Today I took in my venerable Nikon 16-85 3.5-5.6 VR and traded it in (I repeat, Maki: TRADE-IN) for a Tamron 17-50 2.8 VC. In other words, I lost the “Nikon” label and some reach on the telephoto end for the ability to take better photos in poor light and create nice bokeh. A good trade-off, in my opinion. Here I’m taking advantage of the 2.8 aperture to create some nice bokeh I never could have with the Nikon. At 50 mm the Nikon was an unbearably slow f5, so all that stuff behind the statue, such as the tree and the woman with the red umbrella (had to wait while for a colorful umbrella to pass) would have been boringly in focus.
I’m just starting to go over all the photos I took back in the States, but these two grabbed my eye immediately. They were taken at the SF zoo. Both are, in their way, examples of fortuitous timing. In the first, I managed to catch the flamingos at just the moment when the center one was catching some great sunlight while all the others, somehow, were not.
And here, just the right angle of setting sun manages to make these few leaves and some stray spider silk into (what I think is) a beautiful image. That, and my trusty Nikon 70-200, a huge hunk of glass that photos like this make me glad I persist in carrying around.
So today was the second day of my photography group’s exhibition, and my day to go and “mind the store.” It was the first time I saw my pieces printed and framed, and I was very pleased. Here I am hamming it up in front of my piece, Mountain Storm, which is an abstract macro of a piece of pottery about 5 mm (1/4″) across.
For a better view, click here.
Now that I have a mountain, I want to continue the series and see if I can make interesting depictions of rivers, oceans, or or the sky using similar techniques. The hard part is to make it interesting and somehow emotionally impactful. Yes I know that isn’t a word.
Here is my piece next to another tryptic of some Kabuki actors. I described the process of how these three photos were selected here. I like how they placed the most abstract piece next to the most dramatically human and concrete.
I like each of these photos, and I like them together.
This is the sensei’s piece. The location is Izumo Jinja, a huge shrine. The tree is white because people have tied thousands of fortunes to it. When you’re at a shrine or a temple in Japan, you often buy a fortune for a dollar or two. People usually bring the good fortunes home, but tie the bad ones onto a nearby tree, from which they are collected once a year and burned en masse.
“Where Spirits Reside,” by Kenji Sawa
full exif
So, after I went to my photography teacher’s place with a single pottery macro and he told me to reshoot it as a nature-inspired tryptic, this is what I came up with. I won’t bother posting a thumbnail here, since the image is so long. Click on that link and then expand the browser window to see the whole thing.
The title of the piece is 山嵐, or “Mountain Storm,” although it sounds more dramatic in Japanese. Each piece in the tryptic will be printed on A3 size paper, which is 16.5 inches (420 mm) across. The length of the pottery shard (graciously given by my friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二)) pictured in all three frames is smaller than the width of my thumbnail.
I can’t wait to see them hanging on the wall along with everybody else’s pieces!
One challenge I had while shooting is that a very slight change in angle of the light (from an LED flashlight) completely changed the characteristics of the image, since the glaze has all different kinds of metallic crystals, reflections from which are very sensitive to changes in direction of light source.
Here are two shots representing today. I spent it, like I do all Saturdays, with Genbo and Zoe (since Maki works on Saturday, her days off being Wednesday and Sunday). This is just a shot of them at the front of the train. I love Genbo’s protective arm around his sister.
Here is my new macro setup. You can see the ultra-sophisticated use of the sandbag instead of the tripod. Yes, this is primarily because I don’t have a real tripod, but also because in this case a sandbag really is the best way to go. I have two extension rings and a teleconverter attached to my lens, which means one long piece of equipment including four joints. This means that it should be supported all along its length to prevent sagging, and the best way to do that is a sandbag.
I was shooting some abstract macros of my friend Kamada-san’s work. Tomorrow the guy who leads my photo group and I will work on them, deciding what to print for a group show. I’m pretty happy with what I got, and I’ll post what we decide on later. (Here are the shots I am going to bring tomorrow. Somehow we’ll figure out how to arrange them into a triptych. I was thinking about portraying them as a mountain with clouds, but they also look a lot like a breaking wave to me as well. There’s also a cool shot in that gallery that shows me holding the shard, so you get an idea of scale.)
Two days ago I met with my photographers group, which is planning for a group exhibition in a couple weeks. I brought a few candidate photos, and the leader of the group selected a macro of my friend Kamada-san’s pottery for me to present. Only, he told me to make it into a tryptic, or three-part piece. So, I’m going to reshoot it in the next few days and see what I can come up with. But doing a coherent three part piece of an abstract macro is hard. Should be interesting, though.
Here are some people arranging some pieces of another tryptic, this time of Kabuki actors. They are using a projector to show the computer screen on the wall so everyone can participate. The guy who took these photos brought in about 50 different shots to select among, and they selected a combination that I suggested, which was significantly ego-stroking to leave me smiling for a few minutes. Only, I suggested it with the two outer faces looking inward, whereas the sensei (the back of whose head is front and center here) immediately recognized that it would be better with them facing outward. And, of course he was right. His own contribution to the exhibit was tailored, I think, to be good but subdued enough not to take all the attention from everybody else’s work.
I’ve talked about my potter friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二) twice before. This time I asked him for some fragments of broken pieces to play around with and he was nice enough to oblige.
These shots were taken with my ZF 100/2 macro lens, my very crappy tripod (I used a 5 second timer, on the theory that all the wobbles from pressing the button would have extinguished by 5 seconds after pushing the shutter), my SB-900 flash, and a PK-13 extension tube. This 27.5 mm ring is just an empty tube that fits between the lens and the camera. Working on the same principle that when you move a magnifying glass farther away what’s in it gets bigger, this little ring can magnify images by a lot. And, since it’s just empty space in there, there is no loss of image quality. What you do lose is light, and the ability to focus very far away, but both of these are negligible for table-top macro photography.
Since I used a macro lens with an extension ring, what you are seeing are very, very close-up images of these fragments. Unfortunately my Nikon D90 does not glean any photographic information from the lens, but these were all taken between f11 and f16. Even at these small apertures, the depth of field is still incredibly small at this short distance.
Finally, in this series the one that really benefits from clicking to enlarge is the second one, since its horizontal orientation means that it gets shrunk by a lot to fit into the space. And, this is the one that best exposes the boundary between stone and glass (which is really what the glaze is).
Last weekend I went on my first model shoot ever. I’ve mentioned here before that I belong to a photographer’s group here in Kyoto. Every odd month they meet to critique each other’s work, and every even month to go shoot something. I usually don’t go on the even months because I don’t like sacrificing Sundays with my family, but I just couldn’t resist this one time because it was an outdoor nude model shoot. They have a few different models who do this sort of thing for the group (and the sensei in particular, who is very well known), and it was the first time I was able to tag along.
The model was both very nice and very skilled. Skilled as in, being able to stand on a rock in a freezing cold river in various stages of undress for long periods of time and not complain nor lose concentration. She didn’t look cold, even though she had to be, especially when the sensei went and doused her with river water.
I have a lot more photos from this day I want to share (even that are suitable for a family blog), but the sensei asked me not to post more than this for now. A few people from the group are going to be using these photos for competitions, and he didn’t want me to “give away” the model and location before that. I was going to stress that this blog isn’t exactly frequented by the Japanese photography elite, but it wasn’t worth belaboring the point.
(Update: Upon looking at this post again, these photos also illustrate what a great firetrucking lens the 70-200 is. Couldn’t have gotten these shots with anything else.)
I just came back from a meeting of some photographers who get together every month to share and criticize each other’s work. It’s a truly humbling experience, because some of them are really good. The main “instructor” always has some great stuff (he shoots Canon, but nobody’s perfect).
I spend a lot of time reading gear-related forums on the net, and people there are obsessive about “pixel-peeping,” or looking at fine level of detail that you would never ordinarily notice unless you blew it up a print to the size of your dining room table and inspected it with a magnifying glass. While this is perhaps appropriate to gear forums, I enjoy my meetings of photographers so much because it’s all about composition and intent. Everyone critiques everyone else’s photos, and when you have ten people taking apart the composition of your photo, it’s an enlightening experience. A certain amount of technical proficiency is a given, but it’s not the subject of the conversation.
Of no particular relation to that are these two shots, which I took while experimenting with prolonged exposures. I tried following people with my lens as they walked down the street, at exposures of one-half to a second or so. These two are the most interesting.
I love how the ultra-thin depth of field created by aperture of f2 at very close distances results in ghost-like apparitions.
Tiny, tiny
Little bit more depth of field here
This past weekend we took a trip down to Osaka to go to the Kaiyukan, which is supposedly the biggest aquarium in the world. Or maybe it just has the biggest tank; sometimes these details can be hard to pin down (a tendency accounting for more than a few grey hairs on this translator’s head).
I’ll have more pictures from the aquarium later on (promises, promises…), but these are from the harbor that the ferry we took from the aquarium landed at. I like the menacing look of the anchor in the first one, and the color in the late afternoon sun of the big…thing…in the second.
These are also the first pictures here that are geoencoded. Using a one dollar application on my iPhone to record longitude and latitude information, and a plugin for Lightroom written by my friend Jeffrey, I can now geoencode all my photos. What this means in practice is that you can click a single button to see the location of each photo on a map.
So, I sold my venerable Fuji S5 Pro. I was very sentimentally attached to it, as it’s a great people camera that I bought it expressly to shoot my kids with. However, Nikon came out with something I couldn’t resist. The new D90 takes video, and is the first SLR in the world to do so (Canon has a new camera that does as well, but it’s not on sale yet and costs more than twice as much).
The S5 had great dynamic range and skin tones, which I loved. The D90 has better resolution, speed, high-ISO performance, and video. It was worth trading in the S5 and a lens. I’m not ordinarily big on video per se, but with Genbo and Zoe so young it seemed like a perfect fit. There are some times when video does justice to young kids more than photos, and although I have a video camera, like 99% of video camera owners it stays in the closet all the time.
This is part of the reason I have not posted in so long. I’ve been figuring out my new camera. At the same time I’m switching from Aperture to Lightroom, and transferring all my photos is a huge pain. Aperture is nice and I have no complaints, but a friend of mine is a Lightroom developer and made me an offer of free lifetime personalized support, including coming over to my house late at night to fix any inconsequential problem that might arise. And, I’ve always thought Lightroom had a slicker interface. So.
