This is a shot from the top of the Vessel at Hudson Yards, taken with a 16mm wide-angle lens on a full-frame camera body. it looks wild but it doesn’t really capture how big or how high this thing is. I do know that after having climbed it with a 60-lb. camera bag on my back, my calf and glute muscles were singing. More on that experience later.
One of the things I put aside in the Great Cleanout was my Dad’s camera bag, a big poofy faux-leather monstrosity that was more zippers than usable space. Inside, I walked back through his digital camera history, which included the following:
- A Nikon Coolpix 995, their millenial attempt at a consumer-friendly point-and-shoot hobbled by an inane menu system and a confusing button layout. Maddeningly, though, in a world where two of my newer-vintage Nikon prosumer DSLRs have died from mechanical failures, this camera from 2001 still boots up and takes pictures. Dad bought a couple of specialty screw-on lenses for it at some point, which are mostly fun for novelty value, and also a slide digitizing attachment. There are also about 10 aftermarket batteries of varying age and quality available. I think this might be Finn’s beater digital camera after I get it cleaned up.
- A Nikon D80 I’d just given him a year and a half ago to have fun with. On the card inside were several pictures of his dining room table, the kitchen, and the front walk, when he was getting used to the features and controls. He’d bought a handful of new batteries for this camera as well. I wish I’d given it to him much earlier, because I don’t think he was comfortable with it yet. This will replace the aforementioned DSLRs I’ve got laying about the house.
- A Canon Vixia HF R300, a tiny HD-quality video camera he’d bought last year at some point, and about six new off-brand batteries. It’s the kind of camera I would have killed for about 15 years ago but I don’t entirely know what I’ll do with it just yet; Finn can certainly have fun with it, and we may use it for things like school events or maybe I can bring it in for work events. This also came with a handful of batteries.
- Finally, I inherited his Konica Auto S2, the camera he used to shoot most of our family photos up until the early 1980’s. After examining the outside of the case I realized it’s a lot different than the other 35mm rangefinders I’ve used in the past. This article goes into some good detail about the design and setup of the camera, and mentions that the lens (a 45mm f/1.8) is both excellent quality and fixed to the camera body, so my dad was shooting a fixed prime before all the hipsters were. I will need to scare up a new battery for it, as well as give the whole case a good cleaning, but I’m excited to put some film through this body and see how it turns out.
Fuji just updated its wireless camera app for the first time in the 2+ years I’ve been using their cameras. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m hoping I can try it out this weekend and see if they’ve made it easier to do things.
I found this in a random picture thread online. Apparently this was a bakery based in Newark and was in business up until the late ’60’s or early 70’s. The cart above was electric, made by the Walker company. Below is a horse and cart from earlier days. I’d love to have that horse blanket; I might have to recreate that logo.
This is a video about scanning negatives with a Fuji XT-3, a macro lens, a cheap copystand, and a film holder. The other element is a plugin for Lightroom called NegativeLab Pro. If I get into scanning negatives (after I scan all of the slides) some variant of this workflow will be what I use.
Petapixel has a short article on how to modify a TLR camera (my Yashica, for example) to focus more easily, using nothing more than some rubber bands, aluminum foil, and a ruler. Plus, it’s set up as a visual picture guide instead of a 15-minute video that I can’t be bothered to sit through.
The online photography world has been buzzing with news of change at Flickr: the new owners have made sweeping changes to the service and are limiting free users to a cap of 1,000 photos. Apparently they will be nuking everything above that for free accounts in early January. They’re also finally getting rid of the Yahoo login (thank christ), fixing comment spam problems (which never affected me because I never got many comments) and enhancing Flickr Pro (step one: moving from Yahoo data centers to AWS).
I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 12 years (I joined the day they were bought by Yahoo, so I blame myself for all that followed) and in the last 5 or so I’ve often wondered what my money was being used for. Yahoo was happy to charge me a fee but never added anything to the service–in fact, they wound up taking some of the things I liked away (the ability to post images and text to my blog from Flickr was super handy, and that’s been gone for years now). I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I was hosting more images from WordPress and less from Flickr, and how I might continue down that path in the future…but then I looked at my hosting bandwidth and realized it spiked when I started doing that. So I’ll keep using Flickr as my photo CDN for the time being, and get my money’s worth out of the Pro account for as long as possible. Hopefully they will start adding useful tools back in to the service in the near future.
I shot the WRI board meeting dinner two weeks ago on the roof of a building with a commanding view of Capitol Hill. I thought I’d share some of those shots here.
I’m very proud of this shot and several other in the series; I used a 200mm long lens and shot from across the room to bring the Capitol dome and flag closer to our CEO (in actuality it’s a little under a half mile away from the roof we were on).
Here you can see the actual distance I was talking about above. This flag is 5’x8′ and we bought it specially for this event. It looked great up there.
This is a shot of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who spoke at our dinner, and he was riveting. I wish he was a Maryland senator; I’d vote for him. I used the same technique as above to bring the Capitol closer.
Most of the other shots are people at the event who wouldn’t be interesting to any readers here, but the rest of the photoset is live on Flickr.
This shot is from the New York event I shot back in September. It was set up in a long narrow room with lousy light and little room for movement. Once I had the camera dialed in with color, aperture and shutter speed settings, I set the timer for 10 seconds and held it aloft on my tripod with a 16-35mm wide angle lens.
This shot was also taken with the same lens; in order to get the right angle on both tables and frame things correctly, the camera lens is, in reality, about four inches from the hand in the foreground. Wish I’d moved the coffee cup.
I’ve been reading a book on the train to work since the middle of last week, and it was fitting that I finished it in New York: Meet Me In The Bathroom is an oral history of the NYC rock scene at the turn of the century when the Strokes, Interpol, TV On the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all blew up. I was reading the first music blogs at this point and sort of liked the Strokes but Interpol resonated more with me at that time; it was unlike anything I’d heard before. The book paints a picture of New York that sounds dirty and glamorous and goes a long way to explain where these artists had come from and who they were. Much like fine art, I appreciate music more with context and personal experience, so I started digging back into these and other affiliated bands on Spotify today and found a new appreciation for some bands and some songs that I didn’t have before.
Another book the family just finished this evening: The Mysterious Benedict Society, a young adult book that was recommended for kids who enjoyed the Harry Potter series. It’s a big one that begins slowly, and is written in a way that is challenging to read out loud. But the ending paid off and Finn wants to move on to the next book in the series, so I’ll be placing an order on Amazon tonight.
At the event yesterday, I was using a new Canon 5D MkIV, which is the fancy new update of the MkII I inherited when I came to WRI. It’s a fantastic camera in all respects–focus, speed, ISO depth, a touchscreen interface, 4K video, and wireless connectivity. But the wireless fell flat on its face yesterday as several people asked me to send them photos directly from the event; I’d followed Canon’s instructions and paired the camera with my app at the hotel the night before the gig (it’s where I got this shot of NYC from) like a good little monkey. But try as I might between photo ops yesterday, the fucking camera forgot how to work and wouldn’t broadcast WiFi for shit, and I didn’t have the proper cable to pull them onto my laptop at the venue–nor did I really want to. My Fuji does this in three steps, and it’s worked flawlessly. I wonder why Canon couldn’t get this right? I’ll have to do some more digging to figure that out. I got some good shots, though, and even set up a timelapse with my GoPro perched on an exit sign for giggles.
Nikon just released a new version of its camera-mounted slide digitizer, the ES-2. For about $140, it’s a barrel that mounts to either a 40mm or 60mm Nikon lens, with a slide tray and a film negative strip holder. Looks like it’s getting decent reviews, and only recently has it actually been in stock. As I’ve mentioned before, my Dad shot slide film almost exclusively so we’ve got boxes of family history waiting to be digitized. I’d have to buy an appropriate lens to match as well, but it’s a lot better than $2K for a dedicated machine.