Still Life - Taken with a Nikon F801s

An old photo taken with a Nikon F801s and a junky Quantaray 35-80 zoom, in the late afternoon sun. This was my first attempt at a still life just after I had bought my very first SLR. While not a great photo in technical and artistic terms, it still holds a special place for me.

Seamless White Background - How To

Just in case anybody was wondering how complicated it is to do a seamless white background product photo shot like the one below, I have included a shot at the bottom of this post to show how simple it can be done.

...and the promised setup shot:

Really not complicated at all! The flash was triggered via Nikon's cool CLS system. The groovy light stand is explained at another post here.

Orange Stack

Nikon D90, 18-105mm kit lens, manual settings, 1/60s, f16, ISO 200, SB600 flash bounced into an umbrella from camera left and a little high, white cardboard sheet against a wall to provide a seamless background, edited in Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3.

Dining Room in Totius House, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Taken with the amazing Olympus Trip 35 on Ilford XP2 Super 400 film, developed at local lab and scanned on my CanoScan 5600F. The camera wouldn't let me take the pic because the light was too low, so I took it off auto and set it to f2.8 and voila! Got the photo anyway! I think it looks moody.


Also featured on the Olympus Trip 35 Cult blog.

“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.” - Paul Strand

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion .... All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. - Richard Avedon

Look of Love!

Contemplation...

Pentax Z-10

New toy, YAY! I will post photos and a basic rundown of how I like, or don't, this Pentax Z-10. I can already see that the power zoom is going to be a PITA.

Philz

Nikon D90, Nikkor 35mm f1.8, 1/100s, f2.0, ISO 200, hand held, giant lightbox in the sky (read cloudy).

Fordson Tractor

Hi, my name is Lanthus and I'm addicted to coffee...

...but it's a good addiction right? And besides I can give it up any time I like! I rule the coffee...
                                                        ...wanna go for a cuppa?

Not the 50mm f1.8!

After all the trumpet blowing for the Nikon 50mm f1.8 I decided to shoot the following portrait with the 18-105mm cheap plastic mount kit lens that comes with a lot of Nikon crop sensor cameras as part of the bundle. It was shot as wide open as it could go at 105mm, which is f5.6, hand held in natural light with VR on. I think the results are very acceptable.

Post processing was done in Corel Paint Shop Pro X3.

Break Those Damn Rules!

Who made up the rules, and why do we have to follow them?

A friend, and long time pro photographer, looked at my portrait photography last year and the first thing that struck him was that I often didn't use the traditional method of framing single person portrait photographs and mostly used "landscape" instead. It got me to thinking about why we have rules at all in photography. Quite often in our attempts to follow these rules (rule of thirds etc.) we make dull, boring, yawn, the same as all the other, yuck, please shoot me now, looking photos and sometimes when we inadvertantly break the rules the result is quite pleasing, and a breath of fresh air to me.

Maybe we should discard the rules and strike out to make photographs that stir the human soul instead. Can emotion ever have a formula? Heck, I want a photo to move me in some way. It should either make me happy, or sad, or nostalgic, or angry, or any damn thing but impressed with how well the photographer has handled the technical aspect of his mundane subject so well.

I would feel a lot more righteous about all of this if I didn't fall into the same trap myself on such a regular basis... oh well, back to the drawing board.

Strobist DIY Beauty Dish Portrait

Taken with my Strobist DIY Beauty Dish. I fire the Nikon SB600 wirelessly in the Strobist DIY Beauty Dish by raising the D90's onboard flash and using it as the commander. By setting the onboard flash at minimum power it has the added advantage of raising the light in the shadow side of the models face just a slight bit.

My Genuine German Beer Mug!

My step daughter in London picked this up for me at a boot sale and sent it to me in South Africa. It's simply the best Christmas present ever! It still says W-Germany on the bottom so it must be fairly old, and although used it's still in great condition.

It might just be me, but a beer certainly seems to taste better when I drink it out of this classy mug!