Seeing the world through my viewfinder.
Taken at The Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair (The Guild) on 19 July 2008.
We’ll be heading to this year’s art fairs on Saturday. Since I’ve taken photos of Ann Arbor with my Holga 120 film camera (photo above), DiMAGE X50 digital point-and-shoot, Nikon DSLR, and my iPhone, I figure it’s time to bring my trusty (?) Lomo to the fairs.
The last time I put photos into a physical photo album was June 2005, from my step-brother Philip’s high school graduation.
I purchased my Nikon D50 DSLR in December 2005.
Coincidence? Definitely not.
I didn’t completely stop using my film cameras once I bought my DSLR, of course. I still regularly used my Lomo LC-A — and, later, my Olympus XA and Holga and some vintage cameras. So, now I have two photo storage boxes full of photos from Jan 2005 (and two with photos from 1994 through 2004, in addition to multiple photo albums). Since I get my photos developed by online mail-order photofinishing, I get scans of my photos before the prints arrive in the mail, which is helpful for blogging and Flickring, even though they’re not super-high-res.
Now that the majority of my photos are digitized (except the occasional roll from the Holga or another vintage camera), I sometimes forget that my switchover to digital wasn’t so long ago. Our honeymoon photos aren’t digital. Our photos of our apartment in Bowling Green aren’t digital. I did take digital photos when we first moved into our house in Toledo, but with the point-and-shoot we had at the time. Plus, like I mentioned, I have scans saved of all my Lomo and other 35mm photos that I sent to Snapfish or other services.
But there are events I’m remembering that I don’t have digitized, like previous years’ fireworks photos (which sparked the thought in the first place). I’m definitely going to go through and start scanning and posting notable photos from years past — I’ll have to go through my boxes and albums to see what rates being scanned and what can just stay analog.
Stay tuned to my Flickr photostream to see what gems I unearth…
Aaron and I enjoyed our evening of Myles Pizza and fireworks in Bowling Green this year. It had been a few years since we’d done the fireworks thing, and we enjoyed ourselves, even though the fireworks weren’t especially spectacular.
This was the first year I shot digital for fireworks photos; I think they came out great, and photographing fireworks with instant feedback was a lot of fun! Check out other fireworks photos from years past, including 2005 (in Holland, Ohio), 2004 (in Bowling Green), and 2002 (at Hemlock Lake in Michigan).
Bonus shot from 2002: Diana incredibly fat and sunburnt. Yikes.
I purchased a new toy camera at Kiddyland in Harajuku while I was on vacation. I hadn’t expected to find any such thing there; we had other cuteness on our agenda. But when I saw that camera on display, I couldn’t say no.
I had planned to take a test roll in Tokyo and Nikko, but I forgot the Blackbird Fly in Aaron’s backpack at the inn, and once I realized what I’d done, wasn’t about to walk all the way back to the edge of town to get it. So I finished the roll at the Old West End Festival on Saturday, instead.
Overall impression: I like it. It makes distinctive photos, which is a big plus; also, it’s just manual enough to keep me on my toes, while being forgiving enough that my slip-ups don’t ruin everything.
More photographic geekery follows — and more pictures, too.
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I had been planning to write an entry about the strong and weak points of my new “walkaround” lens, and why I’m contemplating buying a similar but more expensive version of the lens. After some reflection, though, I realized that I just need some more real-world experience, both with my Sigma 18-200mm and with my DSLR in general.
Don’t get me wrong: I got some great shots in Japan. My new, wider lens allowed me to get everything I wanted in the frame without backing way up: meals, quick snapshots, and self-portraits all turned out a bit better for the wider angle. The zoom factor also helped on occasion, and allowed me to choose how to frame a shot, instead of just getting in as tight as I can and composing what I’ve got in frame.
The major downside, apart from some bigtime distortion at the 18mm end, was the speed of the lens — that is to say, how well it performs in low light. It’s not a particularly fast lens, meaning that it can’t “suck light out of a black hole.” This can be problematic, since I tend to do a lot of available-light photography.
My knee-jerk reaction? I need a better lens. One that’s faster, or that has vibration reduction. The truth? I need to learn to use my camera to its fullest before I go maxxing out my consumer-grade equipment.
The whole time that I was mentally complaining about my slow lens, trying to use a slow-sync flash or brace the camera or whatever — that whole time, my ISO was set to 200. I could have cranked it up to 1600, if the thought had ever occured to me. Better to have a sharp and grainy picture than a blurry and unusable picture, after all. But the thought literally never occured to me.
I guess I’m still living in a film world, to a degree. ISO? Set it and forget it. I should have set it to auto and let the camera decide, if I wasn’t going to keep up with it myself.
I still got plenty of neat pictures, even so. (And, yes, I’ll be posting them over the next while. Check my Flickr for the latest.) I just still have a lot to learn.
