Recently, the factor most limiting the quality of the pictures I take has
been focus. When you shoot a few hundred pictures, a few will always
constitute focus failures, but my fail ratio has been too high
recently. I’ve thought about it and there are a few things wrong with my
approach, but I thought I’d reassure myself that my camera and lenses were
playing nice with each other.
The nice folks over at the
Pentax-Discuss Mailing List recommended
focustestchart.com which has Nikon in
its title but the product works fine with any old camera. The idea is, you
print out their PDF, you lay out the chart page really flat, you line your
camera up, point it down 45º at the chart, and adjust your focus.
I have three everyday working prime lenses; the
40mm and
21mm “pancakes”
from...
Not unexpectedly, A&B Sound
has
gone out of business. This one hits me pretty hard. Does music-on-disc
have a future?
For a while there in the Nineties, Vancouver was more or less the world
headquarters of decent cheap music retailing, and A&B was the big dog.
I didn’t go in that often, but just about every time I did I’d drop a couple
hundred dollars, which went a long way at an average price of around
$12. The selection was fantastic, two big floors pretty well packed with
bins.
Then there was the time in 1997 that our house was broken into, and the
bad guy made off with 225 disks. The way it worked was, the insurance company
issued me a credit at A&B for any 225 CDs of my choice. This was
apparently a frequent-enough event that they had a special “insurance desk”
upstairs,...
The mixture of green and autumnal yellow produces the
illusion of a springlike colour, but in fact this is pure November.
A closer look gives a truer picture I think.
What happened was, after two or three weeks of dim dark wet days, we got
brilliant sunshine and high winds. These trees are laggards; most of ’em are
getting pretty......
That Word via ongoing November 2nd, 2008 at 09:00
Our son, now aged nine, still enjoys a bedtime story, and I enjoy reading
them. He’s perfectly literate but his reading-for-pleasure repertoire is
along the lines of Harry Potter, Asterix, and Garfield. So I aim higher:
Tolkien, Homer, Le Guin. Recently we started on
Huckleberry Finn.
Before we dove in, I spent a few minutes
on a capsule history of the slave trade, the Civil War, the Jim Crow years,
the civil rights movement, and so on. He seemed to get it; as evidence,
he picked right up on it when I pointed out that some of these storylines
extend forward to right now, as in the Obama/McCain that’s on every TV these days.
I also explained that “nigger”, which appears in every other
sentence of Huck Finn, is super-ultra-rude and just isn’t used
any more. I haven’t...
In which I once again ignore the conventional photographic
wisdom holding that shade is your friend and sunlight your enemy.
This time of year drags anyone with a camera irresistibly down
Cliché Avenue. Oh well.
Lightroom weenies: Those two yellow shots are the first time I’ve ever
found myself pulling the Clarity control in a negative direction. I
don’t have words to describe the visual effect produced by a value of -33
aside from “more like what I remember seeing”.
And hey,
that little Ricoh was having a good day,
wasn’t it?...
Of the Lost
Souls I mean. It was so much fun it shouldn’t be legal. This post is
here so I can post a funny picture of myself and meditate, once again, on
the profusion of digital recordings of, well, everything.
Here’s your host:
Photo credit: Sue, one of my band-mates.
You can also get the flavor of the event with a
Flickr
Search; I recommend following that link, some of the pix are fantastic.
And there’s
video
too—on one of the fire-show sequences, you can hear the band.
I found
one that
shows our band in action.
I’ve come to expect that everything public and quite a bit of what’s
private too is subject to capture and posting. Last night it got on my nerves
a bit, for the first time. What happened was, after the parade part and the
accompany-the-fire-show part, the...
I mean
Parade
of the Lost Souls, which happens next Saturday October 25th on Commercial
Drive here in Vancouver.
I’ve
paraded before; once
again I’ll be part of
Russell Shumsky’s West-African drum
ensemble, layin’ down the dance beats.
Assuming the weather co-operates, it’s a blast; come on out and......
On a recent weekend we took the
Seabus over to
Lonsdale Quay. The
Seabus is both romantic and reliable, a rare enough combination in this
world. On the way back, I took a photo of the big container-handling
cranes.
I don’t know what proportion of Canada’s import/export business these
things wrangle but the numbers are big; this is the busiest port in Canada (and
also on the whole West Coast of North America) measured by tonnage.
William Gibson fans: the closing scenes of Spook Country are
set right around......
London via ongoing October 14th, 2008 at 10:00
I spent four days there last week and enjoyed it. Herewith words and
pictures.
I stayed at the
London Bridge Hotel, a
perfectly decent place just at the south end of that bridge. Since
my visit last May, they’ve
upgraded the WiFi and made it free; good on ’em; plus the breakfast is
excellent.
The City
Mornings, I walked northward across the river and considered The City,
which is the part of the city at the north end of the bridge. It’s under
construction.
Well, for the moment anyhow. Times are troubled, obviously; the newspaper
headlines scream crisis and panic every morning and afternoon. I spent time
talking to finance people, Sun customers, worried people but not the names you’re
seeing in those panicky headlines.
London is about money and it’s been about money for a...
Shells via ongoing October 12th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of some jetsam on Vancouver’s Point Grey foreshore.
This morning the boy was snuffly and under the weather but the sun was out,
a gift that in mid-October should not be disrespected. So I bundled the little
girl into something warm and we visited the beach, she to splash (in gumboots)
and climb, I to soak it in and take a few......
There are still a lot of green leaves left, but we’re definitely in
early-autumn mode. Check out these many shades of yellow.
These are the little Ricoh at work. Because it was in my pocket when I
walked by the leaves. Hard to refute that......
I’ve got a touch o’ them old autumnal-financial-meltdown blues, so I’ll
post a couple of garden shots as therapy.
Our September was mostly bright and pleasing, but the rain’s teeth are now
firmly set into the first week of October. The leaves are losing
their green; dusk has arrived by the kids’ bedtime and is marching
back the clock alarmingly fast.
And as the evenings darken, the wolves of financial doom are
howling closer and closer around our circle of firelight. My personal guess
is that the downturn is less shattering but lasts longer than most people
think; still, a whole lot of us are in for some tough times, no doubt
about it.
So let’s look at some sunny pictures.
Real photographers regard sunlight, with its brutally harsh
contrasts and risks of blowout or haze,...
by Werner Patels Canadians are inching towards the big election day on October 14, although most voters in this country are glued to their TV sets watching the terrible financial debacle in the United States unfold. One newspaper columnist has suggested that the Canadian election should be suspended until it can generate as much momentum and interest as the race south of the border. This is missing the point entirely, because the Canadian landscape is about to be altered in a very big way for a long time to come. The U.S. race for the White House is of...
Canon’s much-ballyhooed but
not
universally welcomed 5D Mark II also (and this is a new thing for SLRs)
operates as a high-def videocam. There are two videos linked from
The
Online Photographer and they are mind-bogglingly, jaw-droppingly
beautiful. But it won’t work for you. The pictures you take with this camera
will almost certainly look great with little effort, while your videos will
require huge effort and probably still end up lousy.
Skill
The first reason they’ll look lousy is because there’s a whole lot of skill
and practice that goes into making good video, and most of us don’t have it.
You can get it, sure, and who knows, you might even turn out to have some
talent, but count on months of work to get your chops down. Still, that’s not
the real problem.
Tools
A...
It's been a long time since truer words have been spoken by a Canadian politician. Stephen Harper said, speaking of his arts cuts and his tougher crime measures, that it is ordinary Canadians who matter, and not those who populate ivory towers. Criminologists who say that tougher sentences for violent young offenders, and publishing their names, won't do anything to fight crime are downright insane. Well, those criminologists are (a) lefties and (b) have no clue about reality. Those "scholars" are a waste of space, as is all of their research. It is partisan, biased rubbish. Hey, how about...
Driving via ongoing September 19th, 2008 at 10:00
Like most people on the left half of the New World, driving has informed
and constrained and enriched my adult life. I’ve enjoyed it. Indications are
that mine will be one of the last drive-everywhere generations. The shape the
tribe settles into may be more pleasing, and strengthening local
culture is a fine thing, but the loss of the
time-behind-the-wheel, with the music playing, going places, well, it’s
sad.
One time years ago I even wrote a terribly long (pages and pages) poem
about driving; here’s the beginning:
To walk is best of course. And I
would rather drive than fly. Would turn
Earth's curve beneath my tires. Would burn
Earth's blackened past in engine fires;
burn time that space is measured by
from edge of map to edge of sky.
Now? Now, we’re looking at $100...
It’s on
Main Street
near 14th Ave. They make a damn fine chicken
Shawarma.
The place is a little odd inside; apparently once a French bistro,
the shift to Middle Eastern cuisine seems not to have involved a redesign.
But it’s cheery and comfy and lets you be part of the Main Street scene.
Hey, while writing this, I learned that the dude who makes the awesome
lunches is “Mori” Momenzadeh Tameh and
is little political issue all by
himeself.
Anyhow, you can’t beat it for a quick tasty nutritious bite on that part of
Main; which is saying something given the number of nearby......
The Horror via ongoing September 13th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of a wasps’ nest.
The wasps are dead.
I have a visceral horror of bugs, extending to a dislike of most
arthropods; I don’t really like crab or lobster I suspect partly because of
the mental effort in not being revolted by their appearance on the
table-top.
We have an old (1919) wooden house with lots of big botanicals; most
summers we’ve had to take out a nest or two, because the wasps are a major
irritant when you’re trying to eat on the porch. These days
extermination is easy and hands-off; you wait till dusk when they go to
bed, squirt the poison in the entrance, and the wasps never wake up.
A few years ago we were renovating a bathroom.
I remember like yesterday when Jack, the towering
burly gentle Polish plumber/carpenter, came shooting out, face pale with...
Being three photographs of a lonely old rose.
In June of 2004 I said
I’ll try again next
year, and I did too but this is an elusive target; follow that link
to read why. This year, what with the cool spring, it
didn’t bloom till September.
I have to say, the
GX100 is a wonderful
little macro box, but even in the clouds this little guy’s hyperintense
off-pinks overloaded it some, and I had to resort to fairly intense
Lightrooming to make the
picture look like what I......
Being a photo of a sunlit salad at the
restaurant in the
Teahouse in Vancouver’s
Stanley Park.
It was a fairly standard tomato-mozz salad, and not bad at all if not quite
up to the presentation. The same could be said of the whole meal but then the
presentation, on the plate and especially out the windows at sunset, is beyond
fantastic, so that’s very weak......
Being another photograph of
that same sunset, once
again without benefit of clouds, this time with the help of an aluminium
shed.
I confess to having taken the exposure down quite a bit in shameless
pursuit of extra......
Being a photo of a cluster of small white flowers against a leafy
backdrop.
I’ve started cropping a lot of pictures into a 1:1, i.e. square, shape.
It’s probably just a phase I’m going......
Treeset via ongoing September 6th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of the sun approaching the horizon with no clouds
to serve as a canvas for its setting rays. But there’s a little tree.
I went out to take pictures of the sunset and it just doesn’t work right
without clouds. Still, I got any number of ridiculously-dramatic shots of the
ripe prairie grasses in sideways light. I’ll run one or......
Horizon via ongoing September 5th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photograph of a Saskatchewan hayfield and a cloudy sky.
This taken within a couple of minutes of that shot of the
storm-beset barn. Damn,
it was......
Crossings via ongoing September 4th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of a nice modern construction site on Vancouver’s
Main
Street.
When I say “nice” and “modern” above, that’s because it stands out.
I’ve written before about Main Street’s lovable funky grubbiness standing in
the inevitable path of gentrification. As the old and mostly never-were-very-good
buildings wear down and out, they are being replaced ad-hoc.
I don’t know what this one’s going to be, but the quality of the
concrete-and-steel building process is remarkable.
I have cranked the colour saturation a little but only a little, to bring
back the rather striking blue tinge of whatever finish is on the steel......
Being a photo of the sun’s rays spilling over the mountains onto
Howe Sound, taken from a
boat pulling out of
Horseshoe Bay.
There seem to be a lot of random pretty-decent nature shots in the August
folder; I’ll run ’em till I run out, because the Internet can’t have too......
Turning via ongoing August 31st, 2008 at 10:00
We left summery August Vancouver for a week on the prairies, where
blazing heat and lashing storms alternated, thunder often in
the distance.
Here are two photos of a small barn illustrating the heat blazing and
the storm lashing.
We came home to driving rain and an August night so chilly
we turned on the furnace. The sun’s come back, but right now, as
September shuffles in, we’re going around a corner and you can’t not feel it.
The
light, especially in the earlier-and-earlier evenings, has turned; the smells
have turned; the wind has turned. The leaves? No, they haven’t yet, but
they’re getting ready to; with all the other changes my eye’s startled every
time it looks up and sees green, green,......