More Black and White: Arastradero Preserve

Another shoot with the Yashica-Mat 124 (see the last one). Actually, this does not represent the full shoot, just the first half of the negatives.


I love the way the sky looks in black and whites. Sadly, it is the sky that my DIY Negative Scanner screws up the most. I'm sure there's something I can do though to reduce quantization error.


There was an interesting burned stump that had a pretty strange shape.

Here is the same shot in color with my 20D.


Honestly, I like the color shot better, but the black and white highlights the intense contrast between the burned portion and the sky. Black and white also seems to lend an old-time feel to the shots -- sometimes that is appropriate, sometimes not.

Black and White Playground Pics

I'm trying to update this blog a little more with the pictures I've taken over the past few months. Tonight's post consists of a number of shots I took at the playground with my Yashica-Mat 124. The Used Camera Database Blog has more information about the hardware that took the pictures, here I'll just be focusing more on the actual images.

Speaking of the images, these are a bit grainy -- I suspect I need to reevaluate how I convert the images from the negatives that I photographed on my DIY Film Scanner. There seems to be a lot of noise, probably from quantization error. For now, you just get grainier images than you might expect. The real shots are a lot cleaner than these appear.

Playing in the sand:




On the way there:



This fire hydrant appealed to me when we were heading to the park. I liked the bright contrast between the hydrant and the shadows behind it.

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?