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On Sunday, Elizabeth and I went to the closing day of the North Carolina State Fair. You see a lot of strange things at events like that, but this one just depressed me. I don’t know what poor creature lives inside this tent, but I doubt its existence is a happy one.
So, I’m on my way back to North Carolina after spending the last six weeks in the Midwest to work on my master’s project about Asian carp. After checking in at the front desk, I got up to the third floor of the hotel and realized that a different stock photograph adorns each door. Evidently, a deer crossing sign was best suited for my room. I think it’s an interesting use of stock photography–I wish that they had come calling to me, though! I can’t imagine what a contract like that, for a major chain, must have been worth…
While making a long walk back to Union Station from Navy Pier, with a detour to Water Tower Place (some detour, I know…my legs are still burning a bit) I happened upon the Wrigley Building right after twilight. The image about would have been better if I had taken my 24mm TS-E with me, but I had borrowed my dad’s 24-105 f/4L IS because it’s lighter and smaller than my 24-70. and I only wish that the couple in the image below hadn’t been standing right by those beverage containers. You can’t have it all.
They’re photographic clichés, but everyone I know seems to respond positively to silhouettes. On my last morning in Grinnell (4 Oct.) I decided to take a (slightly) different tack on an old idea: blend architecture and pictorial, but have architecture remain the subject, not the person walking through it. To achieve this, everything beyond a few “feet” in the image is soft.
Normally, in a situation like this, either a photographer would make everything in focus by stopping down to maximize the depth-of-field, or would focus on the place where people were moving in and out and let everything else fall out of the DOF. I wanted to try something a little different. Does it work for you?
On September 11, 2010, I left Durham, North Carolina to get to Racine, Wisconsin by way of Chillicothe, Ohio. Last Sunday I departed Racine for Columbia, Missouri, by way of St. Louis. Since then I’ve lost a pillow (it will be returned), been slimed by a Silver carp, photographed a levitating Kim Komenich at the 62nd annual Missouri Photo Workshop in Macon, Missouri, and played tourist at my Alma mater. My odometer cracked 27,000…not so happy about that, and I’ve also had my share of meals on the road. Things will slow down soon, but not yet…
This past Sunday, as I was driving up I-65 North through Indiana on my way up to Racine, Wisconsin, I came upon the Meadow Lake Wind Farm. I exited off the interstate and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and Dairy Queen in one (where else can you can get dip cones with a faint aroma of gasoline?) and was impressed by the imposing structure of the wind turbine directly in front of me. It was about 4:00 in the afternoon (Indiana is on Eastern time) so to help the color I screwed on my circular polarizer. The sun was coming from about 90 degrees, so I knew I could get optimum polarization if I wanted it, but I really only wanted a touch. It’s easy to make the sky turn blue-black if you’re not careful! The tricky part was conveying a sense of movement.
My tripod was packed away in the trunk of my car, so I braced myself against a car door and switched to shutter speed priority. I knew this would mean that a slow shutter speed, in broad daylight, could only be achieved with a low ISO and a tiny aperture. The polarizing filter was already helping by knocking the light back two stops, so a small aperture would finish the job.
Thing is, while the 5D Mark II has built-in sensor cleaning, it’s also the camera that I use the most, and I knew that it had some dust spots that needed to be cleaned off. So, to get a slightly less dust-revealing aperture (originally f/32), I knocked the ISO down to 50. Now, if only the wind turbines in the background had been slowed down enough to show that they were moving, too!
Together with Elizabeth’s family I spent a week in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in mid-August. While I had high hopes of making landscapes of the coastline and the Cape Hatteras Light Station, it didn’t quite work out. Combining a family vacation with photography is clearly an art that my parents somehow perfected, but I will have to learn to do myself.
That said, I was able to do a fair number of pictorials, particularly on the car ferry that took us from Hatteras to the island of Ocracoke. I had rented a Zeiss Distagon T* 35mm f/2 ZE (Canon-mount) lens for this trip, and while I didn’t use it as much as I had hoped, I did make enough to get a general impression of how the lens handles and renders its subjects on the sensor. What I was looking for in my photographs was the “Zeiss look,” defined by strong micro-contrast and subjects that want to pop out of the frame (read: three-dimensional). I’m not convinced that I found this look in every frame that I made with this lens, but it was there in several of them. Having experimented with the Canon 35mm f/1.4L a few months ago, I was curious how my experience would differ.
I will say that the Zeiss lens is demonstrably sharper than the 35mm f/1.4L–the edges hold together better, and even the center is much sharper. I believe the online rumors that the 35mm f/1.4 is due for replacement and that Canon surely is working on a successor; after all, the 24mm was re-staged with a Mark II designation not that long ago, and with the increase in resolution from the cameras coming down the pike, the 35mm is going to demonstrate too well that it is an older lens design. That said, the “effect” that these lenses provide is similar–strong vignetting so that the subject of the photo really “pops” when shot wide-open.
While I am still in the process of going through my images from the trip, as well as evaluating two lenses from Canon (the 135mm f/2L and the 14mm f/2.8L II), I would tentatively say that I give the nod to the Zeiss lens over the Canon 35mm because while they do produce similar effects, the sharpness and control of chromatic aberration with the Zeiss is overwhelming to the eyes. But, the Canon lens has autofocus (the Zeiss being manual focus only) and is a full stop faster, so anyone trying to decide between the two should keep those details in mind.
More to come.
Last night I had a fairly productive evening at Salmon-a-Rama. I still need a couple of audio interviews, to gather some ambient sound, and to shoot some video, but I have the feeling it will all come together.
Some of the photos are more visual “notes” that I like the idea of an image, but that a given frame is not enough to push it into the final edit. I’m hoping to perfect all of these frames before the week is out, although the one above may be tough to beat given that the Yellow perch (“Lake perch”) were still jumpin’ on the table!
Please scroll down for the rest of the photos and, as always, comments and criticism welcome! Continue reading “Checking in at the Weigh Station”