Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Some miscellaneous images from my afternoon trip to the Whatcom museum and area.

Just some more miscellaneous images from my trip up to the area around the Highland Valley Copper mine two weeks ago.  I haven’t had time to go through and edit all of them yet but the delay actually makes seeing them refreshing.

Fuji has released yet another camera that has peaked my interest, the Fuji X10.  It is a small fixed zoom lens camera (28-112mm equivalent) with a maximum aperture of F2.0 at the wide end and F2.8 at the telephoto end.  All this information is readily available elsewhere so that’s not really what I want to post about.  One of the new features of the X10 apparently is that manual focus is performed in the form of  the sub command dial.  This may seem new and innovative but it is actually something Fuji has done before. The Fujica 35SE used a thumb wheel back in 1959 in combination with a coupled rangefinder.  In this form I can say it works very well, the only problem for me being that that same location changes my aperture on my DSLR and it takes me a moment to get that through my skull.  How well the modern implementation works remains to be seen especially without the rangefinder patch.  When I first started writing this post most of the scant info about manual focus mentioned the main command wheel for focusing but after reading more info from Fuji itself it seems that it is the sub command dial which will not be as easily done with a thumb or even one handed. 

I went to the Whatcom museum and art gallery to see the work of a  Washington state artist, Elizabeth Colborne  (1885-1948) , who produced beautiful wood block prints and paintings.  Photography isn’t allowed at the gallery but I did purchase the gallery guide which has some great reproductions of her work.  It was an exceptionally interesting show for me because some of the images are from working proofs and really do a great job of showing her method.  The show has been on since June but ends soon (Sept. 21, 2011),  it certainly has inspired me to make some more prints.