Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I took a day trip to Seattle yesterday, with my Pentax K-7 and some lenses.  One of the places I visited while walking from Fremont to the University of Washington was Gas Works Park.  It’s an interesting thing they have done here.  You would expect a city to want to remove any evidence of a locations industrial past when converting it into a park but Seattle did the opposite. They preserved much of the structure from what was a coal gasification plant.  More info about it’s interesting history can be found here.

Gas Works Park Wikipedia

Here are some more images using the Pentax M50 1.7 and the DFA 100 Macro WR.

I’m planning a day trip and was having some difficulty deciding what lenses to take to use with my DSLR.  So today I went to a nearby area and took pictures with one possible lens selection.  I took the Pentax DA18-55 WR, a SMC M50 1.7, and the DFA100mm Macro WR.  This combination gives me a broad focal range and also one fast prime.  While I didn’t mind the manual focusing I would have preferred to have used an A series 50mm that would have provided aperture control through the camera rather than the lens.  Otherwise it was a pretty good arrangement.

What I have tried to do here is create a bit of tension visually.  By blocking half of the image, and obscuring the path beyond, we don’t know if there truly is a an oncoming cyclist as the sign states.  If we were to step out would we be struck?  Maybe I’m reaching a bit far here but that’s what I was trying for.

Some more images from my walk at the Golden Ears Bridge.  While these are pictures of the same subject you can see that by varying elements you can create entirely different impressions.

I had planned to take pictures in a particular location but was thwarted by the weather so I went for a walk on the Golden Ears bridge instead.  It turned into a great image making opportunity.  These four images are just a few of what resulted but I have grouped them together thematically.  As you can see these ones share several elements:  the bridge, the colour processing, occurring against the light.  While I didn’t get the source material for a painting as I had planned I’m pleased with the way it worked out.

There is a lot of discussion around the light gathering ability of current digital SLR cameras at this time on the Internet.  In case you are absorbing this post at some future date I am writing this in 2010 back when cameras could only capture images in murky darkness not inky blackness.  Sorry about the fossil fuel thing, who new?  Anyway back to the present, so there is all this discussion regarding which brand and which model of camera has the best signal to noise ratio and processing engine in order to make all images look the same no matter what circumstances you decide to take the picture in.  Well before such a comparison is no longer possible do to the dwindling availability of a thing called film I though I should provide some perspective.  I took some images with Kodak MAX 800 film and took similar pictures with my Pentax K-7 DSLR set at a comparable ISO 800.  So when discussing ISO speeds of 12,800 and greater perhaps a small reminder of how much has changed in a few short years is warranted.

Pentax K-7 ISO 800

Kodak Max 800 taken with a Pentax ME Super.

Pentax K-7 ISO 800

Kodak Max 800 taken with a Pentax ME Super.

As an addendum I’m aware that this wasn’t the best possible film to use but it is what I had on hand and I also didn’t do any noise reduction on either the film or the digital files.

I’ve taken a try at recreating the look that my Pentax K-7 generates using the digital reversal filter (slide filter).  It appears that it isn’t that simple a matter and that the processing may vary depending on the source image.  When optimized for one image it may produce different results on another.   It still makes an admiral effort and has a look all it’s own.

Original file

Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4 (Reversal)

Wallace’s Lightroom Reversal Preset.

You can see that while there is a close match in these images (blues and yellows are a bit of a problem) the results diverge even more on some real world images

Original Image

Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4 (reversal)

Wallace’s Lightroom reversal preset.

You can download this preset by right clicking and saving the target file to your computer.  You can also find out how to add this or any preset to Lightroom by doing a Google search.     Download Preset

Here is another example of using multiple exposures to extend the effect of time.  I had set my ISO to the lowest value available (100 ISO) and had stopped the lens down as far as I wanted to without having to compromise image quality, so this put me in a position where I had a shutter speed of 1/2 a second.  This is certainly enough to blur the fast moving water but not enough to give it that soft gossamer look I wanted.  So I set my Pentax K-7 to do 9 exposures with auto EV adjustment.  I also used mirror up and remote triggering to limit any camera movement.

K-7  70mm, f11, 0.5 sec

K-7 70mm, f11, total exposure time 0.6 seconds from nine individual exposures.

I like the term Contre-jour it sounds more sophisticated than “Back lit” but really it does refer to photographs taken where the primary light source is behind the subject but not necessarily directly behind it as I have done here.

These images have me thinking about how often I use this technique, so I have just gone through some of my images to find other examples.  This is by no means all of them but based on the number of images I had to look through to find them I can safely say I’m not being repititious when I do take an image like this.

UPDATE:  Ok I found another one that I really like.  It’s funny because until I looked at it again I had forgotten how a friend and I had  rushed ahead so that I could capture this and we would still be able to make it back before dark.  Based on the date this was 19 years ago.