Esperando o ano novo...
This is one of the first tests that I did with my new 24mm AIS lens. (Added a bit of vignette in post).
Palmer Joss: What are you studying up there?
Ellie Arroway: Oh, the usual. Nebulae, quasars, pulsars, stuff like that. What are you writing?
Palmer Joss: The usual. Nouns, adverbs, adjective here and there.
From the movie Contact, 1997
Yesterday, we had the first REAL rain in months. Maybe it's time to pack my sandals and prepare for Winter...
There are times when you just do not know what to do next, but where standing still is not an option. Responsibilities make you move forward even when the paths ahead are dubious and dangerous. Sometimes you can see a blurred image of what's in front of you, but you have to make a decision. It's on those difficult times that one has to step up and lead.
Maybe the worst thing in Portugal. The lack of respect for their cultural heritage. Don't think I've seen other nation treat so bad what they have (as long it isn't ephemeral like a decadent soccer star or a corrupt politician).
Turn your back on...
* D. José turned his back to the city
* The lady in the poster turned her back to the River
* The two seated turned their backs to the statue and the square...
Who follows?
Sunday hot afternoon... and Lisbon is filled with tourists. Probably September is the best month in the year to visit Lisbon ( if you're not into beaches and crowds and stuff ) because you still get the hot summer but less hotter and less crowded...
Another day with the 35mmf2-nonAI lens. I'm enjoying this lens more and more as I shoot with it. Today me and my sister went to a stroll downtown and I played with this lens for the entire afternoon. At f2 its bokeh is unique and at f8 it is very sharp. I think that this old lens is getting to be one of my favourites.
I've been playing with an old 35mm f2 Non-AI lens, that has some sort of fungus in its inner elements. This lens was perfect at its time and I wanted to see how did it perform in low light and short DoFs. The above image of my cat is one of a set that I uploaded to flickr.
All images were made BW JPGs in the Nikon D80. I haven't done any post-processing. All images had a +1 in Contrast in camera, while the last one had a -1. I've found I like this lens with a +1 more for modern look and a -1 for old looks.
Continuing my Lisboners set. These two ladies were resting by the Tagus River in Lisbon when I spotted them. The symmetry and the V shape between them immediately capture my attention.
Meanwhile, I'm finally using Photoshop CS5 but I still don't have my favorite plugins installed. I'll try to manually move them from CS3 but if I can't use them that's something that will keep CS3 in my hardrive.
Lisbon is such a nice city with so many angles to photograph it that I really think that as a photographic subject it will never be exhausted. These two are part of my Lisboners (Natives, foreigners and tourists) series, one of my favourite themes in Lisbon.
A new Chess clock. Not as beautiful as a mechanical Garde, but practical enough. Also bought this small chess board as a study board for my side desk! Chess pieces are from the Czech Republic.
Lisbon was filled with tourists during the weekend... I don't really know why but I do like this photo a lot. Maybe it's the several stories that it tells, maybe it's the myriad of situations one can imagine for each one of these characters... who knows?
Spent the afternoon in my other city by adoption. We went for a walk to the old town, and I really can't understand why doesn't the old center has more people during the weekends. In others cities the old centers are filled with life during weekends. I remember Viana or Óbidos. Setúbal on the other hand, has fewer people in the streets of the old town. I just can't get a plausible reason to that. Maybe someone can one day explain to me this..
No one knows what they are for but in a Management School someone asked in the walls of the university "Economists? What for?"... Rivalries!!!
Still another detail of the constructions in Bulgaria, with the "extended" 1st floor and the stone ground floor.
When I landed in Sofia (Even a bit before in the approach), the first thing Bulgaria shows you, is that it is green. Water is abundant and you see green everywhere. I was shooting a Canon S90 only but the beauty of all these greens made me wich I had brought some film camera and Velvia 50. I'll not forget it next time.
There are only you four variables in photography: Aperture, Speed, ISO and YOU. And the last one is the most important! There's no such thing as correct exposure... There's only YOUR exposure.
Without a doubt the Bulgarian architecture made an impression on me (this was taken at the old town in Plovdiv). The way they expand their houses into public space above the street level is amazing. The mixing of rock and wood is also very interesting.
How to get myself to go out and take pictures? Sometimes all it takes is to put yourself into photographic mode is a detail, something you see that immediately catches your attention...
There's a bit more than the correctness of photography. There's emotion. Taking a look at some of flickr pictures that show up in explore or interesteness (what ever that is) I've found them very flat, both in color and in emotion. Rarely there is more than the simple tack sharp (or tack blur) technically perfect shot. And this is one of the reasons I stopped paying flickr pro. There wasn't really no way to say: Uau! This guy is saying something here! This is emotive and important.
-- Dave
Haven't been shooting much lately... My Nikon FM has stayed in the bag for a long time and haven't felt the urge to put it to my eyes. But today I decided to edit some old photos that were laying around in my hard drive and try to give them a new life. I decided to crop... and went with the ratio 3:1. I liked them and in the next few days I'll be posting them here...
-- Dave
I'm just writing the latest paragraphs on my Canon S90 review. It will be up tomorrow at Sixhat Pirtate Parts. Just check it out!.
I'm testing the new Canon S90 (not new as in new, but new as in just bought it). The camera pushes lots of right buttons near my heart. It's small as all cameras should be. It makes astonishing color pictures and although I'm still not truly convinced by the black and white pictures I suspect that's due to the fact that I haven't mastered all the things this canon S90 offers. One thing I turned on is the Intelligent Auto Contrast. It's just a way of compressing the dynamic range of the photo. In situations like this one in the photo, where the scene is highly contrasty it works very well, like in HDR photography. But when shooting BW... hm I still don't kown (I'll post some BW photos in the following days). I had to punch contrast a bit in all of them.
My ideal small camera is the one that takes great, sharp BW Jpgs out of the camera. The amount of contrast has to be just right, not to much, but enough. Until now, this canon S90 is the on that got it better, but as I said... I still need to test it a bit more.
It's spring and I'm back to office after easter in the north. And... I need to refresh the computer that has been working so hard lately that it needs some attention. As cameras need to be properly cared, computers are similar beasts... but less fun.
It's amazing what the Nikkor 85mm f1.8 can do. I must admit that I'm someone that preferes very fast lenses. The faster the better, and I even sacrifice the wides to get the shallow depth of field that I like. On the other hand I also like wides... but the 24mm f1.4 cost so much that probably I won't ever see it in my hands. It such a peaty that these nice toys are so expensive... :(
I'm trying to move away from flickr as it is very limited in terms of the free account. I can't spend all the money I usually spent in photography and if I want to keep some parts of it (like buying old gear) I need to cut on other things. I'm now trying to move some of the pictures published here from flickr to other online free services so it's natural that sometimes things break. I'll try to be quick in choosing a new and reliable service.
Image processing is a pain. The old days you'd had to deal with the chemistry, the temperature, the paper, the darkness, etc... etc.. all of these things were costly and a mistake implied the loss of work, or even worse... the loss of the precious negative... The master of all masters... the imprint of your eyes (and soul) imagination. But now... with digital cameras, the process of Sex O Shoping1 is even more painful in certains ways. Obviously you don't loose your masters (if you are careful to make copies), but I don't feel that sitting in front of a computer for 2 hours Sex O Shoping a "digital negative" is what I want to do in photography. I want to capture things, not create them in digital... Although I take pictures in Raw mode, I find myself more and more using plain vanilla jpgs (with all the loss they have) and in camera BW conversion / processing. At my age (and not living from photography in anyway) I just don't have the time to be sitting in front a computer screen. That is what I already have to do to put money in my pocket.
1 - this expression isn't mine, but I don't remember where I first read it.
Lisbon is the city of clothes hang to dry at the houses windows. It's something that you don't see much in other places, but here is a very common. A way of taking advantage of the good clima and not spending huge sums in electricity...
Went for a stroll this afternoon with my syster. Took my 50mm f1.4 with the D80 just to find that I should be out taking more pictures. As the 50 is a manual lenses (no metering what so ever) I need to use the Sunny 16 rule to take pictures, but with this lens as I do like to take pics at f1.4 f2... It is a lot of calculation... And maybe I need to buy a ND filter... :)
The bad weather (mainly strong winds) in Portugal this afternoon started to make some damages... this is just near my house and luckily this happened without anyone inside...
We've been seeing some strange things happening in Portugal. This is one of the most aberrant constructions that we've seen. The National Library expansion is out of someone without his right mind. The lack of respect for the space, the history or the volumes in this 50's building is something that everybody should protest about... but in these dark ages of the portuguese architecture everything is allowed (as long as the money goes into the right pockets).
Walking downtown in portugal we can find some streets closed to the cars. Curiously every time someone starts talking about closing the downtown streets to traffic the commerce protests saying that they'll loose customers. Curiously it's in those streets that are closed to traffic that we see the high profile shops and are always full with people. Can't understand their logic...
Playing around with Aperture 3 I come to the conclusion that it just doesn't make the cut when it comes to speed, usefulness and IQ, to be in my photo editing process:
I have this sensation that Aperture (although a very good software) isn't a product for photographers, but it has been developed to the computer geek that occasionally takes pictures.
It is very slow and after closing the program, my machine seems like it went to an halt.
After using to process 1GB of files I've decided that I'll stick to my line of editing... LR+Photoshop. It's far more productive than all the bells and whistles of Aperture that don't even come close to what I already use. I'm passing this one...
I've added more comments in my blog (in Portuguese! Google Translation)
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