Couldn’t sleep, and it’s super bright out, so here’s the 2023 Super Blue Moon:
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August 2023 Supermoon
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Category: Landscapes
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Found these on a CF card
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You know, I never bothered to look at the pictures I took a few weeks ago. My digicam is pretty much always in the scanning rig with a macro lens on it, so I very seldom use it in the wild anymore. But a few mornings this spring I did head outside with the long lens to take pictures of the neighborhood hawk, and 3 weeks ago I quick like snapped pictures of my poppies before the gophers ate them, then promptly forgot about it all.
Here are some samples. I’d like to say more to come, but who knows? I may not be interested in digging through old digital files any time soon.
Behold!:
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Palmhenge Part Dieux
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Once a year, for two days, I get the sun between the palms. That was this week. The first shot was Wednesday, and pretty standard. Thursday I got a few frames with green flash, so I’ll share one of them.
Behold!
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Test roll of HP5
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I’ve been shooting different black and/or white film stocks, just so see what’s what. Got a day with perfect clouds, to the east, so I just walked around and did some composition studies while burning film. I wish I’d had the Delta100 or Tmax in, but I hadn’t expected the lovely skies that evening. Had to take advantage of it while it was there, so 400 speed it is.
I also think I’d have enjoyed a yellow filter. Something to really pop those clouds, though I have to say that I was surprised at how dark the awning on the liquor store is (blue) and how darkly the green trees were rendered. These aren’t my scans, they’re the bargain scan from my developer. But I like the composition enough on a couple of them I might have at ’em myself, see if I can do a better job.
Behold!
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How Often Is There Lightning In Carlsbad?
on How often do you see lightning here? Never. That’s how often. Well, almost never. So these are a rarity. I only got a very few, and didn’t get to play with settings much, but the fact that I had a chance at all is kind of special.
The first couple with the 24-200 lens, the rest with the 20mm. I tried different apertures and opening times, but this was mostly a wild guess. Hold the shutter open 20 seconds or whatever and then hope the lightning… lightnings.
Behold!
The Moon Tonight
on An hour ago:
Macro Flowers
on A teeny, tiny, 1cm across flower appeared in the yard. I’m sure glad I seeded with pounds of wildflower seeds now!1 The sun was well below the horizon, but I have a Tokina 100mm macro lens on the Z6 so I thought I’d try to get some shots with flash. I’m using my 15 year old SB-800 as commander and a newer SB-700 I got a few years ago. I could do way better if I planned it, and maybe I’ll try again over the weekend. Pop a reflector up to fill in the shadows with softer light, use a tripod for the camera, and all that.
After I got a couple from my field of wildflowers then went to the weeds growing through cracks in the driveway. These are the prettiest damned weeds you ever saw2, with amazingly vibrant red flowers that only bloom at night. They were just beginning to open, and I didn’t get them the real color because the direct light is too reflective and makes the image too contrasty and it fools the camera’s meter. But now that I know how this macro stuff works I can get the softbox/reflectors set, overexpose a bit, and get better shots of them even though they’re not open until it’s almost dark.
These were all taken handheld with the SB700 just laying on its side on the ground near the flower. I focused by leaning in and out (the Tokina doesn’t autofocus on the FTZ) and the results were fun. I rigged this for scanning negatives, but now I think I need to take pictures of bugs or coffee beans or something artsy fartsy3 like that.
Enough yammering. Behold!
1. You may recall, I sowed a couple of 1lb bags of wildflower seeds in the yard. This year’s crop was in an area about 10×35 in the middle of the yard and a 5 foot wide swath along the walkway. The wildflowers were coming up this spring and, just before they flowered, the gophers ate all of them. Right now, this purple thing isn’t my only flower. I actually have one lonely poppy bush that’s flowering in the middle of the yard. Several came up after we mowed the weeds flat and the gophers went back to work. Two made it to the point where they flowered, but one was eaten almost immediately after it bloomed. For some reason, this one poppy in the middle of the yard has been popping off blooms for a week and the gophers haven’t found it yet.
2. These must have escaped from the whackjob’s garden five years ago, but the last two or three years they’ve come up through the driveway joints and grown into shrubberies as large as five feet tall with scores of flowers each. All volunteers. I’ve never planted anything so hardy on purpose.
3. Coffee beans are artsy. Maybe I get a can if kidney beans for fartsy.
Velvia in 135
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I got a chance to shoot some slides in the F6. Not a fan of many of the film stocks I’ve tried in 135, just for the added grain, but slides in 120 are pretty much grainless. I have been excited to shoot a roll and see how good they might be. In fact, I’d have tried this before, but everyone was out of stock on Velvia in 135 until recently, when I found it at some random photo business at a bargain price of about a dollar less than other stores’ list price! So, still about twice as expensive as negatives, both for the film stock and for the developing. Shit’s not cheap, yo.
Results are spectacular, though. It takes a bit of thinking to shoot. I mean, it’s still iso50, so not exactly action film, but that’s not too much slower than Ektar, which I have to overexpose 2/3 of a stop for consistent scans. And holy crap are the results spectacular. Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some Ektar, but geez the hyper-real, over saturated colors of Velvia are special. And it’s grainless enough I’d be glad to make some pretty large prints from these slides.
Of course, it’s still slides. You’ve heard all the warnings. Better for low contrast scenes, not a lot of dynamic range, just straight up blows out highlights negative film would be a lot more gentle with, so you’d better get your metering right, and all that. I shot in full sun, cloudy, night, crappy light, and a variety of subjects just to get a sense of it, so the gallery is totes random. It’s fussy in bad light, but when the sun’s out it’s holy shit beautiful. Does amazeballs things to the sky at sunset, too. The sunset shot here is just the scan shrunken down to a webbable jpeg, nothing done in the photo shops to boost the colors. The slide itself is actually MORE vibrant.
Behold!:
Super blood flower pink something something…
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Why do they keep adding names to the moon? I think super flower blood moon or some shit was what I read on the first site the quack quack go gave me when I was searching to find the time. It was an eclipse. There, that’s plenty clear. Good enough for coding java, good enough to describe a shadow on the moon.
But, alas, it’s not good enough to convince the unseasonably tropical cloudiness to stay at bay. So I got up at 3AM and shot some pics, through a high haze and the gaps in the high cumulus, which never seemed to be completely clear of the moon. As it got closer to the horizon the haze got worse, to the point where I had to add a stop and a half to get the moon even close to exposed. I gave up just after totality as it would go 5 minutes without being visible.
And, yet, the Z6 was able to pull a few usable, if not sharp or particularly good, images. Modern cameras are pretty amazing.
Behold!
Here’s what I was contending with, weatherwise:
Tilt Shift Tests
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As you saw in a previous post, I broke out the GX680III (not S) to practice with tilting the lens. I got that roll of film back yesterday. It was Fuji Provia 100F.
You remember that I began in the yard with the stump in the foreground and the palm trees in the background. I think I tilted it slightly too much, in the full sized scan the telephone pole is tack sharp about to the crossbar, then rapidly becomes blurred above that. I took a second and it’s sharp top to bottom, but I had lost the light even before the first exposure, so the second is even more bland. I won’t share.
The second test was to haul it to the lagoon trail, where I took pictures of the flowers with the train in the background. That worked out well, the telephone poles in the distance are also perfectly sharp and the shrubbery just a couple of feet in front of the camera are in focus. I purposely wanted to get 1/30 or 1/60 to get a sense of movement on the train and would not have been able to get those near flowers and leaves in focus at that speed without the tilt. I’m starting to understand how it works in real life.
The others were just DoF tests, but I’ll post them because they’re nice scans. Have I mentioned how much I love slides?
