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Posts published in “Photography”

Mikey, Leah, and Sienna visit New York – 10/11/2009

Last month my brother, his wife, and their child Sienna came to visit me in New York. It was an adorable trip and we hung out and danced and played and ate and ventured through the city without a care in the world. I also took a bunch of photos. Surprise surprise!!

Here are some of the best of the set.

Here’s the whole gallery!

And even better, a bonus video!

For these photos I took out my much maligned 50mm prime, the unbelievably cheap piece of glass I got with my first camera. I thought, then, that it would be a great tool for learning, but I ended up using my Tamron 28-75 much much more. However, the Tamron is long gone and replaced by a superior lens I use more and more rarely, and the 50mm is still sitting in my drawer. I never really liked using the lens; it felt clunky and inelegant compared to the zoom I was used to shooting with. It didn’t behave like I wanted it to, and I had a hard time achieving pleasing results.

But that was then, and this is now. Now, I have much more experience shooting with primes, so I thought maybe I ought to give the little 50 a second chance. I am glad I did because, for such a cheap shit lens, it is capable of making quite good photographs. I used it a lot in this set since it’s super light and we were wandering all over the place and I didn’t want to carry around a bunch of heavy shit.

I am still not entirely satisfied with the clunky auto-focus, but that’s about it. Sure it’s soft wide open, but what isn’t? I kind of like that. Having everything in super sharp focus is for illustration and technical photographs. Life’s not in focus all the time, so why should my photos be? Right. I can definitely see upgrading to the slightly more expensive 50mm f/1.4 in the future just to have the more advanced auto-focus mechanism. There’s no reason to go L for a half-stop difference, though, especially with the fine high ISO performance of the 5D2. Stay tuned for further developments from the little lens that could.

L’esprit de l’escalier

“Oh those pictures are dope. But it’s because you have such a nice camera.”

“Yeah, that’s right, I just manually set aperture, ISO, and shutter speed, composed based on desired effect and available light, focused, chose the proper lens, picked the exact right moment to release the shutter, picked the nicest photos from the set, and developed them so as to extract the most detail possible and further enhance the effect I had in mind when shooting. The camera really does most of the work.”

Montreal – 07/25/2009

Montreal is awesome. Only there for 36 hours, our trip felt much to short, too rushed, to get a good feel for the city. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time there and wouldn’t hesitate to go back. It’s funky. It’s French as hell. It’s got a thriving metal scene. And the motherfucking Portuguese lady who took the chicken I ordered and chopped it into bits with the meat cleaver? I was in love. And I had an insta-stomachboner.

There’s nothing too special photographically about these, but they’re good and I feel like they captured the essence of our brief, wild trip in the great white northern wastes of Canada.

Here’s a link to the gallery.

Windy Hill and Burritos, 06/15/2009

Clearing out more of my backlog, here’s a small set from the last time I was in California. I think these were all taken with my beloved 85mm. I just love the texture it imparts, the beautiful edge blurring, the extremely shallow depth of field, and the way it distorts things when used wide open on subjects that have lots of depth, a field of thistles, for example.

Here’s the whole set. I couldn’t be bothered setting up a page for only 14 photos.

[flickrset id=”72157622551668604″ thumbnail=”square” overlay=”true” size=”large”]

Yum. Burritos.

Christina’s Graduation from University of Oregon, 6/13/2009

Here are a few of the photos I took while in Oregon. They are mostly uninspired I think, but some of them are nice. I don’t know, I guess I just wasn’t on those days. I really just wanted to get these up since they’ve been sitting on my computer since June.

Here’s the whole gallery.

Christina’s Graduation, Eugene, OR Gallery – 6/13/2009

An inspired triptych.

While in Minnesota, I was looking out at the hazy expanse of seemingly endless water on Lake Superior and I was reminded of Sugimoto Hiroshi’s Seascapes. Standing on the edge of the inland sea there I thought I should probably see if I can create something like I remembered them to be. I ended up taking three photos, all of Lake Superior, at different places and times of day. I am going to get them printed and put them on my wall which I think will be nice, but I am having a hard time deciding which ones I like more, color or black and white.

Here are the color ones.

Here are the black and white ones.

They will hang in this order, left to right, on the wall as 12″ square prints. I highly recommend clicking on the photos for a closer look or even going to Flickr to look at the 2K sized ones.

My only hesitation is that the last time I printed black and white photos for the wall, I ended up hating them. But that might be because that was a whole lot less thought out than this. Anyway, I’d love your comments.

The North Country, Minnesota – 9/12/2009

I few weeks ago I went up to Minnesota with my friend Mikey W for a week in the woods of uninterrupted, extreme relaxing. The goal was to get some work done, which happened to a lesser extent than desired, but we also trekked through the Minnesota State Fair, accomplished a whole lot of drinking beer, made some fires much too large for the tiny little fire pit we had, fished for tiny little guys not worth eating, and rocked the hell out of the Indian Casino in Walker, MN. Not bad at all. And, of course, I made a bunch of photos. I have some thoughts on the development of these afterward.

Here are a handful of my very favorites.

Check out the whole gallery here:

The North Country, Minnesota Gallery – 9/12/2009

On this set of photos I really spent a lot time making local adjustments within Lightroom. The light during the week was very difficult with lots of hard shadows, reflections, areas of wide dynamic range. It made getting good exposures right off the cuff fairly difficult. Add severe haze to the mix for the few days we were at Lake Superior just north of Duluth and you’ll understand the conditions. While shooting I aimed to get a balanced exposure, not too hot in the highlights, not to dark in the shadow, so that I could extract as much detail as possible back at the computer. I think I did a pretty good job on these, especially at making my local adjustments fairly seamless. What do you think? Is there anything glaring here that you notice? Do you notice at all? Thoughts?