Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Two things are happening here I am posting some images of green things and I’m using you as a guinea pig to test out a flash gallery.  Thank you for your unwitting cooperation.  The thing is I have thousands of images on my blog and mostly they get mentioned and then fade away as I post even more.  So after the suggestion of Nikhil Ramkarran to have my prints grouped together I’ve decided to create some galleries starting with my acll phone pictures.  The first effort in that pursuit is to present the images of  this blog post using a gallery that I created in Lightroom.

If you click on the image bellow you will be presented with a flash gallery of green’ness.  The point of this is that it will allow me to easily control and update my galleries through Lightroom without needing to do anything with my blog.

I realize that by doing this I am currently excluding iPhone users but that is an Apple issue not mine, I can’t tailor my site just to suit one handset, sorry maybe in the iPhone 6.

UPDATE  before I even posted this I have created the gallery for my cell phone images which can be found under links on the right.  Cell Phone Image Gallery

Some images from my hike along the Hayward Lake Reservoir trail.  There were lots of ravens in the trees always just out of sight, but seemingly keeping track of me.  The early morning coupled with the thick trees made for a very dark atmosphere but the morning sun breaking through the trees and lighting the moss is something I will never tire of.  It always amazes me to realize I live on the edge of such wilderness beauty and aside from a few other hikers you can enjoy the solitude undisturbed.

The bottom picture of the stream that has the tilt shift effect was processed in camera I was just playing around and thought I would include it.

I love fall! It’s such a beautiful season.

Here is the polaroid from the picture.

Tackeling the entire spectrum of cell phone cameras and social picture sharing is a bit too much in one blog post.  However the effect in how they relate to photography is of particular interest to me. 

As difficult as it may be to admit, much of photography can be described as an attempt by the photographer to reproduce an image they have previously seen and liked,  even if that image is one of their own.  You might find this a harsh statement but it is something that even occurs subconsciously.  The photographer may not be directly attempting to reproduce something but everything we have seen and remember affects our visual judgment.  Paintings, television, magazines and definitely advertising of all types play a roll in determining what we consider to be “stylish”.

Do not post pictures of weird faux animal heads it creaps people out!

Several new genres of photography have emerged through cell phone imaging.  There is the “these are my feet shots”, the “#me” pictures of people not yet afflicted with age.  And the supremely popular “CAT” hash tag.  The tendency to follow and create based on what is popular is brought to a new level through instant feedback within image sharing apps.  Why wouldn’t I want people to like my images?  If you really want to give up and go strictly for what people like have a look at what images have the highest popularity.  Soon you will be taking pictures of your cat lying in flowers at your feet. 

Note cat not cute enough, find cuter cat!

There are exceptions to this rule as I have discovered, dandelions gone to seed can be very well received.  🙂

It’s not all bad though, as a photographer it is an opportunity to have people see your images and also a chance to develop better composition skills.  Look closely at an image you intend to like and think about what makes it appealing.  Is it the content (#cat) or a matter of colour or maybe how something familiar looks different when photographed a certain way.  You can definitely use photo sharing apps to improve your image making.  The strength of these services is that you get immediate feed back (yes I am aware that was one of my negatives too, subtle difference)  They also reward good simple design.  A tiny cluttered thumbnail will be ignored more than a simple graphic element. 

 In the end though don’t take it too seriously, and enjoy photography, even if no one else likes a picture if you do that should be enough.  In a future post I intend to talk about composition within a square frame, which is the format many of the social photo sharing sites use.

Apparently I can't judge my own images I don't really like this one but it was one of the more popular ones this week, go figure.

Images that include the sun are also very popular, sun set, sun rise, sunflower, just plain old sun, but not aSUNder.

UPDATE  at the time I wrote this I was unaware that Duncan Turner had posted about Mytubo as well here is a link to his thoughts about the subject

DLTphoto . Also I unintentionally proved my point about recreating images that we have previously seen as I produced one that was very similar to one of Duncans. 

As the Canon Classic and the Pentax 24EW (pronounced 2-4-EEEEEeeeewwwww) fought it out to be the supreme irrelevant the Olympus mju III was waiting for it’s moment. In a move reminiscent of Doc Brown it has vualted forward from 2003 and staked it’s claim to be the preeminent irrelevant camera from around the turn of the last century.  It’s 37.5-150mm (really 1/2 a mm wider you coun’t have rounded?) lens is something to behold.  That’s 150mm in a Point and shoot!  I’m not aware of any PS film cameras that had a longer lens.

So why wouldn’t it just win hands down, it’s lens is the longest?  The reason is that it lacks much of the control that the Pentax and Canon have such as exposure compensation and that neat feature of automatic zoom for portraits.  Features like that really help when your trying to be the best of the abandoned.  And the Olympus is champagne coloured, please that is so 2000.  The Canon and the Pentax are a “real” camera colour silver, which isn’t really a colour because it’s just a reflection….. 

So how did it perform?  It took some getting used to because it seemed to want to use the flash all the time every time.  This was annoying and required me to poke at teeny little buttons until the flash symbol was off every time I turned the camera on (camera on-flash off-camera off-flash on-camera on-flash off)  I think you get the idea.  The one feature it has and luckily is useful is the spot metering.

The results though were good, again if good had stayed the same since 2003 but good is better now than it was then, (flash-off)  After all this which one would I choose you might ask if you cared.  The thing is they all have a certain charm.  The Pentax for it’s control and 24mm wide lens, the Canon for it’s looks and image quality and the Olympus for it’s 150mm long lens.  If you thought choosing a camera a decade ago was hard it’s far worse now.  There are more categories of cameras and more cameras in each category and new one replace old ones at a rate that even the all mighty internet can’t keep up with. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little blast from the resent past, and take a moment to reflect just how much has changed between 2003 and 2013 (note if it isn’t 2013 when you read this ignore that)

If you ever wake up to go take pictures and find it to be foggy, don’t use it as an excuse to go back to bed.  Difficult shooting conditions are actually an opportunity to try something new without the expectation of success.  A couple of things to keep in mind is that fog is quite bright and can fool (will fool) your meter in your camera, I found on this morning that I needed to shoot with +2/3 exposure bias to adjust the camera to prevent under exposure.  The other thing to keep in mind is that fog severely cuts contrast and is the most extreme example of aerial perspective.  A scene that would ordinarily be too busy can be simplified when a  distracting background recedes into the mist.

So to recap , fog filter bad, foggy day good.   I know I didn’t mention a filter previously I just figured it was understood.  And also be careful around road ways, your not the only one having a hard time seeing.

It’s Autum now and I thought that I would have a little celebration of the colour orange that wasn’t leaves.  Sort of a pre leaf changing colour contemplation.

I guess I just couldn’t wait, I’m posting this in the field.  See Polaroids can even be uploaded, they have kept with the times.

 I’ve been using an Android photo sharing app called Mytubo for a week now after a friend Duncan suggested it.  I’m enjoying the immediacy of posting and feedback as well as seeing what others are photographing around the world.  My only complaints are that some people use cameras other than the ones in their cell phones and I’m really not that interested in that with this app.  To me the whole point of this concept is to share the world as you see it when you see it.  My other complaint relates to the number of young women who feel compelled to point the camera at themselves repeatedly.  Your young, your pretty we get it. 

I’m writing this on my phone and I’m including some images I’ve posted to Mytubo.  The barriers to sharing and having people see your images is pretty low, I just need to try to keep the quality up.

NOTE:  I found it necessary to go touch up this post on the computer so that the images were grouped into a gallery instead of individual images in a long list, maybe in the next update for the WordPress app.