Some recent B&W images to share with you. Various cameras from iPhone to D200 add a little variety to the mix.

Moving along with my Out And About posts, I have a small batch of photos that were taken here and there with a couple of my film cameras, the Konica Auto-S and also the Canon Canonet QL17-GIII. These were from the summer, but the film sat for sometime before getting processed and scanned. I use an Epson V500 flatbed scanner and the results are nice for my purposes. Yes, there are much better and more expensive scanners available, but I don’t shoot the volume of film that I think would warrant their cost, and truth be told, reasonable-sized prints (8×10, 12×18 max.) look perfectly clear and clean from the scans I’m making, so I can’t find a reason to upgrade.

The photo above and the next few were mostly from a church festival here in town at St. Vitus Church we attended, and were shot with the Konica. Film was ISO400 Walgreen’s Color film (which is Fuji), though I converted most of them to B&W after scanning. The rest were with the Canon from various outings here and there, same film.

And now the Canonet:

Bonus Shot. This is from my G12 and not film at all, but take a look at how well the G12 does B&W compared to the film shots above. I find it very filmic in the way the images come out, at least with some massaging in Lightroom 3. If it only had a decent and usable optical viewfinder, it’d be a perfect substitute for the Canonet in many ways.

Haven’t posted much on personal activities lately, so today I’m going to start making up for that. With the weather having been reasonably decent over the last month or so, me and the fam made a few outings to our favorite spot, Mill Creek State Park in Youngstown, Ohio. As as a result, I have a few batches of photos to share which I’ll spread out over a few posts just to keep each one within a reasonable size.

Today’s batch was from a few weeks back. The weather was fairly comfy, but overcast, and I had the D3 w/ 80-200 f2.8 for the day. Unlike some photogs, I’m not one to carry a big kit with me when I shoot – at least not for unpaid, pleasure work. Instead, I’m usually one lens/one camera, and maybe a flash if I think I’ll be in a situation where I’ll need it. Any more than that and it becomes a hassle to me and also to my family as I’d be more worried about my gear than them or the outing. Besides, I’m lazy – shit gets heavy after 3-4 hours of traipsing around with my whole kit.

Anyway, like I said, this time out I had the long zoom on for a change because the reach is actually pretty handy when hiking near the river and also because I’m kind of bored shooting wide/normal all the time. Glad I made the choice because I had a few nice ops for candid shots that would have been impossible with the 24-70. I also processed the shots mostly as B&W as it was so cloudy the colors were crap anyway and B&W would let me get serious enough with the contrast to give them the pop they’d be missing otherwise because of the weather.

With that, here’s my faves from the day. Mostly landscapes, with a few candids thrown in for variety. But then, that’s pretty much Mill Creek in a nutshell, so there ya’ go. Enjoy!

You may have seen this photo before – last year in March I posted it along with some others in a post about me trying film again after over 10 years of digital only photography. Unfortunately, since this was first posted I hadn’t touched the camera until just last week when I finally got a battery for it (odd size, but easy to find -> BatteryMart). I had bought film a bit earlier, but just never got around to the battery. In case you’re wondering, Fuji makes film for these in three flavors – FP-100c, FP-100b, and FP-3000b. That equates to one color film and two B&Ws to play with.

Of the film I bought, I already burned through one of the color packs. Results were pretty decent once I got a hang of where to set the exposure dial, though it’s a bit blurry. I won’t post any of the shots because they are really mundane and were taken just to get a feel for the camera/film combo. My first real outing with it though was earlier today when we went to the Franklin Applefest in Franklin, PA. I took a few different packs with me to try, but ended up shooting just one pack of FP-3000b, which is an ISO 3000 B&W film with an extremely fast develop and drying time.

Results were pretty good for the most part, and sharper than the color film, but it seems really sensitive as to how you pull the sheet when you develop the print. As you’ll see below, it has a high tendency to unevenly distribute the developer and thus you get some unevenness in the final prints. I could say it was my rusty technique or a malfunctioning camera that was the real issue, but I had no such problems at all with the color film, so I chalk it up to the ultra-fast develop time (15 secs.) that makes it so touchy. That’s my hunch at least. I’ll find out with more certainty in the near future when I try the FP-100b B&W film that has a much longer develop time. In any case, I shot all ten pics in about 2.5 hours, which if I had had my digital gear would have probably been ten times that amount. Can’t say that’s a benefit as I don’t mind shooting a large number of frames if warranted, but I wasn’t trying to rush it today, and unlike digital, each shot runs a little under $1.00 a pop.

And here’s the results, scanned on my Epson V500 scanner, with no adjustments other than dust and bubble removal, which is a necessity. First one is dark from trying to get a bearing on the exposure comp needed. You can easily see the development unevenness in most of the shots, but that’s life and just adds character I guess you could say. One shot was snapped by the Ape, I’ll leave it to you to decide which one.

Got a batch of new photos to post from the past few weeks. Definitely, I find that having a camera handy all the time can lead to coming up with some interesting work. In this instance, most of these photos were taken while shopping at a major local housewares store that everybody and their brother shops at (can you guess from the pics?). Because of that familiarity, trying to take photos there that show something fresh can be a real challenge, so you have to think on your feet a bit, stay observant, and be willing to experiment (and look somewhat silly while doing so sometimes) to get a decent payoff. It’s learning to make gold out of lead in the photographic sense, and it develops a creative skill that will help immensely if you ever find yourself in the position of having to create original photos on demand (like for a paying client), but are given a dog of a subject, location, or both.

First up, some abstracts:

And now some candids:

This one is from the local library off my Droid2:

A few more phone pics:

And the best ice cream in the area, Forbush’s Drive In on Ellwood Rd. in New Castle:

Saikin(最近) is the Japanese word for ‘lately’ or ‘recently’. I use it here because this post is about exactly that – some thoughts about my recent take on my photography.  As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting a lot of B&W street-type photos here in my blog and on my Flickr stream. More so, in fact, than my automotive or previous personal work in the past. There’s a number of reasons for this, so I’ve decided to share them with you and talk about it somewhat.

First off, a large part of the reason for the change in style has to do with the fact that I’m again carrying a small-ish camera with me almost everywhere I go these days. Because full size DSLRs can be a burden at times when photography isn’t my main goal, in recent years I’ve gone through a short succession of “little” cams in search of the perfect everyday cam to keep by my side. This started with a Canon G10, then moved to a Olympus E-420, then back to my D200, then to a Ricoh GR-D III, and finally to a Canon G12. Is the G12 the perfect companion cam to my DSLRs? Who knows. But I will say that it has been very satisfying so far to use, and the image quality, to me, has a fairly filmic feel to it that I like, plus it has been pretty rock-solid operationally, which is always vital to me.

The second reason for the style shift has been that I’ve been getting more into the work of Japanese street photographers like Daido Moriyama(森山大道) and Ko-ji Yamasaki(ヤマサキコージ). Moriyama is a Japanese institution, and considered probably its greatest photographer at the moment. His photos, particularly his older works, have an edge to them that I like, plus his method of shooting is also something I find appealing. I touch on the reasons why I think so in my last post, but essentially I’ve been experimenting with his shooting style, and since he uses compact cameras exclusively, it ties perfectly into shooting the G12, and also the GR-D III I had prior.

A third and final reason is I get bored easily. Since my everyday travels usually involve going to one of a number of parks with the Ape, shopping, eating out, etc. I tend to visit a lot of the same locations over and over and over again. After a while, you start to get bored by the same scenery, and since I’ve shot those places numerous times before, my photos tend to stagnate, which is bad. Looking at them from a new perspective by forcing a change in viewpoint due to new gear, style experimentation, and the like is nothing but beneficial I think. Legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki once said that he likes to “break” his photographs to shake them up a bit, and the best way to do that is to shoot the same scene with different cameras. In some ways, my recent photos have been a modest attempt to do just that, to break my photography.

So there you go, a better look into what’s been behind my recent shooting trend. Will it continue like this much longer? Don’t know, but it will definitely change again at some point I’m sure. I don’t care really one way or another – it is what it is and what it will become. Are the pics any better as a result? Maybe, maybe not, but at least I’m thinking about them and that can never be a bad thing.

Some more shots from recent days:

A short series of leaves that caught my eye:

And finally, just because, a snap of the coolest camera shop in the area:

Managed to go to the Three Rivers Art Festival in downtown Pittsburgh today. It was completely by coincidence that we found out about it because we were actually in the area for a different reason altogether. I knew about the fest and roughly when it was going to take place from sometime before, but since I wasn’t participating the date just slipped my mind until a friend jogged it today while we were out. It’s times like this that having an “everywhere camera” is a good policy.

That said, I put my G12 to good use and decided to take candids for the most part, though I took some general overall snaps as well. Usually, when I attend an event like this, I tend to shoot it photojournalistically with the emphasis on telling the story of the event. This time though, I put that aside and did the candid street photo thing just because it forces me to consider a different method of working that can be very useful, plus it changes and puts perspective onto my typical compositional style as these are shot sans viewfinder and from the hip, and then culled later for images that I find striking in some way. The compositions tend to be somewhat looser than I would normally shoot if actually framing each shot, so when deciding what photos I want as my finals I’m forced to consider not only the framing, but also the value of the content as well. This of course seems like a “No shit!” basic concept, and in truth I already have considered all this as a matter of process when shooting and editing up to now, but the randomness of composition achieved by shooting from the hip forces me to look at what I consider good composition with a wider eye and perspective by giving me some fresh views to work with, so it’s a very useful way to increase my compositional vocabulary and it’s a relatively relaxing way to shoot as well.

Got all that?

Good, so let’s look at the pics. Aside from the people pics, I’ve thrown in a few architectural details that caught my eye as well for variety.

These last two have nothing to do with the Art Fest, but are a couple that I took over the last week or so that haven’t been posted yet , so I’ll tag them onto here. First is a candid from waiting for breakfast, and the other a scene from a local park that caught my eye.

Anywhooo, now for something completely different:

What do we have here? My complete collection of P&S and craptastic plastic film cameras, that’s what. I’m posting it because I was recently talking with a close friend of mine and the subject of Holgas came up. She was thinking of picking one up and I suggested to her to skip that idea and look for some crappy promo cams at the thrift store instead. I used this pic to show her what you could find if you looked a bit. In my case, none of these cameras were over $5, and most quite a bit less. The best deal of the lot was the near mint 80′s Canon New Sure Shot (bottom left) that was $0.50 at a local thrift store (these were $125 new back in the 80′s). Far from being a crappy camera in any way, it was a complete steal and impossible to pass up.

Now the reason I suggested what I did to her was that I think Holgas are overpriced for what they are and you can find cameras that will produce similar results for far less. I don’t hate Holgas, but I don’t love them either. My feelings toward them are similar to how I feel about the Blackbird, fly TLR, which is that for that kind of money there is no excuse for making a camera that has such poor image quality in the end. Sure, some people feel that’s what your paying for, the cameras’ built-in aesthetic style, but I’m not one of them. I also think it’s a bit more interesting to shoot with cameras that were made to be legitimate photographic devices that fail miserably at the task, than to use cameras that were designed to suck from the outset and are considered legitimate photographic devices now as a result. Yeah, it’s a purity thing, I know.

Collecting them is addicting too, BTW. There are soooooo many of these things floating around with hundreds of variations, that it’s somewhat staggering at times. Once you get a few of them you realize that they must all be coming out of the same factory because of the design similarities they all share, and that makes it even more entertaining and fun. They are cheap, plasticky, and plentiful, and that’s all you need for some thrifty and unique lo-fi film photography. Period.

Now how about some photos? Yeeeeyeah, yeah! That’s the whole point ultimately, right? These are all with the Ricoh GR-D III and one from the D3 as well. My street shooting boom is still active and I have some nice additions in that vein this time ’round. BTW, these are the last of the GR-D shots you’ll see, as it’s up on eBay as we speak. Shocked? Don’t be. It’s a wonderful design of a camera – fast, compact, very efficient and straight forward in purpose and handling, but I find that the focus isn’t as consistent as I’d like in all situations, and it’s just a bit frustrating and keeping me from relying on it to the level that I need to for an everyday carry cam. Disappointed quite a bit actually, because I really wanted one for a looong time. Perhaps the GR-D IV will address those issues though, and if so, I’ll pick it up in a heartbeat because the camera is that good in every other way.

BTW, here’s a rare selfie of me where you can actually see my face(!). All pics shot with the Ricoh GR-D III. Fun, fun!

First up, a few B&W abstracts for fun:

And a nifty selfie with help from some exhibit at the museum:

The Ape gettin’ his digital freak on:

Someone famous ^_^:

Mr. Rogers’ Lobby:

Strip District:

And . . . . a Bitchin’ Camaro!