Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Just a few shot’s from a demolition site.  I took some other photo’s for painting references.

It’s a bit of a thorny issue, talking about the P7000’s focus which causes moments of wonderment, such as why didn’t it focus on the object in front of it or why does it focus only after a second press of the shutter button.  Most of the time it is great and I don’t expect perfection but I do like consistency.  One area that I couldn’t find any info about was the minimum focus distance for different equivalent focal lengths.  I suspect the value given in the spec. sheet is just for the widest lens setting.   So I did some testing and these are my results with a high contrast target and measuring to the front of the camera body.

28mm……1 3/4″ , 35mm……2 1/2″ , 50mm……6 3/4″ , 85mm……..13 1/4″ , 105mm……15″ , 135mm…….15 3/4″ , 200mm……16 3/4″

Yes it looks odd to me as well to have the focal lengths in metric and the distance in imperial but that was the tape measure I had on hand.

My thirteenth time shooting a Polaroid each week happens to coincide with Polaroid week which is a group on Flickr who post their images collectively.

OK I didn’t actually have lunch with Ken Lum, I’ve never met him but I’m pretty sure that if he is as interesting as his art it would be a good lunch.  What I did do aside from eat at the cafeteria at the Vancouver art gallery was see the Ken Lum exhibit as well as “The Colour of My Dreams THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION IN ART”  both are fantastic shows.  and were well worth the trip.  As is usual for me I carried a camera, which I would not have dreamed of using in the gallery.  I surendering it at the front desk for safe keeping, while people with camera phones snuck around pretending to be ignorant of the rules.  I saw you behind that Jim Campbell installation!  Anyway here are some of the images I shot in colour with my new Nikon P7000.

I took the train into Vancouver to see the surrealist exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Of course I took along my latest camera the Nikon P7000 which is an advanced point and shoot.  One of the most surreal moments aside from the guy that talked to me while he washed his feet in the fountain and the women carrying the injured pigeon was the woman who tripped and put her hand right in the middle of a surrealist painting.  I had a moment where I had to think, did that just happen?

Well it’s official this is a great camera.  This little rangefinder is exceptional and may be the best fixed lens camera I have ever used.  It was the peak of the Yashica Electro 35 line and in retrospect probably the peak of the small rangefinders that came out of the 1970’s.

I decided to go all retro with my lenses.  I went for a walk and took: 28mm 1:3.5 Super_Takumar, 35mm 1:2.3 Auto-Takumar, 55mm 1:1.8 SMC Takumar and the 200mm 1:3.5 Takumar.  All of these are manual focus manual exposure lenses that I mounted to my Pentax K-7.  It’s hard to define the look of these lenses but they are different than a modern one that is corrected for distortion.  Some of the distortion I think actually adds to the look rather than detracting.  The 35mm 2.3 has an unusual effect on out of focus areas creating a kind of swirling vortex of blur.  The 200mm has pronounced chromatic abaration creating a kind of halo around bright objects.  All these effects are what we see when we look at older photographs and there really is no way to re-create them with processing or apps. 

This is the pool that they used for the movie Hot Rod with Andy Samberg.  Of course the fense is back up and a slide has been added and what looks like a dead possums head is at the bottom but it’s the same pool.