Steampunk stuff is great – old knobs and rivets. The stuff that inspired it is even better – authenticity, you know? With this one though, I just couldn’t pass up the pun…
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF50mm f/1.8 II | Shutter: | 1/15 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2010:01:01 15:31:24 | Aperture: | f/1.8 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 200 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 50 mm |
I mentioned the Seattle Underground Tour in the last post. Low light, shoving tourists, not a lot of time. In cases like this, you get a lot of what you get:
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF50mm f/1.8 II | Shutter: | 1/6 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2010:01:01 15:25:14 | Aperture: | f/1.8 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 3200 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 50 mm |
Sometimes that isn’t a bad thing though. Back in the film days it was more of a change, but even now it feels odd to some people: taking good pictures is all about taking a whole lot of picture. What you get will vary and what you expect to like might not be what you do. For these shots, I wasn’t trying to really document what I was seeing because I knew it wouldn’t come out, but I like the effect anyway.
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF50mm f/1.8 II | Shutter: | 1/6 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2010:01:01 15:25:56 | Aperture: | f/1.8 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 3200 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 50 mm |
The hand-held shots means camera shake. High ISO means noise. Funny lighting means… funny light. It just is what it is and these two, I liked. Wish I’d have taken more, but it was a tour, not photo time. Oh… and if you are wondering, these two are both the old glass sidewalk skylights common in Pioneer Square – if you see them on the street, the ground underneath is hollow.
When you like a picture, it doesn’t have to be for any particular reason. Maybe the reason I like this is because it’s old-timey. Maybe because an antique sink, completely covered in dust just has some charm. Maybe it’s because the Seattle Underground Tour is fun for the whole family. Or maybe it’s because this is the most anthropomorphic sink I’ve ever seen.
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF50mm f/1.8 II | Shutter: | 1/30 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2010:01:01 14:24:13 | Aperture: | f/1.8 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 400 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 50 mm |
C’mon – there’s a face in that, right? He’s even got a different color for one eye. That’s great stuff! But yeah. A sink. I just liked it. Getting a little photography wonky, it was a dark tour. I took it with my 50mm, which goes down to 1.8, but when you’re being jostled by the crowd, you don’t have a lot of time to set up or a tripod, so you get what you can and I liked how this came out. With low light, you can often lose some color, which made me want to try it in black and white. Hit the jump to see that one!
How do you decide when to take a picture in black and white as opposed to color? In the film days, it was actually a decision you had to make but with digital, it always starts as color. Most cameras have a black and white mode, but you’re kinda nuts if you use it*.
Most of the time when I take a picture and decide to process it into a B&W image, it’s because it either has really strong lines and contrast or it has very little in the way of color to start. That was what I found here:
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT (Canon) & 12.0-24.0 mm | Shutter: | 1/60 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2009:12:19 12:30:21 | Aperture: | f/5.6 | |||
| Artist: | Ari Brown | ISO: | 200 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 15 mm |
You like reading all of my jabbering? Click the link for more:
It isn’t usually that cold here. Seattle isn’t known for snow, or freezing, or any real extremes. This week, however, is not effing around. My computer is telling me it’s 25 degrees out right now, on its way down to 16 overnight. This is not normal or ok. So far, it’s been freezing but dry. At this temperature, however, just a little moisture and you get what we had last year, almost to the day:
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT (Canon) & 50.0 mm | Shutter: | 1/13 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2008:12:13 23:08:31 | Aperture: | f/1.8 | |||
| Artist: | Ari Brown | ISO: | 400 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 50 mm |
Right now it’s all happy and bare out there, but never forget people – this is how it started. You remember what happened after that, right?
Panning shots always looked cool to me. You see them often in sports photography – a car or bike in perfect focus with the background just a motion blur behind it. The way you usually do this is by setting your camera to a moderately low shutter speed (it all depends, but maybe somewhere between 1/50 and 1/10) and as the subject moves past you in a horizontal direction, you track them with your camera and take the picture while moving your camera to follow them. When done right, you get a subject in focus and everything else a blur. I’ve never had a ton of practice getting this type of shot but here are a few like that:
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF35mm f/2 | Shutter: | 1/80 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2009:10:12 11:31:19 | Aperture: | f/5.6 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 200 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Shutter priority | Focal Length: | 35 mm |
Here’s another. Notice how… not sharp the subject is. Part is lack of practice and the other part is this just… kinda hard!
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT (Canon) & 24.0-105.0 mm | Shutter: | 1/60 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2007:09:29 09:27:56 | Aperture: | f/5.6 | |||
| Artist: | Ari Brown | ISO: | 200 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 24 mm |
I’ve got the cure for your problems. Wanna take a picture that doesn’t require things to go whizzing past your face, lets you easily accommodate your subject of choice, and get a great panning effect? With a little help from an idea stolen directly from DIY Photography, you can do just that! Hit the jump for the rest!
I might have told you a few days back that I had migrated the blog to a new host. That was true, except for one thing. During the migration, somehow the database that runs the show and makes everything sparkling and magical got a bit borked. Everything seemed to work, except the plugin I use to show you all the info on each picture couldn’t find things. I tried all sorts of configuration until I realized it just wasn’t going to happen. My options were to attempt to edit the database (a really bad idea), manually remove and reupload all my pictures (a super time consuming bad idea), have my great friend Josh try and fix it (a very promising but ultimately unsuccessful bad idea), or figure out what happened and how to fix it.
In the end, I had to delete my whole blog, including the wordpress install and database , which scares the living crap out of me, and rebuild it. Since the files are all in the same places, after reimporting the XML file I had saved, it mostly came back to life. I had to rebuild all the pages, reconfigure everything, fix some CSS, blah blah blah.
Along the way, there was a little damage. If you were subscribed to a post, that went away. I’m sure I’m more sorry about it than you are and I heartily encourage you to resubscribe if you’d like. If you made a comment on my last post or two, that’s gone too. I really like comments. I miss them already.
Long story short, although there was a bit of damage, I really think we’re back online and relatively trouble-free. I’m not going to touch anything unless I really have to. Please tell me if you see anything funny, otherwise, back to doing the photography thing, no more doing the “make it work” thing.
Love,
Ari
Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach is my kind of place. I spent a lot of my formative pre-college days listening to the pounding waves against the cliffs and enjoying the distance from the hippies and crowds of OB proper. Usually out on the cliffs you have the company of a few joggers, a few more seagulls, and a lot of wind. It’s just a nice place to be.
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM | Shutter: | 1/250 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2009:10:13 11:39:22 | Aperture: | f/10.0 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 100 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 24 mm |
If you’re a property owner, however, I’d be a little more worried. The cliffs are always eroding, sometimes in a spectacular way, and I wouldn’t want my house right across the street. They put up these little fences around areas of particular danger, and I thought the sharp man-made lines just seemed so out of place in all the rounded nature around it. I like the lines in this picture, and it’s one of the few that makes me feel ok breaking the rule of thirds. Maybe even more than in this one. I think that because there is one man-made object in the whole frame, it makes sense to sort of hide it in plain sight. It lets nature stay balanced all around. I think it would have looked sort of funny anywhere else.
Oh yeah… one more thing I didn’t mention above. I threw a little vignette on this picture. I don’t use this a ton and when I do, it’s mostly for portraiture. I tried to keep it pretty subtle too, but I think it works well here for the same reason it does in portraiture – you’re bringing all the eyes into the middle and you don’t want people drifting out the sides. Just thought I’d mention it!
Sometimes it rains in Seattle. I mean it – it only rains sometimes. Wet, however, is a state of almost constant being. Seattle is damp. Seattle is drippy. Seattle has moss.
| Camera & Lens | Canon EOS REBEL T1i (Canon) & EF50mm f/1.8 II | Shutter: | 1/50 s | |||
| Creation Date: | 2009:10:31 14:30:39 | Aperture: | f/2.8 | |||
| Artist: | Photographer: Ari Brown | ISO: | 100 | |||
| Exposure Mode: | Normal program | Focal Length: | 50 mm |
I can’t say that scenes like this are rare, but the forest-like nature in the middle of the neighborhood seemed just right to me. It reminds me why I like carrying around my camera while I’m taking walks on rainy days. It also bewilders me why people feel the need for specialty lenses like the Lens Baby line. They’re not cheap enough to be toys (well… except when compared to real lens prices) and they create an effect you could otherwise create in Photoshop, if you didn’t want to do it yourself, like above, with a small aperture. Just sayin…
If you are reading this, odds are my blog has been migrated to a new host. I meant to focus on this a week or two back, but I managed to mangle the translation a few times and well… I need a little me time first.
As far as I know, we’re sitting on a new host. The masthead has been refreshed as well – nice elephant, eh? Other than that, I know of one problem – the exif information (specifics about each photograph) that usually appear in a little table underneath the shot aren’t showing up right. I need your help finding out what else is wrong, because I’m sure there is something.
If you could be so kind as to randomly click three links deep, wherever you want to go, and tell me if you see anything else messed up, I would be forever in your debt. Do it for me, before google finds the problems and destroys my meager page rank.
Thanks team!
Ari
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