[Taken 2 November 2015]
Sometimes, if you wait on the MLK Bridge just long enough, a gull will fly into your composition just where you hoped it would.
Category Archives: photography
Seeing the world through my viewfinder.
Planning the Annual Schnuth Family Christmas Self-Portrait
Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet and I’m already thinking about Christmas. Our annual family self-portrait, anyway.
It’s fun for me, yet it’s also a source of stress. Every year I want it to look perfect, and I plan for weeks to figure out the right seating, posing, lighting, framing. Inevitably, even with all that planning, something goes awry. Even so, just the fact that it’s a family self-portrait in our own home makes it that much more perfect: a slice of life.
Last year’s portrait session involved a tantruming toddler and a grumpy Daddy. I had to merge two versions of the portrait in Photoshop to get the end result (which still wasn’t awesome, for various reasons).
The year before (shown above) was one of the best, actually — Connor had these fantastically rosy cheeks, the cat laid down calmly on Aaron’s lap, and everybody was in focus at f/6.3 with off-camera flash. We had our moments of Are We Done Yet? — but we have those every year, just about.
I wished I’d remembered to comb Connor’s hair for our 2012 photo, and I wish he were sitting up straighter, and I wish the cat weren’t trying to escape (as usual), but otherwise it actually turned out pretty decent.
Connor’s first Christmas portrait was one of those awesome slice-of-life moments, where he cried his fool head off while we took the actual photo, plus Aaron and the cat looked like they were photobombing Connor and me, thanks to a narrower depth-of-field than I’d intended.
Before that, it was just a matter of keeping everybody in focus and happy — which I still had issues with, even without a kid in the mix.
Twitter Update: Finished up the roll in my #blackbirdfly over lunc…
Finished up the roll in my #blackbirdfly over lunch today. #filmcamera ift.tt/1i9YckH https://t.co/pfXMHPcxXp
Looking Up
[Taken 17 July 2015]
I loved this composition so much that I had to save it for its own photo post, instead of including it with the rest of the photo walk pictures.
Downtown Photo Walk, 24 July 2015
I had originally intended to take my new Argoflex 75 for a spin around downtown Toledo… then I discovered that it had a stuck shutter. So, since I had my heart set on a photo walk, I loaded up the Holga and took it out over my lunch break, instead.
I’d never tried using the rectangular mask for the Holga; up until this photo walk, I’d only used either of my Holgas with the square mask. One thing that threw me off was having to remember that my photos would be vertical, not horizontal. I forgot several times. Sometimes, it totally screwed up the composition — but not often, since the viewfinder is apparently more of a general suggestion as to the composition of the actual photo (i.e. the actual lens is considerably wider of an angle than the viewfinder would lead one to believe).
I also learned that — surprise! — focusing to infinity with the Holga is pointless. I should just stop using the infinity focus on any of my lo-fi / box / toy cameras, since it always comes out unfocused. Half of the roll was either poorly composed (vertical, oops) or out-of-focus due to me having focused to infinity.
I did find a few places I’m going to have to visit again, like the Manos community garden and a couple of murals that my unfortunate focus and composition issues failed to do justice on this roll.
Definitely enjoying getting out into downtown, getting away from my normal “test roll” repeatable compositions, and discovering that downtown really isn’t a scary place to walk alone — especially not in broad daylight.