Category: Wildlife

wildlife photography

Photos From the Art Walk

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I took some photos of bands playing at Baba during the art walk in June. A few of them were pretty good, so I thought I’d share. I really like a couple of Cameron, and the shots of Mitch are not bad, though that may be sentimentality speaking.

These were on Portra 160, taken with an F6 and an F3. Lab scans — I really should redo these myself, but I’m too lazy.

I also took some photos of the first band, On The Menu. There was just too much going on, too many people around, and too much in the way to get good framing. But it’s not always about the photos themselves, sometimes it’s about the good people in them. Here are a few of my favorite.

These weren’t at the Art Walk, they were taken another evening. However, they were on the same rolls of film and they’re music, so why the heck not.

This is the Soto Six. Three of them, at least. They play at Baba every Friday and I occasionally decide that it might be fun to try and get some shots with the Baba logo for Rob and Reegan. These shots were taken July 1, 2022. Portra 160 and Tmax100 pushed 1 stop.

The Last Photo

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I had my cameras out at the Art Walk, trying to capture some of the bands playing at Baba that afternoon. It was all rather a mess, but I captured a few, and it was my last chance to do so, so I thought I’d share the final one. Portra 160 taken with the F6 and a 70-200 f/2.8 VRII.

Behold:

Nothing else to say right now. I’mma just sticky this on the blog. I have a few other nice shots, I’ll post them later.

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!:

800px

1250 px

A Hawk

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Red Shouldered, I believe. A pair have been courting recently and they spend a lot of time screeching for each other until the crows come by and try to chase them away. In flight pics are rough — I spun the ISO too high and for some reason didn’t open up the lens to F8 where it’s fast and sharp. At least I was smart enough to do so when he perched on the telephone pole.

Last year I watched them grab claws and spiral to the earth, pulling out just above the trees across the street, on two occasions. Always drama with the raptors. But now when I hear the screeching I head outside hoping to see it again. Alas, it hasn’t happened this year, and never with a camera in my hand. But at least I got a nice portrait before the crows chased him off his perch.

Behold!

Portraits. First 1250px for phones:

And a little bigger for the desktoppers:

Ilford FP4 and Ektar

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Working with some older manual cameras the last week. Specifically an F3 and an FM3A. The Ektar shots here are from the FM3A, the B&W are Ilford FP4 in the F6. I think the Still I Stand shot is a winner, the rest are mostly trash. Partly because they’re just snapshots as I was excited to try out my new old camera, but also because the scans are kind of terrible.

There are horizontal stripes in the skies of many of the shots, especially the Ektar. I’ve had this issue in the past and it is not on the negatives (or the slides, I’ve had it with Provia, too, and with medium format negatives) and I’m just not sure why it’s happening. At this point I’m convinced the lab’s software is shit, and these are JPEG artifacts, as they are almost exactly what happens when I try to reduce size on a digital shot from the Z6.

The thing is, I don’t get why this happens from the originating scan. Shouldn’t it be like a full sized digital image? Are they reducing it to make it smaller for the download and just overcompressing the jpeg? Whatever it is, they claim they can’t seem to see it at the lab and, frankly, I can’t not see it. They say nobody else has the problem, but I just cannot imagine how that is true! I don’t know if I want to even bring it up again, I’m getting a reputation as the complainer, but I’m to the point where I think I’m going to have to rig a light source for my camera and a macro lens and just scan my own.

Whatever. I’m just really fucking annoyed. Here’s what I came up with. I didn’t bother to pick and choose, this is any of them that aren’t blurry because I can’t focus.

Cinestill 800 Tests

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These photos are from the first roll of Cinestill 800 I shot. I was interested in the film because it is for artificial light, and some people were raving about the halos. It’s motion picture film and the anti halation coat is stripped so it can be processed using C-41. The creative possibilities, taking pictures indoors and with odd effects, seem to tickle a lot of people.

I hate it. The halos just look like shit. The colors are not particularly good, either. I’m sure I could do as well with Portra 800. A few I took in natural light do have that 70s movie look to them, but considering this film stock costs twice as much as anything else I use, I’d rather shoot slides for the price. Or just shoot Portra for high speed. I guess it was the sort of thing you might try once, but not something I expect to do regularly from here on out.1

From what I read, you’re supposed to take a picture of a gas station first 2. So, here we go:

I also took some shots of a band that plays on a trailor in the parking lot behind the ice cream place. Somebody Guitar Somebody… dude has guitar in his name so he must be good at guitar, right? Been stoking the Duane look pretty hard, too. God bless ’em for finding a way to gig, even if they have to drag the stage and bubble machine along with them. They had a dozen happy people watching them, and one obnoxious narcissistic girl who kept trying to pretend she was playing the bass and begging her boyfriend to take insta toks, so everyone would look at her. That’s what a fun band is supposed to do.

And a couple of daylight shots, just to see what colors I could pull out with the light streaming in the window.

  1. That’s what she said
  2. Actually, the In-n-Out was first, but we’re splitting hairs here

It says ‘I Choo Choo Choose you’, and it has a picture of a train

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Trying to get pictures of trains today. I dragged the Fuji out, with the goal of practicing with the tilt to get flowers in the foreground and a 1/30 shutter speed on Velvia to get a slightly blurred train in the background with sharp surroundings. It all sounds like a lot of work for two frames, and it is, but I also caught a freight train that I didn’t realize was coming, so I climbed out onto a rock in the lagoon to get a perspective that’s hard to nab with the giant camera.

There was a nice lady on a paddleboard in the water just to my right who was chatting with me while I was climbing down the rocks. She caught my attention as I was hiking out and told me she hoped the pics come out — she had counted the cars on the train and everything. Nice to know someone was pulling for me.

The setup, I was looking for flowers in the foreground:

The train tracks run across a bridge. I took one less florid train shot from the trail, but the best digital shots were from along the lagoon, or perched on a rock a couple feet out into the water.

And, since I have nowhere else to put them, here are some random pics from along the trail, and a couple from Terramar that I took over the weekend. I had the Z6 set up for landscape, but the reflections on the water were so amazing I really wished I had the long lens to get some shots of the egrets. Another day.

Tilt/Shift and a Generic image dump

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This is mostly another image dump. I’ve just been taking pics of random stuff. Birdies, kitties, dragons, flowers, and the like. The dragons were actually taken while I was shooting video, since they were fighting and vying for territory so I thought it might be a fun challenge. And I was stalking Lucy as well, hoping to test the pet face/eye detect I have programmed into a user setting. It seems to work, even in the shade, though exposing a black cat properly is still difficult.

The camera shots are a GX680III (non-S) with the tilt and shift adjustments. I just got it and decided to try and focus on the stump and the telephone poles at the same time. We’ll see how it came out when I get those slides processed. My goal was to get a shot just as a crow jumped off the telephone pole and swooped down to the trees below, which they were doing every few minutes. If such a picture doesn’t appear here in the next couple weeks, you’ll know it didn’t work out. Until then, enjoy the setup and pics of the new camera.

Behold!

Portra 160 in the F6

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135 is a special challenge to me. The grain is enough that it bothers me in a lot of situations. I found the Portra 400 tests I did unsatisfying, even though I really like the film in 120. But shooting 6×8 negatives gives me a lot more resolution, so I decided to give up on high speed (for the moment — I have a roll of cinestill 800 in the camera now) and try Portra 160.

All Kodak film is 2/3 of a stop slower than advertised. At least this is my rule

All Kodak film is 2/3 of a stop slower than advertised. At least this is my rule now, and since I’ve been following it I’ve been getting much better scans and more consistent results. In the F6 I just shoot +0.7, regardless. Medium format I set the meter for 100 instead of 160. To expand that rule, I shoot Kodak negatives +2/3 of a stop over, and always miss high. I find I can over expose a full stop from the box speed and the scan is still better than shooting at the speed published.

Since I’m bringing it up, I have experimented with Fuji, as well. Pro 160 NS I shoot exactly at box speed. If I miss, I can go down 1/3, or up 2/3, so I tend to miss high. Fuji slides are also exactly box speed. But don’t miss. At all. Velvia’s lovely, but exposure latitude is narrow.

Enough jibber jabber. Here are some samples, all just taken around town over a couple weekends. I am happy with the grain, and the not over saturated (like Ektar) colors. It’s not fast, but Portra works well enough in 135 for my tastes.