MMMMMmmmoooooossssssseeeeee

This image was cropped. Heavily. It was snowing as well. Again, heavily.

More Digital Panoramas

Lets talk sub-zero

Well I ventured out of the house, into the -8 degree Fahrenheit loveliness. There are a few things about shooting in sub zero temperatures that I thought I would bring up. First, get small gloves so your skin isn't exposed to the air. The wind was dead calm so I took my gloves off to use the camera, but putting the tripod back away was less than a good idea. Second, the camera functioned fine. I was using my 7d and shooting video and stills and it never knew the difference. I shot about 15 minutes of video, and about 200 pictures without the battery draining too much. The meter says it dropped from 95% to 87%. But who can trust that? Third, sub zero temperatures means its very cold. I watched as my tripod head completely froze as I watched. This didn't affect anything really that I noticed as I wasn't using it too heavily. However, when I picked up the tripod and tried to put the legs up, they wouldn't say up. And when I flipped it over to see what the deal was, the center column slid out. Apparently the tripod was cold enough that certain portions of the tripod contracted enough that it lost the ability to lock. This was an aluminum tripod from Giottos, so it may not be an issue for you if you venture out.

But enough about the details. My parents and I snowshoed out onto the lake. The snowshoes weren't necessary, but made for easier goings. They also add a silliness to the whole thing. I took a 360 panorama and stitched it together, but I'm having trouble representing it as a full 360 panorama instead of just a very wide picture with the first and the last image the same.

Finals, Travels, and Snow

Finals are over, school is out for "Winter break", and I am in Alaska. I've been pretty busy with school stuff and haven't had a chance to get out and take some pictures so its nice to be able to be somewhere photogenic with time to my name. A little panorama I whipped up while hiding in the kitchen (its below zero).

A single

Here is another image I found. Its a poorly executed scan of a poorly executed picture and for some reason I love it.

Digital Input

So out of 13,000 or so images, lets assume 8000 are digital images. This is an extremely generous estimate of how many images were scanned. In truth, the number of digital images is much higher. However, after going through my digital images, the amount I felt were good was less then my film shots. This is NOT because digital is worse, or film is better, but instead is due to how I shoot with each format. I found it interesting how sparse of a selection I felt I had of digital, especially because digital took a backseat to film rather quickly. I'd also like to point out that 9/19 images were from my trip to Europe, the first image you see here was me taking a picture of the lens when selling the camera pictured (RB67 Pro-S), and then 2 from Christmas break in Alaska, a couple from the same day of dew, and then images I've taken since getting my newest digital camera. I use the tools completely differently without even intending to. A lot of my digital work has been of events, and those I don't really consider to be "good" pictures, but more accurate images.

Slipping through the cracks

Here are a couple that didn't get in the first post for some reason...

Direction

I'm trying to redesign my website, which is another story in itself, but in doing decided to get some of my film scanned professionally, so it was scanned without random hair lines, proper color balancing, and a lot better resolution than my scanner offers. In doing so, I went back through what is a year of film photography. The images varied from slides to print film to black and white film, and from 35mm to 6x7 medium format film. I've shot through two 100 foot rolls of bulk black and white, and then a smattering of other film purchased one roll at a time. I've also shot a lot of medium format, in quite a few different cameras. And on top of that I've shot a lot of digital pictures. Doing a quick count of images stored on my computer, the number comes out to 13,136, with probably 200-300 coming from when I got my first point and shoot digital camera, to when I first got a DSLR. Going through the images made me look back at all I've done, learned, and enjoyed.

I found it was a lot easier to go through film and pick out keepers, as with digital I'll have six shots of the same subject, with little to no change. So the first batch of "looking back" images are all from film, shot in Spokane, WA or around Alaska. I'm putting them in chronological order, as well as I remember the order, to show where I started and where I'm going. Next I'll be doing a look through my digital files.