new lens

new lens, originally uploaded by Sophie_vf.

new to me, anyway. It's a used 24mm prime that will have to be manually metered and focused on my camera.  I am strangely enamored of the colorful coating on the lens. I don't have any other lenses that look like this at all, or else they're more recessed so I don't notice.

I haven't really tried it much yet, though. It's a wide-angle 24mm prime that I thought I'd use for landscapes and such, and the weather is currently so wretched I am not sure when I'll get it out next. If only September actually felt like September instead of November.

Out of the vault

An old - well, not that old - picture from a trip I took to Seattle with my mom and two of my sisters. We were picking up a cousin from the train station, but had plenty of time to kill. It was my first time to Pike's Place Market and I had so much fun - it was like Granville Island on steroids.

I played with this pic early last year. It was one of my earliest attempts at Photoshop Elements, learning how to use layer masks and before the happy times of discovering actions like those so generously provided by Rita of CoffeeShop photography. Then I forgot about it for several months.

My kids started this silly game: running Shakeit on my iTouch, and choosing pictures at random by pressing the touchscreen with it facing away from them. This one wasn't quite random - I kind of cheated, actually. But I liked how it came out.

telephone

telephone, originally uploaded by Sophie_vf.

Another Film Friday placeholder. After over a week of miserably grey cold weather, the chinook came and tore the clouds into fantastic shapes that changed throughout the day.

I didn't actually take the film version of this one myself - I let my daughter try out the film camera this time, but honestly she has as much of a chance as I do of getting something decent.

The film is done so I'll take it in tomorrow. I was genuinely worried I'd mess up rewinding the film and taking it out of the camera since it's been so long since I'd last done it. I hope some of them turned out, but I'm glad I have these digital versions for backup.

One more cloud picture, looking westward.

Film Fridays

This is really a placeholder for a picture still waiting to be developed. I decided to try to get more use out of my film camera - so I've decided to start making it film Friday, with a digital picture taken side by side. Not just as backup, but to remind me when the picture was taken, since obviously film doesn't have exif data. I'll scan the developed photo a few Fridays from now.

Two - three! I meant three things I learned:

1) 50 mm on a film camera has a different field of view than 50 mm on a digital, at least a digital with cropped sensor like I have. Actually, I already knew this, but somehow forgot when I slapped a 50 on each camera and headed out. Then was stupidly surprised when I went from one camera to the other and thought "hey, this looks different".

2) don't bother looking at the back of the film camera after you take a shot. There will only be the back of a camera.

3) if your film camera seems to lock up? you probably forgot to advance the film.

Man, the things you forget when going back to film!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

extreme processing

window of St. Nicholas church, originally uploaded by Sophie_vf.

I dunno. Is this the photography/processing equivalent of knitting a uterus, or inventing a butter chicken/tater tot casserole?

Actually, even if it's processed more than I normally like, I think I like this better than either of those hypothetical things. This is a restored church at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village near Edmonton, but it was one of the buildings closed the day we were there. My husband and I walked around trying to peek in the windows, and it was hard to get a shot, partly because I'm short and this was way over my head. I like the way this preset made the cloud reflections look a little like smoke wisping up from the candles inside the room.

Eryx preset courtesy of the talented and generous underthewaves at Flickr.

Caroline bay, 1987

Caroline bay, originally uploaded by Sophie_vf.

I've been meaning for months to scan some slides and pictures from pre-digital days, in particular the slides taken during my travels in Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines after university.

I remember seeing this slide shortly after it was developed and wishing it had been in better focus, that it didn't have the blurry grasses in the foreground, etc etc. But now, looking back over the decades, this perfectly captures that retrieved memory - heat, high sun, sand, and grass on a New Zealand beach, twenty-two years ago and far away from home and responsibility.

Process oriented

Since starting the 365 photo project, I've almost, of necessity, become interested in organization and processing software. Previous to this, I'd had the attitude that if it wasn't good enough SOOC (straight out of the camera), it wasn't good enough, period. However, trying to take a picture every day, whether there was a picture to take, and whether I had enough time or energy to put into it, made for some really abysmal pictures. This was pretty much evident within the first week. So after picking up Photoshop Elements at Costco, I started playing around and found that aside from quick fixes to exposure and contrast and cropping, you could really go to town with processing.

This isn't always a good thing.




I'm not in love with this shot. Actually, I kind of hate it. It was one of those last-minute, end of the day pictures, after working in the lab in the evening and coming home to poke around in the garden. The SOOC pictures is flat, soft (those last-minute shots are inevitably taken indoors at night) and pretty much lifeless. On the other hand - should the near-lifeless always be revived?

I threw on some textures from Boccacino and Rita at the Coffeeshop (not to slag them or the use of textures - they can be used judiciously to wonderful effect) and played with gradients till I got something kind of workeable.

And in the end, I admit I got carried away with the processing here, making me think: if the day was so busy I didn't have time to *take* a decent shot, then why do I have time to salvage it through processing?

On the other hand, sometimes processing really makes me happy. I recently started using LightRoom, which is ungodly expensive; an academic discount placated my frugal nature. I like it best for its organization and sorting capabilities, but also because you can lightly retouch minor things like exposure and contrast very quickly, leaving the picture in a more natural state. And in general, that is what I prefer - something as close as possible to what I saw while I was right there: I look at processing not as a tool to create something unreal, but as a way to bring back some of the reality that didn't get picked up by the camera sensor, whether through technical limitations, lighting difficulties, or user error. So this, taken in the coulees in the soft evening light at the end of a hot August day - this, I'm happy with.