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.

While by digital camera standards this camera is now ancient, November of 2004, I still enjoy using it for Infrared photo’s and sometimes just because I really like it.  One thing I’ve recently started to do is to shoot RAW with it despite the fact that the write times with RAW are very long.  By shooting RAW and processing in the latest version of Lightroom 3 I am able to wring a lot more detail out of the files than ever before essentially giving it some new life.

If density were a criteria for choosing a camera this one would be a winner.  Well it still is a winner but more so because it is a great camera.  OK I admit I say that about many of the cameras I shoot with, but that’s often why I choose them.  Some of the fun quirks of this camera are that you need to operate the film advance lever twice per exposure to cock the shutter and advance the film, the back comes right off to load the film and the shutter release is a lever beside the lens.  Did I mention it is very dense.  Everything is packed into a tiny solid package, I can walk around just holding the camera in the palm of my hand.  There is no light meter and I didn’t have one with me so all these images are “exposurtimations“.  Hey it’s my blog I can coin words if I want.

A few more Minolta X700 shots.

When you’re out photographing and you notice something interesting the first reaction may be to snap a picture, you wouldn’t be wrong.  The next reaction should be how can I make that better.  Questions such as camera settings and  where should I stand and how will that look need to be thought through.  It may come naturally to envision a scene from a different vantage point or it may come from practice.  Practice should take the form of thinking about how something will look from somewhere else and then going there and seeing for yourself.  Technically you don’t even need a camera it just requires actually thinking about what you are seeing around you.  Using a zoom lens gives more options but may actually hinder this type of creativity as it tends to make you stand where you are and try to frame a scene, rather than actively searching.

Here is an example.  I saw this scene and took an initial image.  I then noticed the curve of the shore and how the fence could make an interesting foreground element.  So I left the trail and headed for the beach.

And here is the image that resulted.  I did have to wait for the man trying to fly the parachute to get it airborne again and luckily this seagull was the bravest of them all and didn’t fly off.

My first serious camera that I bought for myself was the Minolta X700.  I still consider it one of the last great manual focus SLR cameras and it has always been reliable and accurate.  It was first introduced in 1981 and apparently it was made right up until 1999.  I purchased mine in the late 1980’s at a department store across the border in Washington state.  I’m not sure how many rolls of Kodachrome 64 I ran through it but where ever I traveled it went along.  I recently shot two rolls of film with it and was reminded why it is so good.  It is functional, without frills, with easy to control settings that don’t get in the way of creativity.

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.

Everyone loves a good oxymoron right.  The Big Mini, is a modern classic that is clearly misunderstood.  The camera is small so that must be the mini, so what’s big?  The pictures it creates?  Not really, there the same size as any other 35mm camera.  OK it’s just a catchy name for a decent camera.  One nice feature is the +- 1.5 exposure compensation, which works great for backlit scenes, like the one of the trees with the sun behind.  It’s also quite good at close distances focusing down to 35cm.  Hmm 35mm lens,35mm film, f3.5, 35cm close focus,  those stats almost exactly seem like they are accidentally on purpose.

Ok that’s enough, I’m almost done, how many oxymorons are in my post of vexing fun?