I'm still shooting film, and have only developed one roll. I have two-and-a-half rolls of Portra 400NC shot, but need to wait for #3 to be finished. That's the roll that I've been using to shoot colour targets whenever I get a sliver of daylight, so I'll be getting prints made so that I'll know what the photos are supposed to look like when I scan them.
Eventually I'll stop messing around with test shots and will actually take some photos with the thing.
This is the side of a black truck, covered in salt and grime.
Who says that the urban winter isn't photogenic?
Shot with my D700 and Sigma 180 on a monopod - f/5.6, iso 200, and 1/250s - at 100% magnification they make my eyes hurt.
I took Stumpy for a ride to Downsview TTC Station, and one of my favourite photos was of a stationary train. Sometimes I think that I can take the sort of photo that I like almost no matter where I am, and in this case, it's almost literally true.
You'll notice that I say that one of my favourites is of a stationary train, but that there are two of them here. The first photo, #887 ("5202") doesn't quite work for me. The second photo, #888, does. Some extra cropping on #887 helps it, that brings it to on 72% of the original frame, which I hate. For comparison, #888 is 94%, and #887 as shown here is 87%, which may be one reason why I don't like it as much.
I'm a little worried that I'm getting odder as I get older.
To take this photo I needed to sneak my camera into the art gallery and surreptitiously take a few shots. If I'd been caught, I would have been sternly told not to do it again. Considering that I was using the non-small Canon SX20, that meant that I needed to wear my fluffy down parka for the two hours that I was wandering around. My audio recorder was in my other pocket, partly because there were no rules against it, but also because it helped the balance.
When I was looking for a destination for my first photographic day trip, the National Gallery having a Rothko was one of the deciding factors. To some extent, I've picked this as one of my best for its greater significance rather than its own merit. Mark Rothko is one of my favourite visual artists, and I plan on doing a couple of photo trips a year from now on. It all comes together here as a proof-of-concept.
I would have loved to be able to use my standard compliment of gear in the gallery; the little compact camera can't capture the subtle colours and has far too much noise. It also has the same sort of complex wide-angle distortion that makes my Olympus 12-60 such a challenge to use indoors. I learned a few tricks in the process of refining this image, and the final product owes as much to Adobe as it does to Canon.
This is the most recent of my best photos from 2009, and was posted in a slightly different form on December 5.
I've been shooting jewellery for a while now, but this one is my favourite. It's also one of the ones that I wouldn't be able to do with anything under the D700 and 85mm tilt-shift, which is good, because this is exactly the sort of thing that I wanted that gear for. I haven't needed to modify the perspective, which is hard on the image quality, and the 700's awesome highlight range has let me recover details that should have been gone for good.
It also doesn't hurt that it's a great subjected. Watches are how I got interested in jewellery, so it's fitting that shooting jewellery has gotten me a photo of a fascinating timepiece.
It was also refreshing to be able to shoot really wide - f/11 - and still get the depth of field that I wanted.
Shot on the same day as #394, this is the sign that warns boaters not to anchor near the town's water supply. Shot with a 180mm lens, I was nearly in the water supply myself trying to get far enough back for the framing that I wanted. Something that I'm unreasonably proud of is that I never create these compositions by cropping the image after the fact. I like knowing that I can print them as large as the megapickles will allow, even if I don't, and getting the best image quality possible even though it hardly needs it.
The font in this one is Arial, but I like the photo anyway. I've added a bit of the vignetting, but what appeals to me most is the overall asymmetry that's balanced by the strength of the N and E on the edges of the frame.
Of the photos that I'm including as my best of 2009, half of them are from its final three months. This tells me that I'm either getting better, or lacking sufficient time for a proper perspective. In this case, I'm afraid that it's the latter.
This photo is one of the few from an afternoon spent in the woods around Killarney, Ontario. This was taken in the back of a shed in a stand of sugar maples, which we reached by boat. It needed a 2.5 second exposure at iso400 and f/11, and was shot with my tilt-shift lens contorted for the perspective and focal plane that I wanted. I was even standing in a peculiar pose to get some of the light and shadow to fall where I wanted it.
Of all of the photos I've selected for this series, this is the one that I would least want to print and hang on the wall.
