New hosting with Nearly Free Speech, same old look. I’ll work on making this more attractive (and relevant) once I get the main site figured out.
Next I have to tackle getting my main photography site moved, and thats not going to be fun at all.
Photography vs … I have no idea.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
So one of my more recent lens purchases is the nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR. I have the older model (The VR II came out like last month or something). I knew the VR II was out when I bought this, but I found one in great shape on craigslist for a reasonable price.
Even the person I bought it from said “oh, its not the sharpest thing” and “it vignettes”. For my non-photo friends (if any read this blog) vignettes means it gets darker, like a shadow in the corners. Not sharp just means it looks like its never quite in focus.
I just got done shooting 3 days of portraits for the Beast Women Productions winter series and the opening night. And the cracks against this lens are a load of hooey. It works fine, if you do your job – the pictures are no better and no worse than other lenses. I do find it a little more difficult to get it to focus in low light – and the theater with all its lights on is still technically low light. The 80-400 VR (also a maligned lens on the internets) does a bit better at Auto Focus in this light. As to the vignetting? I have no idea what people are talking about.
Also keep in mind that due to the light, I shot this in Aperture mode with the aperture nailed at f/2.8 (wide open). For any lens, shooting wide open like this should show off all its bad habits immediately. Guess what? If the performer is holding sort of still and my shutter is 1/30 or higher, i get decent pics most of the time.
This has to be the internet phenomenon of pixel peeping where all these critics do is shoot gray test shots and then blow them up to 200% and complain about its not as sharp as BLah blah blah.
My complaints with this lens? Its long and heavy. Its nearly too long to fit in my domke bag (and I have the largest bag domke makes) and it weighs more than I wish it did. Its built like a tank, takes fine pictures when I’m not screwing up, and I’m quite pleased with it.
This annoys me to no end – as a still relatively new photographer it would be nice to get ideas/counsel/advice from the internets. But this trend of finding that lenses that do poorly on the internet work just fine in reality is a bummer. I guess at some level you just have to test stuff yourself and guess at whats likely to be good or bad.
Plain Black Shirt
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Yesterday was the viewing and funeral for a friend of mine, Leah Cunningham (Kubik). It was in her home town of Mishawaka, IN. The viewing was great – lots of family and friends. It was really REALLY hard seeing Leah just lying there. I half expected her to jump up and shout “owned!” at any moment.
Afterwards was some socializing and remembering at the wonderful old home of some of her family friends. We made a quick trip to see a band at a small bar and then out to dinner with her sister Elizabeth and sister-in-law Rebecca. Since there was a Notre Dame game, I had to drive back last night – no hotels.
Leah’s religious belief was deeper than I knew. Her love of music (all of it) was legendary. So I thought of a song I heard some time back would be a fitting rememberance: itms://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=171341956&id=171341918&s=143441&uo=4. That link won’t work unless you have itunes installed, but I figure most people (some people?) do. If I get any comments about a better way to link, I’ll change it.
And the shirt? I bought a plain black dress shirt years ago as part of a halloween costume. I thought I would freak out my friends by showing up as a priest. Matt W trumped me by showing up as a nun. Leah was his date at that party, and her costume was just legendary.
I wore that shirt yesterday – it was dressy enough with black jeans, it was clean, and it was a little tribute to Leah. I’ll rip it up or burn it or something now – I won’t ever wear it again and don’t want anyone else to either.
Tomorrow I start working on renewing my passport. I want to travel more.
Portraits and cropping
Sunday, August 16, 2009
1×2, 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, and on and on it goes. An excellent article by Liz Masoner points out that 8×10 is generally the most common “squarish” crop, and the others either match its rough ratio (1.25) or can be cropped from it.
What that means is that I’m probably going to make 8×10 my standard ’size’ and know that if the composition works there, I can crop into any other size. The “standard” nikon ratio (which I get when a photo is first imported into my software) is too long and narrow. Which is a shame, since I like some of the pictures with that long and narrow ratio- but there’s no easy/standard way to print them out that way without a lot of wasted paper/space.
This also brought up an annoying feature/bug in Lightroom – if you’ve cropped a photo to ANY ratio, and change the crop ratio, LR unhelpfully ignores what you done and makes the crop the largest possible crop with the new ratio. What I would prefer is that it held to the center of the old crop and preserved the size of the old crop as closely as possible under the new ratio. You’d invariably STILL have to adjust things, but you wouldn’t be starting over blank.
As a work-around, I create a virtual copy of the existing photo/crop (with cmd-’ on a mac) so that I have a visual reference to go by. Then I change the ratio on the “master” (the thing the virtual copy came from). LR blows the crop out to the maximum, but the virtual copy is unaffected. Then I can re-adjust the crop on the master using the VC as a reference. Once I’m happy with the master again, I delete the VC.
Welcome Thor Dilda-Sarik!
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Thats not actually the kids name – yet. Heather has announced she’s pregnant, and alleges that Sean was somehow involved.
CONGRATULATIONS
I’m voting for “Thor”, as that would fit with seans heritage, it sounds cool, and it would intimidate other school yard kids.
I’m also planning a betting pool….
A good week
Monday, August 10, 2009
I had a picture published in the entertainment section (actually, the section lead) in Thursdays Chicago Tribune. It wasn’t huge, and they didn’t use my name anywhere, but it was MY picture. Unfortunately while the article (a positive review of beast women) is online, the picture only ran in the printed edition.
Also this week, my first paying gig. And the BWP producers liked the portraits I took last week and did up some proofs for.
A good week. Now if work would be so accommodating.
Portraits at the Prop
Thursday, July 30, 2009
I took my first serious portraits last Sunday at the Prop Theatre. These are “head shots” of the performers for Beast Womens summer series.
All in all, some of them aren’t too bad. I’m fairly pleased with a couple. Lessons learned include this Induro tripod isn’t improving with age (strap snapped off), the new Gitzo ballhead is plenty strong to hold up my gear, but the quick release plate that it uses is best suited for a point and shoot, and the hallway of the prop theater makes for some VERY cramped quarters when it comes to shooting portraits with lights and a background.
How cramped? Try
(If you click on the picture, that will take you to the flickr page that has some notes about whats going on.)
I have about 3 feet of working width for my models. Some of whom were very comfortable in front of the camera and some of whom weren’t. In reviewing all the pictures, it became apparent that skilled portraiture means having complete command of the gear and technique, so that I can concentrate on the little details of light highlights, costume/dress, elbow position, etc.
The next shoot is this coming Saturday, which is opening night. I can’t wait to see if I can improve from what I’ve learned on this go round.
You can smell the photosynthesis
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The previous post was of a performance I found while trying to get to a different church in Lemont thats quite visible from the bridge. I found it, but there’s a house close by with just a massive amount of beautiful flowers and plants. Someone has a very green thumb.
The whole set is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/huntermatthews/sets/72157621786791068
Pictures like
and
make me want to look into getting a macro lens.
Of course, the macro lens won’t have a little voice telling me to use a tripod and smaller aperture to get a deeper depth of field (so more parts of the flowers are in sharp focus).
So patriotic I almost can't stand it.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Church, kids singing, people on lawn chairs listening, young kids running around, babies crawling through green grass and an American flag flapping proudly overhead.
Sunday July 19th in Lemont was a good day.
I’m not going to post any of the other pictures unless I can talk to the director about the kids. I don’t need any hassles right now.
But what about the FIREWORKS?
Saturday, July 4, 2009
The fireworks themselves? They ROCKED. Huge huge explosions, lots of different patterns, clear view, a little music – it was great.
The crowds were enourmous, but in my area of the park/shoreline at least it was almost all families and friendly little groups.
The photography side didn’t go as well. I brought the wrong lens – I brought my 80-400VR because I thought I’d need the range, but I actually needed the opposite – a super wide to get the full breadth of the show. I almost always carry my 50 f/1.4 with me, so I quickly switched to that. And now that I think about it, I feel really silly have made the mistake – oh well, live and learn.
I rode the subways in and out of the downtown area – I parked in west town and just took the blue line in and walked. Other than some minor adventures, it wasn’t bad at all. Not riding the Metra all the way in from Lemont or Lisle really feels right, and there simply was NO parking (or driving really) downtown/shoreline. So driving to western-ish suburb and then cta was a win.
Taking one smaller camera bad and the tripod was a win too – I was glad to have both. The strap on the induro just will not stay attached with their strap arrangement. I’ve now found two mostly acceptable alternative. One is to unscrew one of the feet, and use that as a mounting post for the clip on the that end. Not too hard/slow to get on and off, and I don’t worry about the dang thing falling off in a subway platform.
The other is to clip the strap to itself near the top mounting, and wear the strap like a big shoulder holster almost. I did this on the way back from the shoot because I didn’t want to muck about getting back to the blue line. It was more comfortable than I would have guessed, and I’ll definitely use this technique again.
The pictures themselves I’ll look at tonight – they are too bright (not overexposed, but too bright somehow) and you see far too much of the smoke from previous fireworks going off. I think I can bulk correct this in post. We’ll see.
I’d definitely enjoy shooting this again, but not down in the crowd. That’s just right out.