While travelling in the Florida Keys last year, I looked hard for a place to fly my kite camera rig. Open spaces in the Keys are hard to come by. I finally found one space on the southern tip of Marathon Key and was able to get this photo of the shore and Highway 1.
Most of the pictures from this shoot I converted to black and white. This allowed me more lattitude to salvage some detail in deep shadows without worrying about funny colors appearing. But this picture of Kat with Orchid Pool only worked in color. It used to be that you had to choose BW or color and even the ISO (or ASA) before you shot with film. But the digital darkroom provides greater flexibility after the image is taken.
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.
- the MuseI 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.
- the MuseI 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.
