April 30, 2012 | Little Dog on Leash

I’ve been taking a lot of photos of people with their dogs, with the dog as the main subject.  Dogs react much like people do; sometimes they bark, sometimes they lick, or they are looking to get pet.  Most of my ‘good’ dog photos are undeveloped right now, at least I hope so.  Yesterday when I was at the beach I took a number of dog photos, hopefully some of those turn out.

I especially like this photo because of the crop.  The leash obviously leads to the human, and the only other trace of the human is their tattooed and shoe’d leg.  i took this photo right around the corner from my house, so it must have been getting towards the end of the day.  you can see the critical plane of focus is on the leash, where it connects to the collar, and the dogs face is slightly out of focus.  but i’ve got to do what i’ve got to do to shoot at 1/500 of a second.  this was probably at f4.

i think the whole zone focusing craze is interesting.  i don’t think pushing my film to 1600 is the best way to get nice photos…. just so that i can always use f16.  i’d rather open up my lens and try harder, than rely on ISO to get my aperture and shutter speed right.  plus i can’t push to 1600 in the daytime because my limit is 1/1000 at f/16, which would be 1 stop over @ sunny 16…..

on my lenses ‘zone’ only works on the 28mm.  my 50mm has a very tight plane of critical focus, even at f16.  i’ve been experimenting with zone focusing on the 28mm however, and i’m interested to see how some of my photos turn out.  i took a few yesterday where i simply forgot to focus.  perhaps the 28 is making me ‘a worse photographer’, because: who forgets to focus… i would make fun of people who forget to focus…  also, for whatever reason, my 28 looks inherently more out of focus all the time, than my 50.  maybe that is part of the difference between the 50 AI and the 28 non-AI.  we will see once i process all my film…  the first images from the 28 came out quite nice.  I believe this was taken with the 50 however.  on this roll i opened the back of the camera after i thought i had finished winding my film, but it wasn’t actually finished.  luckily it didn’t fuck up any pictures too bad.  you can see some extra light in the bottom right hand corner.

April 29, 2012 | Lady is Irritated with me

i was testing out my 28mm nikkor f3.5 lens for the first time this day.  i had to get very close to make this photo, and this irritated the lady.  she told me ‘i had no right’ to take the photo.  i mentioned this in a post yesterday, but i then later edited my post because i had not liked what i had written; sorry if you got it in your email.  anyways, i’m rather disconnected from people objections to having their photo taken.  it seems like the closer you go, the more likely they will be irritated, or happy, it just depends person to person, and there is no way to tell what will happen.  my cameras all have an audible shutter noise, so, when i’m close they know it when their photo is snapped.  i went to town on this in photoshop.  the sidewalk walk really really reflective, so i burnt it, and the grass too, because the brightness was rather distracting from the subject.  i use my light meter like a portrait photographer would so my subject is properly exposed, but the rest of the scene is not necessarily correctly exposed.

April 28, 2012 | Old Man Smoking

April 27, 2012 | Flower Girl Smiles

I like how there was just enough light and just enough space at this moment to catch her eyes and smile with my lens.  This photo was taken in Oakland.

April 26, 2012 | Family

This is my second post from my iPad. I used photo toaster to manipulate this photo again. I personally do not really care for this way of editing photos, I like using photoshop because think I can get these sort effects myself, but they look more balanced when you can use photoshop to adjust and adjust until its just right. That being said sometimes I’ll try out these programs so I can look at my photos processed with these presets just to see what they look like. I could see how people like wedding photographers might like these things, like color efex and silver efex because it makes processing a lot of photos easy….and they are in it for the money, so time is money. And you can just repeat a look over and over easily. Might even work for a photo series. Initially I thought I wanted to make this black and white, but I think I’m going to do that myself in photoshop.

April 25, 2012 | Sisters

This is a photo I took at the beach in Bolinas of my sisters eating canapés. I took it last year. I was thinking about it today so I thought I’d post it. I was thinking about older photos that I’ve taken of people and this one came to mind. Reexamining it I really began to like the cookie shadow cutter shapes of laurens hat that is cast on her face and her arm. Graphically, Kari’s freckles sort of balance the light spots on Lauren. Kari is eating a canapé and passing the board to Lauren who is selecting one. This is all quite obvious. But that is why I like this photo, it’s obvious. The fact both of them have hats it rather awesome. I emailed this file from my old computer to my iPad and tried out this app called photo toaster jr. I did add flash in the brightness and contrast section, then in the effects section I choose cross cut. I guess cross cut means some sort of cross process, but I thought that the colors started to look all Joel Meyerowitzy. So I went with it. Finally I resisted using any type of vignette or borders because I want to show my picture….but I think borders look good, but I’m trying not to use them anymore. I think this has some potential in black and white too. I think I’ll try and work on it in full blown photoshop sometime soon.

April 24, 2012 | Fun with DSLRs

here is my latest self portrait, and also a good example of the types of things i like to use a digi cam for.

firstly, as far as i’m concerned, my digicam is much better for night photography.

secondly, i can go out in the middle of the street, take a few shots, and come back inside and make this in like 20 minutes.  and there would probably be no point to doing this in film, because it requires photoshop anyways – so i just cut out the middle man.

okay, so if you want to know how i did this:  i took one picture of the background without me in it.  used manual settings, and let the flash fire, although i angled it so it wouldn’t hit the ground, but would hit me where i was going to be.  i took the second photo sitting on a stool.  then in photoshop, i stacked them, and masked out the stool.  very easy.  you can do this with so many ideas, creativity is up to you.

i was inspired to make this by http://photoextremist.com/ … check out his youtube vids – he has all types of energy to make crazy light paintings and night photography and superimposed images.

April 23, 2012 | People that ask for money for charities get their photo taken.

one of my goto subjects lately has been anybody who is asking me for money (that is not homeless), or anybody that is trying to pass out flyers or something like that.  I hate being solicited to on the street.  Its not like they want to talk to me, they just want to ‘talk me into’ something.  I suppose that street photography is sort of invasive like solicitors are, but I’d like to think of street as a way of complimenting people, or at least a way of recognizing them as human.  Solicitors just want money, and that is icky.  I suppose when solicitors approach me and i shoot them, its my way of disarming them and taking the upper hand before they can get into their pitch.  If I really wanted to get her goat I would have taken more shots, but my rule is 1 shot per person.  Which I break sometimes, but I find that my first shot is usually better than the following shots, at least when I shoot digi…

So, I could tell that this chick was about to do just that to me, so I took her photo.  I think her face really says this as well, because she is trying to greet me, but I’m already attacking her with my camera before she could attack me.  i suppose what is extra-ordinary about this image is that when i was showing my girlfriend marisa my photos from this trip, she actually knew this girl, and actually was her roommate in santa cruz, long ago, and the girls name is Liz.  She was telling me that i could afford charities if i managed my money differently.  What about her stupid hair dye, her stupid ring, her stupid ear rings, stupid nail polish.  all that cash could have feed a starving baby.  i didn’t say that, but i did tell her i was a starving artist and i spend all my extra money on processing film.

April 22, 2012 | Lost In Thought

saw this bus stopped and this little dude sitting in the back just zoned out.  did my best to make a composition as quickly as possible.  luckily i got his facial expression amidst all of the reflections in the window.  i suppose if i just got a CPL filter things could be different, but i sort of like shooting filterless and getting whatever reflections the glass gives me.  in other news i received a stainless steel developing tank in the mail today, as well as a 28mm nikkor lens.  so now my nikon fm is all wide angled out.  the lens only opens up to f3.5, which isn’t so wide, but it was only 70 dollars for a minty nikkor lens.  also it won’t meter, so i’ll be bringing my light meter around with me.  which is better anyways, because when i meter through the lens, i’m always drawing more attention to myself.  i’ve became quite good at using the light meter while walking the streets/predicting using sunny 16 and EV values as i move in and out of the shade.  i haven’t been processing my film immediatly anymore.  i’m sort of sitting on a few rolls, and i think thats how i’m going to roll.  i here costco does develop and scan for just 5 large (color).  i’m saving up my b&w film to process myself, although i’m sort of scared of buggering it up because the b&w rolls i’m sitting on have some special shots on them.  more to come, thanks for reading!

April 21, 2012 | Girls Inspect Statue

i missed the ‘decisive moment’ on this shot.  but i still like it.  its a touch overexposed, but not for the kids.  sometimes you’ve just got to shoot in the middle of the day, and deal with ‘bad light’.  at least i do since i am normally sleeping or working when there is ‘good light’.