Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Don’t you just love to hate oxymorons?

The Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim is one of the ultimate plastic cameras.  It has a “Ultra wide” 22mm lens and is an incredibly small camera, you could ever say it’s massively slender.  One thing to keep in mind is that it has a fixed aperture of F11 and a fixed shutter speed of 1/125sec.  So to get the best results you want to shoot in circumstances that require exposures around that level.  I was using ISO 400 film so that would be about EV12 or average daylight.  Looking at the roll of film as a whole it’s clear that I pointed the camera towards the light a lot.  Well it’s a plastic lens of course it’s going to flare so let it flare.  And vignette don’t get my started with the vignetting it’s perfectly awful!  OK so it’s bad in a good way and I’m nearly out of oxymorons.  

This lens was made in many different camera mounts but here I have it in Olympus OM. It is a true macro lens providing a 1:1 ratio. I loaded my OM-1 with Fuji 400 film in order to get a little more speed over the 200 ASA I typically use. That one stop can mean the difference between a sharp image and a blurred one. For example while typically you can hand hold a 55mm lens at 1/60 sec that isn’t necessarily true with macro. The reason is that small amounts of movement are magnified at close distances, while an angular shift of a degree has little effect at 100ft it means an entirely different view at 1 foot. Of course a tripod would be a good idea ordinarily but in this case I either hand held or used a mono-pod. As you would expect with a macro lens it is very sharp and has very little distortion.

My only wish is that it were in K-mount so I could use it with my DSLR, I really can’t find any reason to fault it, on the OM-1 it performs great and I was able to use it as a normal lens too.

This image more closely represents the reality of this birds life than if I took an image of it in a tree with a blurry background, obscuring it’s true environment.  There is nothing wrong with taking pictures of animals while creating a visual environment that we would wish for them, but it would be a mistake to think that that is the same thing as them having one.  We do virtually the same thing when we look at a scene even without a camera.  No one wants to admit that the road they are on exists while they look up at the mountain in front of them.

A wonderful gift that I recieved from a friend is this Sun 24mm lens in Minolta MD mount.  That’s ideal because I have my Minolta X-700 to use it with.  If your wondering why in the world I would dub this lens The Jelly Fish just have a look at these highlights.

That’s not the only soft thing either the right side of all the images are definitely not in focus.  As it is now so it was then, you get what you pay for.  This lens though seemingly well built, optically  is not.  Oh well on the plus side it breeds Jellyfish which I hear is difficult to do. 

I feel fortunate that my father took a lot of pictures during my childhood.  They form a certain kind of memory cue card that allows me to recall the events surrounding the images, even the feelings associated with them.  I think that that may be a part of what makes them special, that attachment to specific events and times.  In contrast today we seem to be taking so many pictures of so many events that maybe each individual image looses some of it’s ability to be a mnemonic and becomes just visual noise.  How long will an image be relevant if it is superficial to us now?  My dad shot Kodachrome slides, at the rate of about 3 to 4 36 exposure rolls per year.  This is a number and an amount of visual information that is easily retained. How can we deal though with thousands and even tens of thousand of images each year?  Does it really provide us with more information or is it diminishing returns?  There was a certain different social aspect to watching slides then as well.  While we share many images online with our friends, families and strangers it tends to be a solitary experience lacking the immediacy of a group of people all in the same place at the same time pointing at the same thing.  This was the way that those images my father took were re-enforced within my memory.

There is a degree of satisfaction though, derived from having others acknowledge your work online.  I don’t believe I could have finished this piece without the online community of  Mytubo photographers and their positive support.   I’ve posted most of these there, all having been taken and processed on my Android phone.  In case you find yourself there I’m @WallaceRoss, but the Internet generates fleeting things so who knows for how long.

These 3000+ cell phone images captured over the last 8 months do not replace my memory of that period of time and while I can recall where most if not all of them were taken for how long will that be true.  It makes me wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t select 100 to 150 images a year that have meaning to me and have them printed out, after all that is an amount I can handle.

This Print is 60″ x 40″ but a lower resolution version can be zoomed into online here  Cell Zoom

There is nothing quite like actually seeing an original platinum or gum print but I wanted to try to evoke the aesthetic of pictorialism with this digital image.

In this detail you can see some of the processing that has been done. There were a lot of steps to arrive at this but the primary ones are that the image was toned and reduced in contrast followed by the addition of grain and scratches from a scanned negative. I then applied some surface texture as if it had been printed on a rough paper. There were more adjustments and a few dead ends in the process.

Pictorialism was a photographic approach that created atmospheric images that were more about tones and creating a painterly look than capturing detail and reality. It developed during the late 1800’s in somewhat of a response to the growing proliferation of amerture photography and in an effort to raise photography above this. For more information see Pictorialism on Wikipedia or for a longer look the book Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945

My favorite from this book though is a quote from Edward Steichen in 1903

“Some day there may be invented a machine that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o’er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods – in short, a machine that will discriminatingly select its subject and by means of a skilful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will remain nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society’s exhibition and gratefully receive the Royal Medal.”

I believe I downloaded that app.

 I’ve been playing around with editing some digital files on the iPad even before I have uploaded them to my computer.  One of the things this allows is the freedom to go over the top with the processing, just as most of the images on social sharing services have digital filters applied, editing on the iPad seems like a license to do it there as well.  Would I want all my images to be square and highly saturated? No, but there is a certain appeal to it.  

When I took this polaroid yesterday I also took some cell phone pictures as it developed.  For me it’s as close as I get now to watching an image form on a peice of photo paper under red light.

I thought I would post these images from today that I took it with the Pentax K-7 and processed on the iPad with Snapseed.  While not an ideal workflow I imported the  images into Lightroom as this is still the way that I am able to manage the images best.  I then sorted and selected a few for further editing on the iPad.  To put them on the iPad I use Lightroom’s publish feature to put them in a specific folder for this purpose. That folder is synced to my iPad by iTunes.  Once the images are on the iPad it’s as simple as sitting down on the couch and editing. 

Now the only problem this creates is that if I import them back into Lightroom I will have what appear to be RAW files and edited versions of them renamed by the iPad.  For now I am goint to tag them on import until I can figure out a better way.  For reference the iPad 3 has no problems editing these  full resolution DNG files but at this point they are being reduced in resolution from 4672 x 3104 down to 4096 x 2721 which I haven’t figured out as yet.  Using the iPad is certainly a fun way to edit files and allows for more comfortable seating, now where is my coffee?

Taking pictures today was entirely for fun with Duncan of  DLTphotographic and am looking forward to seeing his images too because despite being in the same locations I think we took images of different things.  Of course the exception would be the few times the pursuit to fill our cell phones with pictures caused overlap, and I didn’t even see the pile of rail spikes.

I’m writing this on an iPad that is using my Android phone for it’s Internet access. The image has been converted in camera from a DNG raw file to a jpeg and then loaded to the iPad using the camera connection kit’s SD card reader. The point of all this is really just to test out the usability of the iPad as a photographers tool. It does allow the importing and viewing of the RAW file but the camera provided the most convenient way to convert and resize the image. The key test for me though will be how easily I can import the files to my computer using iTunes as I use my own file locations and work flow.  

UPDATE  with windows 7 I am able to download my DNG raw files directly from the iPad through Lightroom and all the exif data remains untouched.  This is good news and means that in addition to being a great way to view images it can be used as field back up too.

One thing to note if you are importing to the iPad is that you will be prompted to delete the images from the card, personally I like to have a backup so I decline the delete.

For reference 31 RAW files from my Pentax K-7 took just over 3 minutes to import into the iPad.  This is from a 30Mb/sec Extreme III card and the “New” iPad.