Or at least a longer focal length than conventional wisdom suggests. I’m always reading that so-called street photography is best undertaken with a prime lens within the 35mm to 50mm range and I understand the merits of this range for reasons I will elaborate on further down. But convention is naturally a gauntlet that Alpha Whiskey cannot ignore. So before meeting my date I decided to kill an hour in town the other night shooting with a telephoto zoom and mostly at the maximum focal length (210mm: 420mm equivalent field of view).
Aliens Among Us
Photographers have the power to reveal the origins of alien life on earth. All we need do is grab a camera, lens and some extension tubes (or a macro lens or close focusing filter) and ‘the truth’ will be revealed! [Read more…]
If it Moves, Make it Blurred
Hi, my name is Giovanni Ruffinengo and I am a student who likes photography. I currently study mathematics in Italy and for me photography is the constant construction of the relationship between the photographer and the images. Anyway, I would love to own an Owl.
What to Photograph in Florianópolis, Brazil
It was the year 1987, living in São Paulo, three friends and I decided to undertake a trip to the south of Brazil. We took our surfboards and cheerful for the information we had collected in the region, we boarded the bus to face an 11-hour trip. I had a camera with me that was borrowed from my stepfather. It was a Penthax Sphotmatic with a 50mm and a 70-250mm lens. The photometer did not work, so I used a hand-Weston. I rewound 20 films and left.
On the Road: Traveling Through Yellowstone
Our landscape photography tutorial has taken us from Colorado to Wyoming to Montana, and we have filmed in some amazing locations along the way. Cell coverage is hard to find in this area of the country, but there is no shortage of beautiful landscapes to photograph. After packing up and heading out of Grand Teton National Park, we took a short detour through Yellowstone on the way to Montana. This was the first visit for both John and I, and it did not disappoint – I wish that we had more time to spend in such an amazing place! Still, with our filming schedule, we had to make the most of the couple of days that we had.
Silver & Light
Two months ago, while browsing the web page of an on-line analog photography store in Germany, Fotoimpex, I came across a link to a video entitled, “Silver & Light”, made by a brilliant artist named Ian Ruhter. The video takes the viewer inside the thought process and passion behind one man’s dream to create photographic art using one of the oldest photographic processes ever invented – the wet plate collodion. I found the story tantalizing and inspiring. Given the recent publication from our enthusiastic and talented guest poster, Simone Conti, on a modern-day version of a comparably old photographic process, I thought this video would be of interest to our Readers. Some notable quotes from the video: “If you had been searching your whole life for something you love and you found it, what would you be willing to sacrifice?”, “The only limitations there are, are the ones that I put on myself”, and “I am literally pouring my soul onto every plate.” Please, enjoy.
The Atacama Desert: Perilous for Humans, Great for Cameras
Being married to a university professor has its advantages (and disadvantages, but this is not the time or place…), the most important being the international conferences and research trips. After-all, if one airline ticket and hotel is already paid for, it makes sense to buy another ticket and make a holiday of it, right? So when my wife announced a research visit to Chile in 2013, I didn’t need much encouragement to join her once most of her work was done. The only condition was that she would still need to spend several days of our time together working, and during that time I would be her “official photographer”. Since these “work days” would be at abandoned nitrate mines in the middle of the Atacama desert, you might wonder what the attraction was – but the prospect of “leisure” days looking at volcanoes, salt lakes and mountains soon persuaded me.
Technicolor Black and White
Recently I returned to one of my enduring passions: shooting film. I’m Italian and I recently moved to California. In Italy, it’s really hard to find a good lab to develop film and it’s even more difficult to find rolls of film of the brands I like. Here in the US, I felt reborn with new joy: everything is so much easier when it comes to shooting film. All over the world shooting film is getting more popular, it’s in fashion again, and it’s even possible to find photographers returning to analog, ditching digital for paid jobs. In Italy, the business of photography completely revolves around shooting digital: almost no one thinks about film anymore. So for me, it was amazing to take my four 120 rolls to the lab to discover they could be processed only after the order for the previous customer was finished… the lab told me a well-known company with a blue logo based in the Bay area had just delivered a big batch of 70 rolls for processing! I was kind of sad when I discovered my batch was delayed by 48 hours (beyond the usual 24 hours needed for developing, printing the contact sheet and scanning everything in high resolution), but I finally received my processed rolls and you can see some results in the images of this article.
Stop Taking Crappy Pictures!
Hi. My name is Elliot Madriss and I teach a successful class at the continuing education facility as part of the University of New Mexico called “Stop Taking Crappy Pictures!”. This class was created as a direct result of my reaction to the very poor quality of images being posted on the Internet and on many professional sites – in my opinion, collectively we are losing our ability to take great photographs. With the advent of incredible cell phone technologies as well as the great sensors that now populate most DSLRs, taking snapshots has been made much easier. However as always, photographs (which are great works of art) are still difficult to take. But don’t blame yourselves, its in your DNA not to see photographically!
A Little Practice Never Hurts
I decided to take a small break from my client video work this week and went to Bird Kingdom for a few hours to take a few practice images. [Read more…]
