Phat Photos

As in Wide Angle. A perpetual struggle with most dSLRs, as is razor-thin depth of field.

I recently swapped some iStockPhoto winnings for a much wider lens but - that 1.6x crop factor - still a problem. Can't get around it - laws of physics and all that.

Which means its time to step up in class - either to a 5D (not a fan of the body, to be honest, but Oh! the image quality!) or a 1D (best camera body on the planet, but older sensor now) or the updated 1DmkII ( $$$ ). Yes, I could step all the way up to a digital medium format - but that would be $$$-squared.

Stay tuned - tentative plans for a trip to Korea in January and Shanghai in March - will do "something" before then.

Snow in the Canadian Southwest

I may as well succumb to the inevitable and post the obligatory snow photos.The next few were all taken on the same snowy evening - an evening our local press reported as being a "white out" - from which I am forced to conclude they have never seen a proper snow storm.



What I wouldn't have given for a 17mm perspective on a full-frame sensor that evening! Also noticing that how I deal with images has changed since I started working on a 30" monitor. For the first time, the display outresolves the images!

Holga Snow

It had literally been several months since I had snapped any photos at all. Work is insane - impossible to relate to anyone who has never lived the startup lifestyle - and no need to explain to anyone who has. It was so bad that despite ending up in Korea for a few days - and only a few days after the loose screw up north detonated a nuke - I didn't manage a single photo.

When I went out this evening I didn't know what I was after. I looked up and found...



...motion.

Too centered, too ordinary, too obvious

But I still like it.



For some reason, either my memories of film are fading or these conditions allowed for photos that really do look like B&W. With even the slush now disappearing from the streets, one last monochromatic memory.

Hill Street Blues

San Francisco is a great place, but there are large tracts of the city that were clearly untouched by dot.com affluence (fleeting though it may have been). The number of homeless and panhandlers is astounding, especially given this is one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest country on earth.

Not a car-seat-friendly street.

A couple of nights ago my partner lost conciousness and stopped breathing. A little CPR, a short 9-1-1 ambulance ride, and a night in acute care took care of things, but it was a stark reminder of how much of partnering goes into making (and sustaining) a family.

Even if you don't live on the side of a hill.

Sly Tech

Recently I came across a great deal on a very nice piece of glass, a long telephoto zoom that opens up to an aperature of 2.8. A very, very nice piece of glass. And it captures nice images. Crisp, sharp details, full of nice color and contrast.

It's the most boring lens I've ever owned.

I'll never get rid of it, of course, because sharpness and speed and accurate color are things you need for voyeurism of the journalistic variety.

But...there's no way of getting around it...it's boring.

Flowers for Vincent

About 20 years ago, the art world went through a spasmodic love affair with Vincent van Gogh. It turned out a lot of the high prices were complete bunk - artificially inflated, Enron-style - but however you looked at it, van Gogh was, for a little while, the be-all and end-all of painting. Personally, I didn't get it. Then a few years later, I saw my first "live" van Gogh.

And I got it, instantly.

Van Gogh does not translate on a flat page or screen. He painted in three dimensions, piling and shaping the paint until the shadows of the textures intermingled with the shadows of the image he was recasting. It's not sculpture, it's far more subtle than that, but the end result is a visual sledgehammer.

Steel

Some day in the future, large metallic objects may be too valuable to be left lying around, waiting for someone with a vision to turn them into something interesting. Fortunately, that day is not yet here.

Taken near Michael den Hertog's Granville Island studio. LensBaby, with a little grain mixed in.

Mobitel Camera

Somewhere in the archives I have an image of Emily and her grandfather at the Tour de Gastown. It had that quality about it where all references to space and time seemed to be removed: it could have been taken nearly anywhere in the Western world, nearly anytime in the past century.

This is not that photo, but for some reason it reminded me of it. Or maybe I'm just perpetually seeing the world through Daddy Eyes, and what triggers my subconcious is seeing my daughter with her grandfather.

Who knows?

The astute viewer will notice this one doesn't get bigger when clicked: it was taken with a camera phone, 1/3 megapixel resolution.

Spring

Taken on the marina side of Granville Island. It was just one lonely red rose up against a blank concrete wall. And then the sun came out for a moment...

Homeland Security, Great White North Style

I was told the Government of Canada was paying big bucks for "art" with high levels of red content. This is the only photo I took today with any red in it.

Night Suspension

Taken near the south tower of Lions Gate Bridge, a sulfur lamp shining on the cables, taken while laying on my back on the vibrating bridge deck while K waved traffic around me. Ok, just kidding about that last bit.

I tried a number of exposure/aperature combinations, but nothing was really working. Then it occured to me that since there was virtually no color in the image, it should be converted to black and white. And because it's black and white, with no detail in the emptiness, I could crank up the ISO, knowing the chroma noise could be flushed out by raising the black point in post-processing.

Blair Witch

There is something very enjoyable about watching young children leap before looking. Every step, every dark tunnel, is more adventure than cause for concern.

The Green Room

Back in the day, black and white film was occassionally painted to give it a faux-color appearance. This one I did in reverse - bleeding away most of the reds and blues, leaving only a little green.

Taken near Beaver Lake, in Stanley Park.

Bottoms Down

Yes, I freely admit this has "greeting card" written all over it. About the only thing missing is a cat hanging from a branch. But somehow images seem much less corny when they involve your own kids.

I really like the tonality, at least in print. This is another of those images that just doesn't seem to want to come right on the screen.

Whytecliff Park, West Vancouver

Whytecliff Park, near Horseshoe Bay. A near-miss, I think. The hillside was very rocky, the raven was a little twitchy, and I just couldn't quite get the exact right position I was visualizing. And in all the mucking about, I missed the Decisive Moment of Light.

Still, I'm fond of it. I can imagine Shakespeare looking at a view like this before putting pen to paper and writing Macbeth.

Whytecliff Park, West Vancouver

Second in a series from Whytecliff Park. Dealing with this image really made me miss my old darkroom. The 80dpi we get from our screens just can't capture the textures in the clouds or the detail in the rock shadow. The contrast limitations of a typical LCD screen are also shown in the highligts midway up the righthand side: to get any "hotness" in the whites requires blowing-out ("clipping") more of the image than should be necessary.

This image comes with a little poignancy, as the good friend I was with at the time slipped on the hillside just to the left and cracked a couple of ribs. But he assures me he will survive!

Beach Detris

This image begs to be printed. A friend blew it up to 11x14 on a Lightjet, and it looks fantastic! It completely captures the feeling of decay, rust, abondment. Unfortunately, it doesn't come across as well on a typical display.

I'm going to invoke editorial privilege here. I love my Canon digital SLR. It gives millions of pixels, at 12 bits per pixel. But I'm a black&white shooter at heart, and the color mask and anti-aliasing filters on the sensors are costing roughly 2 bits per pixel. That's 4x the dynamic range! A B&W-only camera may be a niche product (though I'd argue with that, since B&W film was always more than a niche), but it would be a profitable one. Hopefully somebody will fill that need.

Displays are another issue. JPEG is fine for many things, but at 8-bit color depth we lose a huge amount of color and luminance information everytime we convert from RAW. If HDR displays became prevalent, perhaps users could be nudged towards a better format. Or perhaps JPEG itself could be extended.

Ok, I'm off my soapbox. Thanks for listening. :)

Scale-model Effect #1

First attempt at recreating the tilt-shift "scale model" effect. By minimizing perspective angles, mimicking selective lens blur and playing with the contrast levels, I think the image got pretty close. At least for a first attempt. This kind of thing really screams out for an HDR display; the way the tone curve is manipulated really pushes what a typical LCD monitor can do at the dark and light extremes.

Scale-model Effect #2

Second attempt at the "scale model" effect. Looking down on False Creek from a 19th floor Yaletown condo. This is a very good color set for the effect, but I think it would work better if the image was horizontal. But for a second attempt, I'm reasonably happy.

Scale-model Effect #3

The latest attempt at achieving the "scale model" effect. I'm fairly happy with it, thought I think it would look more right - or is it more not-right? - if the car in the intersection were a lighter color. That would allow it to throw off better specular highlights.

A Picasa Miracle

Normally I process RAW data from the camera sensor in Adobe Camera Raw. This image, however, was created in Picasa. To be honest, I don't know what happened. It is a sunrise shot looking back over the city, and I cannot find any way to recreate the colors when using Adobe's RAW converter. In effect, even though I have the negative, I no longer have the right developer to duplicate the print!

Vaseline

This doesn't come across very well at all at web size. It was an attempt to play with coloring by applying various translucent "muck" to the front lens element. Obviously, this is not something you'd want to do with a nice lens! An alternate way to get effects like this is to shoot a textured surface (vaseline smeared on a glass plate, off-white plaster wall, etc) and then combine the texture with images inside Photoshop.

Pinhole

Our son, Sasha. I am currently experimenting with home-made...err..."custom"...lenses. This was taken with a pinhole, effective aperature of about f/600. Like any camera obscura, there is no focus ability, although I am attempting to marry the pinhole with a cheap old EF-mount lens to see if some sharpness can be obtained. What I really like about the experiment so far is the coloring.

There are small specks visible on the image. That is from dust and detris on the sensor itself. Normally they aren't visible, as they specks are very very small, but at such a tight aperature all kinds of wonky diffraction effects can happen.