Wind was howling this afternoon. A steady 15 knots with gusts much stronger. Enough I had to set the tripod with the legs extra wide so it didn’t blow over.
The clouds didn’t quite want to cooperate. And I really need a 3 stop reverse GND, as 2 stops is nowhere near enough. Blew the highlights even on shots that were just too dark. But I got one or two that looked good enough. I like this one because of the birds.
Here’s a version cropped to 8×10:
And here it is properly exposed — except for the sun, which is totally blown out. I was boxing the “correct” exposure because of all the silly things I was doing with the GND and reverse GND filters in there, and I’m glad I did. Getting the sun a stop down helped the image above. The benefits of digital. Just fire five shots, two below, two above, and one of them might be close to right.
I am not going to composite these, but if I was willing to cheat that much I could graft the better foreground in to the one with the better sun. The ones above I just clicked “Auto” and let the software bring the exposure up a little. The one below I lowered the highlights until I got it as close to in gamut as possible, but the sun is so blown out there’s just no detail to be recovered.
Note the vignetting. That’s the cheap GNDs stacked. They do it a little one at a time, but it is really accentuated when using more than one. If I print one, it’ll be 8×10, so I can crop some of the vignetting and put the sun and birds in a more aesthetically pleasing location.
I tested the Nikon claim that my camera was weather sealed this evening. In between rain storms I shot some landscapes, using a GND to tame the sky and a reverse GND to tame that sun when it decided to peek out.
No neutral density. Ocean was pretty victory-at-sea today and the wind was howling, so very few reflections to play with. And I wanted the clouds to look like the looked, which was absolutely wild.
Would have liked to do more experimenting, but the lens and filters were so spotted from the squall you can see coming in in the third photo, I couldn’t get anything but water drop blurries after that. I headed back to the truck to dry off my gear.
Interesting side note as I post these. I did the third one out of Nikon Capture, and the first two from On1. I did auto white balance on each, and On1 wants to correct that magenta cast while Nikon doesn’t. I might try an apples to apples comparison, as it was getting mighty dark in the last photo as the squall line marched toward us, but… I probably won’t. I like it just fine either way.
I have done some test prints in a variety of colors and styles with the local photo shop called North Coast Photo. I have tried a few online places that do photo prints and also do large stuff inkjet style, notably Photique and mPix. I had mixed results. Photique’s color correction was off, and mPix did better with colors but some of my photos had problems and one was even physically damaged. I love many of the prints, and was really energized to do more, but it was disappointing to wait a week or more only to have a print I couldn’t mat and frame.
They are old school. Even their ordering software and website have a distinctly Y2K flair to them
Since both places did a great job of my black and white prints, I thought the color issues might be me. I decided to calibrate my monitor and start checking my files for gamut. I sent some calibrated, in-gamut shots of lizards and neighbor kitties and other throwaways to each house for a second round. I still got different results from each, so I decided to see if there was another place to try, not at the top of the duck duck go or various blogs that all only refer you to whoever gives them the affiliate kickbacks. That’s when I discovered North Coast Photo.
This place is barely two miles from my house and has been in Carlsbad for decades. They are old school. Even their ordering software and website have a distinctly Y2K flair to them, neither having been updated in the last 15 years. They do film developing as well as prints, but they aren’t one of these all in one inket printing places that’ll spray your image on a piece of aluminum. They only make an old-fashioned wet process prints and enlargements. Inkjet has many advantages, and most of the online places print on everything because that’s the business model that supports them. But for North Coast Photo, well, that’s not their bag.
The prints I got from the online places were also silver halide — mostly, as I did try the glicee from mPix — so apples to apples. The one difference being that they came on Kodak Endura paper for color and North Coast uses Fuji Crystal Archive. Photique, especially, offers the entire range of Kodak papers, from glossy, to deep matte, and specialty metallic, lustre, and silk textures. None of which I really like, except in the case of Endura matte in black and white looking fantastic for my Chicago cityscape.
The local place is not as versatile, obviously. And they’re not cheaper, in fact they’re a couple dollars more than the online places, even when paying the upcharge for giclee at mPix, which theoretically has better color gamut and longevity.1
But, they’re local. No shipping charge. I can talk to them in person, I’ve actually seen the owner around the Village for years, never realizing this is what that logo on the side of his truck meant. Carlsbad as a whole is a reasonably big city, but the Village, up until four or five years ago when the “fuck locals” attitude of the council and resultant tourist deluge destroyed its character, has always been a pretty small town. The sort of place where I had my own meal off menu at restaurants and would run into people I knew any time I walked down the street or stopped in for a cup of coffee. You get pretty embedded in that kind of community, and recognize one another even if you haven’t met. It’s really nice to be able to get advice if I need it but even more, it’s nice to support a local business. Too many of those have failed this year.
So, for my first test, I sent three images. The first was chosen because I took it the very day I talked to them. I was quite excited with that capture, and wanted to see it in the reals. The other two I just grabbed off of my NAS, and I chose these because they were taken at Terramar, which is walking distance from the lab.
They were done perfectly. Better than perfectly, the waves in the surfer shot are more vibrant than the monitor and the palm fronds in the Palmhenge shot are absolutely tack sharp. I couldn’t believe how good the looked.
The point is, to know this they must have actually looked at the pictures.
None are actually out of gamut, the Palmhenge shot being completely unedited — straight out of the camera, and the soft proof showed no clipping when I bounced it to jpeg — and the jetty shot edited to bring the sky into range, but the surfer shot has difficult light and very subtle details on the waives, and all three are quite close to the edge of sRGB and have more difficult contrast than the shots I sent to mPix and Printique. Yet the results were exactly, precisely, amazingly correct.
But here’s the real selling point. When I went in to pick them up the next afternoon the gentleman helping me had trouble locating the envelope. He asked someone in the back and that person called out “Sunset and surfer?” I said yes and he said “Great pictures” then a girl working a different machine said “I loved the surfer photo!”
This all seems like it is just retail employees blowing smoke up a client’s skirts, but that’s not the point. The point is, to know this they must have actually looked at the pictures. With the damaged photos from one place, and the colors wrong from the other, there’s no way they did the color matching and quality check they advertised. These had perfect contrast, vibrant color, and it was obvious that these people at North Coast had provided the personal services they claimed.
So I sent in a second batch, with the olio of colors. I wanted lots of variety to test my monitor calibration, but also including He’s Big on the Inside, which I had in my test prints from both Printique and mPix. That way I could do a direct comparison. Here are the pictures I printed in batch two.
As with the first order, they are perfect. Bootsy and the green of the truck are the same on screen as in the print, way better than Printique and as good as or better than mPix. I am very impressed, and now I know how well my monitor is calibrated and am confident of what they’ll look like when printed. I feel remarkably lucky to have a service like this only a couple miles from home. I’m going to have to expose a couple rolls of 120 some day and let them do some real, old fashioned work.
One of the images was taken in Venice, and several people have asked about it. Not my favorite image, but I thought I’d share here. First, this is the canal picture in question, cropped 5/4 and printed as an 8×10 color glossy picture.2 The picture is fine, but print itself is glorious. Even after 800 words of rambling praise, I cannot emphasize enough that North Coast Photo’s work is absolutely amazeballs.
Thing is, though it’s not my favorite photo, I am not a good judge of which of my photos are actually good. I didn’t like the surfer shot from the first test trio when I took it, but when I show people a batch of 8x10s it draws as much praise as any of the others. People connect with it for some reason.
That, I understand. It’s the root of why I can’t always enjoy good shots, and like ones people don’t gravitate towards. I have a strange emotional attachment to them, and it colors my perceptions.
Here’s an example. I don’t like Bootsy, who is a horrible dog, so taking a sympathetic portrait of the little asshole is actually an achievement. Everyone loves He’s Big on the Inside but even more pedestrian portraits of that little shithead strike me as good, mostly because I know his personality and I’m proud of hiding it. I like the picture because it makes me feel like I did a good job.
So, for me, the problem with pictures of Venice is that I don’t like Venice. I left with few positive impressions, and never bothered to appreciate what I did there because the whole experience ranged from disappointing to downright unpleasant.
I’m not sure there are any locals, actually. Just hordes of visitors, fresh off a cruise ship, trying desperately to immerse themselves in Venetian culture and history in the two hours before they have to reboard
I visited in November, which should be off season, but the weekend I was there the place was so crowded you could pass out and not fall over. Shoulder to shoulder with tourists, almost everywhere I went, and I wasn’t able to get any sense of the city or of how the locals lived. I’m not sure there are any locals, actually. Just hordes of visitors, fresh off a cruise ship, trying desperately to immerse themselves in Venetian culture and history in the two hours before they have to reboard for the all you can eat buffet and two day sail to Dubrovnik where they get to see that game of thrones castle.
In fact, the only time I really enjoyed the city was on a Sunday night, in the rain. That drove out the mobs of shuffle walking idiots and gave me time to see a bit of architecture, even if I didn’t get any sense of culture. My only positive impressions of the city are dark, wet, and bewildering, which is better than that sentence sounds.
There’s a special joy in getting lost in a place, then seeing what you see as you find your way back. I’ve done this with many cities over the years, purposely wandering off the beaten track with no map, which is how you really get to know a place.
Venice does this better than almost any city. Getting lost is easy. It’s myriad alleyways never go straight for long, and two or three turns into a neighborhood can have you hopelessly turned about. But, then, it’s a small island and all you have to do is keep walking around at random. Sooner or later you’ll stumble into a square, run across the Grand Canal, or just notice a sign on the corner of a building pointing you to the train station.
As I mentioned, I was there in November. During the daytime, the weather was just plain bad for my style of photography with a dark, washed out light and grey skies with very little contrast. Skies are pretty much all blown out in my images, and I was struggling to get in-focus, non-shaky shots every time I tried, often having to use a bollard, bridge rail, or something similar as an impromptu tripod to keep the camera steady for the long exposures times in the dim light. Many of the more iconic vistas were so crowded I couldn’t even choose my vantage, being lucky to find ANY spot on the rail at Ponte Rialto to take an shot. I left feeling like I got nothing of value, photographically. Or culturally, for that matter. I think the best thing that happened to me that whole weekend was finding a place to do my laundry in Mestre Saturday morning.
But I have revisited some of my Italy pictures while playing with more of these photo tools that I am using to prep printables, and I eventually got back to the shots of Venezia. I’ve been messing with desaturating them, converting them to black and white, or just cropping them and letting them be grey and rainy. This is new for me. I’m a light guy at heart, always looking for contrast or a glowing surface, or spots that reveal a piece of a story when the rest might be hidden in a nearby shadow. But if all I have is sickly light and flat, desaturated colors, there has to be something else compelling in the composition.
It has been an odd exercise, and the formerly uninteresting photos have struck me as interesting now, if for no other reason than I remember experimenting with composition when I took them. I guess if the light is shit, the composition is all that matters, so it’s all about converging lines, rule of thirds, and, once in a while, those weird and blurry details hidden somewhere I never looked before.
Here’s a batch of examples:
Obviously not all great art, but better than I remembered in December, after the longest two month job of my life was finished. And at the very least I remember taking those shots down the street while standing on top of a large pedestal in an attempt to get a vantage over the heads of the thousands thronging down that street, so even if you don’t like it, it evokes an emotional response. I can almost smell the rotten fish and mildew from here.
Good times.
1. Silver Halide prints, even on “Endura” and “Archive” paper are good for 40 to 60 years in normal display conditions, depending on who tested them, unless they’re sealed behind UV resistant glass.
2. With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
Yeah, you know me. Who’s down with GND? Every last lady…
Wait. Not sure that’s appropriate. GND (Graduated Neutral Density) filters are what I’m talking about.
They are a mainstay of old school landscape photographers. I’ve done the circular GND thing, but since I’m using lenses with stupid large filter threads (which means they must be better than smaller ones, right?1) and my favorite lenses all seem to have different diameters, I figured it was time to just get a proper holder and use square filters. They’ll work on my main lenses, which use 77mm and 67mm threads, and when I get stupid and pull out the medium format they’ll work there, too. So it’s a good investment2.
Sometimes the ugly days will surprise you with a few good moments if you’re patient.
I started with an open-box set from the bargain bin on the Formatt Hitech site that has 1, 2, and 3 stop soft GND and 1, 2, and 3 stop solid ND filters in resin. They are pretty cheap to begin with, especially compared to the name brand resin filters, but with the open box bargain they were as cheap as anything save the horrible random-chinese-company-brand filters you get off of the amazon dot com. My thought was to experiment with them and then be better informed if I decide to spend money on higher quality glass in the future.
I’m not bitching too much as getting a half dozen good filters for less than a hundred is impossibly inexpensive — one Lee resin filter costs that much — but they aren’t exactly perfectly neutral. The clouds today and the foggy sky yesterday definitely showed a magenta cast, especially when I tried stacking the NDs to get 5 stops. Maybe Hitech is trying to be the Velvia of the filter world. It’s not the worst thing, and probably correctable in software if I cared or knew how to do more than use the crop tool and click on “Auto sharp”, but definitely not perfectly neutral.
I also got a reverse GND for sunsets since I take way too many pictures of of the sun setting on a perfectly flat horizon. I really should remember to turn around once in a while, as the joy of golden hour light is what’s illuminated, not the lamp. Also, I have heard rumors that there’s stuff east of the beach, though I haven’t confirmed that recently. Really seems pointless to head east of I-5.
Of course, the weather yesterday was terrible. Foggy, but not foggy enough to be interesting. Today was almost as bad, but there were high tropical clouds, so at least there was something to test. And sometimes the ugly days will surprise you with a few good moments if you’re patient.
I shot the sand at the waterline, and then the sky, and found 1.5 stops difference. Strange as I usually see 2 to 3 stops, but that’s why you don’t just get a 3 stopper and be done with it. So I began with the 2 stop GND and added 3 stops of ND so I could do a long exposure.
Interesting to see the little blurries there as I was using 15-25 second shutter speeds and there were lots of people around, kids running in and out of the water, surfers, and wading birds. I think the ghosts add flavor.
I did clean my sensor last night and can be proud of the fact that there aren’t a dozen little spotty things to use the retouch tool on. So I have that going for me, which is nice.
Then I slapped the 2 stop reverse GND on as the sun was on the horizon. This worked well, and the hard edge was much appreciated compared to the softer GND I started with. I have some proper glass filters, hard edge, already on the way as I think they’ll be useful for this superwide lens, but this sky wasn’t the best for a reverse GND alone, so I slapped the 1 stop GND on with it to tone down the top of the sky some. That gave me 2.5 stops on the horizon and maybe 1.5 stops at the top of the frame, and I set it up to do three shots, at exposure setting and 2 stops above and below. Just to experiment with what I got using different metering.
Then, somewhere in the middle of this intervalometer experimentation, the sky went insane. This was 10-15 minutes after sunset and the clouds had dulled, but they suddenly brightened again and turned a brilliant crimson. It was cool. Everyone on the beach was either staring slack jawed or trying to take selfies with the red sky behind them.
Alas, I spent time fumbling with the camera, still had 3 stops of ND filter in even though it was getting significantly darker, and still had both GNDs in though the sky was barely a stop brighter than the reflection at this point. I yanked one and lined it up for some shots, but I was rushing and didn’t remember to turn off my bracketing. Of the half dozen shots, each between 10 and 25 seconds long, only 2 came out. Then one I did with a shorter exposure that came out OK. The brilliant sky only lasted a minute or two and all of this was past the peak.
I guess it’s a good lesson. I know how to set this stuff up, but all the fiddling and silly experiments with timers and automatic exposures are too tempting. I could have gotten at least three more great shots with different framing if I’d just stuck to the script. So these aren’t my best work, though I did clean my sensor last night and can be proud of the fact that there aren’t a dozen little spotty things to use the retouch tool on. So I have that going for me, which is nice.
Here are the two that came out close to adequately exposed. Both taken after the peak in the crimson glow, but still before it had completely faded. The last one I had spun the aperture way open and was a bit overexposed, but none of the highlights were blown so it was recoverable. There are benefits to compressing the dynamic range before it hits the sensor.
I’m sure I’ll take more soon, and we have proper rain coming this weekend. Two storms back to back, so maybe I can get something dramatic in between the storms, or after the second one passes. There’s often a day with great visibility and fluffy white clouds after a front moves through, so here’s hoping the timing of the rain is photographically opportunistic.3
1 That’s what she said.
2 By investment I obviously mean expense. No offense, but if you’re looking to someone wasting good money on camera gear for financial advice you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. Between the lenses and filters I have I could have really invested, in something really important and useful. Like a guitar.
3 It’s 2020. Let’s be real, this is about as much optimism as we can invest right now.
Sounds like a parable of some kind. I should write it. But mostly there was a big friggen red tailed hawk on the telephone pole out front and the neighborhood crows don’t cotton to that, so they were divebombing him attempting to chase him away.
Tried to get some decent pictures, but pictures of a static hawk and a dive-bombing crow turn out to be damned hard to capture. This is about all of the drama I was able to get in the frame before the hawk decided to fly away, chased by a handful of zealous black shadows.
Maybe there are more stills worth bouncing to jpg. Check back later and see. For now, here’s a couple of the hawk, himself.
I have been waiting weeks to get the sunset precisely between these two palm trees from the front porch. It’s NOT quite there, but almost. A couple more days! But I am impatient so I took so pictures tonight.
I tried some things. They didn’t work. At least I got some decent stills.
Here is the Harvest moon of 2020
A couple from the night before the full moon. 99.5% waxing.
My experiment was to try and get some context. Take shots of the moon with some trees to frame it. It didn’t work. Still learning to see 500mm, and you have to go a looooooong way out before you are in focus at infinity.
Here’s a short hint of what I tried tonight, though.
They’re in an older post, but here are the shots I did last week when the moon was waxing at 40%.
Just a couple of studies of the finches that occasionally feed on the berry bush by the driveway. They’ll hang out atop the avocado tree, and often there will be half a dozen in the berry bush, but they don’t stay there for long nor can I count on them every day. As I was taking these, Doug came by and startled them, and they never returned.
The first is in the berry bush, where I finally got one not obscured by the branches. This is actually only the first on the page here, as this series was what I was taking when Doug and Bootsie came through and broke up the party.
A few will pick pine nuts off the dead pine tree in the middle of the yard. The Goldfinches do this, as well, but I haven’t been able to get a really good shot of them.
And this guy spent some time atop the avocado tree. The dark streaks in the background are the power wires across the street, and I haven’t photoshopped these. I just cropped what came out of the camera.
Alas, while this perch is great in that they’ll stay there, it is still difficult to get a good angle on them as the light is from the west and the tree is right on the western edge, against the fence. Trying to get up against the fence always scares them away, but as the summer is past and the sun is moving south, it is easier to get them reasonably lit while standing in the driveway, due south of them.
So, LBBs are hard. There’s a reason for the term “flighty” and these little bastards sure are. They swoop in and swoop out, and choose a different place to perch or feed almost every evening, very seldom where I am when I have a camera in hand.
At least I’m getting some practice exposing birds. Even if I do end up deleting 100 crappy images after I’m done trying.
Quick study of the moon with the new lens. I learned a few things.
First, that the tripod will still oscillate a bit with the ginormous lens on this camera. 5 lbs atop a raised pedestal was bad. So I had to keep it just on the legs, and then I set the timer so there was a 3 second delay to give it a moment to settle.
Full moon is one week from today and it’s due to be warm and dry
B, if there is camera shake on the tripod, the AS does a darned good job of taking care of it.
And, 3, some of the images have a lot of noise. I think I have to overexpose the moon a bit to get the black of the sky to stay — black. Although it was quite blue when I took these pics, but obviously the moon is significantly brighter than the sky half an hour after sunset.
I took a few at different settings, different apertures, different shutter speeds. Except for the ones with noisy black areas, they all look just as good as one another by the time they hit jpeg. I guess that’s a good thing, though it sure is easy these days.
All manual — it will NEVER auto expose properly, no matter what I try — and on a tripod.
I’ll do more in the upcoming nights. Full moon is one week from today and it’s due to be warm and dry, so I bet I get some more chances.
Not worth another post, but I tried out the multiple exposure on the camera an hour ago. Took the stars first, then the moon, as a double exposure. By the beach on a hazy night, so the starfield isn’t super spectacular, but it gives me ideas. I can try this in the desert with less light pollution to make a fun image.
No photoshop. I don’t even have photo editing software other than the free Nikon stuff right now. I’m sure I could do composites in lightroom if I bothered to use it, but what the heck. This is old school, like how you’d shoot film.
