In SoFoBoMo on
10 May 2009 with 1 comment
I’ve been teetering on the edge of SoFoBoMo since the start of May. I was going to start the first weekend of May but (fortunate) things made me postpone it. Now I’m ready to start tomorrow and thus a blog is called for.
I’ll try to make it short and sweet. SoFoBoMo means I’ll make a photo book with at least 35 photos and I’ll have a “fuzzy” month to do it. That month will have to be 31 consecutive days sometime in May or June. The results only need to be posted on-line as a PDF book but I plan to have my book printed.
So, I’ve meant to blog about this for a while but it looks like tomorrow, Sunday the 10th of May, will be the day when I start. I plan to update you on the progress through this blog, where “update” means “ignore”. I don’t really mean to but I’m afraid that’s how it’s going to be.
Also, if you have an interest in what I’m doing for SoFoBoMo, you might want to visit my corner of SoFoBoMo.
In Photography on
26 February 2009 with 2 comments
Sometimes I prefer to focus manually. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no Luddite. I love autofocus and only partly because I’m a very lazy photographer. Or rather lazy in general. I’d probably go crazy if I had to manually focus my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 at wide apertures when snapping concert shots. Add badly lit stages and the dinky, dim viewfinder on my D40 and I’d be in hell.
But focusing manually need not mean squinting into an all too tiny viewfinder of a crop sensor DSLR and twisting the focus ring until that green light stays on. I’ve used my aforementioned Sigma 30, a modern lens that has autofocus, a lot in manual focus mode for street photography. But instead of focusing while looking through the viewfinder I prefocus.
This technique is a lot more enjoyable with my old Zorki-4 rangefinder camera, though. Its 1961 vintage Jupiter-8 50/2 lens not only has a proper distance scale but depth of field markings as well. Quick zone focusing1 is child’s play when a glance down at your lens tells you where your depth of field lies. I usually prefocus to the hyperfocal distance when feasible, though.
I recently bought an old Nikkor-N 24mm f/2.8 lens as I fancied something wider than 30mm for street photography. Although not in league with the Jupiter-8 the Nikon 24mm has a better distance scale than the Sigma. It also has a rather basic depth of field scale but its use is somewhat limited as it’s marked for 35mm film cameras. Never mind that; I keep a set of laminated depth of field tables, for 18, 24 and 30mm, in my camera bag (see, I’m a nerd) so I can check what I’m doing. It’s also a good way of slowly memorising the various distances that matter for the apertures I use the most.
But the beauty of a wide angle lens such as the 24mm is that depth of field is comparatively huge. Even at f/5.6 you’ll hit hyperfocal a bit past 5m and everything from about 2.5m will be in focus. Using manual focus in this way makes street photography faster than with autofocus but also means that when I look in the viewfinder I have nothing to think about besides composition and framing.
So this is one reason I love manual focus but there are more. A nice bonus when using old manual focus lenses on my D40 is that I must control the aperture with the aperture ring on the lens. On any Nikon DSLR that has two control wheels, thus all but the D40, D40x and D60, this isn’t as big a thing but getting a dedicated aperture control on the D40 makes operation of the camera a lot more pleasant.
On the flip side the D40 won’t meter with my 24mm, nor most other Nikon manual focus lenses, and the camera will only work with it in manual mode. But that’s how I want to use it most of the time anyway and, besides, what do you expect for €47.50 including shipping? The 24/2.8 may not be the best lens I have but it’s also not the cheapest. That honour goes to my Nikon Series-E 75-150mm f/3.5, made in the early eighties, which I got for free from a total stranger.
The honour of which lens is my best probably also belongs to the E75-150 so old and cheap need not mean crappy image quality. Even if I hadn’t been lucky E75-150s are dirt cheap and especially so considering their optical quality. I’m a lot less fond of manual focusing when it comes to telephotos, though, as it is generally harder than with wide angles. But in my case I had only a limited need for a telephoto and a limited budget. The focus system of the D40 is also quite limited so for the purpose I originally got the lens, football photography, I’m not sure how much better off I would have been with an autofocus lens. Especially a cheap one which would potentially have had slow autofocus, small variable aperture and less image quality.
So old manual focus lenses can be a great option for those who have little to spend on gear but can devote some time to practice their manual focus skill. Not that all manual focus lenses are old and cheap as new ones are still being made for cameras that can use autofocus lenses. There may not be many today that choose to focus manually with their 21st century wündercameras but for some things it may just work better than autofocus.
In Photography, Stuff on
2 October 2008 with no comments
Back in August a Twitterbuddy of mine, Tony Delgrosso, commissioned me to do a photograph. He was working on a novel he planned to release in serial form on the web and he needed a cover for the “book”. He offered me a little cash, a lot of pimping and told me what he wanted.
I’ve never before been commissioned to do a photograph. Writing this now makes it feel quite cool but I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for two factors: I think Tony is a cool guy and, since he’s a cool guy, what he wanted me to do was pretty cool.
It was also not easy. The photo needed to pass for a 1940s European street scene and I soon noticed that there aren’t many places in Falun where a modern street sign hasn’t managed to plant itself. Falun is in big part a collection of quaint wooden houses and much of the rest is quite modern even if there are old buildings in between.
In the end I managed to find what I considered the perfect spot. Cameron, Marie’s middle son, got to play model and wear my suit and fedora. This was the first time I photographed a model besides myself and I learned a lot from my mistakes.
A couple of photographs were basically pretty good but there was a ton of small errors I had done. Tony however was very pleased so I dashed any thoughts of torturing Cameron into doing a second shoot in downtown Falun all dressed up.
I can’t show you any of the photos because I don’t have the finished product and the raw materials I have aren’t that good. Tony did his own post-processing, thus mostly fixing my mistakes, so you should head over to the website for his novel, Mr. Abernathy, and download the first chapter.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but I’m pretty sure it’s better stuff than the cover photo – which you’ll get to see when you start reading the first chapter.
In Stuff on
1 October 2008 with 2 comments
Yesterday afternoon I noticed that the small hole in my last decent pair of jeans had turned into a head–sized hole. I’m still trying to convince myself that the hole had been as small when I put them on that morning as it had been the night before. Otherwise I must have displayed my colours, by which I mean the colour of my drawers, to refugees and immigrants from three continents at school yesterday.
The situation of not having one decent pair of jeans is an untenable one to any unemployed man besides Jeffrey Lebowski so off I went to Dressman to remedy it. Back in Iceland I would at most have walked through a Dressman store to briefly glance around and convince myself that no article of clothing in there was of any interest. Living in Falun, however, the choices for reasonably, or maybe rather cheap, men’s clothes are more limited.
I must admit, though, that given a bit of patience, driven by lack of money, it is possible to find entirely decent clothes in a Dressman shop. And not only if you happen to be a gentleman in his fifties or sixties with a penchant for dressing like fictional European detectives. I ask you; would that gentleman buy drainpipe jeans?
Now, I realise that this puts me about two years behind in fashion. I probably should have bought drainpipe jeans back when The Rakes’ Capture/Release album was more than just a memory from a rather interesting summer. But no, back then I probably didn’t have the courage, besides being lazy when it came to clothes purchases. Today I just can’t argue with a 70% discount at Dressman for a pair of jeans that fit me perfectly.
In Photography on
21 August 2008 with no comments
For some reason I’ve been incredibly disinterested in writing lately. I have however been very preoccupied with photography. So preoccupied that the only blog I’ve attempted to write lately was about photography and got terminated when I discovered just how boring it was turning out to be.
Another facet of this preoccupation is that I launched a photoblog a couple of weeks ago. I finally managed to pad it with a couple of older photos tonight so I think it’s time I announce it here. I call it Snapshots From Falun and I mean to post only the very best photographs I manage to make. Put it a bit differently; I intend to put only good photos there. Which explains why there are so few photos on the site.
As for the name the photoblog isn’t only for photos from Falun. You can drop by the site’s About page for an explanation of the title and contents.