Last year’s hydrangea still hangin in there. (Taken with instagram)

I’m really digging instagram. I mean, I’ve got a DSLR, and most of the past images I’ve posted on this site were shot with thousands of dollars worth of equipment - and there’s still a place for that. OTOH, it’s been said that the best camera is the one you have with you, and I always have my iPhone with me. 

Filters and faux polaroids can be seen as derivative and trite, I suppose, but in the end, I really love the way the images *look*, and that’s what photography is about, for me. The final result trumps all prior analyses. 

I certainly don’t wanna be one of those people who  confuse technique with art. You will (hopefully) never hear me say “It can’t be art, it wasn’t done with the right equipment or technique.” And if you do, feel free to kick me in the shins. 

Frozen blueberries! (Taken with instagram)

Springy out today

I love ferns at this stage. (Taken with instagram)

Chalk! (Taken with instagram)

Waitin on the trains (Taken with instagram)

Been a month since I posted here. I’ve been taking pictures - I can’t help doing it - I just haven’t gotten anything squared away for my blog. Work and Real Life have been keeping me from it. I’ll be back soon, though…

I’ve always felt a little self-conscious converting color images to black-and-white ones, both in film and digital. Back in the day, it was usually pretty easy to spot the conversions, and we all sneered at them. They didn’t have the feel, the texture, the caché, the honesty of “real” black-and-white. Of course, this was largely an artifact of the difficulty of translating a color negative image to black and white paper and getting contrast that mattered. If you wanted “real” black-and-white, you shot Tri-X, or HP5+, or something. Maybe even type 55. 

Then along came the digital revolution. There’s no monochrome sensor; they’re all color. You want black and white, you’d better not be hung up over converting it. Of course, the digital revolution also brought along the ability to change contrast with a slider; to increase or decrease exposure, lift shadows, dodge, burn, sharpen, blur, etc… all the various abuses a digital photographer can subject the images to. You can adjust the saturation of the color image that produces the black and white one; you can filter out blue, red, green, orange… whatever you want. 

But I was still somewhat iffy about it. Most digital conversions I’d seen were very… plastic. Smooth. Lacking in texture. Glassy and tasteless. I cut my teeth on Plus-X and Tri-X, and dammit, I wanted to see STRUCTURE in that gray. Texture. Feel.

Then I discovered Nik Silver Efex. This isn’t an advertisement; it’s just me talking about a tool I found that accomplishes something. 

The feel of Tri-X, complete with sliders. Someone spent a lot of time looking at the characteristics of film negatives, and worked very hard replicating them.  I’m still reticent to convert wholesale, but I find images I have to see in B&W, to see if they still look… interesting. Black and white is easier in some ways - it’s surreal, as we never see the world that way, but everything in the image is immediately recognizable. But it’s harder in others - you can’t use colors for interest. Just tones, and the objects in the image, and their relationship to one another.

You can now approximate this with Lightroom using filters and the grain slider. Not quite the same, but still very good, and not glassy or plastic. Crisp edges, subtle textures, long tonal ranges. Blacks that are black, whites that are white. 

Yes, I know all these images contain flowers. It’s not a theme; that’s just the way it broke out. But I’m over it. I can live with it. Conversion is no longer for poseurs. 

I’ve always loved shooting pictures of insects, spiders, close up things that we can’t see with the unaided eye. Revealing details that are hidden by the sheer diminutive size of the subjects. I’ve got close-up lenses, macro lenses, extension tubes, you name it. I chase bugs with a virtual arsenal of optics and accoutrements. 

When you pursue images this way, you frequently get nothing usable. The depth-of-field is measured in millimeters, working distance in centimeters, and the slightest breeze can make shooting an image frustrating beyond all belief. Take this lady for example - 

She was about 1/4” from toe-tip-to-toe-tip. She’d spun a web between a couple of the fronds on our shrubbery (no Monty Python comments). There was only the slightest breeze, but I shot fifteen or twenty images to get *this one image*. Notice that the very top of her abdomen is blurry? That’s because she’s thicker than the depth of field at this magnification (around 1:2).

Or a couple of days ago - I slipped out the back door at lunch time and went looking for this bug that I’d seen on the wife’s Hydrangeas a few days before. Bright orange abdomen, shiny black legs and body. Moved very, very slowly, but also very shy. Found one after about ten minutes of hunting:

Tried to coax him out from under the leaf, with little luck. Took twenty or so images to get this one with the ‘face’ intact. Turns out it was an assassin bug nymph, just as I’d suspected. Twenty shots to get one that seemed worthwhile. Look at that fang! 

Some shots are easy, though. You point your camera at ‘em, and voila, you get an image you like:

This flower is maybe 1/4” across. I’m not sure what it goes to, but I thought it looked pretty cool all protruding from the green. It was standing in the middle of our yard.

Then, sometimes, you just get lucky. I’m selling off a bunch of lenses I don’t use, and one of them is an old Tamron 80-210 f4 that’s never been a stellar performer; just ok, and I’ve got much better glass now, so it goes on the chopping block. Anyway, I was testing it - stuck it on the K-5 and took it out in the back yard to make sure it worked before I sold it to some unsuspecting eekbay shopper - and while I’m shooting random items designed to illustrate the lens’ performance, I got lucky. Normally, I’d have my D-Xenon Macro lens, but this time, the butterfly appeared and posed for me, and all I had was a crappy old zoom:

Like I said… Sometimes, you get lucky. :D

So I read on a forum about the Russian Helios lenses and how they were copies of Zeiss designs - the 44 being a copy of the Zeiss Biotar. Being a recovering Zeiss junkie, I had to try it out… like optical methadone. Plus, in 35mm film, my favorite lens was the venerable 85mm f1.8; this 58mm f2 would be almost exactly 86mm on the APS-c “Crop Sensor” with 1.5 crop factor.

The Helios 44M is an m42 - Pentax screw mount - lens, which means it needs an adapter. After various adjustments and finickiness, I finally got it adapted properly. 

This was one of the first images I got from it. Crisp, interesting bokeh… I like it. Then:

Another crisp, exceptionally sharp image. Its Zeiss heritage definitely shows. The coatings are vintage, so it’s prone to flare, but sharp, sharp… And interesting:

And the cost? $27.00, delivered. Sometimes you don’t get what you pay for. :D

Finished my day of shredding millions of life forms with high-speed machinery - including tool-using species of hymenoptera. Muahahahaha….