LOOKING BACK AT SLIDES!

Last Thursday our office staff gathered around the conference room to view 35mm slides from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.  Throwback Thursday!  It wasn’t planned that way but it fits.  Several of us were old photographers that cut our teeth on film, not digital formats.  As the projector did its Kachunk, Kachunk to advance the slides, we naturally started talking about what it was like to shoot film, much to the amusement and sometimes surprise of the younger staff. 

Kachunk.

How many readers remember those days?  You would finish your roll of 24 or 36 shots and ship them off to the Kodak or another processing center.  Then the wait.  Maybe a week or two later the prints or slides would arrive in the mail.  Only then would you know how well they came out. Maybe they would be great.  But usually some would be out of focus or over/under exposed.  That was the way it was.  No instant feedback on your quality back then.

Kachunk.

There were also the different types of film to choose from.  Kodachrome, Echtachrome, etc. Each had their pluses and minuses.  Regardless of which film, each picture had a price.  Wasted shots were money down the drain.  The only solution was to be careful about composition and exposure. 

Kachunk.

We all have boxes of photos or slides.  Each box of slides labeled with the subject and dates (if we thought to write it down).  Packs of photos, hopefully with the negatives. Packs of negatives by themselves.  They are supposed to be stored in cool dry locations to preserve them. Most probably are not stored properly.

Kachunk.

The biggest change from the film to digital age I noticed wasn’t these things. It is the quality of the images and my perspective on good resolution.  Many slides were very good images that were what I considered to be sharp images at the time.  But years of shooting digital images with better equipment has changed my views.  What I considered years ago to be great images are now just good.  Or maybe only average.  It is not just digital versus film.  I noticed this same phenomenon as I look back at my digital images taken with older digital cameras. 

Kachunk.

My conclusion is that the quality of photography keeps advancing, just like the slides in the projector. Kachunk... Kachunk... Kachunk...  

DAWN OF SPRING DOLDRUMS

Today is the first day of Spring.  Visions of flowers and awakening vegetation providing opportunities for nice photos dance through your head at the mention of Spring.  But, alas, we are in the photographic doldrums. A late winter storm last week covered the ground for days and is now finally disappearing.  But there is just bleak landscape to look at.  A few flowers are starting to sprout.  Nothing of visual interest. A few weeks from now it should be better.  Let’s hope!

SIGNS OF SPRING

A mild Winter is giving way to Spring.  The first flowers of Spring are appearing and adding color to the bleak post Winter landscape.  This little beauty caught my eye as I got home the other day.  I had just enough time to take a quick snapshot with my iPhone.  

LENS ENVY

Okay, I admit it. I have lens envy.  You know – that feeling you get when you shooting with your consumer level lenses and you see someone with a big high quality lens that screams “I’m a pro!” Immediately you believe your pictures can’t be as good as theirs.  But that is not necessarily true.  As one such pro said, “the quality of the picture starts six inches behind the camera.”  That is true.  But it is still nice to have a great lens for the situation. 

This winter I have been taking pictures for the girls’ basketball team using a Canon EF-S 55-250mm 1:4-5.6 IS STM lens.  Unfortunately, many of the gyms have very bad lighting so I had to use a high ISO to get a shutter speed fast enough to freeze action.  Even then many pictures left a lot to be desired or needed a significant amount of post processing work.  The composition and action I captured were good enough for the local paper to use in their online editions and a couple printed editions. 

I was getting along using my basic lens and ignored my lens envy.  That is until a friend let me borrow his EF 70-200 1:2.8 L series IS II USM lens.  Wow!  What a difference it made.  Being able to shoot at f2.8 enabled me to use a lower ISO and reduce noise.  The images were much sharper and brighter. My need for post processing was significantly reduced.  So now my lens envy is back!  You know what is on my wish list for my birthday and next Christmas!!! 

KICKING OFF MY BLOG

Two of my favorite hobbies are photography and writing.  So I guess having a blog makes sense from that standpoint.  But I never gave writing a blog much thought until I needed to set up a photo sharing site.  This winter I was asked to take pictures of the high school girls basketball team and post them to share with the parents.  A little research led me to choose the Pixieset site but I needed a website to sign up.  My solution? Set up a blog site.  And that is the genesis of this blog.

This blog site has sat without entries for a couple months.  Why?  Well, I was a little reluctant to get started blogging until I had a better idea of what I wanted to say.  Then I got busy taking pictures at the games and ….  Okay, Okay. Enough with excuses. I’ve finally decided it is time to start posting my pictures along with my thoughts and experiences with photography.

My first serious interest in photography started in the mid-1970s when I bought a Canon FTb SLR all manual film camera.  I enjoyed it for many years until I got tired of the shutter breaking.  The all-manual camera gave me a good understanding of exposure settings and adjustments within the limits of the camera. 

After several years using different cameras, I purchased a Canon Rebel XTi kit as an economical way to get into digital photography.  That camera served me well until I dropped it and broke the lens.  Eventually I replaced it with my current camera, a Canon 70D and took a couple classes to improve my craft. 

Throughout the years, I have accumulated many photos from snapshots up through serious shots.  Family events, sports, landscapes, and wildlife are my most common collections.  This blog will be used to show some of the better pictures and, in some cases, write a little about the picture or its subject.