ted’sblog

I realized I haven’t done anything on this site since 2006, which just goes to show I have a life outside the blogosphere. But a few folks have asked me to post some more stuff, so I have had to jump back in and figure out again the various mudras involved in doing admin on the site. Mainly, entirely too many user names and passwords. Too bad we cant just digitize our fingerprints and use them for all our webaccess.

On to More Interesting(?) Topics
My little Canon digicam turned out to be a wonderful tool. I take it with me wherever I go, and have made many nice shots I would have missed by not bringing anything bigger. I have managed to make some 11×14s and even 12×16 or so that look surprisingly good after appropriate massaging in Photoshop, mostly upressing a bit. Until you put something better next to them, they look quite decent.

I am using an HP 9180 printer now, which does very much better than my previous Epson 1280, which died the ‘Epson death of ultimate clog’ and being obsolete, is not worth fixing. Grrrrr. My 50+ year old M3 works fine, and can be fixed when needed…..and is still worth fixing. No more Epsons for me. The HP is generally more reliable, and cheaper to run so far. Far better black and white, and although the color gamut is different, it seems quite reasonable. Fairly useless on glossy paper, but the Fiber Art papers from HP are very nice for B&W.

I finally gave in to the song of the digital Sirens, and got a Nikon D300 a while ago. I can thereby use all my wonderful Nikon manual focus lenses, including such alltime greats as the 105mm f/2.5, the 55mm f/2.8 micro, the 105mm f/4 micro, the 28mm f/2.8, and the magnificent 180 ED f/2.8. These are too good to retire, and I don’t usually shoot stuff that moves, so I don’ need no steenkin autofocus lenses.

The main use I have for the D300 is for macro work, and any other work low yield enough that I don’t want to shoot tons of film hoping to have a few winners. This is stuff like hand held macro, low light, experimental, etc. I have already saved enough on film to pay for the camera.

My macro work is usually in color, and doesn’t get enlarged beyond 11×14, so the D300 is quite appropriate technically. It has the best built in exposure system I have ever used, and I can leave my hand held meters at home. The Nikon matrix exposure system almost never lets me down, and can be used with all my manual lenses. Huzzah.

Serious work still deserves film for my purposes. I can’t and won’t spend the bucks for digital medium format, and scanned 6×7 is far better than any digital I can afford. In addition, I happen to like the color pallettes of various transparency films, and like being able to control the development of B&W film.

The biggest advantage of film is as a storage medium. Scanned film and digicam images run you out of HD space pretty quick, and I don’t want to have to worry about periodic migration of storage, or image format wars. Film storage is quite convenient and economical. I don’t think i will be pursuing high end digital image acquisition any time soon. It will take about 5 years for anything digital equal to medium format film to become affordable. In addition, it takes a humongous desktop computer to deal with the files produced by scanning film, or MF digital.

So as Spring breaks out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I intend to sling the Mamiya 7 over my shoulder, stuff an Old School Leica or Nikon into my rucksack, and head out for some landscapes and botanical closeups. Last year was not very exciting photographically, but I have found a few places to return to, and researched a bunch of others I hope to reach.

Now to try to put some more recent images up on the site if I can remember how to do that.

I have been playing around with ice abstracts and reflections in general. Franz Kline comes to the Blue Ridge. Made a few shots of endless ridges up on the Blue Ridge Parkway…I am at this point fairly burned out on endless vistas of endless ridges. I want to get down in the woods. I went on a nice woodland hike to a ruined lodge from the 1920s, and got a few decent shots. Craggy Gardens remains my favorite site on the Parkway, but the road there is still closed due to rockfall. I intend to post some of the photos from those places, along with some botanical stuff. Hope you’uns (as we say here) enjoy them.

I finally surrendered to the digital tsunami and bought a little Canon SD700IS digicam.  Smaller than a deck of cards.   I take it with me every time i leave the house.  In a period of less than 2 weeks I took over 2000 photos.  Since the storage is “free” –i.e. prepaid, like cell phone long distance–I did a lot of experimenting with things I would never try on film at 35 to 40 cents per frame of 35mm E6.  The results can be quite nice in terms of composition and color, and the lens seems reasonably sharp with only a little vignetting on some images.  The internal color settings available include a pretty accurate “neutral” setting, as well as a saturation-goosed ‘vivid’ setting, and a very goosed ‘positive film’ setting.  In addition you can decrease contrast to deal with high dynamic range lighting.  Unfortunately you can’t choose aperature or shutter speed, and the thing only focusses automatically.  It has a lot of difficulty with closeup material in dim light, but other than that is incredibly convenient, and better than most film point-and-shoots I have encountered

Yes, I’d rather use a Nikon or a Leica, but the last time I went hiking I took along a Nikon and a couple lenses, (probably 3-4 lbs.) and never even loaded the film into the camera.

Now I get to take advantage of any photo op I encounter in daily life, and if it looks promising enough I can usually go back with a film camera anyway.

The best camera is the one you have with you when you see a good photograph.

Anyway, if you wanna see the latest digicam work, click on “Canon SD700IS photos” under ‘Photography links’, and some more in “More Digicam Photos”

Just getting started……

If you’d like to check out some photos, click on the “orchid photo album” link at the bottom right of the page

If you’d like to see some black and white landscape photography, then click on the “black and white album” link

in each album, if you click on a thumbnail image, you will see an 8×10 version

enjoy yrselves

ted