Roadtrip - Centralia Part I - Windmills

Last week The Missus and I went on a little road-trip with some friends. We took the FJ to Centralia for some history, photography, and a bit of off-roading.

We missed a turn en route to our destination. As the four of us crested a hill, we found ourselves eye-level with one of these:



A collective, respectful "daaaamn" went up from the crowd.

After some additional driving, and assurances that I would make sure to stop by here on the way back from Centralia, my ADD-like inclinations got the best of me, and I swung the rig around, headed back for the windmills, and found a good place to park.

Surprisingly, access to the site was simple, and, apparently, not discouraged. I looked for, but did not find, any signs prohibiting our presence. There were a handful of warning signs indicating that high voltage was present, and I'm certain there were cameras to observe our activities; the site seemed very photographer-friendly.

The first thing that struck me was the sound. The blades appeared to be moving at a deceptively leisurely pace, but the "frwwrrzz" of displaced air as each blade came arcing toward the ground was eerie, I've tried to document it with a short video:



Beyond that, the mere scale of these windmills was impressive. You understand, at a purely intellectual level, that machines like this are large. They're visible from miles away. You don't really get to appreciate them on gut level until you stand at the base and look up:



I can't easily quantify how many feet above us the hub was, but a fact sheet on this model of windmill puts it about 250 feet above us. I'll buy that.

We took a few more shots, got a few more minutes of video, and finished up with a shot of The Missus and Annie before heading down in Centralia:



I'll cover the actual Centralia portion of the trip in "Centralia Part II - Mine Fire Boogaloo".

POTW 2012 - Week 5 - Sweets

Not all that much to say about this week's shot, except I wanted a subject that I could light through. This fit the bill nicely:



Rock candy, FTW!

Setup is light behind the subject, in the form of a small softbox, with a bare speedlight hitting the candy head-on, to light up the stick a little bit.

To either side of the subject are black flags, to give the edges some definition.

200mm (320mm APS-C equivalent) at ISO 100, 1/250, and f/11. The light at the back is set at around half-power, the speedlight is set to 1/16.

The setup looks like this:



One of the advantages to this shooting style, where the background is completely blown out is recomposing in post is easy. Extend your canvas, fill it with white, and drop the shot where you want it. No extracting necessary.

I added the vignette in post, and it's the first step toward turning this shot into a retro candy advertisement.

POTW2012 - Week 4 - Shadow

My intent for this week's theme dovetailed nicely with my intent to try stand developing for the first time.

Stand (or, in this case, semi-stand) development uses a very dilute developing solution, and very little agitation. It's used as a compensating development method to bring out shadow detail and increase apparent dynamic range. By letting the film sit undisturbed, the highlight areas develop quickly, but exhaust the developer touching them just as quickly. The shadow areas develop much more slowly, and can sit undisturbed for long periods of time without depleting the active developer. In this way, your highlights don't blow out, but you can still see details in the shadows. It's one part exposure, by exposing correctly for the shadows, one part developing, and three parts patience. Letting a roll of film sit in the tank for forty minutes, only agitating once at the beginning and once halfway through was a new one for me.

I will point out that I don't think I was completely successful - the highlight areas in image below are, obviously, not blown out, as there's quite a bit of detail in the light fixture. The shadowed areas, frankly, could be a bit darker. I did 'shop some color back into the image. It needed something, and the clearest picture I had in my head of this composition was the red "< EXIT" on the sign.



So, no setup here, film and all, but, this is my "recipe" if you will:

Exposed to put the shadows in Zone III (I metered on the ducts, to the bottom-left of the sign)
Developed in 600ml 68-degree water plus 6ml of HC-110.
One minute agitation, sit for 20 minutes, 15 seconds of agitation, sit for another 20 minutes.
2 minutes in the stop, constant agitation.
5 minutes in Kodak fixer, agitate for first 90 seconds, then 5 inversions every minute thereafter.
5 minutes in Hypo.
5 minute rinse, Photo-flo, 5 more minutes of rinsing


I wish I would have had my 60D with me, to get a comparison shot on digital. I'm fairly confident saying that if I had made the same shot, at the same settings, you would have seen the shadows, but the light fixture and surrounding ductwork would have been clipped.

DIY Strip Lights

I've wanted strip lights for a while now, but the dang things are expensive, so I started in on a build to rig up a couple.


Here's what I used:

• (2) 54" pieces of 4" PVC
• (2) 4" PVC Caps
• (2) 2" L-brackets
• (2) 4" L-brackets
• (4) Self-closing overlay hinges
• (2) 1/4"x20 wingnuts
• (1) 2' x 4' sheet of hardboard (clip board material) cut into 3" strips
• (8) 1/8" aluminum rivets with a 1/4" grab
• (16) Total feet of drop-ceiling L-channel
• Some wood
• Some screws
• Some nuts, bolts, and washers

This is what they look like all done and whatnot:



Painted the insides gloss white, and the outsides and barndoors flat black.

Popped the flash:



Some burn at the bottom, but it's much more even than my first test shots. I have some small convex mirrors on order that I'm going to mount in the cap to try to even things out a bit.

This is a shot with the barndoors partially closed:



And, finally, a shot with the door closed completely:



Yes, the flash did fire - I'm pleased to see I have very little light leaking out.

POTW2012 - Week 2 - Orange

I had a few ideas bouncing around in my noggin for this one. With "orange" as the theme, I obviously considered oranges (and there's a bag upstairs now), a construction area (no shortage there), cigarette tips, things on fire, the usual.

I decided, however, to make an image that was my first impulse, and one that I'm sure everybody with a camera tries at some point - I shot smoke:



While smoke isn't orange, I did reckon I could take any decent captures into Photoshop® and make them orange. So there.

My first edit was boring - just a quick orange layer in "Color" mode and the smoke turned orange. Since that was tremendously underwhelming, I pulled a yellow to red diagonal gradient across the color layer instead. That's much more satisfying.

Setup for the shot is easy, if a bit stinky:



On the table are three burning incense sticks. Both big strobes are snooted, and blasting through the strobes to strike a black flag on the other side. The flag prevents any spill on the background.

The camera is set to manual, ISO100, 1/250, f/6.3, and 80mm (128mm in APS-C terms), and fired with a wired trigger. I grabbed over 100 frames, and this was one of the 20 or so keepers.

Two weeks down, but I don't think I'm done playing with these smoke shots yet.

POTW2012 - Week 1 - A taste of Vintage

New year, new challenge, and hopefully some new techniques to attempt.

This week's theme is "A Taste of Vintage", and, while I wanted to go with the double entendre and provide a food-themed picture, I could not come up with a suitable subject. I do have "vintage" food in the 'fridge, but it's suitable for neither consumption nor composition.

Instead, I give you my battered old workhorse, the only medium-format camera I own, and one of the nicest cameras I've ever used, the Mamiya RB67 ProS.




Lighting on this was relatively simple, and came together quickly. Two Canon 430EZ flashes, at 1/32, and through some homemade snoots, at around 45-degrees to the front of the camera.

The shot was ISO100 at 130mm (208mm with the APS-C sensor) at f/5.6 and 1/250. All light is provided by the flashes.

Setup looks a bit like this:

And that's it - nothing fancy.

Fun with UWA Lenses

So, what happens when you have an Ultra-Wide lens, some shafts of sunlight, and a cat who really wants to know what you're doing pointing that big, black box at her?

Something like this:


An important specification to know for any of your lenses is MFD, or Minimum Focus Distance. The MFD is the absolute closest your subject can be to the focal plane (normally your sensor in a dSLR) while still having the lens able to focus on the subject.

The temptation with an Ultra-Wide is to spin it back to its widest setting, and try to get in as much of the scene as possible. While this is an appropriate technique in some circumstances, it's generally a whole lot more gratifying to use the usually much shorter MFD to take advantage of the inherent distortion in such a lens.

The cat above is quite the butterball, but you'd never know it from the picture. I got down nose-to-nose with her, and shooting at 10mm, got as close I could while still being able to focus. She obliged me (for once) by stretching her neck out to see what I was doing.

Shooting at aperture of f/5.6, to increase DoF (and compensate for any missed focus) I made the shot. If I were using my next-widest lens, which goes as wide as 17mm, I would have had to have pulled the camera back an additional four inches, and it would have looked a more normally-framed shot, and more of the cat's Rubenesque shape would have been apparent.