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21 February, 2009 · 1 Comment
Recently I decided that I missed playing music. I was never terribly good at it, but I enjoy it nonetheless. I hadn’t played the bass since maybe 1990 or so, but a few of my coworkers wanted to put on a show for a company party in December, and I was coaxed out of retirement (actually I leapt at the opportunity). I used a borrowed bass. Had a great time.
My good friend Chris happens to be honing his skills as a luthier, building basses. He’s an extended range player himself (which I define as basses with six strings or more), so a lot of his basses are seven or eight string beasts, with tree trunks for necks. For me, however he’s building a four-string “jazz style” bass. I’ve always loved Fender Jazz basses. They’re a joy to play with their tiny necks and fast action. He’s reproducing the experience with a large alder body and a tiny maple neck, adding some niceties like the highly adjustable bridge you see there, a flame maple fingerboard, and a striking body design that blends the best of Fender and Rickenbacker design without being a copy of either.
Chris humored me by allowing me to help stain the body, and aside from that I’ve been taking some pictures of the process, and also experimenting with product-type photography (he’s giving me a good deal on the bass, Sarah and I are helping him with his promotional materials). It’s similar to me to still-life work, which I’ve always enjoyed, with the additional challenge that I’m aiming to convey something specific about the object I’m photographing.
Here, I’m trying to feature the figuring in the alder body. I get the impression that a stain finish is somewhat unusual for alder, since it usually doesn’t have a lot of grain. This body has some lovely grain however, and the stain and wax really brings it out. I also wanted to feature the body shape, but found that my most successful shots were ones where I didn’t try to get the whole body in the frame. Even though the body is in an unfinished state, I think this shot succeeds because it’s conveying something about the instrument. With modern instruments becoming technological marvels, it’s nice to see the simple controls and electronics, such as you might see on a 50 year old instrument.
There’s more shots in my Flickr stream (link to the right), including a very stylized eight-string body that Chris is building out of a solid piece of mahogany. For these I used a studio strobe cable-synced with my Nikon D70s. The light was off to the left and high overhead, with a silver reflector to the right and a bit lower. I wanted soft highlights and a little bit of fill for the shadows. I had the light turned down almost as low as it would go so I could use a wide-open aperture and control depth of field. In Aperture I bumped up the black point to get the black cloth background to drop out and made fine adjustments to exposure. I don’t have a flash meter, and the Nikon can’t do ttl flash metering for a studio strobe, so at the shoot I’m left taking test shots until I’m reasonably happy with the results in the lcd and “fixing it in post”. Shooting in RAW gives me the exposure headroom to be able to do that without having to throw a lot of information away.
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Sarah and I camped a couple weekends ago on Rollins Pass west, or the Winter Park side of Rollins pass. It was a spot we’ve visited before. Easy to get to, absolutely beautiful and a great way to beat the heat in a particularly scorching Colorado July. This shot is taken from our campsite, which I reckon was about 500 feet below treeline or so.
We hadn’t been up there in a couple years, and despite being aware of the widespread pine beetle problem throughout Colorado, I was shocked at the extent of the damage in Winter Park. I’m no expert, but from the look of it there will be no pine trees left in the whole park within a few years (I’m using the word “park” here in the Colorado mountain sense, as in “South Park”. Look it up). Just about all of the trees at Winter Park ski resort are dead, for example. This means that there were several areas of Rollins west that were being clear cut to get the dead trees out (no doubt to avoid a wildfire). There are photos on my flickr site which illustrate this.
Again, I’m no expert, but my understanding is that the pine beetles are native to Colorado but have historically been kept in check by the winter cold. Since the winters aren’t getting as cold, the toll on the pines has been extraordinarily heavy. Aspens will probably come in to take the place of the pines, but that process will take decades. In the shorter term, Winter Park (and vast swaths of the mountainous part of the state) are going to look as though a wildfire hit. This means that we probably only have a few more years to enjoy this campsite in its current state.
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The Canon G9 giving it all it’s got, albeit with a bit of help from Aperture 2.1. It was raining in New York for a great deal of the time we were there, including when we were out on the observation deck of Rockefeller Center (or “Top of the Rock”, as the literature calls it). Anyway, it’s a great view from up there, and we spent a fair bit of time taking it in and snapping pictures. Just barely visible in this photo, off in the distance to the right is the statue of liberty, which of course looks tiny from here, but we’re a few miles away at least.
More pictures from this trip are on my Flickr page.
This is a good example of a photo that would be extremely hard to capture in a JPG format. I ended up doing quite a bit of dynamic range compression to bring in detail in the blown out highlights and the shadows, and if you’re not working with a raw format file that highlight and shadow detail data will have been discarded in the camera when it was making image processing decisions.
With RAW, you don’t get to use a lot of the “scene” modes on the camera, which can be a serious drawback for tricky shooting situations. Of course, if your camera supports RAW, chances are it included software which can take those files and process them as though they had been processed in-camera in a “scene” mode. One nice thing about the Canon G9 is that it has a couple custom modes, where I can save handy presets for settings that aren’t affected by the RAW format (e.g. flash settings), so I don’t have to manually check settings every time I power up the camera.
By the way, Aperture 2.1 is a great upgrade from 1.5, and if you’ve been a longtime Aperture user and have old photos that were processed using Apple RAW 1.1, take the time to go back and reprocess them with RAW 2.0; the difference is striking in some cases.
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Sarah and I went to New York for a long weekend. Many highlights to the trip, and one of them was definitely the “Take Your Time” exhibit currently on display at MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Go if you’re able! This piece was one of the ones at MoMA, halogen lights describing a 1 cubic meter area in a fog-filled room.
The whole exhibit is must-see (oh, and while you’re at it MoMA has perhaps the most important collection of modern and contemporary Art in the world).
More pictures from NY soon. It rained the whole time, but it was a fun trip!
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Another shot that does a somewhat better job of capturing the type of scenery in the Bassam area. I shot with both the Nikon D70s and the Canon G9 on this trip, so I’m looking forward to getting the Canon shots off the camera and doing some comparing. After several weeks of shooting with the G9, it was nice to handle the Nikon again and feel in control. It’s a much bulkier camera obviously, but a much quicker and more natural shooter for me.
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Sarah and I spent a lovely Memorial Day weekend staying at the Bassam Forest Service cabin just down the road from Buena Vista. If you live in Colorado (and probably elsewhere, but I don’t know), Forest Service cabins are a great way to get into the woods for a weekend without all of the fuss and planning involved in tent camping. Bassam Cabin ended up being lovely, and smack dab in the middle of a network of nice 4×4 trails and some of the most lovely scenery I’ve seen in Colorado.
Unfortunately the aspens didn’t have their leaves yet, so I ended up getting a lot of shots of dead-looking trees. Also took some shots for HDR processing which I’m hoping to get to in the next couple days. In my flickr stream there’s also a shot of maybe the biggest aspen I’ve ever seen. Bassam Park (the area where the cabin is) is definitely on my list of places to visit in the fall to catch the aspens turning.
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I think a lot of people would pick February as their least favorite month, at least anyone who has spent February in the upper midwest. Here in Colorado though, I think it’s April that really drives people crazy. This shot is from the 17th of April. Two days previous the temperature reached 78F. The snow in April comes fast and thick, and right when you’ve overcome your rational self and become convinced that spring is, at long last, here. Oh no it isn’t. Of course on the flip side, I had to take this picture first thing in the morning, as the snow was all gone by evening. Today, three days later, it was in the 70’s again and I was out golfing.
I reckon the fact that the ground was retaining heat from the previous days explains the weird lumpy nature of the snow here. Any snow that came in contact with the ground melted, so it was just the flakes that were suspended on the (let’s call it) grass in our yard stayed frozen. Nice almost foamy effect.
Shot with the Canon G9, using the built-in “snow” setting, with no post processing other than cropping and whatever resizing flickr did. I got the camera because I can go full-manual and shoot RAW, but there’s definitely something to be said for the idiot-proof modes when I’m walking to my truck in the morning and I just want to snag a couple shots without thinking about them too hard.
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Our cats Nora and Lenina just turned 17 years old! They are two of the shrimpiest cats you’re likely to meet (Lennie is the big one by a wide margin and last time she sat still on a scale she was 8.5 pounds). They’re transitioning from kittenish straight to little-old-ladyish. Nora here has been on maintenance meds for chronic intestinal troubles for a couple years now, so we’re lucky to have had as much time with her as we have. Last spring when she shed her winter coat she was suddenly all salt-and-pepper with lots of white hairs appearing everywhere.
Here, she sits on the wool rug in our bedroom and enjoys some sunshine. Shot with my iPhone a couple months ago, while she was still in her winter coat. I like how the white rug in the foreground contrasted with the black background echo’s Nora’s coloring.
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Got a new camera as a carry-around daily shooter, a Canon Powershot G9. Great specs for a (fairly) compact camera, with some important features for photo geeks, notably the ability to shoot raw. It feels great in the hand, very solid, and the manual features are easy to get at and reasonable to use. Yes, we’d all prefer knurled rings on the lens barrel for aperture and shutter speed setting, but let’s all repeat together: “Canon is not Leica”.
The only real quibble I have with this camera is the sensor. At 12 megapixels, it’s way too much resolution, especially for a small sensor type like this. I’d much rather have purchased this camera with an eight megapixel sensor and gotten even lower noise at higher ISO ratings. When you’re talking about the consumer space like this, the main thing that more megapixels buys you is more noise in the image, more disk space taken up on your computer, and longer transfer and processing times.
That said it’s a minor quibble, as it achieves very low noise even at reasonably high ISO, and the extreme ISO settings (800 and above) I’d go so far as to call usable in a pinch. The image above is a shot of Boulder Creek I took this morning before heading in to work. We got a nice little snowfall last night to remind us that spring is not here yet, and in fact March is the snowiest month of the year usually.
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We went out for a day of shooting in September, driving the pickup south over Guanella Pass. The day was blustery and cloudy, which made for some nice shooting conditions. I attempted to shoot several pictures with the idea to combine them into HDR images, however I didn’t have a tripod on hand, so I set my camera for auto-bracketing, set for continuous shooting, and shot off three hand-held shots in quick succession. This produced photos which weren’t suitable for automated HDR creation methods, so I was left to line the photos up by hand and use the magic of layer masks to combine properly exposed areas from two photos. Here’s the result of the first attempt:
Clicking on the image will take you to my flickr account, where the picture can be viewed larger. This is from two exposures. The sky is from an underexposure and the foreground is from a metered exposure. The hills in the background are blended between the two exposures. It’s definitely got that faky HDR thing going on. There’s a bit of haloing around the border between the hills and the sky, due imperfections in the layer mask and layer alignment. It’s a kind of interesting, the border provides contrast while maintaining the atmospheric perspective, but it doesn’t feel genuine. For comparison, here’s one of the exposures by itself, processed through Aperture:
Again, you can click the image to go to my flickr account and see other sizes. A somewhat more natural photo, with the tradeoff that it does show the limitations of the camera’s dynamic range. Oh and the layer mask method: whatta pain in the butt! I’m sure it’s possible to become efficient with practice, and it feels like a very powerful method viz the control you have over what comes out of it. Maybe with a truly exceptional shot that can’t be processed any other way it’d be worth the effort.
Categories: landscape · light · special processes
