The Tao of Walking Ridge

Shooting a band is challenging.  Band members are in motion, at this venue the band was lit with colored stage lights.  The light is bright enough for human eyes, but not much for a camera.  With film, very fast film would have to be used, and this would often be black and white so that it could be pushed even more, used in light even lower than the film was made for.

My Nikon D100 with a 50 mm F1.8 lens can take some amazing pictures at 1600 ISO.  The noise of this high gain setting is still far less IMHO than the grain of 1600 (even 800 ISO) film.  The advantages of shooting with available light rather than flash are many.

In the picture below, both Kat and Dan (at the time in the great band Orchid Pool) are correctly exposed.  The further a flash travels, the less light hits the subject.  So near subjects will be brighter than far objects.

Also, available light provides a more natural top lit effect.  This results in a more three dimensional feel to the photo.

And for live performance, it is far less disruptive to take several photos without a flash.  Taking many photos is what allowed me to capture this moment.

The next time you go out looking for a neat picture to take, change lenses.  Put on a fixed focal length lens that you don’t typically use.  It will help you see the world in a new way.  This is not my idea, I’ve read it before, but it works.  I went to Greenfield Village and carried my (then new) Nikon D100 with a wide angle lense.  My favorite lens is a mild telephoto, 70 to 85 mm.  The normal 50mm lens on my D100 is about a 65 or 70 when you factor in the image sensor size.  This picture was a direct result of putting a lens on that I did not use a great deal and seeing what I could shoot with it.

I was really impressed with SimpleViewer and had used it to build a photo gallery on my website.  Then, after scanning over 100 slides, a customer wanted a viewer inclded with the CD that the picture files were to be written to.  Eureka!  (There may be an easier way, but this worked for me) I installed the directory on my website temporarily, ran the build gallery php script which builds the index and thumbs, and then just burned the files to a CD.  Not only did it work flawlessly, but it is broswer based, so it works in both Windows and Linux!  It would probably work on a Mac!  SimpleViewer is a great tool.

I was driving into Bay City one morning in the early 1990s when I saw a beautiful sunrise from a bridge over the Saginaw river.  I quickly parked and walked up the bridge to try out my new medium format camera, a Mamiya C200.  Of course, had I been using digital equipment I would have shot in color and chosen black and white or color later.  But, back in the day, I was loaded with Kodak T-Max film and though I had a commercial lab process the film, I did the printing in a darkroom in my basement.

I took three pictures that morning.  By the third picture, the sun was beginning to rise too far, and the effect was gone.  The first shot was the best.  Naturally, that was the negative severely nicked by the lab.  It was unusable, and I printed the second image.  Well thanks to my Epson 2450 trasparency scanner and some digital editing, I am now able to enjoy my favorite picture of that day.

Bay City - Saginaw River - Kodak T-Max film, Mamiya C220.

By memory, I think it might be the brig Niagra, which was visiting.  It is docked near where the Appledore IV and V call home.  A decade after taking this picture, I served as volunteer crew aboard Appledore V.

I was sorting through a box of old negatives, thinking to myself how much easier it is to sort through slides, when I stumbled into a couple of slides that had separated from the rest of its group.  One was a beautiful sunset on Lake Huron.  Instantly stunning when seen as a transparency (compared to a negative) and still clear and colorful after more than fifteen years.  Though I’m not sure, I think this may be a sunset off of Presque Isle.  I’m sure it is Lake Huron, where out away from shore nearly every sunset and sunrise is memorable.

For portraits, the warmer tones of Kodachrome 64 would still be my first choice today when trying some inspirational photography in a non-digital form with my old vintage (but optically excellent) photo equipment such as my Nikon FM2N.  However, Kodachrome does not use the E-6 process that most slide films currently use.  Looking ahead, with fewer people using slide film and fewer labs processing slide film, it would make sense to look for an E-6 slide film that would give some flair for fine art work.  Fine grain, and a creative interpretation of color would be the objective.  Enter Wikipedia:

Velvia was introduced in 1990 and quickly replaced Kodachrome 25 as the industry standard in high-definition color film.^{[citation needed]} It had brighter and generally more accurate color reproduction, finer grain, twice the speed, and a more convenient process (E-6)…..

Velvia has the highest resolving power of any slide film.^{[citation needed]} Assuming high-quality optics, a 35 mm Velvia slide can hold detail up to 160 lines per mm^[1], a resolution equivalent to around 22 megapixels on a full-frame sensor.

The colors from Velvia are vivid, and this slide film is widely used and should still be available in the foreseeable future.  Though I have a strong long time affinity to Kodak products, Velvia is worth trying for some experimental photography.

I recently was scanning 40 year old slides for a customer.  The colors were vivid and rich, and the pictures amazingly clear.  It reminded me of why many shot with slide film.  It was common in the publishing world.  For years, the signature look of National Geographic was due in part to the use of Ektrachrome and Kodachrome.  F1 Magazine uses Fujichrome film, which delivers very vivid colors.  But my favorite, the classic warm tone of countless photos, especially glamour and product photos - Kodachrome.

Because of both the longevity and the tonal range of Kodachrome colors, Kodachrome has been used by professional photographers like Alex Webb and Steve McCurry. McCurry’s famous image of Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan girl” portrait taken in 1984 for the National Geographic, was taken with Kodachrome.

When shot with a high quality lens, a 35 mm Kodachrome slide will hold detail equivalent to 25 or more megapixels of image data^{[citation needed]}.

- Wikipedia

The digital scanners available today breath new life into the possibilities of this film.  They are a natural for scanning rather than negatives, which are nearly impossible to sort through.  Don’t want to take that expensive digital camera somewhere?  Get an old vintage film camera, now available quite reasonably, and drop some slide film into it.  I still have a Nikon FM2N with manual focus lenses that are excellent workhorses.  I also have a Konica S2 with a very crisp lens.  Unfortunately, the meter has finally failed on the S2, but I may just get a handy meter or use the Sunny 16 rule outdoors and bracket some shots.  For less than $50, the quality of the images can hardly be beat.  And if my kayak rolls, well, more sentimental loss than monetary.

Stuck in a rut with your photography?  Shooting with slide film will make you think a bit.  Overexposed slide film has a distinctive look.  The movie Three Kings look is due to the use of Ektrachrome:

In addition, Russell shot the film on Ektachrome slide photography stock, and used the bleach bypass process, both to reproduce “the odd color of the newspaper images [of the Gulf War].”

- Wikipedia

Print film is more suited to snapshots, as it is more forgiving of exposure error.  With slide film, exposure changes of 1/2 stop can effect color balance of the image.  However, because the machines that develop the film are not doing any kind of correction at all, slide film does give the photographer total control over his image.

While I was looking through old boxes of photos, I realized too that slides are easy to store, compared to the stacks of prints, some near some far from their negatives.  This sunset was shot 15 years ago on Lake Huron.  Sunsets are spectacular on the Great Lakes.  Scanned with an Epson Perfection 2450 transparency scanner.

Lake Huron Sunset - Kodachrome, September 1991

As I continue to move from Windows to Linux, one of the features that FrontPage had that I missed a bit was the photo gallery feature.  I miss it no more.  SimpleViewer is even easier to use.  They have a plugin for WordPress, but I like the basic SimpleViewer so much I just set it up to open in a new window.  It is very easy to install.  Check out the new Painting Gallery to see how nice it looks and works.

The music business certainly is a mix of the great with the frustrating to say the least.  Hunter S. Thompson had a quote that sums it up succinctly.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

- Hunter S. Thompson

This is my favorite quote about the world of music.

I wanted to add some custom graphics to a fuzz pedal and discovered waterslide decals.  Technically I rediscovered them, as I recall using them with models as a kid.  But I was really happy with the crisp Union Jack graphic decal on my “British Invasion” edition fuzz pedal.

I used a color inkjet printer, leaving the white bits of the graphic clear and then painted the pedal a cream white.  There are many possibilities for the combination of waterslide decal and paint under the transparent areas.  The paint I use is Krylon enamel, with several coats of clear over the waterslide decal to provide durability.  The Krylon applies easily and dries quickly.

The pedal circuit was a standard Aqua Fuzz pedal.  Kits are available, you can build one yourself and give it your own custom look.