***SW&D Photography Thread***

[Crane's]



All true. I just don't think it's a good beginner film. Having said that, my only experience shooting it was in a ski resort in Bulgaria, and snow isn't very forgiving to shoot, other scenarios are probably easier.

I shoot it a lot. I have a small refrigerator full of the stuff in 35mm and medium format. Yeah, a snow scene is not a good thing to play with this film on. Snow tends to end up underexposed by 2/3 to 1 1/3 stop if you go by the meter. Easy enough to deal with on a DSLR, not so with film. Typically I'll automatically overexpose any film I use by one full stop. If it's something important I'll bracket + or - a half stop from there.

Personally I think he should just get some Kodak Gold and go out and mess with that for a while. Just shoot it at box speed and then look at uncorrected scans. That way he'll be able to figure out if he has a camera with a lazy or hyper meter. If you know that then compensating for it is easy enough to deal with either by ISO/ASA settings or by just over/under exposing the image to suit.

 

[Gravitas]

A few shots from the past week from the a7:

Hiking yesterday in the Cleveland National Forest:

Zion National Park:

Random Utah shot:

Rocky Mountain National Park:

 

[Parker]

probably not good enough for this thread, but just for fun I did a mini series of my garden at night... with my iphone.


japanese maple


boxhedge


ginger

 

[sikeee]

late pass on the Christmas pics

 

[el Bert]

Here's some that I've taken with my iphone that I've really liked.

 

[iamacyborg]

Random Utah shot:

This belongs on the Cabin Appreciation Tumblr.

 

[basil rathbone]

Recent stuff pulled from instagram:

Disposable 35mm:

Disposable 35mm:

D800:

D800:

x100s:

D800:

D800:

 

[LonerMatt]

 

[ShakeEmUp]

Printed and framed some shots from New Orleans for my mom. I wish I could've found a better frame but it all turned out a lot better than I had expected and she was stoked.

 

[hennree]

Just spent time reading through this thread and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Some really amazing work going on. It's hard to believe what can be achieved with such little post-processing & I hope to be at that level one day!

I recently picked up the Nikon D3200 as my first camera. I don't know if that's a good or bad choice for a beginner but I heard good things about it as an entry-level DSLR.

As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, one of the huge benefits is having the screen so I can easily shoot, change a few things, shoot and compare. It's a great hands-on way of learning which settings have what effect.

I've gone straight to manual which has been a lot of fun too (although catastrophic in most cases so far ).

Hope to post some pics soon.

 

[shoreman1782]

^I got the d3000 a few years ago as my first serious camera; the entry level nikons are an economical way to learn the basics with manual control. I've gotten a ton of use out of my 3000. I'd recommend a cheap prime lens for learning, too--they're generally sharp and take the zoom variable out of the equation when you're learning exposure. I've only recently realized how much technical stuff I've picked up (not that I apply it well) when trying to explain manual controls to a friend who just got the d3200.

Haven't been shooting much lately. Did get an old camera for christmas, complete with batteries and film still loaded.

 

[iamacyborg]

Just spent time reading through this thread and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Some really amazing work going on. It's hard to believe what can be achieved with such little post-processing & I hope to be at that level one day!

I recently picked up the Nikon D3200 as my first camera. I don't know if that's a good or bad choice for a beginner but I heard good things about it as an entry-level DSLR.

As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, one of the huge benefits is having the screen so I can easily shoot, change a few things, shoot and compare. It's a great hands-on way of learning which settings have what effect.

I've gone straight to manual which has been a lot of fun too (although catastrophic in most cases so far

).

Hope to post some pics soon.

Post-processing is nice when you've got a clear vision of how you want your image to look and it can't be achieved out of the camera, though a lot of beginners use it as a crutch for mediocre shots. Focus on good composition and exposure and you'll go far, as will learning to use natural light to your advantage and taking the time to get the perfect shot.


As an aside, does anyone here buy prints from other photographers? If yes, what've you got?

 

[nicelynice]

I own a fair amount of mid- to high-range cameras, but like 80% of my photography lately has been on my iPhone. When I'm going somewhere for the express purpose to take pictures, I always take a camera, but lately I don't want to carry a camera around the city if it means I'll be only be snapping 2-3 pictures - the iPhone will suffice. The social aspect of friends and internet strangers liking my pictures also gives some wonderfully hollow sense of self-validation that e-mailing pictures to my mom never gives me!

If y'all like pictures of raw fish and whatnot, check it out:
http://instagram.com/nicelynice

 

[shoreman1782]

You didn't write this, right nn?

Goodbye, Cameras

This past October, just before the leaves changed, I went on a six-day hike through the mountains of Wakayama, in central Japan, tracing the path of an ancient imperial pilgrimage called the Kumano Kodo. I took along a powerful camera, believing, as I always have, that it would be an indispensable creative tool. But I returned with the unshakeable feeling that I’m done with cameras, and that most of us are, if we weren’t already.

My passion for cameras began when I was a teen-ager, but I took to them in earnest in 2000, when I arrived in Tokyo as a college student. Back then, the city was rife with used-camera shops overflowing with rows of dusty, greasy, and dented bodies and lenses. I spent several lazy weekday afternoons wandering through the stores, precociously bugging the grouchy owners about the benefits of one camera over another. Deep down, I wanted a classic Leica M3, which cost fifteen hundred dollars at the time, though a choice lens could easily double the price. Constrained by a student’s budget, I chose a used Nikon 8008 body, which the Times had named “the camera of the future” in 1988. I paired it with a cheap 50-mm. lens, then set off for a month hitchhiking the entire breadth of Japan, from Tokyo to Fukuoka, filling my backpack with delicately exposed rolls of film.

I shot exclusively with Fuji Velvia film, partly because of its famous lollipop-like color saturation and partly for the challenge of using I.S.O.-50 slide film. The lower the I.S.O. of a film, the less sensitive it is to light. This makes it more difficult to shoot with, but the images have a smooth, polished quality to them; while high-I.S.O. film needs only a trickle of light to produce a usable picture, the images look rough and grainy, like sandpaper. The experience of waiting for the slides to return from the developer was both petrifying and magical: Had any of the images that appeared in the camera’s viewfinder made it back intact? I was rewarded with hundreds of gorgeous, otherworldly images, and I pored over those slides for weeks.

Two years later, I used eBay to piece together a Hasselblad 500C, the classic medium-format camera. (It also has an impressive geek pedigree: Walter Schirra took one into space on the Mercury rocket, in 1962, igniting NASA’s long-standing love affair with the company, which is based in Sweden.) Depending on the type of medium-format film, the images can be anywhere from two to six times as large as standard 35-mm. photos. While the cameras are larger and less portable, they capture an incredible amount of detail: if you were to take a picture of a man holding a penny from a few feet away with an iPhone, a 35-mm. Nikon, and a medium-format Hasselblad—with equivalent lenses—you would notice the penny in the iPhone shot, you’d clearly see it in the Nikon shot, and you could read the date in the Hasselblad shot.

Holding the 500C, I could hardly believe that I had spent so much money on a box. That’s all a camera is, really: a box with a hole. Film rests at the back of the box and the lens is at the front. The shutter sits between them, and by opening for longer or shorter durations it exposes the film to certain amounts of light. Most cameras have some kind of automation, elevating them beyond a dumb box. The Hasselblad doesn’t: it has no electric parts, no automatic focus, no light meter; it doesn’t even have an automatic film-winding mechanism. It holds only twelve photos per (expensive) roll of film. But it is beautifully machined, with solid, precisely interlocking pieces.

Because of its simplicity, shooting with a 500C is deliberate in ways that few other cameras can match: you line up your shot, take a deep breath, and then, when everything comes together—light, shadow, and subject—squeeze the release and mumble a short prayer as the cloth shutter opens and closes with a thick, satisfying thunk. It almost feels like the camera is munching on the photons of light passing through it. I loved looking at the world through its precisely ground glass, though now it sits idly on my desk, its obstinate, mechanical simplicity a lifeless monument to the designer Sixten Sason’s hard-edged minimalism.

In late 2004, after graduating college, I scrounged together enough cash to buy my first real digital camera: the Nikon D70, which was almost identical to the 8008 except that, when the shutter opened, light hit an array of sensors rather than film. Even though that difference seemed small, the purchase made me nervous. I had developed hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls of black-and-white film in my badly ventilated, chemical-filled university apartment. Would I miss watching ghostly images appear from the silver halide salts, the sting of acetic acid on my hands and in my nostrils?

I stopped using film almost immediately. The benefits were too undeniable: results were immediately visible on the camera’s rear screen, and I could snap thousands of photos on a trip without worrying about fragile rolls of film, which were always an X-ray machine away from erasure. But the D70 was unromantic. It didn’t have the strangely alluring mechanical rawness of the 500C, while the shift to digital imaging disrupted the compartmentalized, meditative processes that had punctuated photography for the previous hundred and fifty years: shooting, developing, and printing. As anyone working in a creative field knows, the perspective gained by spending time away from work is invaluable. Before digital (and outside of Polaroids), photography was filled with such forced perspective. No matter how quickly you worked, it was common for hours—if not days, weeks, or longer—to pass between seeing the image through the viewfinder and reviewing it in the darkroom. Digital technology scrunches these slow, drawn-out processes together.

By late 2009, the five-year-old D70 felt about as fresh as the twenty-year-old 8008. It captured only 6.1 megapixels, less than a current smartphone, and the rear display was laughably small, the size of a postage stamp. On a whim, I picked up a brand-new Panasonic GF1, a so-called micro-four-thirds camera.

The GF1 and its oddly named technology heralded a subtly new type of device. Most professional 35-mm. cameras and their digital equivalents were single-lens reflex cameras. When you look into a typical S.L.R. viewfinder, you see a doubly reversed image, reflected once from a mirror in front of the film (or sensor) and twice more inside the viewfinder’s pentaprism. When you squeeze the button to take a picture, the mirror slaps upward—the loud clack that often echoes from professional-looking cameras—allowing the light to hit the film or sensor, capturing the image. The GF1 dispensed with both the mirror and the viewfinder, making it significantly smaller and lighter. When I went to Annapurna Base Camp, in central Nepal, the GF1 was so slight that I could keep it strung around my neck the entire trip, and the results were extraordinary. Not peering through the viewfinder to shoot provided a unique benefit: it altered the camera’s role in portrait photography. In an extensive field test from the trip, I wrote, “For better or worse, a camera without a viewfinder is less intimidating. You are no longer half-human half-camera … which is wonderful if you want candid, real photographs. Subjects focus on being human rather than being a subject.”

After two and a half years, the GF1 was replaced by the slightly improved Panasonic GX1, which I brought on the six-day Kumano Kodo hike in October. During the trip, I alternated between shooting with it and an iPhone 5. After importing the results into Lightroom, Adobe’s photo-development software, it was difficult to distinguish the GX1’s photos from the iPhone 5’s. (That’s not even the latest iPhone; Austin Mann’s superlative results make it clear that the iPhone 5S operates on an even higher level.) Of course, zooming in and poking around the photos revealed differences: the iPhone 5 doesn’t capture as much highlight detail as the GX1, or handle low light as well, or withstand intense editing, such as drastic changes in exposure. But it seems clear that in a couple of years, with an iPhone 6S in our pockets, it will be nearly impossible to justify taking a dedicated camera on trips like the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage.

One of the great joys of that walk was the ability to immediately share with family and friends the images as they were captured in the mountains: the golden, early-morning light as it filtered through the cedar forest; a sudden valley vista after a long, upward climb. Each time, I pulled out my iPhone, not the GX1, then shot, edited, and broadcasted the photo within minutes. As I’ve become a more network-focussed photographer, I’ve come to love using the smartphone as an editing surface; touch is perfect for photo manipulation. There’s a tactility that is lost when you edit with a mouse on a desktop computer. Perhaps touch feels natural because it’s a return to the chemical-filled days of manually poking and massaging liquid and paper to form an image I had seen in my head. Yet if the advent of digital photography compressed the core processes of the medium, smartphones further squish the full spectrum of photographic storytelling: capture, edit, collate, share, and respond. I saw more and shot more, and returned from the forest with a record of both the small details—light and texture and snippets of life—and the conversations that floated around them on my social networks.

In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels. This information, like location, weather, or even radiation levels, can transform an otherwise innocuous photo of an empty field near Fukushima into an entirely different object. If you begin considering emerging self-metrics that measure, for example, your routes through cities, fitness level, social status, and state of mind (think Foursquare, Nike+, Facebook, and Twitter), you realize that there is a compelling universe of information waiting to be pinned to the back of each image. Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture.

It’s clear now that the Nikon D70 and its ilk were a stopgap between that old Leica M3 that I coveted over a decade ago and the smartphones we photograph with today. Tracing the evolution from the Nikon 8008 to the Nikon D70 to the GX1, we see cameras transitioning into what they were bound to become: networked lenses. Susan Sontag once said, “While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important.” Today, it turns out, it’s whatever can’t be networked that becomes less important.

Craig Mod is an independent writer and designer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the co-author of “Art Space Tokyo” and author of the forthcoming novel, “Stosh.”

 

[el Bert]



South Lake Tahoe, CA, USA.

Always seems like I'm the only one whose never been Tahoe whenever anyone brings it up. Considering I've live in Bay Area all my life D800: [/quote] Really like this picture.