Old tech meets high tech

I have boxes and boxes (ok, small boxes) of photographs and negatives that came from my mom's parents' house. Many of the photos are from North Dakota, where my grandparents were both raised on farms before moving to Portland to raise my mom and her sisters in the house my grandfather built (below).

Now that we have a good scanner that also scans negatives, I'm slowly working my way through digitizing them 1) to preserve the images and 2) to find out what the heck is on all those negatives. (a light box might help too, but we don't have one of those.) So far, it's a relatively easy, but slow process. The pictures look pretty good on the computer, though, and I'm pretty happy to have them collected in one place. I have seen some neat projects that involve printing the pictures on fabric or iron-on transfers and then sewing them into things. My mom went through them with me and tried to do her best to identify the subjects, but some of them we don't have a clue about. Here are a few highlights. The quality has deteriorated, but you can click on them to make them bigger and easier to see.

































I particularly like these ones- I'm sure there is some technical name for the format, but they just look neat to me. The one on top is my grandfather, I would guess in his 20s, so late 1930s maybe. We think the bottom one has my grandmother on the right side of it, on the horse back in North Dakota.

The picture at the beginning has my great grandparents in it, Aquilinius and Clementina (or is it Clementine?). I'm pretty sure they're the two on the far right and far left. They were both born in Ukraine, where their families had moved from Germany. If the internet geneology people are right, they were married in Richardton, North Dakota in 1906.

The K1000s came out to play

My first camera was a Pentax K1000, it was a Christmas present my freshman year of high school. For those of you who don't know, the K1000 is the quintessential student camera. It's fully manual, has the barest of controls, almost no electronics, is built like a brick and weighs about the same. It's the kind of camera that would be on the A-team if you were plotting an expedition to Kafiristan with Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot. If I were Charlton Heston, I'd have something to say about my K1000 and my cold, dead hands.

Unfortunately, as much as I love my K1000, it's gone kinda by the wayside. Digital photography isn't just incrementally better, it's so much better as to qualify as an entirely different and superior way of doing things. Now I can take twenty times as many pictures because I know that I'm not paying for them (or rather, I already have paid for them). I get instant results, so if I mess up a picture, I can adjust and try again. I can work wonders in post-processing, turning crap into something I'd actually want to show my friends. I'm sorry, poor little K1000, I love you but you're just not on the A-team anymore.

A little while ago, on a whim, I got a Pentax K-mount Lensbaby 3G.
This was precipitated by the photo-contest over at The Range Life, in which I've been much more of a bystander than a participant. The main thing that I noticed is that most of the photographers there don't use out-of-focus areas in their composition. Everything is in-focus, at least that's what they're striving for.

So there I was, with a funny little lens, and only my K1000 to mount it on. The scene could've been straight out of my elementary school rendition of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. K1000 to the rescue. I buckled down, bought a roll of film, took some photos without knowing immediately how they turned out (gasp), got them developed, and scanned the negatives.

This also resulted in Shelley busting out her cute little K1000 and a geek-out session where I drooled over her sexy little 50mm/F2.0 Pentax prime. As great as digital is, it will be a sad world when parents don't buy high school students moderately priced cameras that are built to last a lifetime. I have a hope, that maybe once digital photography gets a little more settled, we'll see a return of a $300 SLR body that is "good enough," not packed with every feature under the sun, and built to stand up to years of use.

So, this is all a very long-winded of saying that it's really film's fault that I haven't posted on the blog in a while. Simply put, I've been waiting to finish a roll of film. There will be a few successive blog posts, since that roll of film contains a backlog of photos from various events.

In the mean time I'll leave you with one photo from the last hurrah of my K1000 and the first hurrah of the season from the Wenatchee river.

Seattle Panorama Desktop Backgrounds

I posted a link to my Seattle panorama shot on DPReview's Forums and I got a lot of really positive feedback. Some people asked about getting versions resized to fit as desktop backgrounds.

Right-click on the image you want and select "Save Target As" or "Save Link As" (depending upon if you're using IE or Firefox)

1600 x 350:

1200 x 263:

1024 x 224

Hang On Little Tomato

I'm generally a slow-poke when it comes to projects. I don't pop them out at spit-fire speeds. Since this blog is still quite new, I'm going to pad it out a little bit my 28 year back-catalogue of unblogged projects. To keep things simple for the narrator I'm going to discuss things I did 4 months ago as if I did them yesterday. By choosing to read further you are explicitly releasing me from any responsibility for damage incurred as a result of confusion of the narrative tense.

---

Here's a list of thing's you'll need to do this project at home:

1. Mutant Tomato
2. Tiny Saucer
   
3. Pink Martini Album
4. Hoya R72 Infrared Filter
5. Digital Camera and Tripod
   
6. Halogen Bike Headlamp
7. Tolerant Girlfriend
   

Amazingly enough, the oddest items on this list (1, 3, 4, and 6) all arrived within days of each other. Shelley was obsessed with the copy of "Hang On Little Tomato" (the Pink Martini album) that finally arrived from the library. The season was changing and I needed a headlamp for my now-nocturnal bike commute. I got an IR filter for my camera just for the heck of it and a strange little mutant grape tomato showed up in our groceries. Convergence like this was definitely a sign.

Here's the thing about infrared filters for cameras (it should be noted that they don't filter out IR, they filter out almost everything but IR). Your camera is sensitive to infrared light. This would make your photos look weird except that the camera manufacturers put a filter in front of the camera's sensor to remove most of the IR spectrum: most, but not all. You can get some of this sensitivity back if you stick a special filter on the front of the camera that takes out everything but the IR. The only drawback is, you now have to deal with a seriously long exposure time. Long exposures can be an asset too.

Why would you want to use an IR filter? Simple, it makes things look unusual. Chlorophyll reflects a ton of it, so plants look bright white in the IR spectrum (pictures of trees tend to look like cherry blossoms).

So anyway, while listening to China Forbes do her thing I set up the tripod, the x-men vegetable, and a little teabag saucer. All I needed now was a good source of IR light.

You know how halogen lights like to set stuff on fire? IR light happens to be very closely related to heat. Good thing I got that bike headlight.

Enjoy, and hang on little tomato.

(As a footnote, I do have a signed model-release form for the tomato, and it was not harmed in the production of this work. However, we did eventually eat it)

Comets look like little dots

Shelley and I took a field trip to the overpass where 12th crosses I-90, supposedly to see the comet at sunset. It turns out that clear nights in January are really cold. I would never have guessed.

Comets are neat to see. They're even neater to see if you're smart enough to carry a pair of binoculars. However, they're not that neat to photograph, even if you've got a telephoto lens with [a 35mm equivalent of] 700+ mm focal length. Zooming in on a dot still looks like a dot.

All was not lost. Against some vocal complaints about the frozen state of her keister, I made Shelley sit through me taking about 8 shots, each with an 8-second exposure. The above stitch is the end result (click on it to make it bigger).

[Update:]

I messed with the color balance, curves and cropping. The image you now see is the new one.