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Fall Colors

October 28, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Out and About, Photography

Fall colors at their peak in my region of the Pacific Northwest. Yesterday, I couldn’t resist getting out between errands to snap a few photos of the natural beauty surrounding us.

One of my favorites, the reflection of color off of a pond, has an almost impressionist quality to it.

Lately, I’ve been leaning heavily toward black and white film photography. But there are times when modern digital color photography is undoubtedly the best medium to capture a scene.

The Thrill of Solar Astronomy

October 25, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Solar Astronomy, Astronomy

WARNING: When observing the Sun, be sure to use only equipment designed specifically for that purpose and produced by reputable manufacturers. Follow their directions closely. Do not improvise your own filter material for solar observing. If you are careless, you risk instant and permanent injury and/or vision loss.

The annular solar eclipse that swept through my region about a week and a half ago reminded me how thrilling solar astronomy can be. It also underscored how central the Sun is to our existence.

The Sun is the ultimate source of life and energy on Earth. Without the Sun, our world would be a frozen, lifeless wasteland.

Think of how often references to the Sun come up in our culture, references that we aren’t always fully conscious of. We wear sunglasses, we drink sun tea, we relax in sunrooms and on sunporches, and we enjoy our Sundays. Spending time outside, we get a suntan (or maybe a sunburn). A happy person has a sunny disposition. Sunflowers are a thing of beauty. We often orientate how we build our buildings to bring sunlight into them. In another age, we used sundials to tell time. The Sunbelt is a place where Americans migrated to as they moved away from the Rustbelt. Sunrises and sunsets are things of beauty to observe. And so on.

The Sun is at the center of our existence as we live it here on Earth. It’s apparent motion across the sky defines our daily rhythm. And we measure the passage of our lives by the number of times it takes for us to make a complete circle around the Sun. With it occupying such a central place in our lives, it’s natural for us to be drawn to the Sun.

Within the world of amateur astronomy, solar observing turns everything about our hobby on its head.

• It’s done during the day, not at night.
• One can enjoy spending time in warm, pleasant sunlight instead of shivering in the cold during the winter or fighting off mosquitos during the summer.
• Light pollution is not a problem. Indeed, no human-generated source of light can possibly match light from the Sun.
• The Sun is ever-changing. It never appears the same from one day to the next.
• It’s our opportunity to study a star up close.

I get a thrill from knowing that I can not only observe something as forbidding as the Sun but also that, by taking all necessary precautions, I can do so safely. Being able to observe something as powerful as the Sun instills a sense of awe and wonder that nighttime astronomy can’t match.

For much more, check out the various resources I have listed in my section on solar astronomy.

People Photography

October 23, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Photography, Book Reports

In The Great LIFE Photographers, one of my very favorite photography books, the most compelling images for me are those that feature people. Former LIFE photographer John Loengard opened his introduction to the book by writing, “Photographers working for LIFE like to photograph the world around them, especially the people in it and what those people do.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt, who Loengard called “the dean of LIFE photographers, if we had a dean,” famously said, “It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter.”

In their brief bio that appears with the section on Eisenstaedt’s work in The Great LIFE Photographers, the book’s editors glowingly wrote:

Eisenstaedt never lost his childlike interest in things and people, in what made them what they were. He would put his subjects at ease, then get up close and take a few pictures—he didn’t need roll after roll—then it was on to the next person, the next happening, tirelessly pursuing the heart of the matter that he saw so easily and wanted very much for us to see too.

Eisenstaedt joined LIFE in 1963 as one of the magazine’s four original staff photographers, and he stayed there until 1972. His work is first rate, as one can plainly see in this collection of his photography from Paris in 1963, for example.

What I’ve read about taking pictures of people is by no means limited to The Great LIFE Photographers. I have several books on my shelf that offer tips and advice on how to make candid images of people effectively. Time and again I’ve read how important it is to establish relationships with people in order to win their trust and get good people shots.

I am indeed a great admirer of people photography.

But I have a confession: I’ve never been much of a people person.

Is it possible to have an interest in people photography without being a people person?

Maybe this is a matter of me being an admirer of something I’m not good at. I enjoy listening to beautiful classical piano without being much of a pianist myself. I appreciate a good painting without being anything remotely resembling a fine art painter.

At bottom, though, I’ve always been more comfortable flying under the radar and working behind the scenes.

Does that mean I can’t do meaningful photography involving people? Does that mean that my shyness is something I need to overcome?

I don’t think so. One thing I’ve been doing lately in my street photography is setting people in context of their surroundings, using a variety of techniques to blur out or otherwise obscure their faces, and so forth. I like a lot of photographs I’ve taken along these lines.

The Great LIFE Photographers also has a section on Andreas Feininger, who shot for LIFE magazine as a staff photographer from 1943 to 1962. The book’s editors introduced him this way: “LIFE’s photographers were known for their images of people, but Feininger was a profound exception.” He was “not at all a people-person,” and with a “chilly single-mindedness” he preferred to work “without any interference.” To be sure, he demonstrated a mastery of photography both in a technical and a compositional sense. But he was simply not like most of his colleagues at LIFE.

If the quality of his photography isn’t reason enough, I love Feininger’s work all the more because of his personal character, which I can completely relate with.

In his 1965 book The Complete Photographer, Feininger articulated his own approach to photography (pp. 325-326):

To me, photography is a mirror of life and any photograph worth looking at must be a reflection of life, of reality, of nature, of people, of the work of man, from art to war. I have no use for “arty” pictures nor for pictures that are stilted, posed, or faked. My approach is intellectual rather than emotional and I feel more closely related to the viewpoint of the scientist than to that of the artist. In consequence, I am more interested in facts than feelings, and clarity of rendition is important in my photographs. I have occasionally been criticized (unjustly, I feel) for being unemotional, cerebral, and cold.

Whatever my shortcomings, I have learned to accept them because I have found through experience that it is impossible to change basic traits. Instead, I try to make the best of what I am, to express myself through my pictures as precisely as possible, and to use my camera to give people new insight into some of the endlessly varying aspects of our world.

Later (p. 330), Feininger wrote:

The artistic growth of any creative person follows a definite pattern which is based upon his character, temperament, interest, sensitivity, and taste. To fine one’s own pattern is the first step in becoming an original photographer.

Originality is the sum total of one’s traits. These traits must be consciously recognized, accepted, and utilized to best advantage. They cannot be changed, although they can be suppressed. One must try to make the best of his abilities.

Feininger advised his reader not to join a stylistic movement or a school of thought. You can be influenced by others, but don’t give up your right to say what you want to say through your photography. Instead, develop whatever style distinguishes your work from that of others. “A personal style evolves from the photographer’s personality. A man who is very orderly [a man like Feininger himself?] will express this orderliness in the form of precision in his pictures.”

When I first read all this, I took it to heart immediately. It was a crystalizing moment for me, actually.

Rather than act like someone I’m not, a more constructive and effective thing for me to do is to embrace my personality traits in a positive way and to use those traits to say something original through my photography.

I believe there is a deepening sense of loneliness that characterizes modern life. Rather than help cultivate a sense of connectedness, we’ve allowed social media in particular to intensify our disconnection with each other.

Part of what I like to reflect candidly and at a distance in my photography is that increasing sense of disconnection. Time and again I’ve read that one needs to get close to his subject in order to be an effective people photographer. This may be true for a given purpose. But the sense of distance I typically maintain in my photography is a very intentional element.

I still love revisiting the superb people photography that’s in The Great LIFE Photographers, and I am continuously drawn to the work of more modern photographers who have mastered a genre that I myself am not temperamentally well suited to pursue.

But when I am out and about with my camera, the images I tend to make are those that are true to my own personality and that express my own experience. What I pursue, in other words, is a very different kind of people photography than the type that I often admire.

Peter Gunn

October 21, 2023

Permalink  |  Tag: Old TV

One of my guilty pleasures is watching old episodes of Peter Gunn.

Maybe that guilty pleasure is driven in part by my affinity for black and white film photography. Each episode has that gritty film noir character that I absolutely love. As I take in each story, I often sit there admiring the shadowy, high contrast footage and wonder how I might reproduce that same look and feel myself.

Not terribly long ago, my wife and I watched the sixth episode of season two: “The Young Assassins,” which originally aired 64 years ago on October 26, 1959. It had all of the classic cinematography that I’ve come to expect from Peter Gunn.

With the same walking double bass riff that opens every episode, this particular story begins with a teenage boy and girl together in a park at night. She leads him to what eventually proves to be a trap. Clip, the leader of a gang of juvenile delinquents, produces a switchblade. The gang surrounds the mislead boy, and Clip murders him.

After a brief title sequence during which we are treated to Henri Mancini’s iconic theme song for Peter Gunn, we are taken to the prison cell of Charlie Mays, who is due to be executed at 10 pm that evening. Charlie asks private investigator Peter Gunn (Craig Stevens), to reach his son, who Charlie is afraid is going down the same path he did in life.

As Charlie and Peter Gunn talk, the camera switches back and forth between the two. The angle of lighting casts a dark shadow across both faces.

Eventually we see both of them in the same shot with a guard standing on the other side of the cell’s bars carefully monitoring the two.

Gunn agrees to take the case.

We then move to the apartment of Charlie’s son, Johnny Mays. He clearly knows what is about to happen at the prison. A clock shown close to us in the foreground is about to strike 10 pm, and a distraught Johnny sits slightly out of focus in the shot’s distant background.

Peter Gunn eventually appears at Johnny’s apartment in an attempt to put him on the straight and narrow path. In the middle of rejecting Gunn’s appeal, the clock’s alarm bell rings jarringly. It interrupts Johnny mid-sentence: “I don’t care about him!” His father has now been executed. But he clearly does care—why would he have set the alarm clock for 10 pm to begin with? If this were not obvious enough of a clue, we see Johnny visibly reacting as he turns off the alarm.

At that moment, a few of the same gang members we saw at the beginning of the episode appear. Both plot threads come together: Johnny is a member of that gang.

Clip, the gang’s leader, brandishes brass knuckles in a clear threat to Gunn. After a bit of tough-guy back and forth between Gunn and Clip, Johnny rebukes Gunn and sticks with the gang. Gunn goes on his way.

In the next scene, Peter Gunn consults with Tallulah, one of his many contacts in the seedy underlife of the unnamed Gotham where the series takes place. Waving a five or ten dollar bill as enticement—five or ten dollars must have bought a lot back in the late 1950s—he asks Tallulah where he might be able to find the gang’s den. Tallulah resists.

Without us seeing her actually do so, it’s obvious to us that Tallulah eventually spilled the beans. In the following scene, we see Peter Gunn appear in the gang’s sewer drain hideout. Gunn makes still another appeal to Johnny, but instead of reaching him, the gang taunts and eventually roughs up Gunn—everyone, that is, except Johnny, who holds back in clear hesitation.

The gang carries the now half-unconscious Gunn to a place where they’ll soon finish him off when Lt. Jacoby (Herschel Bernardi) and his men on the police force swoop in to save him and arrest the entire gang. The scene’s lighting adds to the drama.

We then move to Jacoby’s office, where the badly disheveled Peter Gunn (whose hair manages to remain perfect) has a dialog with his close friend.

At this point, Gunn learns from Jacoby that the gang had killed someone and that Jacoby finally succeeded in finding the gang’s den. Jacoby plans on holding the gang for 48 hours on suspicion of murder in an attempt to extract a confession.

“Look, Pete,” Jacoby says as the camera moves close in to him, “they think like an adult, they kill like an adult... let’s see if they can sweat like one.”

With that bit of film noir toughness uttered, we then move to an interrogation scene. Clip, who is indeed sweating in front of a hot and bright light, is being questioned. Eventually, Jacoby turns off the light, and we see what is perhaps the best shot of the entire episode.

In the background, Gunn appears in silhouette and in profile. A backlit Jacoby and another questioner sit closer to the foreground. Clip, who is closest to us, is now in darkness.

As we sat there watching the episode, my wife said, “What a great shot,” echoing the very same thing I was thinking.

Gunn is hunched over, and the two cops sit on either side. Everyone is smoking, of course. They’re not getting anywhere with this guy, and everyone knows it.

After the unnamed cop takes Clip back to the cell where the rest of the gang is being held, Peter Gunn then proposes something to Jacoby. The cell has a view of the street below. Gunn suggests that Jacoby release Johnny Mays, who would walk out of the police precinct and onto the street in plain sight of the rest of the gang still being held, thereby creating suspicion among the gang and particularly in Clip’s mind that Johnny snitched. Jacoby does so, and the plan works.

We then move to Peter Gunn’s sweet pad in all of its late 1950s glory. Johnny appears at the door. While Gunn sips a cup of coffee—as always, it’s very late at night, the perfect time for a cup of coffee—the two talk. Johnny asks Gunn why he was released and the others held. Gunn coyly explains the situation. The rest of the gang will have been released by that point, Gunn says to Johnny, and they are going to wonder why he went free early.

Johnny realizes he’s been set up, and he walks off disgusted and scared. But before he leaves, Gunn makes his case again: that gang is no good.

Next, we move back to the gang’s den. Johnny arrives, and Clip immediately puts the heat on him.

We see both sides talking. Clip and his gang are now pointing guns at Johnny.

Accusations fly. As the tension rises, the camera gets closer to Johnny and Clip.

Clip pressures Johnny into drawing Gunn back to the den so that Johnny can kill him as proof of his loyalty to the gang.

With the presumed passage of a bit of time, Gunn eventually appears in the next scene. The gang surrounds Gunn, Johnny holds the gun that Clip handed him earlier, and now Johnny has a choice to make.

He chooses. Rather than shoot Gunn, he starts fighting with Clip and eventually neutralizes him. Johnny starts to walk off with Gunn, looking back to the others as a gesture to join him. They start doing so one by one, and the episode ends.

Peter Gunn is not sophisticated television. Its story lines are simple. They have to be: each episode is only about 25 minutes long. There’s often filler, too. In most episodes, we see scenes featuring Peter Gunn’s girlfriend Edie Hart (Lola Albright) singing in front of a jazz ensemble at Mother’s, a night club that doubles as Gunn’s “office.” But that filler is part of the draw for me. Along with the show’s title track, Henri Mancini wrote the first-rate toe-tapping late 1950s/early 1960s jazz band music that accompanies and enhances the action in each episode.

Everything happens late at night. Everyone smokes. Everyone drives huge cars with tail fins. Everyone’s a tough guy. Everyone’s got attitude. And Peter Gunn always gets his man. The show is total escapism, but it’s escapism that’s fun to watch.

Annular Solar Eclipse of October 14, 2023

October 14, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Solar Astronomy, Astronomy, Astrophotography, Photography

WARNING: When observing the Sun, be sure to use only equipment designed specifically for that purpose and produced by reputable manufacturers. Follow their directions closely. Do not improvise your own filter material for solar observing. If you are careless, you risk instant and permanent injury and/or vision loss.

One of the things I have grown to love about astronomy in general is the sheer luck that sometimes comes out of it.

Although I had been eagerly awaiting the annular solar eclipse that swept over my little corner of the Pacific Northwest today, forecasts had been pointing to cloudy conditions that threatened to scuttle the entire event.

But today was my lucky day. A clearing in our cloud cover happened just in time for the eclipse. Although I didn't see its very beginning and very end, I saw the part that mattered most.

At the very least, the eclipse reminded me of the sheer joy I get out of being able to observe something as awesomely powerful as our Sun.

Check out more details and pictures from the eclipse in this fuller-length article.

The Nikon Z f

September 26, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Camera Gear, Photography

About a week ago, Nikon announced something that had been widely rumored and that I had eagerly been waiting for: the Nikon Z f, a full-frame mirrorless camera with styling reminiscent of the company’s FM2 film camera of the 1980s.

The articles on DP Review soon flowed forth: first their preview article, then their first-look video, then their pre-production sample image gallery, and finally their hands-on slideshow.

When the Nikon Z fc came out two years ago, I was immediately smitten by its styling, and I thought the camera body would look great connected to my Questar telescope. My growing interest in film photography only added fuel to the fire.

But rather than jump in and buy one, my reluctance to plow hundreds of dollars into what felt like a redundancy—I already had a cropped-sensor camera in my Canon EOS M50, and I found it hard to justify getting yet another cropped-sensor camera—I held off. I also felt that I would feel foolish if I bought the Nikon Z fc when what I really wanted was a full-frame version of that camera.

As time went on, I grew to appreciate the virtues of my Canon EOS M50, and I began to doubt whether or not I really wanted a full-frame version of the Nikon Z fc.

When it finally materialized in the form of the Nikon Z f, the price tag that I feared would be very high was indeed very high: $2000 for the body alone.

Ouch. At that price, I’m not sure I would even be comfortable taking it out of the house and into the wild.

But more importantly, if the price is not the thing that would hold be back from buying a Nikon Z f for myself, the real thing that would do so would be a more philosophical objection. The seeds of that objection appeared in my opening post in this DP Review discussion thread, where I wrote:

If I’m going to shoot digital..., shouldn’t I just use a modern digital camera in its modern native form, boring as it may be, rather than a digital camera that tries to mimic a film camera? If I want that fully manual film experience, shouldn’t I just go for the real thing and stick with the Nikon F I already own and love using?

I still feel this way. In fact, I feel this way more and more.

What really killed my interest in going down the Nikon full-frame route, though, was the only thing that should matter at the end of the day: image quality. I downloaded Nikon’s NX Studio, the company’s free software for editing raw image files generated by Nikon cameras. In a nutshell, I was completely nonplussed after I had a chance to play with some sample raw image data I downloaded from DP Review’s sample image galleries for various Nikon mirrorless cameras. I felt NX Studio’s capabilities paled in comparison to Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, a piece of software I could already use with my images I produce with my Canon mirrorless cameras.

I’m not sure if I should feel disappointed about this or if I should feel thankful that I avoided spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on something I might ultimately come to dislike.

No, I’m am sure. I feel thankful.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll change my mind down the road. But at this stage, I have arrived at the realization that I’m kind of a Canon guy.

In spite of the appeal of Voigtlander’s manual-focus lenses for Nikon Z-mount cameras, Canon’s Toyota Camry-like product design aesthetic, and Canon’s refusal to open up its R mount system to third-party lens manufacturers, I just like the image quality I get out of my Canon cameras. After all, modern cameras are meant to produce images, not be imitations of the camera gear of the past.

Shooting a Local Event on Film

September 13, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Local Events, Out and About, Film Photography, Photography

Having seen that a local youth group was planning on converging on the center of town to call for climate change-related reforms, I immediately thought the event would be a great way to practice my film photography as a photojournalist of sorts. The Nikon F, after all, was largely synonymous with photojournalism in the 1960s. I’ve used my Nikon F to photograph local protests in the past, and I’ve found that shooting faster-paced events like this on film can be an exciting challenge.

Although the event was a little on the quiet side, I still found decent subject matter to photograph.

Part of seeing an event like this is the way that professional photojournalists circulate among the crowd. To document that experience, I often find myself drawn to photographing the photographers.

After having shot only one roll of film—I never loaded the spare roll I had in my pocket—I thought to myself at the end of the event I didn’t get many keepers. I was delighted to discover upon scanning the roll that there were indeed several that I quite liked. I was also very pleased with the image quality that I got from Ilford FP4 Plus, and I’m encouraged to shoot more on that film stock.

Magnum Contact Sheets

September 1, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Photography, Book Reports

A few days ago thanks to, of all things, an article on the Apple News app—it never ceases to amaze me how much garbage I find there, but I still navigate to it (I don’t know why)—I discovered a book entitled Magnum Contact Sheets.

In a roundabout way, I ended up also discovering that the book was available in its entirety for checkout on archive.org, a virtual online library. Paging through it on my iPad, I was struck and somehow comforted by how many stinker images photographers often captured on the roll of film that contained the one good keeper image that was the center of discussion for each contact sheet. Many of those keeper images were iconic ones in the history of photography.

I ended up buying a copy of the book. It’s nice to have access to some books online, but sometimes it’s worth the expense that it takes to get the actual physical paper in my hands.

Perusing through the book, I began thinking about how I could create my own contact sheets both for my digital and film photography. After a bit more contemplation, I remembered that the Windows print dialog for images includes an option to print a contact sheet for a collection of image files. I poked around Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, which I use to edit all my raw image files and to generate JPEGs, and I discovered that it, too, has a feature for printing contact sheets with a much more robust set of options than what the Windows photo print dialog offers.

What a great way to capture a complete chronological record of images I may take in a given session. I may not want images that are clearly not keepers to consume significant disk space, but I’d like to maintain a record of what I shot from end to end, if anything, to preserve the train of thought I had when I was working a subject.

When I went out and about today, a welcomingly wet and cloudy day considering that we’ve been dealing with wildfire smoke for the past few weeks, I shot photos on my walk with the intent to save everything I shot on a digital contact sheet. I ended up saving only a handful of images from that photo shoot, and I rated an even smaller number as being worthy of any regard. But I now have an end-to-end record of my walk and an indication of how many images I often shoot in order to get a handful of keeper images.

Smoky Moon

August 25, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Lunar Astronomy, Astronomy, Astrophotography, Photography

This year, wildfire smoke hadn’t been too much of an issue until recently. But rather than get bummed out about it, I decided to make lemons out of lemonade.

With my Canon EOS M200 mirrorless camera attached to my trusty 1962 Questar, I took this image of the Moon as it appeared in our smoke-laden skies:

A bit more than a year ago, I took this series of three images as the Moon set:

As I noted in this post on Cloudy Nights the next day, the effect was kind of like that of a total lunar eclipse. As the Moon set, it sank lower into the smoke haze, and its reddish tone grew more intense.

New (to Me) Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 Lens

August 21, 2023

Permalink  |  Tags: Out and About, Film Photography, Photography, Camera Gear

Today was the first time I got out with my new (to me) Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens. The one I had worked well enough. But the perfectionist in me frowned upon the dry and scratchy focus action. It’s a good user lens, but I wanted something nicer.

Having resolved to myself to buy not one more lens unless I can evaluate it in person, I found that something nicer at National Camera Exchange in Minneapolis. I’ve done business with them in the past, and I trust them. That’s something I can’t say about many of the sellers I encounter on eBay.

The example I got was in exceptionally good condition. Its focus action almost feels like it was recently lubricated. The aperture ring has nice and firm clickiness, for lack of a better way to describe it, the glass is clean, and the lens body’s finish has few if any blemishes or other signs of use.

It was an added bonus that the lens was on sale. I was prepared to spend twice as much for a good example as what I spent on this. And I don’t think I could have found anything nicer.

There’s a nice stretch of sidewalk near my house that always makes for a great photograph. I captured this image with my new (to me) and first-rate 50mm Nikkor: