triggers, Nikon D90, mondo lens. I wonder if Santa reads blogs?

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Temporary toy

I got these goodies to play with for a few days. It's a Nikon D90 with a 17-55mm f/2.8 lens. I discovered Borrowlenses.com, an online camera equipment rental site that only charges you a very reasonable rental fee -- most other rental outfits put a hold on your plastic equal to the retail value of the equipment until it's returned.

Camera and lens, which includes all of their in-the-box accessories, insurance plus shipping both ways all adds up to about 20 dollars a day. Not too bad. I'm renting this to use on a photo gig this Saturday and am taking a couple of days to get acquainted with it. For about 10 dollars a day more, I could have rented a Nikon D3x, a top of the line pro camera, but I figured the learning curve may have been a bit too steep for shooting an assignment only two days after I've touched one for the very first time.

The photo of the D90 was taken with my trusty D60. Used three strobes, one with a honeycomb grid placed above the subject and another, also outfitted with a grid, to the right. A third strobe was placed six feet to the right and slightly behind the subject with a red gel to add some color highlights. This strobe was triggered via a synch cord. The other flashes were set to slave mode to fire when they detected the flash from the first strobe.

Maybe Santa will bring me a set of wireless flash triggers this year. I've been a good boy.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Film revisited

Got my first batch of pics back from the trusty old Canon Canonet that was gifted to me (I used to abhor nouns used as verbs, but now I think it's a simply cromulent way of embiggening the English language -- just don't get me started on apostrophe abuse).

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the Canonet, a 1970s vintage rangefinder camera. Its history with me started as a footnote to this blog entry. Had a frozen shutter which I was able to unfroze. Filled it with Acros black and white film and shot about half the roll before realizing that Acros has to be developed in B/W chemicals, not C-41 color, like TMax film. Nobody nearby does straight B/W anymore (and this is Chicago we're talking about). I'm considering buying some developing equipment and doing it myself, like I used to long long ago in a darkroom far far away.



In the meantime, I slapped in a roll of Fujicolor Sensia (slide film), which I had cross processed in C-41 at good old Walgreen's. I discovered that Sensia does not take as well to cross processing the way a higher end film like Velvia might. Sigh. Some color desaturation and fiddling with levels in Photoshop rescued some images.



During the couple of weeks it took me to shoot up the roll of film, I played a game of me vs the camera. I let the camera pick the exposure on half the shots. I chose the rest, based on a decade of experience shooting film. I won. The Canonet tends toward overexposure. A lot. It could be the age of the camera. It could be that the modern battery discharges more juice than batteries in the 70s, making the electric eye hyperactive. Anyway, I'll trust my own judgement from here on out.



Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Things are blooming

A purple pot of pleasant posies placed precariously on a perch. Actually, a deck rail in my backyard. I was out in my yard in the late afternoon looking for Mr. Goodlight with a 70-200mm zoom attached to my camera. Found him lurking under the shade of the old oak tree behind my house.

Aperture priority, wide open, 200mm, let the camera make the call on the exposure. No major post processing, just a couple of levels adjustments.

What else is blooming: I received an e-mail from Getty Images yesterday afternoon. Getty is in a partnership with Flickr to troll the photos in the Flickrverse for inclusion in their library of stock images. The e-mail informed me that Getty had selected two dozen of my Flickr photos and gave a link to their web site where I could enroll as a contributor.

So far, about 8,800 Flickr members have taken Getty Images up on their offer. Getty is one of the biggest players in the stock photo business, so it can't hurt to have them behind a few of my photos. So make that about 8,801 Flickr members being represented by Getty. We'll see how that pans out.

New toy! I like classic cameras and got one as a gift yesterday (from someone who visits this blog on a regular basis -- you know who you are -- thank you very much). Being involved with photography, I get a lot of people who approach me and start a conversation with, "I don't know if you can use this, but ..." Then they present me with "this."

"This" is a Canon Canonet GIII QL17. A camera with a name bigger than the camera itself. Canon introduced the camera in 1972, and it sold for about $90, which translates to around $400 in today's money, about what you can get a new Nikon D40 for. What you got for the money back then was a very decent camera that actually had more features than today's D40.

The GIII is film camera (obviously) with rangefinder focus and a fast 1.7 40mm lens. A hotshoe mount syncs the flash on all shutter speeds, which range from 1/4 to 1/500 second. An internal metering system allows full automatic exposure or you can go manual. The light sensor is built into the lens, which saves on having to compensate the exposure setting when using filters. The camera has a bulb setting for long exposures and a pc synch outlet for off camera flash. The shutter button accepts a cable release. The GIII picked up the nickname "poor man's Leica" after it appeared on the market, because its capabilities mimicked those of the much more expensive camera at a savings of about $1,000.

I'm planning on buying a roll of film and a new battery to try it out this weekend.

The photo is of my gift Canonet. You can click on the image to enlarge. Taken with my Nikon D60 which doesn't synch flash at all speeds, doesn't accept a cable release and has no pc synch. But I'm not bitter. Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

A word about lighting hardware

I spent some time yesterday working on my studio lighting techniques. The only problem is that I don't currently own any studio lights. Up until the last few months, I've been a natural light kind of a guy. I've had a few still life photos rejected by iStock because they weren't up to par with photos taken with a bank of lights and soft boxes. Ok, fine.

I came across the blog of a pro photographer who uses some unorthodox (and cheap) lighting methods. He also shoots for some big time clients. And his photos are good. I'm sold.

One trick - he frequents that well-known photography supply store, Home Depot, where he picked up a couple of 4-foot fluorescent light fixtures and some daylight-balanced tubes. Instant studio lights. I did the same, and got a two-light fixture for about nine bucks plus tubes.

For this shot, I set up the fixture vertically to the camera right and took some test shots. The fixture lit the antique camera well (a Kodak Brownie Box Camera from about 1910), but the twin tubes created two streaks of light in the camera's lens, which I found distracting. I have a round five-way reflector (you can get one for as little as $50 at a camera shop that carries them) in which one of the ways is white translucent. I placed that in front of the light fixture to ty to soften the light. Perfect.

A piece of white foam board to the camera's left reflected some light into the shadow side and a flash unit bounced off the ceiling rounded out the lighting for this shot, which is very nearly SOOC (straight out of camera). Just a very small amount of levels adjustment and cleaning up some dust specks on the mirror was all that was needed.

I'll probably be heading to the Photo Home Depot soon for another fixture. Next step, portraits.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Foggy autumn morning in the hollow

My first posted photo of the fall. And with it, I'm introducing a new feature. Actually, Blogger has always had this feaure, but I never thought to take advantage of it. I've set the headline of this post to take you to a Flickr page that shows the exposure info for the photo in the post. Just click on the headline to go there. The Nikon D60 records a pretty thorough set of data for each picture taken with the camera.

The only thing it won't record is if a filter is used. In this case, a 2-stop graduated neutral density filter was used to balance the tones between the sky and ground.

Happy autumn.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

In other news: I've landed a small but regular gig as a photography writer/reviewer for a web site called Innovative Digital Photographers. It features news about photo gear and offers tips and techniques in a variety of photographic disciplines. Check out the profiles I've written for two photographic pals of mine, Peter Bowers and Trey Ratcliff. Each has a unique take on photography.

I scored my first magazine cover recently. A photo taken at Cave Point in Door County graces the cover of the fall 2008 issue of Door County Living. The magazine chronicles the lifestyle of the Door peninsula in Wisconsin.

And there's nothing like having some of your photos blogged. (Numbers 2, 4, 5, and 6)

"Really now, must you hover?"

A chickadee makes its move at the backyard bird feeder. I wish I could attribute this shot to amazingly fast reflexes, but no. The chickadee flew into the frame as I pressed the shutter.

Still acclimating myself to the digital camera. The advantage over film on a shot like this is I can rip through dozens of shots to catch the one-in-a-hundred winner and just delete the rest. I'd have burned through three rolls of film to get this shot. This is quite a change from someone who up until now, planned every film frame and thought long and hard before pressing the shutter.

It's becoming a guilty pleasure.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Pot of gold

Yeah, I know it's more accurately "vase of gold," but the other title seemed more interesting to me. If you have a digital point and shoot camera with a closeup setting, a tripod, a window, a sheet of colored paper, a piece of white poster board, and a vase full of flowers, you too can take a photo much like this. The instructions for the set up is posted on my photo advice blog. Just replace the vase of flowers for the old camera in the illustration.

For you detail junkies out there - this photo was taken with a Kodak Easy Share C633 set for closeup. Set at ISO 80, center-weighted focus, flash off and used self-timer set at 2 seconds. Minimal levels adjustment and color saturation performed in PhotoShop, along with some blurring and vignetting for effect.

I keep amazing myself with what those little cameras are capable of.

Oh, and don't forget to take your free flower in honor of spring.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

Old but beautiful

George Eastman made it his life’s work to put photography into the hands of the general public. His slogan was, “You press the button, we do the rest.” It would be fair to say that he succeeded. It seemed fitting that this Kodak 3A Folding Brownie, called the Model A, would have its picture taken nearly a century after its creation with a Kodak Easy Share C633 digital point-and-shoot. As they say, you’ve come a long way.

These folding box cameras had a relatively short production run from 1909 to 1915. Knowing the serial number of this camera and the total quantity manufactured, I’m guessing this camera dates to about 1910-11. The bellows came in either red or black. As far as I can tell, it’s still operational. The mechanical parts work smoothly - you can hear and feel the carefully engineered shutter works do their thing when you press the release. The bellows are in good shape and have no light leaks. The lens is clean.

Hmmmm.

George Eastman pioneered roll film, making it faster and easier to take and process photos. The Model A used what was called 122 roll film, quite a bit wider than today’s 120 film. It produced an image 3 ½ inches by 5 inches in size. Contact prints were made from the negatives.

This camera was given to me by my wife’s father about 20 years ago, who no doubt, received it from his father. He also gave me a 1930s vintage Foth Derby II, the lens of which is pictured in my previous post. I had only a passing interest in photography at the time I received these items, and I put the cameras into storage. Fast forward 20 years. I remembered the cameras while testing out the macro capabilities of the C633 and took some photos of them. A little research on the Internet helped me understand exactly what I had in my possession, and I discovered that a company in New York makes and processes custom rolls of film for both cameras.

Hmmmm.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

Oh, by the way ... if you're interested, I described the simple setup for photographing still life subjects like this one on my photo advice blog.