Still alive

There are two ways to make pinhole images with the Diana Plus camera: True pinhole and Magnum pinhole. When shooting either pinhole settings the aperture is set to P and the shutter to B, but with True pinhole the lens needs to be removed before the image is taken. Theoretically the magnum pinhole result in sharper images but frankly I couldn’t tell the difference.
According to the shooting suggestions you need to keep the shutter open for about 2 seconds when shooting in bright sunlight and 30 seconds in the shade, but 10 seconds in the shade will do just fine.
Maybe I’m missing something but the Diana plus instruction manual says the shutter needs to stay open for about 6-15 minutes if taking indoors pinhole and 1-2 hours at night… but it doesn’t say HOW to do it. I mean, how am I suppose to keep the shutter open for such long time when the only way to keep it open is by pressing the shutter button… Weird.
But anyway, stick to daylight pinhole and you’ll be just fine. Its actually quite fun.

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Here’s a preview of my latest book:
I am not an artist – unconventional and creative photography.

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If you are interested in displaying your book, magazine, article or any other document in a neat way, issuu.com will let you do just that.
I don’t even remember how I stumbled upon this site but right away I liked the fact that each and every publication displayed on this site looked good, and possibly even better than the real thing.
So basically its a stylish way of publishing your PDF document to the web, while you can get feedback from your visitors and also dynamically embed the document on your site just like I did here.

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So as some of you, or at least one of you, I think it was actually just Rory who suggested I won’t give up on my Canonet QL17 and give it another try.
So I did.
But this time I made a point to take my time when using this camera. Meaning, not to shoot it on the move as I often do. So for each picture I took, I actually stopped, took my time focusing and only then made the exposure. I have to say this was a (cruel and) unusual practice for me, but the end results definitely made it worth while to go a bit out of my way.
I know the standard practice in photography is to have the camera fitting and accommodating to our needs, and not the other way, but sometimes with classic cameras, well, it’s a good idea to slow down, be patient and more flexible.

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A hot weekend here in L.A. , always raises the same debate: should I drive and get stuck in traffic on the way to one of the crowded beaches, or should I stay home, indulge on popsicles, and wait for the liberator evening to get out and enjoy the cool evening air.
So I stayed home today. And what’s a better opportunity than this to get creative with photography, i.e. image transfers, mixed media collages, distressing prints or manipulating an extinct time-zero film.

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I haven’t followed the digital marketplace for quite some time now and so I’m quite overwhelmed with the choice of cameras out there.
I read a few reviews but actually got even more confused.
Besides, I would rather hear from you; which DSLR do YOU prefer? Nikon D80 or Canon EOS-40D? or maybe another DSLR at this price range?

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Other than the obvious things such as reducing unnecessary electricity usage, planting something, recycling failed photo papers, bicycling, walking or taking the bus to work, all of us photographers (and non-photographers of course) ought to just turn off our computers, grab our cameras and go out there (i.e. walk, bike, take the bus) to make pictures of our beautiful planet.
Ah? How about that?

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I don’t know about you but I actually like my pictures printed in a small size.
My Epson printer is capable of printing photos at a sizes up to 13X19 but I’ve never even tried printing at this size. I also have a few large prints that were professionally printed for me, but they all ended up in storage at the back of the closet.
so why do I like small prints? Because I like to have this intimate connection with my photos.
When you look at a small size print, you often have to step closer to the image in order to take a good look at it.
I’m not at all an expert on printing but I also think that as far as details and depth go, most photos simply look better when printed smaller.

But, maybe IT IS just me after all, because when people buy my photos, they often want them as large as they come.

And by the way, I have a few framed photos at various large sizes that I got “stuck” with after my last photo show was over and I have to say that I hardly ever really look at them. I mean, I see them when I walk in the living room but I don’t really look at them.

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I’m not going to write a review about ACDSee here, there’s no need to do such a thing as there are plenty of reviews all over the net written by experts who know much more than I do about photo editors.
But all I want to say is that if you have lots of photos to work with, and if you have thoughts about putting together a website or some sort of a catalog of your photos ACDSee can really make things faster for you.
I used to have an early version of ACDsee and I was definitely not impressed with it. It was merely an image viewer and I didn’t need one.
Recently I wanted to put together a website/catalog of my photos and was looking around for a tool which will help me working with the large number of images, organizing and displaying them. ACDSee turned out to be perfect for batch renaming images in a folder, tagging them and creating a PDF file or an html album which displays image information below each image. Perfect!

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If you check out the review of the Canonet I wrote back in January, you’ll notice I really liked this camera and was quite impressed with the color saturation of the images. However, the pictures I took with it were just test pictures around our neighborhood so now, I took the camera for a real test through the streets of Los Angeles.
This time around I decided to shoot the first roll on manual mode…and it didn’t quite work out all that well for me. To start with, changing the aperture and f-stop was a bit rough and kept slowing me down.
But the main problem became visible once I saw the negative. Most of the pictures, which were taken on the move, turned out too blurry, and I’m not talking about cool motion blur or anything like this, I’m talking about images that are just too blurry to figure them out.

This is definitely not the first time I shoot manual mode on the move but I don’t think I’ve ever came across such poor results.
So next, when shooting the second roll I was determined to give the automatic mode a try. I even set the focus between 10-15 feet and just forgot about it.
Photographing in this manner yielded better results. The pictures turned up nicely exposed, clear enough and reasonably focused. I’m not really seeing the sharpness everybody warned me about and it doesn’t really matter to me, however, I’m curious if it’s my camera…or what?

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