4 posts tagged “photography”

One of our favorite walks to take on the weekend is the gentle walk in the wetlands near the Palo Alto Airport

The wild life is always changing, migrating birds, huge jack rabbits... and cranes of all types

 Mocha and Kaori love this place and are happy as clams;

And of course there are the airplanes, both taking off and landing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was once pretty good with a camera, not just a good eye but technically proficient.  Too many point and shoot cameras, too little attention and I seemed to have misplaced a lot of this knowledge.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been playing around with my new Nikon D200 and relearning a lot of what I forgot or got use to not thinking about.  The D200 is a very sophisticated camera, more so than my dear departed Canon 20D.  Controls are better laid out and there is more flexibility without going to the menus or switching modes.  Last weekend I played around with depth of field.  Here are a couple of shots taken by our koi pond.  This dragonfly spends all day by the pond, you can recognize him by the junk stuck to his wing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The differance is amazing and I had all but forgitten to control this variable, as well as many others. It's fun to get back to honing these skills.

OK, so here is the long story about the Ramones album cover. 

One night in 1976 I'm standing on line at CBGBs to see Patti Smith with my Nikkormat around my neck.

A guy in the line in front of me balls up a piece of paper a throws it on the ground

Me: "Hey, don't be such a punk and pick that up"

Him: "But I am a punk

Me: "Pick it up anyway"

It turns out that after dutifully picking up the paper he introduces himself. 

He is John Holstrom THE person who coined the term Punk Rock and THE editor and illustrator of the  Punk Magazine which had just released its first issue. The first issue included this "editorial";

We talk while waiting and at some point he eyes my camera and hands me his card saying "send me your shots of the show, maybe we can do something with them".

About a week later I get a note saying he loves the shots, actually it said "those shots are a real wow. It was the first time I had seen that term but I got the gist.  He further wrote that he will use them in his next issue and would I shoot more for Punk?  

Of course I say yes.  In a little bit I get the next issue.  While he didn't use my shots on the cover, all the inside photos are mine.

A few weeks later John calls me in the middle of the day on a weekday.

Him: "Would I like to shot the cover for the Ramones first album?"

Me: "Yes, yes, yes"

Him: "They need to do it this afternoon"

Me: "But, but... um... I... need to teach Hebrew school... and I'm driving the car pool with 4 other teachers"

Him: "Huh"

Me: "Really, can't we do it tomorrow morning, on the weekend, tonight late?  Can't we?"

Him: "I'll call you back"

Well, he didn't call back, Roberta Baily who was the hostess and coat check girl at CBGBs had a Pentax Spotmatic that someone had left one night. 

She did the shoot and become a world famous rock and roll photographer  I taught my Hebrew school class... the car pool made it on time.

 

If you have a digital SLR and you are not shooting in raw format, stop it, stop it now!

Seriously I am playing around with raw and I can't believe the errors it can correct.  Check this out, I was taking pictures of my friend's family and I really screwed up.

As I said the camera is new and I accidentally put my hand in front of the flash while shooting.  And of course this turns out to be the perfect group shot if it wasn't so badly exposed. 

Enter RAW. Using Bibble Pro in about 10 minutes I turned that shot into this:

 

The RAW format is the unprocessed data from the camera's sensor.  That gives you the chance to "go back in time" and re-expose your picture.  It's like you have film that has been developed and you realize you need to push it (sorry for the film lingo) and you can reprocess it and increase the ISO by 1, 2 or even 3 stops.  That's amazing!  If I had this when I was a photographer I might have stuck with it and wouldn't the internet be a poorer place... not. 

So shoot RAW, do it now, thank me later.  I shoot RAW plus JPEG normal, it's like 10MG a photo but hey, memory is cheap.