Oh and congratulations Preston!
Oh and congratulations Preston!
Who shoots in the summer? It's the worst time of year to be out with the camera! About the only locations that make sense are high altitudes and northern latitudes, which are inaccessible the rest of the year. In most of the lower 48, the weather is hot and the light not very good for photography. I know, it's a pretty big generalization, but so often you just get harsh light and dull blue skies, at least for much of the west and southwest. There's none of the great scenery associated with the other seasons, like autumn leaves in the fall, snow in winter, and wildflowers in the spring. Also, with the days being so long, the good light doesn't end until 9ish, and you don't get to sleep until 11ish, so that means getting about 5 hours of sleep or less to get up for dawn shooting. Also, the droves of tourons descend like mad locusts on much of the popular photo locations, and can completely ruin your experience. I'll stick to shooting mostly in the fall, winter, and early spring, when the light is sweet and I can get a lot more space to myself. Gas is usually cheaper, also...
Brian Vuillemenot
"...you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."
I'll be on the beach in N.W. Scotland. Tins of Tartan rather than Watneys Red Barrel. Maybe we'll take the kids for a sleepover on top of a mountain. I'll certainly be photographing my usual sunsets, rocks and trees, and musing yet again on capturing the otters on LF.
Oh yes - a great summer ahead of me: It starts with a long session: Furnish that flat !
Matus
Oh yes - a great summer ahead of me: It starts with a long session: Furnish that flat !
Than there will be a big photosession, but unfortunately I will be modelling, not photographing. This one is called: Wedding
But otherwise I hope to have enough time to make some architecture photography here in Muenster and also in the surroundings.
Matus
I'll be spending three months in Newfoundland in a rural fishing community, where I plan to begin each day on the brook in the back yard doing a little early morning fly fishing for trout or salmon, followed by a leisurely breakfast. In case that sounds far too lazy, I also plan to spend some time out on one of the commercial fishing boats. The main project is to complete architectural plans for a place that is going to be built there in the fall, and I'd like to get some of the landscaping done this summer. I also want to start a still photography and sound recording project, which I see taking two or three summers to complete, about the community and the people who live there. I don't have an exact count on how many residents there are, but I know that there are 33 telephone numbers in the phone book.
For the photo project, I have a 4x5, a Mamiya 7II and an old Leica M3. I don't know if anyone here is into in sound recording, but for that I'll use a Sound Devices two-track recorder and a couple of Schoeps microphones, with voice recording in mono and ambient recording in stereo. It's possible, having spent this summer doing still photographs, that I'll bring along a high definition video camera next summer and turn the project into a film. The Sound Devices recorder is designed for synchronized sound via time code, so this wouldn't require additional recording gear.
Re Struan Gray's "musing yet again on capturing the otters on LF", I played around with using the Mamiya/150mm lens to photograph the local Humpback and Finn whales at this place one afternoon last summer. It happened to be the camera that I had with me. I've since seen Salgado's medium format photographs of whales, and I'm doing some musing myself about taking along an MF camera that can handle a lens in the 300mm range. These are two of the photos that I took with the Mamiya. They aren't great, and the light was mid-day harsh, but they suggest that using a medium format camera to photograph fleeting wildlife, especially a camera that takes longer lenses and perhaps a motor drive, may not be as lunatic as it sounds. Large format might be pushing it though
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Last edited by r.e.; 22-Sep-2009 at 09:19.
I am taking an environmental figure workshop in June and I hope to do some pt/pd printing the rest of the summer.
Hmm - let's see:
In July, spousal unit and I are going to San Jose to visit our son. Expect to spend a couple of days in Napa Valley. I will take the 4x5 and do a lot of photography along the way.
In August, I'm doing an environmental portraiture workshop at Peters Valley. Expect to use both the 4x5 and 35mm.
In a few weeks, spousal unit and I will be going to NYC for a day - I will take the 35mm. My wife is supposed to plan this trip (I plan the one in the Fall), but I expect that I will end up suggesting a lot of things. Lots of street photography.
Additional day trips on the list include the Shelburn Museum in Burlington, VT; Rhinebeck, NY; the Storm King Arts Center, Shellburn Falls, MA; Lenox, MA; Cooperstown (the Farmer's Museum); Utica, NY (for Union Station), Bish Bash Falls in MA; and the Clover Furnace in Harriman State Park.
r.e.: I was photographing a leash* of hares with a 150 mm on 6x6 just this lunchtime. They romped into my background as I was fussing around a marl pit and it's pollards and arranged themselves neatly into a row across the middle distance. I couldn't have placed them better myself had they been cast in resin :-)
I think environmental animal and bird photography is eminently possible, even with LF. The biggest problem would be touching up the focus: even if you don't want that false sense of cuddly closeness so beloved of the nature industry, if the critter is more than just an accent in the frame it'll need better than zone focus - at least in Northen European lighting. Doing it on a deck might be more tricky, although Cambo at least used to make a handheld 240 mm point-and-shoot 4x5.
I have only come close to otters in twilight. They are very wary in the areas I tend to go to, and I don't deliberately stalk them. That said, a family of five skipped back and forth around me in a tidal boulder field a couple of years ago. The idea of fiddling with camera equipment at such a time seemed more than a bit ridiculous.
On second thoughts, it was more like a husk :-)
Last edited by Struan Gray; 9-May-2008 at 13:50.
Summer? That season has already finished.
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