12 posts tagged “photography”
I've just posted lots more photos from my trip to Europe. Sculptures from the Hermitage museum. Click through to Flickr to see the whole set.
...and yes, it was scary.
These are the stairs that ascend into the medieval city wall in Tallinn, Estonia. They are very small and steep, with only the stone wall and a rough rope to hold on to. Those of you who know me know that I am somewhat scared of heights. But the city wall was so awesome that I couldn't let a little thing like that get in my way.
There are different towers that you can climb further up into from the walkways inside the city wall. In one of those towers, I came upon some musicians practicing and setting up for a performance to be held at 19:00 that evening. I decided to come back at that time and see the show.
Now, Estonia is known for its creativity in the world of contemporary compositional music, avant-garde, and jazz. Since I knew nothing about the performers or what they had planned, there was a large part of me that was getting very excited at the thought that I could be about to witness something completely underground, cutting-edge, and unexpected. Alas, my lust for the new was not to be so radically fulfilled. They turned out to be a very sweet little a capella ensemble, who opened the show with a rendition of the classic American pop song "[I'm your] Venus", translated into Estonian. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was a very enjoyable performance, and I'm still glad I got to experience something serendipitous such as that.
I went on my second Flickr photostroll yesterday. Croctommy and my new pal Katenadine from Flickr/PCNW came along. There were tons of people! The weather was perfect, I had a great time, and I am very much enjoying looking at everyone's shots.
I brought the Mamiya medium format TLR out for the first time since acquiring it last month. Some folks good some good shots of me with all the equipment. That stuff was heavy!
I went to Portland for the weekend a couple weeks ago. I'm even more firmly convinced that I made the right decision to move there next year. Croctommy came with me for the weekend. He likes it a lot there too, and I would really dig it if he got a job there.
Here's what I did:
- Saw Richard Dawkins read, sponsored by Powell's (they moved him to a large ballroom in a nearby hotel because they didn't have room in the store for all the people who were expected to come, and even the ballroom was standing room only).
- Went to a camera swap meet and acquired my first real medium-format camera (I haven't used it yet, but I'm planning to go get some film after work tonight). The camera swap was lots of fun. I get the feeling that it wouldn't be very hard for me to develop a penchant for researching and collecting vintage film cameras. If the demographics at the swap meet are any indication, by being under 50 and female, I'd be a bit of a novelty in that community (although I have "met" one woman on Flickr who has a similar hobby, and would really like to meet her in person because she lives in my neighborhood).
- Went to a Metafilter/Metachat meetup, where I saw some of the people in Portland that I like the most.
- Walked along the waterfront and took some photos.
- Went to the Japanese Garden and took some photos.
The assignment was to stop motion with shutter speed. I shot a whole roll of these guys - and this is my favorite, not only because of the moment, but because of the way that the heads of the boys form a triangle, with the basketball perfectly placed at the apex. My teacher observed that the negative is a bit underexposed, and it will take some more work in the darkroom to get the tones in the print just right, but I'm still pretty happy with it.
The other half of this assignment was to capture motion blur with a long shutter speed. I'm not as happy with this one - I was kind of at a loss for ideas.
I'm back, and have posted some of my photos from Galiano Island. Here is a sample:
Those who are artistically inclined, could you please look at my Lifeboat Studies and let me know which one you like the best?
My GPS came yesterday (Garmin eTrex Legend Cx, $184 at Amazon with rebate), so I had to try it out. Here is the procedure I followed:
1) Make sure GPS unit and camera are set to the same clock time.
2) Set GPS options to decimal lat/lon.
3) Walk around with GPS unit recording tracklog.
4) Take photos.
5) Copy digital photos from memory card to hard disc in folder for 2006_10_11.
6) Download and purchase RoboGeo ($35 US).
7) Open photo folder in RoboGeo.
8) Tweak RoboGeo default settings to allow it to "guess" location from in-between points in tracklog.
9) Connect GPS to computer USB port and hit F3 in RoboGeo to have it import the tracklog.
10) Verify that RoboGeo imported coordinates correctly.
11) Use RoboGeo's option to write coordinates to the EXIF tag (overwrites original photos).
12) Select Flickr Upload interface from RoboGeo.
13) Tweak tags to add a few of my own (camera make and model derived directly from EXIF).
14) Click button to upload, and wait a couple minutes for upload to complete.
15) Ta da! Geotagged and mapped photos!
(Not my most artistically exciting photos, but I have a big nature trip planned this weekend to really test this out.)
Inkboy/Vinylsaurus has just posted a Flickr set including a bunch of black and white pictures I took in 2002 of him and his friends setting up an art gallery show. It's the naked scans of the negatives with no dust removal, cropping, or other processing, but it's still kind of cool for me to see them.
The reason he has them is because we were roommates for a long time, and I used his scanner.
It is inspiring me to go to my own copies of those files, clean them up, and post a few of my favorites to my own photostream.
