Shutter Priority

Photos from a party. Click on photos for a larger view:

There are few things that restore the mind and soul better than getting together with your favorite people and doing the things you love to do.

These are shots of the fireworks display at Thunder Over Louisville 2012 on April 21, 2012. I had a telephoto lens on my camera to shoot the air show and I didn’t want to change lenses once the ash and smoke began to fall. The telephoto allowed me to get really close to the exploding shells, but it also flattened the depth, giving the photos a graphic look, almost like paintings. I hope you enjoy them. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

I won’t keep you in suspense; my answer is yes and no. Smart phone photography has taken the world by storm, and with the purchase of Instagram by Facebook, interest in phoneography is white hot. I never did get involved with Instagram only because I have enough social networks to manage without adding yet another, but I do have an iPhone with Hipstamatic, Photoshop Express, 100 Cameras and some other photo apps. Like millions of others, I will often check in somewhere on Facebook and post a smart phone picture with the check-in. It’s fun. I love vintage photography and I really enjoy using my phone to produce reasonable facsimiles of Polaroids and Kodak Brownie photos. Also, I always have my phone with me, so I at least have some kind of camera with me every waking minute, and I subscribe to the dictum: Always take your camera with you. In addition to being with me all the time, it is connected to the web so that I can transmit a photo from almost anywhere to almost anywhere anytime, and that is cool.

The dark, critical side of my mind suspects that the popularity of apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram is rooted in part in their ability to mask the fact that the image quality of smart phones photography is not very good. The dynamic range and tone curve on phones are terrible. The little lenses are weak and the image resolution is at best mediocre. When you apply a cool effect with Hipstamatic, people don’t notice that the underlying image lacks quality. So it was in the days of yore with Polaroids, Brownies and Instamatics, but all of these had better tone curves than the phones.

My problem with smart phone photography is that I love cameras – real cameras, like DSLR’s, SLR’s, TLR’s and even rangefinders. I like lenses I can manually focus, depth of field preview buttons, manual aperture and shutter speed settings, viewfinders, and a body I can grip firmly in my hands (I’m always worried that the damn phone will slip out of my fingers when I’m trying to take a picture with it and smash itself to bits on the pavement.) I love the speed of a good SLR or DSLR, 8-10 fps with quick-as-a-bunny autofocus. Have you ever tried to shoot a sports event with a phone? It’s a study in frustration. Most of all, I love big, sharp images, the bigger the better. In my work, I often need to print photos at poster size or even bigger, and if I need to crop the hell out of a photo, it’s nice to have enough resolution that you still get a printable image even when using a small portion of the original.

When I want a picture that may hang on someone’s wall someday, or appear in an ad in a national publication, my first thought isn’t to grab the iPhone. Call me old fashioned.

Phoneography appeals to the narcissist in all of us. I have seen some great stuff done with phones, but I have also seen a tsunami of trivial images that are pointless and ephemeral. Do I really need to see your coffee cup, hamburger or cat? It doesn’t matter that the photo uses a cool filter that looks like film that was left in the trunk of your car all summer. Would this image exist if it was not easy and the photographer was bored and playing with the phone? Is that photography? I’m not sure, but I know that it is not what I consider real photography.

Smart phone photography has absolutely won its place in the photographic universe. It meets a need. I fully expect “point-and-shoot” cameras to begin disappearing from the shelves, since they are quickly becoming unnecessary as more and more people adopt smart phones. I also know that phones don’t get my photographic juices flowing. The phones are just too slow, too limited, and difficult for me to use to ever consider making one the primary nexus of my photography journey.

Click on the picture for a larger view

Some explorations of my guitar, both in camera and during post-processing. Click on picture for larger view.

My friend, Annette Browning, raises alpacas and harvests and dyes their wool at her Kentucky Blue Fiber Company I shot these photos of her product. Alpaca works just like wool but people who are allergic to wool can wear clothing made with alpaca. Click on the photos for a larger view.

Click on photos for larger view

I bought this lens for a specific purpose: I wanted a prime that would give me the low light performance, bokeh, and sharpness on the Nikon D7000 that I always enjoyed with the Nikkor AI 50mm f/1.8 on the old Nikon F3. The D7000 uses an APS-C “cropped sensor” so a 35mm on the D7000 (or other Nikon cameras with this sensor size like the D70, D90, D3100 and D5100, etc.) acts like a 52mm on a “full frame” or 35mm film camera like the F3. This lens is also fairly economical a $230 USD. Overall, I am quite pleased with the lens, especially at this price. However, it is not perfect. To my eye, it is a bit contrasty; the autofocus is not the fastest in the world, and the lens suffers from some chromatic aberration in some circumstances. All photos shot on the Nikon D7000. Here are some pictures with commentary: (click on the photos for a larger view)

ISO 200 1/320 sec at f/9.0

1:1 of the shot above

Shooting in Aperture Priority mode ISO 200 1/8000 at f/1.8 Notice the extremely short depth of field

Shooting in Program Mode 1/320 sec at f/9.0

This was probably the toughest of the shots in terms of lighting. The evening sun was coming in almost horizontally from the left through the flower petals. I had to do the most post-processing on this shot to recover color and texture in the delicate flower petals. I also got the most chromatic aberration of any of the shots along the uppermost petal top edge. I applied lens profile correction in LightRoom and that did away with most of the aberration. Even at f/5.0 the bokeh is quite decent. ISO 400 1/100 sec at f/5.0

Wall art in shadow, no direct sunlight. The texture in this one is wonderful. ISO 400 1/200 sec at f/7.1

More wall art, ISO 400 1/160 at f/6.3 (Program Mode)

This one is notable because it has no real correction. I cropped it just a bit, but aside from that it is straight out of the camera, ISO 400 1/640 sec at f/13

Mimosa Cafe ISO 400 1/100 sec at f/5.0 Nice depth of field, great color

Bokeh testing: Aperture Priority ISO 400 1/200 sec at f/1.8 Focal point was the forward lip of the mug.

Bokeh testing: Program Mode, same focal point ISO 400 1/50 sec at f/3.5

Focus testing ISO 400 1/160 sec at f/6.3

Detail of the photo above

Orange ‘68 VW Bug, just because I like it. I added some “recovery” in Lightroom to counteract the glare. ISO 400 1/40 sec at f/3.2 (Program Mode – I should have shot this one in Manual due to the fading light)