photo
Police car
Mother
Smile
Sunrise
Dance and smile
She’s an orphan, taken in by an old widow who lives in the small community of Yula San Juan Nueva Esperanza. The widow, 65 years old, works in the fields while her daughter takes care of four orphans; a fifth orphan, a little 6 year old boy, is going to move in with them in a week.
This may be the best photo that’s come from any camera of mine–and disgruntlingly enough I wasn’t the one who took it. Deisy, a coworker, took the picture, in full-auto-mode. 1/6s shutter, iso 400, f3.0…like, what…but…how?
I tweeked the exposure in lightroom–the camera’s meter overcooked the exposure by a hair–otherwise it’s unedited.
Look at her smile.
Dear God please help this little girl to never ever forget how to spin around and dance and smile.
Sunset
Flag in a pickup truck
Train jumping, oops
When love comes to town gonna catch that train, when love comes to town gonna catch that flame.
Ironically, in the flight of the moment he failed to realize that this coal car had seen neither engine nor caboose in 13 years. It has indeed come to town, has been in town for a while and likely will be in town for a while to come. Smooth move, man, smooth move.
Nikon F3, E-series 50/1.8, Ilford HP5+
Adobe Lightroom 3: slippery slope, but I’m wearing crampons
Well..I’ve done it. I bought LR3; the install just finished, and I’m poking around for a few minutes before hitting the sack. I took my first step onto the slippery slope of digital world a few weeks ago, D200 in hand, and now I step again. I will still resolutely dislike digital photo editing, with the following (maybe sorta possible) exceptions:
1. mellow HDR
The mind essentially does this when you look at a sunrise, it balances color/light so that you can see full detail in the ground (dark) and full color in the sky (bright). Well..actually I think what happens is that you see full detail in your field of view (the breadth/width human eyes can focus clearly on at one time), while the mind corrects the colors outside of that. I think I’m right, but may be far from fallacy-free. From the little browsing of HDR’d images I’ve done, what you “see” lands somewhere between a typical single exposure and a typical HDR job. I’m going to play around with very mellow HDR processing and some low light exposures. All that said, I’m super skeptical of it. I like natural light shots. I like them a lot. Yes details are lost and/or colors get washed out..but that’s part of what makes a perfectly taken photo so crazy beautiful, isn’t it? So yeah, HDR..we’ll see.
2. White balance
Film is awesome. It does white balance all on it’s own..oh wait, no, it’s SO awesome it doesn’t even need to do white balance! As a matter of fact, most film simply captures colors as most folks see them, straight up yo. Digital sensors aren’t that technologically advanced yet (oohhhhHHH SNAP, kid. Yeah huh). So when I have a digital shot with off-key white balance, I’ll fix it.
3. Straightening
Yup.
4. Exposure Value
Ummm..I’m on the fence about this one. I take a fair number of pictures, not knowing how my camera’s light metering functions would be pathetic, so I shouldn’t be flubbing up the exposure value to need to correct it. That said, I will likely use it to “push” exposures when need be (i.e., when cranking up the ISO and opening the aperture doesn’t cut it).
I can’t think of anything else at the moment. Tons of thoughts and ideas go through my head when I think about digital photo editing and before long I start thinking about what photography actually is. Someday I hope I’ll have good clear thoughts on all that riff raff and I’ll write it all up real nice and simple.
Violin
Practicing on a (newly acquired rental) violin in my room as the sun gets close to setting:
Shot with a D200, Zeiss 50/1.4
South Seattle
I got out of bed at 4:30 to catch a bus to South Seattle in time for the sunrise and Murphy’s law did it’s thing: the morning was fully overcast as daylight came. Mostly undeterred, I shot 22 or so frames of the area. Here are a few I liked.
Nikon F3, Series E 50mm/f1.8, Ilford HP5+. Scans done by Omega Photo, numbered by frame number.
Old film
It turns out that if you let color film sit around for 5 or 6 years, it makes for real neat vintage colors. Old film makes old-esque pictures, cool eh?
Coincidentally, pops gave me a handful of old film the other day, leftover from when he shot a friend’s wedding.
Nikon F3, Nikkor 50mm f1.4, and Fujicolor Super HQ 100.
I burned up the first roll just goofing around in the front and back yard; the second was the progress-keeper of project lets-paint-alicia-and-jon’s-house-while-jon’s-out-of-town (Alicia and Jon being my older siblings, one an “in-law”). I like shooting color, but it seems easier to say things with black and white shots. Different strokes for different days and lighting and things, I guess.
Beyond the nice ones here, most all of the shots on these two rolls were horizontal and I have no clue why.
esta mañana (old)
It’s from early ’08. It’d been a long and bad week; I woke up early Sunday morning, after not having rested very well (or much), to go run. I saw the sun coming through the front door (a sight I miss) and decided to take a photo before heading out. I did a lot of thinking, praying, and wondering during that run, and by the time I got back, some words had come together in my mind, and they matched (by chance?) with the photo.
esta mañana
dejé de la casa, para correr
y fui acogido
por el sol del amanacer
