Cliche’ and Cubes

Fall Leaves and Lens Flare – Lake McBride, Iowa

It seems as though shots of leaves in the fall with lens flare is cliche’, well I’m now a part of that movement with the picture above. I met up with some friends at the dam at Lake McBride in Iowa to take some waterfall pictures as the water level control is an actual real waterfall and not some lame concrete spillway. It was a good time out there shooting the Bronica and some Provia 100F. I took along the D80 just fun and an easier way to meter as the prism on the Bronica makes it hard to read the shutter speed bar. I do need the waist level viewfinder for it, as I mainly used the ground glass on it’s own to compose and focus shots.

Stephen Schaub has a new camera with the help of Matt Abelson – The Cuboid. It’s a really sweet pinhole/zoneplate camera and I want one, but there are a very limited number of them and I’m sure they’re going to be quite expensive. After seeing Abelsons’ setup and the brief tour of the camera in the video posed by Stephen, I’ve decided that I could design and build my own camera, similar to the Cuboid, but won’t be exactly the same. I am an engineer, how hard could it be? I guess we’ll find out as I blog about the adventures with designing a pinhole camera in the shadows of the Cuboid and that does most of what that camera does.

Because I am sick and have stayed home all week (so far) from work, I ended up finding about a new band on MTV this morning that I actually like – Owl City. The song “Fireflies” had a Postal Service feel to it.

A Smooth Pour

A Smooth Pour – Lowe Park, Marion, Iowa

It seems as though photography jobs are “pouring” in, after taking pictures at a friends wedding (for fun), one of Erica’s friends sent her a facebook message indicating she had shown the pictures to her friend who mentioned that we should shoot her engagement photos and possibly her wedding. That’s probably a really confusing sentence -> clarification: Erica’s friends friend may want us to shoot her engagement photos and wedding. We’re already shooting my brothers’ wedding next August and that has me on the fence about a lot of things.

I can’t use my film cameras at his wedding because they’re unreliable and in the case of the Bronica, too loud. He’s said he’d buy me a camera as a Wedding/Birthday/Christmas present. Don’t know how rediculous that sounds, but he’s willing to do it. Because of this though, I’m having a mental war over film and digital; I get the feeling that I’ll give up film after getting this camera. The camera I want (Pentax K-7) is $1200 which just happens to be under half of what most wedding photographers now charge for their services, too bad I’m limited to something not that good, so I’m hoping to get a Pentax K20d with the battery grip. Of course, Eric mentioned a Nikon D1x so I’ve been thinking of that too, if I go that route, I’d have to share gear with Erica.

Erica needs better gear if we are going to start doing this more often, her kit lens isn’t great and the flash she is using has a dedicated Pentax hotshoe which doesn’t really work with the Nikon hotshoe for proper control. I found the two Tamron lenses she needs -> 17-50 f/2.8 and the 70-200 f/2.8.

Time for food, I’m hungry, I’m thinking Pancheros…

My First Engagement Photo Shoot

Jackie and John in Foliage – Cedar Memorial, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

One of my friends at work asked me to shoot some pictures for her (that looked nice) so her mom could put an engagment announcement in their hometown paper. I got all excited and went for the big production of lights and all that, but she really just wanted a couple of nice shots. Needless to say, she is happy we decided to go big.

I pulled together my crew of Erica and Eric to go help out. Erica was there to help pose since she’s a girl and is better at that then Eric and I who totally though technical stuff most of the shoot. She also rocked with her D80 and took over 200 shots in RAW that I’ve been helping her convert and develop into awesome jpgs. I picked Eric since he’s a good shooter and has an amazing portfolio. My plan was to shoot Erica’s D80 off and on, but I didn’t feel it and rocked out the Portra 160VC that I got from the Kodak Expired Film Giveaway and I’m glad I shot film. I really like the Portra 160VC, the saturation is nice in the scans I got and I’m pretty sure my buddy David at Target turned off the auto-correction.

We headed over to Cedar Memorial which happens to be a pretty large and well known cemetary in the area; it’s also really nice and has some good locations for photo shoots assuming you can hide the flowers at the headstones. I got a couple of nice shots that weren’t acceptable because you can see rows of flowers in the background.

The only bad part about the day was the realization that I put my Vivtar 75-205mm f/3.8 lens back together incorrectly when I cleaned fungus off the back of the first element. It doesn’t focus at infinity anymore. I’m tempted to try and fix it, but it took me a good half hour to get the focus barrel on the focus threads. My Vivitar 285hv flash also broke when the wind caught my brollie and light stand causing it to fall over. In order to work better with my Cactus radio triggers (which had no issues at all yesterday) I bought a hotshoe to pc cord adapter that I mounted on the bottom of the flash; that hotshoe adapter doesn’t fit the bracket on the light stand all that well and usually falls out if it’s tilted, somehow it didn’t this time and the flash’s hotshoe tore itself apart. It seems that I can replace that part of the flash so not all is lost; but I realized that mono lights are probably a better thing since I shoot lots of film and having modelling lights would be a plus. Not to mention the camera fails with the half dark frames, they popped up, but happily on frames that weren’t that great, so I’m not too mad about that.

I think the day was a huge success despite my gear failures. From the shots I’ve seen so far between the three of us, the happy couple is going to get some good quality images.