Halloween Pics

It has been a while since I posted. I wanted to get some pictures up, and I have one quick tip for you that I'll lead off with.

As usual, we wanted to get some pictures of my kids in their Halloween costumes. So, before we started trick or treating we stepped out front to take some pictures. I think you can see the obvious problem:


My kids always turn into Squinty McGee whenever I try to get any decent front lighting (or side lighting). From experience, I knew that just trying to force a bad situation would result in mediocre shots. So I pulled an audible and moved out back.

The shot at the top resulted, and I also got a few individual shots:



Total elapsed time? About 10 minutes. That's including the required herding of children and two locations. I also was able to set up this shot that I really like:


Who said that taking family portraits needs to be a chore?

Family Photos

Just figured I'd post a few shots from my new (old!) Yashicamat 124. It has some problems (that I should be able to fix pretty easily) but sometimes the problems add some character to images. These a few of our favorites from the first roll.

If you are interested in the hardware side of things, I'll be posting more over at the Used Camera Database blog.

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Vacation in Black and White

As I mentioned in the last post, I took a number of black and white shots on vacation. I'll share some of them with you here (note: I have more to say on the technical side of shooting on black and white film, but those posts will be over at the Used Camera Database Blog).

Today, I'll just share some of my favorite photographs from the second and third rolls of film (from the Costco scans on CD). I'm going to try to scan the first set of negatives myself (more to test quality than anything else) -- so those will be a little delayed.

I've been wanting to shoot black and white for a while, but this is the first time I really got around to it. Of course, I could always convert my color images to B&W in post processing, but I almost feel... overwhelmed... when converting color (digital) shots to black and white because there are so many options and variables. I'd almost rather be restricted to monochrome at shooting time than do it in post processing.

Maybe, with more experience, I'll get to know what it to look like when I do conversions. For now, I'm still learning what will show up and what won't. For instance, in the shot below, the path through the gate is totally lost in the conversion.


On the other hand, many shots that would be mediocre in color really have a little something extra in black and white. Much of it is the contrast and the way black and white restricts you to just the dark and light spots. Part of it is that 'old-time' feel of black and white -- for that reason, I think there's a good argument for doing black and white in portraits.

For instance, this shot of my son is definitely helped by removing the color (which would be distracting):


Likewise, the frame around my daughter in this photo is brought out by the lack of color. It is too bad I missed the focus and it turned out soft! (she was hamming it up too, which usually isn't a good thing, but it worked on this grab shot).


I've always felt like black and white lends an old time serenity to shots of people. For instance, the shot at the top of the page, or this one:


This last one is a bit blown out on my kids -- I think it would be benefited by rescanning at a stop or two less exposure. It probably could have worked pretty well in color though -- the barn was red with nice texture, and the surroundings were a vibrant green.

Flowers can look pretty nice, but honestly, I think this one would have looked better in color...


Black and white does excel in terms of texture, like this old building I had my daughter try to get into. I shot a series of them, but they looked better in my mind than on film :(


I like these shots though:



And I made sure to get the family dog, Annie (who, sadly, is not going to last much longer since her back legs are no longer cooperating).


I love this shot...


Finally, I'll end with a shot of my son, hard at work. One thing about black and white film is that it handles a wide dynamic range -- this image really shows that off...

Shooting on film...

I'm on vacation right now using dial up. Holy crap it is slow! Writing up a blog post pretty much took me twice as long as usual and it is now well past midnight.

Wow, I can't believe it has been almost two months since I posted. Life has been really busy and photography has not been a priority.

The good news is that I've starting to shoot more on this vacation and I'm catching the photography bug again. I borrowed my Dad's old Minolta and shot some black and white film -- I posted about it over at the Used Camera Database (it seemed more relevant there). Expect to see some of the pictures here in the next few weeks -- I was very happy with a number of them!

In other news, my 20D is starting to hesitate when I shoot because the shutter release isn't quite making contact. Not a huge deal, but it does mess up my timing a little bit and it may just be the push I need to upgrade and use it as a backup. Of course, if my shooting volume decreases again, there's not point in buying another camera.

We'll see!

Random Shot

I liked this image when I took it, but I thought I was just being a bit weird.

But my wife mentioned it, which means it must have something going for it!

(Canon 100mm FD Macro f/4)