Tag Archives: Photography

Wigglegram

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Joey-and-Tracy

You may recall how I extolled the virtues of GIFs in a previous post. I mean, we are in the future now, and one can only expect to have moving portraits like they have in Harry Potter. I think they called them magical portraits, but I like to call them wigglegrams.

My friends Joey and Tracy were kind enough to ask me to take some photos of them for some save the dates cards they’ll be sending out. Of course, I never turn down an opportunity to hang out with friends, so we went out and wandered around their neighborhood of Old Town, Chicago. I found a nice wall to photograph them, and they decided to just levitate in front of it like this. Legend has it that they are still floating there to this day.

I kid, but I did take a couple of other nice photos of them. I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to include a lot more of the environment in these portraits, and I could mix it up with some tighter compositions. Anyway, I’m a little behind on posting these, but congrats Joey and Tracy! You are both great, and even more so together!

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Wander with Friends

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Just returned from a trip overseas with some friends to the UK and Ireland. It’s amazing what a difference traveling with great friends is. I’ve done some solo trips where I’ve explored cities on my own, but it’s is so great to explore things you might not find on your own, or are what you think outside your interests.

I brought way too much camera equipment, and didn’t use some of it. I need to learn to travel lighter. It was my first time trying to travel with a film camera, but I still had to bring a digital camera with a few lenses. Next time, I’ll just bring my medium format Bronica ETRSi, and my Nikon D800 with the 35mm f/2.0. I’m excited to see how those film photos turned out, but for now, here’s a couple of quick photos.

Here’s a gif of us before going out to dinner.

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And here’s a pic of me sitting in a coffee shop in Dublin, with my new travel hat.

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It’s been a while… Cape Perpetua & The Milky Way

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Hi all, thanks for waiting patiently by your computer, tablets or mobile devices for me to update my blog. I promise I am going to do right by you, and I will start posting more. And doing so regularly. (My doctor says that being regular is good.) Sometimes I feel like the words I write are just filler, but I like to think of it as fiber, which will help you digest each of the photos I post.

Just about all the photos I post are in JPEG format. It’s a lossy compressed image format, and is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, who set the standard for this format first in 1992. In all that time, the format and compression have improved, but sometimes, when I want to share a photo, a JPEG just isn’t gonna cut it. It’s just lacking something. Sometimes, you don’t want a still photo to be so… still. Here enters the GIF.

GIFs have been around since the mid-80’s, and they haven’t always been very good quality, but it’s beautiful what you can do with them these days. I took two photos, and aligned them in photoshop to make this lil animation. One is a nice silhouette (a word which I still need to use spell checker for) of the hillside and an awesome road sign, while the other image captures the glow from a car passing by on the road above.

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This is Cape Perpetua in Oregon. From my roadtrip in October. Oregon has so many beautiful oceanside campsites, it’s unfair. The reason I love these oceanside campsites are because 1) you can hear the waves as you drift off to sleep in your tent, b) you have an unobstructed view of the sunset and the milky way (when the weather is cooperative) and 3) you’re usually far away from light pollution.

 

Alright, thus ends this post. So, hopefully it’s not too long before my next post, but I appreciate you all waiting anyway!

The Milky Way over Mt Grinnell [Timelapse]

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I had previously shared a photo taken from one of my timelapse sequences I shot while I camped in the Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park. I finally got around to putting together the full timelapse that I shot while I was there. It was only a few days after the Supermoon, so I had only a short window of time to capture the Milky Way before the moon came out. You can see near the end of the video, as the moon rises from behind me, to light up the peaks and the rest of the scene.

I’ve always wanted to get a wonderful shot of the Milky Way with the mountains in the background, and a reflection off of a lake in the foreground. Unfortunately, due to the movement of the water in the aptly named, Swiftcurrent Lake, the reflections don’t come out very clear, but I guess that’s a project for another time!

This video was shot over a span of about 5 hours. I wasn’t quite as prepared for the cold as I thought I was, so my last couple hours, I was just trying to stay warm by moving and possibly dancing like nobody was watching. Luckily, it was pretty dark so I don’t think anyone else saw me. Next time, I’ll be sure to bring some gloves, a thermos of hot cocoa, and maybe a camp chair!

 

Hole-y Film Wholly Developed at Home

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Finally got around to developing some film at home! Had a roll of 35mm film from this summer that I jury rigged to run in my Fuji GW690II (a 6×9 medium format rangefinder, colloquially called the “Texas Leica” due to it’s size), to get the exposed sprocket holes (hence the title). Since the camera normally expects a larger size film, I had to run a strip of paper in there so that the camera would cock the shutter. Unfortunately, the paper strip tore, so I only ended up with a couple of usable frames before the camera stopped cocking the shutter. Also, another downside… Since the film takes up a smaller portion of the frame, it’s really hard to compose (sorry about that eye patch in the photo below, Ashley).

 

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Stand development with Rodinal was pretty easy. I used a dilution ratio of about 1:100, agitated at the beginning, and let it sit for an hour, while agitating halfway through. Rinsed, fixed, rinsed again, and hung to dry. While temperature doesn’t matter, try not to let it shift too much. I used water that was a little too warm to start (about 100 degrees f), and by the end, it dropped about 20 degrees. Which I think gave me some gradation in development (you can see some the bottom of the film is lighter). In any case, I’d say it was an overall success for my first time developing my own film in 20 years (and even then, had only done a couple rolls in high school)!

 

Ilford Delta 400. Scanned with Epson 4490.