Collectiblend appears to be a pricing website for antique camera gear, pulled from current eBay pricing and other online sale locations. There’s an option to build your own collection; I’m currently waiting for the admins to approve my submission.
Our friend S. has done more for the Lockardugan clan than we can possibly repay. She has nursed kitties, watched over the house, coordinated showers, served as a maid of honor—the woman does it all, with a smile.
She’s getting married in a few weeks, and asked me if I could take pictures at the wedding. This is something that fills me with alternating waves of dread and excitement, because I’m thrilled from a technical aspect, flattered from an artistic standpoint, and terrified I might fuck something up. I’ve been doing some research into basic wedding photography tips, and one of the newsletters I subscribe to had a list of good articles on the subject.
The first article is focused on making happy clients, by doing things like mapping out a shot list, using diffused light, setting expectations, etc. I know I’m going to have to scout out the location of this wedding because it’s outdoors, and definitely find a few backdrops to shoot against.
The second article adds a technical tip: shooting in Aperture Priority. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the Manual settings the last time I shot people outdoors, so I’m going to muck around with this setting a little tomorrow—I don’t know why I didn’t try this earlier.
Several of the commenters suggest lenses that are out of my current price range. The 18-200 VR lens would be a good choice, and a wide-angle lens like the 12-24; I can rent the 18-200 for $35 locally, which isn’t bad at all. I’ll have to see if they have a wide-angle too.
The thing that scares me the most is using the flash; I’m still not up to speed on settings yet, and that’s going to take practice. What I need to do is read up more on TTL metering to see if that’s my best bet, or use something else. I found a book at the store last night which had some great, simple rules of thumb for using TTL flash (especially to reduce red-eye), and doing some digging around the internets I’ve found a few places where the concepts are explained in plain english. This is an article on using multiple wireless TTL flashes. I’ll add more here as I learn.
Interesting…
Well, that fucking blows. Amazon is announcing all kinds of cuts across the board, and one of them affects a site I used to use quite regularly: Digital Photography Review was bought by Amazon back in 2008 and has an incredible archive of detailed reviews spanning 25 years. They will be shutting down, offering the archive for a short while, and then…?
I remember when it was a viable business model to start up your own review site, get a foothold on traffic, and make a living off of it. And companies would send stuff to you for free! So it goes.
Chronophoto is a game where you have to examine a series of 5 photos and guess when each was taken. I love this kind of stuff.
(via Kottke)
A couple of months ago I took advantage of a sale offered by Kodak, the folks who digitized four reels of 8mm film from the Dugan family archives, and sent off the remainder of our family film—eleven reels in total. Nothing much happened for a while, but to their credit they sent me an email every couple of weeks with an update. I got an email notifying me they’d started digitizing last week, and with the space of four days I got download links for all of the reels and a box UPS’d back to the house with our film.
Overall, I’m pleased with the results, but I would have appreciated it all more of they’d focused everything better. I understand that there’s grain in the film, and that the light meter on dads camera wasn’t reliable, but I feel like I’m able to get sharper results with his old projector than they did with whatever system they used. I set up the projector in the den while watching football yesterday and waited for darkness to test out the focus: I was able to get a clean sharp image on a simple white background, but when I tried recording it with the DSLR I got very noticeable flicker. They must have some kind of interpolating software to remove that flicker, which could be the reason the images are blurry.
I’ve seen a lot of old film run through image processing software, both to clean up and sharpen the footage; I wonder if any of it is available at the consumer level…
Cousin Margaret was awesome enough to send me a box of antique cameras few years ago, and there’s one sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to load up with film since then. I haven’t really been shooting much of anything over the last couple of years, but I’ve been thinking that we need some updated family portraits. What’s been stopping me is the film loading method for this camera, which is much different than the Rollei and my current Yashica; there are no guides or arrows for starting the counter—there’s no counter on this camera at all, actually. I did a little digging and YouTube delivered, yet again: this nice man explains the difference between what I’m used to and the simplicity of how they did things in 1938.
His camera has a counter, but it’s the little window at the bottom which tells you where your film is and when to shoot; there’s no mechanical assist with the shutter button on mine. Good to know.
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Interesting trivia: The entire rear deck of the Travelall is made from marine plywood. At some point somebody glued a heavy rubber mat over the whole thing, and it began disintegrating over the years from UV exposure. I pulled out the screws and pulled up the board last weekend: underneath, the stringers and steel are in fantastic shape. Bonus: I can pull the board up and overhaul the brake and suspension systems without having to crawl under it every time.
I had the chance to park next to this beauty at cars & coffee this morning, and got a full tour of French engineering.
Holy Shit. @curatorpdx just reminded me that on this day in 1993 I graduated from MICA with a BFA and a raging hangover. I was wearing a Boumi fez (and my roommate a rubber truck innertube) because we didn’t like the berets issued by the school. This shot is taken from a picture of a VHS still my Dad recorded because I don’t have any pictures from that day.
I love old neon.