Nikon S3 Tests

Shooting with the Nikon S3 using the stock 5cm lens. I’ll update the post with other films as I get them developed.

Lab scanned, I only cropped, otherwise whatever the software decided.

Portra 400:

For comparison, Portra 400 with the F6. Lab scan again, but not the same day or the same scanner operator so… whatever the Noritsu shits out. For a bunch of that I was looking at leading lines while on my afternoon walk, so not great art. Just composition studies.

Photos From the Art Walk

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

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.

Sunset with the 20mm

Experimenting with the 20mm lens and sunsets. No parking near where I had hoped to shoot at the warm water jetty, so I went south of Terramar.

I had hoped to do some long exposure and get the washed out waves, but the crowd in the parking lot behind me was substantial and every time I’d leave the shutter open more than 2 seconds someone would turn on their car headlights, blowing out the bluff and weeds in the foreground. Oh, well. I’ll try again another night.

The people in the photos were just folks who were there enjoying the sunset. I decided not to move, and they make a good focal point. Alas, the traffic on the highway behind us kind of ruined most of the photos with glare from the headlights, but I cropped the glare out of a couple and posted them for fun. The one where the phone glow illuminates their faces is accidental. I promise I’m not being snarky, even though I have done that before.

Older Photographs

Since the only things to photograph here while under house arrest were what I could find in my yard, it was pretty much cats and lizards. So I decided to grab some older photographs for a little variety.

Many of these were taken with my old trusty D70. Extremely modest gear, compared to the current generation of digital cameras, but it’s what I had at the time. Like the old photojournalist’s credo “F8 and be there” it’s more important to take a picture than to take the most technically perfect picture ever.

Some were taken with my 7100, which was wonderful in its day, but on my trips to Taiwan and Italy I carried an 18-200 lens that I never bonded with. Just couldn’t make sharp images to save my life though it’s tack sharp with a 35mm 1.8 or even the 18-120 that camera wore as a walkin’ around lens after I sold the 18-200.

So, soon I’ll be adding some portfolios to prove that I don’t just take pictures of cats. And some pictures of cats.

Let’s begin with dogs. First, some photos of a young and handsome Shadow.

And Chopper and Cookie, plus bonus pics of a little smash faced yorkie who lived with a friend a decade ago.

There are occasionally photographs of actual people, too. Though that’s rare. Not much of a people person.

It’s always interesting to see what you get from a sunset. Or a blood moon eclipse. The eclipse was just the best I could do with the equipment I had, but something is better than nothing and I learned the difficulties of exposing for the surprisingly bright moon. F11 and the inverse of the ISO, a rule for the ages.

I took more than a few snapshots while on the road. I stumbled across some from the summer of 2007, where I started in Boston, DC, Chicago, London for a month, Belgium for a long weekend, Germany for a month, then home for a week before Mexico City… that was a busy year.

I have a lot of photographs from the era somewhere, but here’s a smattering. Some from Chicago, London, Munich, and the Mosel where it is always cloudy yet charmingly beautiful. Or maybe that was all the wine.

Then there were pictures of Doug’s little asshole dog. I hate that dog. Ugly as the day is long, but he makes up for it with an awful personality. The picture in the jeep is pure portrait art, though. I’m actually proud of that one.

Of course, there are about a billion photos of Nono. If I was taking a picture in the house, she’d find a way to get in it, so I often used her as a focal point anyway.

I recall once sitting in a coffee shop with a young girl I’d befriended a couple of years before at an open mic at a different coffee shop and meeting her there was pure happenstance. We had discussed photography in the past, and music, and cat memes, and whatever else it is you talk to 17 year old girls about… actually that’s pretty much all there was to talk about. So when she came over to say hello I showed her my brand new camera, which had arrived only an hour before. Her first comment was “I’ll be disappointed if the first thing you took a picture of was anything but your cat.”

I’d like to say I’d disappointed her, but the first few photos here were on the card when she pushed play. The rest are just random pics that were on this hard drive.