If Photographs Were Flowers

We all leave behind a photographic record. It is either a pile of junk for your survivors to go through or discard, or something more beautiful. I like to think of photographs like wildflowers. Common, yet still beautiful when we come across them on our journey. In the end, the petals drop. Colors fade. Maybe, someone collects them to be enjoyed a little bit longer before they turn into dust.

Favorite Lenses

As lens based artists, it is probably no surprise that we photographers gravitate to certain lenses in our collections. The Olympus 75mm f/1.8 is one of my favorite chunks of glass, for example. I still remember the first time I shot with this lens over a decade ago. It is the main reason I keep an old Olympus camera around, if I'm honest. Anyway, enjoy some store bought roses on a Monday morning.

Cheers! It's Cocktail Hour Somewhere...

Nothing fancy today, just a hopefully pleasant image of this week's lillies, is all. In truth, I still enjoy each bouquet of flowers even if they are often pretty similar. It's always Spring somewhere, I reckon, just like it's always cocktail hour somewhere. Anyway, I still take the time to snap a few flower photographs even though I've done it a million times before. Cheers! 

Once you can't be bothered to pick up a camera to record a moment from your life that briefly sparks your interest, you are pretty much done for as an artist.

So, keep on making photographs, fellow traveler, and good light to you this weekend as well.

I Thought I'd Seen Everything

Sometimes we make photographs simply to record the things that happen to us, or to remember things we find a little bit amazing, like the flower clusters on this stunning Oriental Paper Bush. I've seen a lot of ornamental plants in my life, but this one really blew me away, and I'm so glad we picked one up from the local hardware store. I tend to think of my phone as the proper tool for this kind of photography, but it was locked away in a distant closet. So I ended up using my best digital set-up, which just so happened to be nearby. It ain't art, but it is a state-of-the-art record of my new favorite little plant, and I like it.

Tasting notes: Canon digital camera.

Early Spring Colors, Morning Light and the Pentax Q10

It is fixing to be Spring here in the Southeast, so I had no problem parting with a little of my hard earned cash this morning for these wonderful potted tulips. Although I'm not sure how to describe the color, it was the most appealing on offer. We will enjoy these in the house for a while, before transplanting them outdoors to enjoy for years to come. These blooms were illuminated by a shaft of harsh morning light. I underexposed just a bit to preserve the highlights. The files from this decade old little digicam were plenty malleable and held up just fine.

Tasting notes: Pentax Q10, Standard Zoom lens.

The World Does Not Share Your Impeccable Taste

This week my trip to the Publix was rewarded with a very nice bouquet of flowers, a grouping we'll be able to enjoy for many days, I think. But, you never know what you'll be presented with when you enter the store. In general, the world does not share your taste - a sometimes bitter truth we must learn to endure. But anyway, I don't know for certain how the sometimes fluorescent colors available are created, a case of better living through chemistry, I suppose. We'll leave it at that for now.

Tasting notes: Fujifilm X30 digicam, shot in jpg using the black and white 'film' profile. I have to say, I continue to really enjoying shooting with this little guy.

Monobath clusterf*

There is something fundamentally interesting about using a monobath film developer, at least there is for me. It has to do with the fact that you are balancing two competing processes, development and fixing, against each other in a single solution. This, of course, means that there will be an optimum set of conditions for the monobath to work properly, a Goldilocks problem, if you will. For this reason, I think most commercial monobaths are formulated with films like Tri-X or HP-5+ in mind. It is also why instant film like Polaroid, is such a triumph! So, when I unthinkingly decided to process a roll of Bergger 400 in a monobath, I was setting myself up for weirdness. Grainy, low contrast weirdness as it turned out. I've never seen such odd looking negatives. But, in the end, one of the images from that set kind of grew on me. Not enough to repeat the experiment, mind you, but I do like this image of my yellow orchid. Thankfully, this plant produces beautiful blooms a couple times a year. 

The constant (but lousy) gardener

It is hard to believe I thought about majoring in botany when I first started college. No knack for growing plants. In fact, I have the opposite of a green thumb. But I am also nothing if not patient, and after two seasons, I am pretty stoked to have some healthy echinacea growing in the garden. What I realize, of course, is that my success is due solely to my absence from the garden. Oh well, I'm actually fine with that. It's the flowers I want.

At any rate, I also want to document these little guys, as I am not that familiar with their life cycle. I recently purchased a new digital camera with a plethora of pixels. So, one of the things I've been futzing with is its so-called crop mode. This reads out the middle part of the sensor and turns the field of view of my 85mm lens into that of a 135mm lens, albeit with a significant decrease in resolution. Still, there's enough data for digital sharing, and even printing 8x10's. The camera also has a ton of video features. Wonder if any of those could be leveraged for still photography?

A rose from a friend’s garden

When I graduated from high school I thought I might become a physician. That concept lasted for about a month, if that long. But I took a number of biology courses my first year, my absolute favorite being botany. I did really well in the class, but I had the unfortunate knack of killing most of the plants I came into contact with. So I’m always impressed when folks I know are accomplished gardeners. Over the weekend, some friends came over for tea and brought one of the last roses of the season. It was on its last legs and the petals started dropping right away. I liked seeing the patch of color where petals were in the vase. The fluorescent coloration of the flower was captured accurately by the Pentax KP. I was using the wonderful 35mm macro lens set at f/8. 

I never grow tired of flowers

I don't know how many supermarkets still have a florist, but I'm certainly glad that our local Publix does. Some of the arrangements are a little over the top for me and a few of the flower varieties are downright psychedelic, but there are always enough bouquets that are tastefully done to ensure that I can have nice subjects to photograph. One of the things that the Rolleiflex SL66 does particularly well is close ups. It focusses using a bellows and if that isn't enough, you can reverse the lenses (all are reversible). I even found a set of extension tubes for mine, so I am all set. The Zeiss 80mm f/2.8 is not clinically sharp close up, but it really worked well here, I think.

I never tire of having flowers around the house, I never tire of photographing them, and I never tire of looking at the photographs I make of them. That's just how I'm wired, I guess.

A blustery day

The published weather forecast this morning was for 'a blustery day' which made me smile a little. The past month has been quite rainy -- to the point of annoyance, really -- but, as a result, the azaleas and dogwoods are currently in full bloom. The dogwoods, in particular, are a good indicator of the amount of rain that has fallen. Luckily, I was able to compose, focus and capture this image during a lull between gusts of wind. Dogwood flowers can be interesting to photograph in color, but the dead-leaf-brown tones in the background of this image did not appeal. Hence, the monochrome treatment. I used the 21mm f/3.2 lens on the Pentax KP. It about as wide a perspective as I feel comfortable with, but it is a very fine little lens indeed.

Sizing things up

One of the things that fell by the wayside during the past year was buying bouquets of fresh flowers for the house (and, of course, to photograph). Unfortunately, flowers just didn't make it onto the minimal shopping list all that often; instead, we relied on our own garden. Fine, but I do rather miss photographing the fancy store bought blooms through their life cycles. Anyway, I was rummaging through piles of negatives for flower photographs and I happened across some that I took with an old Pentax auto110 camera. 

What a sweet little imager! The film is 16 mm stock, comes in little pop-in cartridges, and funnily enough, is still available. I found a source of something called Fukkatsu film. How could I resist buying a few rolls? The negative size is pretty tiny, 1.3 cm by 1.7 cm. With that in mind, the quality of the Pentax optics is pretty stunning, resolving plenty of detail in the sunflower. By the way, I always enjoy how one or two little petals wend their way to the center of the flower.

Day of the dead...

Who can resist taking pictures of Fall foliage? The leaves of trees catch our attention throughout their life cycle, but they are perhaps most beautiful at the end of life. They can be captivating even after falling to the ground. I wonder what evolutionary advantage that might confer? Hey, let's not overthink things here. Maybe it is just a gift. Quick, grab your camera before the wind ruins the composition. 

In this case, as I often do, I reached for the Rolleiflex SL66, the 80 mm lens, and a roll of Ektar 100. Note to self: always have a roll or two of Ektar around in the Fall.

The imperfect is our paradise...

Photographing flowers offers endless possibilities. There is an old tree in the yard that blooms in the fall, and this year it has been spectacular. The first set of images was taken with the Nikon FM2 and the 85mm f/2 on a roll of Rollei Superpan 200 that was sitting around. The 85mm f/2 sure is a sweet lens and makes a nice companion to the 50mm f/2 and the 28mm f/2 (which are also great).

Wide open, I think the 85mm Nikkor has interesting bokeh. I find the individual images pleasing and I like the interplay between the pair as well. 

In the end, though, do such things even matter? Elliott Erwitt said, “Good photography is not about ‘Zone Printing’ or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It’s just about seeing. You either see, or you don’t see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more.”