Skipping Stones
This is my 15 year old son, Scott skipping stones into Lake Michigan on North Manitou Island. We were losing light, and trying to get back to camp before dark. I was doing my best to keep the group moving as we were still about a mile south of the camp site, but I couldn’t resist letting them skip stones while I took advantage of the late afternoon light.
Moments before sunrise…
I didn’t get much sleep at all on my hiking trip to North Manitou Island. My tent mate spent most of the night tossing and turning…and hogging up most of the room in the hooch leaving me with my face pressed up against the wall. The upside is that I was usually awake well before sunrise.
This shot was about 15 minutes before sunup. To the naked eye, it was still pretty dark, and only a sliver of light was visible on the horizon. The exposure was a little over 7 minutes at f/22
I’d rather be sailing…
This was one of the last photos taken on my week long camping trip to North Manitou Island. I shot this on the ferry back to the mainland.
I’ll post quite a few of the Manitou shots over the next few days, I just wanted to put this one up since I had not posted anything since well before I left for the trip. I have over 500 digital photos as well as several rolls of film through which to sift….
Nuke Plant.
Here is a better shot of the nuke plant. I stopped on the side of the road to get this one. This is in Ohio on the way to Port Clinton from Battle Creek. I wish the house on the right side of the frame came out a little brighter, it gets lost in the trees and fouls up the juxtaposition….the whole point of phootographing a nuke plant in a residential/agricultural area.
Not in my backyard…
I shot this one from a moving car so the quality isn’t what I would prefer, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
I can’t imagine that real estate prices in this neighborhood would be terribly high…what with a nuke plant literally in the backyard.
Been a while….
…since I posted anything new, so I thought I’ll find something worthwhile from recent shoots. I think this one is from early June. Peace is the model’s name, no shit. Not a nick name, but her Christian name as it appears on her birth certificate. Unique…I’ve never met anyone names Peace…clearly her parents were hippies. She was an odd duck herself. Pleasant enough, just odd.
King of the Forest
So…Gary Fields’ Comedy Club is right down the street from my house, 3 blocks due south.
During the summer months, they have a bike night on Mondays (I’ve posted photos from that in the recent past) and local bands play on Thursday nights. There is usually a band on Monday nights as well. The noise travels right up the hill and right into my living room. The stage and my living room window face each other and the sound travels very well.
Most of the time I forget when and who is playing until I hear th music while I am sitting @ my computer. If they sound good, I’ll walk down the hill and get a better seat for listening. King of the Forest came through loud and clear last night, and frankly I could have stayed home and listened just fine.
I took my camera with me, but tripods are useless when photographing people in low light unless you can talk them into standing still, so I was an ISO pushing fool. Nearly everything I shot was at 1600 ISO, and I was using an f/2.8 70-200mm lens and an f/2.5 lens for the most part. I did grab a couple shots with my f/3.5 18mm lens, but foolishly I left the f/1.8 50mm lens at home. I would have come in handy. Even with those fast lenses and high ISO, I was still seeing relativly slow shutter speeds
I was pleased with the noise level, however. I was expecting a lot more color noise than I got. My little Rebel XTi did a pretty good job. I did filter one photo for noise, but the rest were left as is.
I fired off more than 300 images, and trashed over 100 in camera because of motion blur or camera shake. The upside is that I had a wide lot of images to sort through…the downside is that I had a wide lot of images to sort through. My biggest hurdle is whittling away the chaff to get to the wheat. I got it down to 30 images after an hour of sorting. Now I have to get it down to one, to post here. It ain’t fair, I tell ya.
Piss on it, I’ll post four.
This young lady had the most energy of anyone on the stage (and she was in the best light) so I got more photos of her than of anyone else.
My point of view…
The title of this post does not refer to my point of view as in what I think on a particular subject, but rather what I actually see when I look into a camera, my perspective.
A single lens reflect camera has a prism with two mirrors that “right” the image in the view finder. When viewing what the lens actually sees as you would with a view camera, the image is inverted both vertically and horizontally (upside down and flipped over). With the waist level view finder on this RZ67 there is a single mirror that inverts the image upright, but it is still flipped on the horizon…left is right, right is left. The right brain fights with the left if you’re not used to it.
But I love these medium format cameras. The lenses are so crisp, and the negative so large (granted not as large as the view cameras) you can pull so much detail out of everything. There is just something cathartic about turning a lens and bringing something beautiful into sharp relief.
On the rocks
I’m not sure why, but I love the way water behaves in long exposure photographs.
This one was around 5 minutes. I’m wishing I had a flashlight with me to put a bit more detail on the rocks along the shoreline, but the deep shadows work, too.
Over the edge
Believe it or not this is a 45 second shot that was hand held…sort of.
I couldn’t get the shot I wanted from this vantage point with the tripod on the ground (well the top of the parking garage) because the ledge was too wide. So I laid the tripod on its side across the top of the ledge and dangled the camera over the side of the building, and laid my body across the tripod to keep it still during the exposure. I wasn’t able to look through the view finder, so I focused on infinity and repeated the process a few times til I got a shot that I liked well enough to call it a success.
Old Train Station
Well, it isn’t a train station anymore, but it is a cooler title than restaurant…which is what this old train station is now.
Clara’s on the River is one of the better restaurants downtown. It is a nice thing to say, but frankly doesn’t mean much as their simply aren’t that many restaurants downtown. If you count fast food like Subway and Schlotzki’s there are about 7 or 8…which I suppose is a lot considering the size of Battle Creek.
Clara’s, Arcadia Brewery, and the BiCi Bristo probably have the best food and service. Clara’s has the largest menu and is the most reasonably priced, and during the summer time you can sit outside on the river and people watch while you eat. Their Sunday brunch the cat’s ass…all you can eat for about 5 hours….I haven’t made it the full 5 hours, but I’m trying.
I’m still on my long exposure kick. I’ve been there before, but this time I am limited to doing it at night since I still have yet to replace my netural density filters after my camera gear was stolen. I’ve replaced just about everything else, but I still have yet to replace all of my filters. I do have a circular polarizer that adds 3 stops of exposure, but I need to get my paws on some ND filters, too.
This one was f/22 for about 4 minutes.
Long Exposure on the Battle Creek River
I’ve been neglecting my blog, but not photography. I just haven’t had much that was ‘blog worthy’ to post lately.
Last night I took part (led) the Battle Creek portion of the 2nd Anual Worldwide Photo Walk. I’ve been photographing downtown so much lately I was actually kinda bored and spent most of my time photographing the other photographer. But I did do a bit of night shooting after the walk was over, and got this shot. It isn’t terribly earth shattering, but I was tinkering with long exposures. I have a couple others of this scene that show more detail, but they were lousey with lens flare. I like lens flare on some of my shots, but these were particularly nasty. This one had a few, but I was able to eliminate most of it in post processing.
(click image for larger view)
Bike Nite
Monday night is Bike Nite at Gary Fields’ comedy club (wich is more of a bar when their isn’t a hack comedian telling yarns inside). The patio is covered with chaps wearing leather chaps and bikers of all sorts. There is usually a band on the stage outside as well.
This evening I was on my nightly walk and was actually headed to the Griffen (tonight is 50 cent taco night) for dinner, but wandered across the street for buffalo wings and a beer instead. I came away with a few decent motorcycle shots as well.
I’m such a wannabe. My father was a biker, but I never learned to ride. If I had the extra scratch, I’d buy a bike and learn to ride, but at this point, it would just scream mid life crisis.
Michael & Alex
I was speaking recently, with an old classmate. I had been browsing photos of her children. She remarked that her son was very photogenic, but that her daughter didn’t like having her picture taken. But the truth is that both of her children are very photogenic…one of them just happens to be a ham and makes it easy for the photographer.
Photographing children can be difficult sometimes. I’ve found that the best kid photographs are the ones where you didn’t try to pose the child, but rather the ones where you just let the kids be kids and create their own moments for you to capture.
This is especially true when photographing children you don’t know. Kids have been drilled and drilled about “stranger danger” as well they should, but it does make a photographer’s task tricky. As I’ve mentioned before, child portraits aren’t my favorite thing, but if the money is green, it still puts food on my table just the same…so ya do what you do and you do it the best you can. The first trick is to try to establish a connection with the kids. This can be hard to do when you only have a brief period with the kids to photograph them, but you do what you can. An outwardly friendly relationship with mom and dad in the children’s presence helps. I tend to be pretty rough around the edges and children to do not naturally take a liking to me. So if you’re like me, then you gotta ham it up a bit. It might feel phony and ridiculous, but the younger the child, the more likely they are to buy it. Just don’t do anything lame like rub their heads or call them “slugger” They are people…just smaller. Treat them accordingly.
An uncooperative child does not mean you will not get good photographs. Just look at the work of Jill Greenberg and you will see what I mean. She intentionally made children cry for her work called “End Times.”
Let the child do what the child wants to do, and don’t try to compete for their attention too much. If you can get the child to look at the camera from time to time, great, if not, great.
The biggest thing to remember is that you have to work fast. Think like a sports photographer. Those moments are fleeting, so shoot shoot shoot. You’ll probably dump about 80% of what you capture, but you should be able to pull out some real gold.
Also, kids have short attention spans. Don’t keep the kid in the studio or in front of the camera all friggin afternoon. Even the biggest little ham will tire of it on short order. 30-40 minutes is probably pushing it with most kids.
Under the gun…
My friend Steve ownes and oprates a firearms training school (Michigan Defensive Firearms Institute) I’ve taken a few of his classes and found them to be worth while. The link provided is worth a click.
Steve is a retired Sheriff’s Deputy from Wayne County Michigan, and generally knows his poop. He is a large individual with all of the graces and subtlety of a 400 pound ballerina, and has about as much tact as a 3 year old, but there are few people on the face of the planet that can out shoot him.
He is pictured here bird dogging one of his students.
Michelle
I’d rather shoot portraits than anything else.
Ironic considering I don’t care for people much….
Self
When I have nothing else to photograph, I photograph myself.
…suppose I could have dragged a razor across my face first, though, huh?
Desert of Maine
Yup, there is a desert in Maine….look it up.
The happy accordion.
Shot this one during the World’s Longest Breakfast Table in Battle Creek this past Saturday.
Once a year, the city closes down main street, and a tables are lined up end to end all through down town (about a mile long), and Kellogg’s and Post cereal companies buys the whole city breakfast. Event lasts about 4 hours. There are musicians up and down the street, as well as different cereal characters like Tony the Tiger, Sugar Bear, Snap, Cackle, and Pop (though this year, I only saw Snap)
This gentleman was one of the street musicians. His vest and accordion were a god awful orange that just didn’t translate very well in the original photograph. But I figured everything looks better in Black & White, and everything B&W looks better with a tad of contrast.
…womanly.Anticipation
This is the second (actually the first) photograph of the diptych I submitted to the West Michigan Art Exhibit…the one that was not accepted.
After
I managed to get this one into the West Michigan Art Exhibit last year. It was part of a diptych, but the second half was not accepted.
I missed out on the exhibit this year due to financial restraints. Kinda bummed about that, too because the juror’s preference was right up my alley.
I coulda been a contenda…
A piece of Emily
I’m not sure why, but I really enjoy photographs with a lot of negative space, and this one has a pretty good dose of it.
The negative space itself becomes part of the subject matter. It competes for attention. But, not much can take attention away from Emily. I really like the curve of her arm as it blends into her torso and leave the bottom of the frame.
Efergoh 
Brother, can you spare a dime…
Think about the low points in your life. Most of us pride ourselves on self reliance and pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but from time to time, we need to rely on others for strength, or simply a hand up.
Now think about the high points in your life. Often times we get so wrapped up in our own little worlds and our own little lives that we simply can’t be bothered with the troubles of others. We don’t want to see it because it reminds us of where we once were, or where we could be again. Reality can be ugly from time to time.
July 1, 2009 | Categories: Editorial/Conceptual | Tags: digital photography, editorial, photography, Portrait, portrait photography, social commentary | 1 Comment