Posted by mcc on Mar 20 2011 in Around The House
Here’s a quick shot of a common houseplant - a Peace Lily. Taken with a plastic lensbaby muse on Tri-X developed in Rodinal.
Here’s a quick shot of a common houseplant - a Peace Lily. Taken with a plastic lensbaby muse on Tri-X developed in Rodinal.
Kalamazoo was in the sweet spot for an ice storm on February 21st this year - just to the north heavy snow fell and just to the south it rained. But here we had a heavy freezing rain that left well over 100,000 homes without electricity. Mine was one of them. Between the oven and the fireplace and a propane heater borrowed from a friend I was able to keep the house warm enough to avoid freezing pipes, if not crabby cats pissed off over being left in the cold - inside.
Here are a few macro snapshots of the ice, taken around my house.
All photos taken with a Pentax K-7 and D-FA 2100mm macro lens.
With Worldwide Pinhole Day just a few weeks away, I decided to look at some new options for pinhold photography. Up till now I’ve been using a converted Kinoflex twin lens reflect camera, which was converted to a pinhole with a micro-drill. It is very nice and the TLR finder makes composing a breeze. However, the pinhole in this camera is not very small - based on exposure experience I estimate it to be in the f90 to f128 range.
There are loads of pinhole options on ebay these days, from holgas to dslr body caps to beautiful hand made wooden cameras. For me, having some sort of a finder is essential - I get too fussy about composition to just guess what is going to wind up in the frame. Many of the cameras out there have no finder, and that ruled them out for me.
While I was poking around, I found a nice pinhole body cap for the Pentax 6x7/ 67 /67II family of cameras. I gave this a test drive yesterday - here is the first shot I took with the camera, a 32 minute exposure:
The documentation says the aperture is f244, which would be about 8 stops from f16. To estimate the exposure I used a light meter to take a reading at f16, which showed a shutter speed of 15 seconds. I then doubled the shutter speed 7 times - 30s, 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 16m, 32m, each doubling being one stop. I decided to call it quits at 7 stops - if I went the full 8 stops we’d have an hour long exposure. I wasn’t sure if the battery on the 6x7 would hold the mirror and shutter open that long. The negative was definitely thin, but scannable. Film used was Agfa APX 100 developed in Rodinal, 1:50 for 17 minutes.
There is nothing particularly interesting about the radiator, but I like the tonality. This and the other test images look fairly sharp, for pinholes, which is what I was hoping for. With the pinhole on the camera the finder is way too dark to do any composition, but the standard Takumar 105mm f2.4 lens is pretty close in angle of veiw to the pinhole, just a little narrower, so composing with the lens and swapping it out for the pinhole works fine.
I’m looking forward to running this through it’s paces a little more in the next few weeks! While I bought my pinhole body cap on ebay, it came from the folks at pinholeedum.com.
Here are a few snow crystal photos from the Groundhog Day blizzard of 2011 - I posted these on the Story of Snow blog a while back -
I heard about the London Street Photography Award and that got me looking through of my old B&W scans. This isn’t street photography since I was driving a car when I took it (like, how can you take a street photo while driving in the, um, street…)
But it’s an overlooked shot that I like. It has inspired me to unearth my original Holga from the depths of my car trunk, and I might even develop the film in it and try a fresh roll.
This shot was taken in 2007, whilst driving through Battle Creek, Michigan:
Here’s a re-work of a digital infrared image from last fall - I decided to ditch the channel swapping and go for a more subtle color tonality. You can see the original version here.
Here it is, bleak mid winter. The skies are gloomy and grey and days pass without a hint of sunshine. A little snow covers the ground. It is cold.
It snows, now and then, and I’ve been going outside to take snow crystal photographs. But the snow is opaque, dusty, and effervescent. Hours spent collecting snow crystals result in only mediocre images, as all the crystals are broken, odd or irregular.
The other night, after a few hours of collecting and discarding snowflakes, I realized just how selective this whole process is. The snow crystals I decide to display are the most regular and symmetric of the snow crystals I choose to photograph, which are the most regular and symmetric of the ones I gather. It seems that the vast majority of the crystals actually flying around in the air or landing on earth are irregular or broken, odd and ugly. I ignore them and focus attention on a small percentage that flatter my construct of how snow crystals really should be. Nature speaks with a loud and clear voice, but I hear only one word out of a thousand, and misunderstand even those.
Hmmm… Too much time spent out in the cold. Here are a few shots from the last couple of weeks:
This December has proven to be pretty cold - I noticed folks ice fishing in the last few day s- but aside from a little snow at the start of the month, it’s been pretty dry. Here are a few more snow crystals from the second good snow of December . As this month winds into the holidays and then to an end, no snow is in the forecast. Hoping for a productive 2011!