1 year old!

So its a little late, but I decided to put together a little photographic montage of my sons first year.

Happy Birthday little man!

Final winter pictures

Here are the final pictures from the roll of film and probably the final ‘winter’ pictures baring more snow, but the weather is likely to begin warming around here in the next couple of weeks.

Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro

Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro

Sigma 24mm f/2.8

 

Vivitar Series 1 70-210mm f/3.5   Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

The picture immediately above is probably my favorite of the whole roll. Its a little hard to tell in the 600 pixel image, but that is a fox out on the frozen river. You can see it better in this enlargement (50% actual pixels). In something like an 8×10 he/she is much more noticable. Of course if I had my Sigma 400/5.6 on the camera that would have been a little better. I saw the fox run out on the river and managed to snap a couple of pictures with my Zuiko 50/1.4 as the fox stood there. As soon as I went for my Vivitar 70-210/3.5 the fox ran over the bank it was by and in to the bushes. I do love the picture though.

50% actual pixels

More snow

Well, not around here, but there was a few weeks ago and these are further pictures from that snow fall. The Potapsco river tends to freeze over in  the winter time. That combined with some snowfall makes a very pretty scene. I had been considering heading to the valley on my lunch hour to take some quick pictures, but most of the snow had melted by lunch time, but I figured, “Why not?”. So I drove over and lo and behold the extra shade and cooler temperatures in the valley meant there was plenty of snow.

The first couple of pictures were from some snow a few days before walking around a local lake.

I’ll have a special story about a picture posted tomorrow (or the next day), but I forgot to email it to myself to post it today. Here is the first half of the pictures from the roll (the rest need to be scanned still). I got a lot of use out of my tripod. This roll and recent rolls is kind of reinforcing my ‘I like primes over zooms’ preference. I think the only exception is that once the focal length gets beyond about 100mm then I find zooms are better…or at least with my style of shooting they are better. That 70-200 range I really just prefer a single zoom, shorter or longer and its primes. Anyway, most of my shooting still seems to be with a Zuiko 50/1.4 and a Tamron 28/2.5.

Something I also realized now that I am actually scanning 100% of the frame is that with the combination of polarizer and lens hood it is vignetting slightly on the Zuiko 50/1.4. What I may have to try doing is stack it hood and then polarizer and see if it continues to do this. If so I may have to try to get a thinner polarizer…it isn’t severe, at least not at smaller aperatures and it doesn’t appear using just the hood or just the polarizer (I am stuck with only one of those on my Tamron 28/2.5 because it vignettes badly with both). My guess is I just need a thinner polarizer (I had to use a vignette correcter on a couple of images because of it, mostly just the lake picture immediately below).

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

More winter

The last of the pictures from that roll of Ektar are now up. I also just found out recently that the Epson scan software when set to tumbnail mode helpfully crops in to the negative about 5-10%. The only way around it is to do the general preview and individually select the negative. At least you can copy the marque to move that over each negative you want scanned. To batch scan, just like file selection in windows, just hold down the ctrl key and click on each marquee and hit scan. You can still do all of the color, exposure, etc changes on each individual negative. It just means an extra couple of minutes to setup the scan, but at least you know you are getting the whole negative.

Well here are the latest pictures.

 

Sigma 50mm f/2.8 Macro (both)

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Ciao!

More winter pictures

I seem to be having more color cast issues then normal with the Kodak Ektar 100. I guess I just need to do a better job of getting the white balance right (I keep missing true white when I try to set it).

*I edited the pictures and reposted them, still not perfect but better on the color cast issues*

  

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4                            Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

Winter weather

I had three great events recently. The first was that my son turned 1 (his party is this weekend), the next is that I finally had a real chance to use my tripod and finally I also got to try out Kodak Ektar 100 film. Since this is a blog about photography I’ll concentrate on that part. The tripod is working great. I love the rc2 quick release system. It is nice and secure and it operates quickly. The Ektar film is also nice, though I’ve noticed it does not tolerate over exposure well at all. Since I was shooting snowy scenes I was exposing around 1 1/2-2 stops over what the meter was telling me so that the snow actually came out white. Its possible/probably that my camera’s meter is a bit off as it is, but 1 1/2-2 stops was definitely to much for the Ektar film. Next time I think I need to keep it 1/2-1 stop over as the snowy areas were just to dense for my scanner the handle and every time I would compensate enough to get every last bit of detail shadow areas would then become noisy (as in color noise, not grain, and hideous looking) and the highlights would be grain central. I figured out a scanning technique to compensate, but there is still some lack of detail in the snow…so next time I’ll bring back the exposure compensation a bit for Ektar film. Reala and Superia seem to handle this over exposure well though.

The Ektar film is gorgeous though. The grain really is quite low and the resolution is very nice. The saturation is lovely. None of these pictures has had the saturation changed at all…in fact other then a slight bit of USM to sharpen the picture a hair nothing else was done to these pictures other then a hair of vignette reduction on one or two (wide aperture on a 50mm lens with white skies leads to obvious vignetting even when it is only maybe a stop of vignetting or a little less).

Anyway, this is the first round of pictures. I have to rescan some I did last night and continue scanning through the roll. Unlike a typical roll where there are 3-6 pictures I really like, I like about 25 out of the 37 on the roll, so it is going to take awhile to scan all of them.

Zuiko 50mm f/1.4

Vivitar Series 1 70-210mm f/3.5 (210mm)

Tamron 28mm f/2.5

 

Vivitar Series 1 70-210mm f/3.5    Tamron 28mm f/2.5