Somerville

Sometimes you’ve got to stop trying to be Mark Seliger and try to be William Eggleston instead. Anyway, here are some street shots from dusk today.

I’m a Pinhead

You guys know I talk about how important good lenses are, right?  Like all the time.  Well take a look at this picture and see if you can tell me what kind of glass I used…

Ah ha, trick question.  I used no glass at all.  I took that photograph with a pinhole camera.  Or rather, a modified body cap on my 5DII.

Basically you drill a hole in the middle of a body cap. Then cover the hole on the inside of the cap with a piece of foil. Then make as small of a hole as you can in the middle of the foil with a pin.  Stick it on your camera and shoot.

This is actually the most simple a lens can possibly get. Basically it goes all the way back to the camera obscura.

Here are more detailed instructions for and a much better built example of what I did.  The smaller and more perfectly you make the hole the foil the better, but I just played until it worked.  Actually I found those instructions after I had, through a number of lesser iterations, come to the same configuration myself independantly.  Like I said though, his is much better.

I’m certainly not going to give up my L glass, but it was fun to experiment for an hour or so.

Nude Experiment 3

Slice of the Sky

Pots

On my mother’s christmas list this year was a picture of a coffee pot on a red background that she saw in Central Park last year.  Neither my sister or I were with her that day, so we only had a vague description to go on, but I decided to try to do my own version for her.  The pots are my sister’s and I sat them on top of a glass in front of a blue wall in my apartment.  Lit by one big softbox using only the modeling light and a long exposure. Then a bunch of photoshop to get it how I wanted.

Here’s the before:

And the afters:

Cameron Experiment

I shot a two very different women for a couple of editorial assignments this week, and it reminded me that one of the best parts about my job is meeting and talking with my subjects.  People pay me to meet and take portraits of interesting people.  That’s pretty cool.

In other news, I’ve been staring at a book of Julia Margaret Cameron photos for the past week.  If you haven’t seen her work, make a point of it.  Not that I’m enthralled by all of it, but it’s amazing that there was woman taking portraits like she did about 150 years ago.  First off because at the time it was a very misogynistic world in europe, and secondly because many of the photos have such a timeless quality, that they honestly look like they could be of subjects from the 1960’s and 70’s.

To that end, here are a couple very short depth of field shots of my friend Omer using only some evening window light. I didn’t do any photoshop work to these, I wanted to ignore my normal post-processing regimen for a while. They were desaturated and such in Lightroom.  Makes me want an 85/1.2 to get even more of that large format bokeh look.

Fire Experiment One and Two

Street Experiment

Scanner Art Experiment 1

Nude Experiment 2