Photography

My daughter has been sending me adorable AI-generated images of her and my grandson in various Christmas get-ups. They’re so fun and cute and she’s having a blast.

I was bored this afternoon so I just walked around the house and used up a roll of HP5 in the Rolleiflex.

On macOS, I prefer Capture One as my RAW editor, but C1’s cataloging features are weak. Plus, I’d prefer not having my catalog and editor so tightly tied together. I’d love to get out of the Adobe ecosystem, so I don’t want to get too deep into using Lightroom Classic for my catalog. Photo Mechanic is great, but has gotten too expensive.

I’m becoming a fan of this awkward kit. The F100 is such a sleeper and can be had relatively cheaply. I ended up with that weird-looking SB-20 flash as part of a local Facebook purchase. There might be something to this TTL flash, auto-focus, auto-exposure photography thing.

It’s nice having a pocketable point-and-shoot film camera with me. Normally for me, this either means an Olympus Stylus Epic or Ricoh GR1. Both of these are having issues, so I impulse ordered a Canon Sure Shot AF-7 from eBay. It was $30 shipped, so there wasn’t much risk.

I’m trying. I really am.

Sometimes I think I should quit shooting film. But I never do.

I’ve tried to make Mylio work a few times. Maybe this time it will.

The Ricoh GR1 looked sad in the “broken camera” drawer, so I loaded it up with a roll of HP5 and gave it a shot. It worked just fine. This time. Sometimes the LCD stops working. Sometimes the viewfinder gets blocked by something loose inside the camera. Usually it’s both those things, but this time I got through the roll without issue. It’s a great camera when it works.

I enjoy using the Rolleiflex so much that I am able to ignore how difficult it can be to focus and how sometimes it flares badly.

The Stylus Epic, HP5, and light leaks at the beach

Captured in the act

I’ve rejiggered the Ghost blog I was using for this site into a dedicated photography blog. There’s a lot of cruft scattered about, and I’m using the default theme for now, but it’s a start.

What if I used Glass for my film roll posts, instead?

I like to have Make and Model information available in film scans, and use exiftool for this. I have a lisp function in Emacs that does this, but sometimes I’d like to do it from a terminal instead.

It’s been great having the MP back from DAG. Sometimes I feel like it’s too much camera ($$$-wise), but then I use it and realize it’s the exactly right amount of camera.

Putting the new Rolleiflex through its paces by subjecting it to some self-portraits of me

Took a walk with the new Rolleiflex this afternoon

I maintain a list of shell commands for updating Make/Model/Lens information in film scans. I’ve always run this via babel in a code block in an Org mode file. Something like this:

I’ve not been shooting much film recently. Yesterday, I was bored and in a mood, so I grabbed the Hasselblad and fired off a roll using Alice as my model. Only one frame was good enough to share. I really like it, so it was worth sacrificing the other 11.

A few quick thoughts after just over a month with the new Nikon Z f

Some former Nik Software people are building a new tool for managing photo libraries. It’s called Aspect. I’m a sucker for any photo-related software, so I installed the beta and spent yesterday testing it. I took some notes after using it for a day.

I bought a nice Nikon FE2, but I don’t love it enough to keep it.

The Canon AE-1 Program was my first real camera. Unfortunately, I no longer own that original from 1982, so I bought another one in 2013. It’s not a great camera, but it works. I like to put a roll through it now and then.

I spent the morning of the election with my daughter and grandson. It was a nice way to spend part of an otherwise anxiety-filled day.

A portrait session with my aunt and uncle’s family. Taken using the Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm Planar. HP5.

The viewfinder is kind of a mess right now. I have been thrilled to be able to use my little GR1 again, after pulling it off the shelf and finding that it does actually work. Except this morning I was reminded why I’d retired it before. The viewfinder becomes blocked by something loose in there or perhaps some sort of separation. Either way, it’s not usable when this happens, so I may have to document the issue and re-retire the camera.

I brought the Hasselblad to my parents house while my daughter and grandson were visiting. I underexposed the roll a bit, but the hit rate was better than expected. I love this one of my sister and Lincoln.

Jess on Trampoline I posted the above photo to Flickr 20 years ago today. It was my first. Flickr remains the best place to upload photos. I just wish it was still the best option for sharing them.

Photo Mechanic is the fastest, most powerful tool for ingesting/browsing/exporting photos. It’s always been a little expensive, but I’ve had a license for many years.

Most of the information I’ve written down about my cameras is either on my wiki or in random blog posts. I’ve decided to try and consolidate things in a new, separate wiki (using TiddlyWiki). It was trivial to drag and drop my original camera notes from the main wiki into this new wiki. I then copied the wiki file to my server, and it now lives here:

Recent versions of the new Lightroom (Desktop, not “Classic”) have added features making it feasible for me to use.

I switched from using Lightroom Classic (LrC) to Capture One Pro (C1) “for good” back in 2021. It wasn’t because of Adobe’s subscription model, or because I had some vague aversion to Adobe, the company. It was because I felt like I was getting better images, faster, with C1.

As much as I would love a new X100VI, I don’t actually need one.

I don’t like the way Glass shows images in a desktop browser when the browser window is wider than around 1,000 pixels. I prefer the layout in narrower windows, but I never have mine that narrow. This means whenever I’m browsing Glass, I have to shrink the window.

In which I think about using Lightroom again.

I have never regretted taking a photo, but I always regret not taking one.

I got tired of waiting for a Fuji X100V so I skipped it and got another Q2

I recently found my original Fujifilm X100 in a box in our storage unit. I have such fond memories of the camera, so I knew I would enjoy using it, even today.

I go through periods during which I don’t feel much like making “art” with my cameras. This is normal, but lately I haven’t felt like taking photographs at all.

While doing some spring cleaning this week, I ran into a box of old cameras that I had marked “To Sell” but forgot about. The box had an old Olympus digital and a bunch of beat-up OM-2n film cameras and accessories. This was neat, but what I was most exited about were two cameras in particular: An original Fujifilm X100 and an Olympus Stylus Epic.

I brought a Hasselblad 60 megapixel medium format digital camera to Africa with me. I took photos side by side with my film camera. The digital camera’s images were sharper. They had more detail in both the shadows and the highlights. The digital camera made photographing very, very easy.

It’s always surprising to me how many frames I don’t screw up when using the meterless M3.

I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004 and a SmugMug user for nearly as long. For some reason, I prefer looking at my photos via online galleries rather than, say, my Photos library, and both Flickr and SmugMug have helped me do that.

The Leica SL2 felt inevitable. After an almost accidental run with the Panasonic S5, which I didn’t enjoy at all, I tried going back to the Fuji system. I’ve always liked Fujifilm cameras and their classic control layout. I purchased a new X-T5 and a few nice lenses late last year, but it didn’t grow on me. The X-T5 is a great camera and I had nothing to complain about. Except it just didn’t give me The Feels. Not the way, say, a Leica does.

Long story, short, I sold my precious Leica M6 (Classic). I could no longer justify having two modern Leica M cameras, so I decided to keep the beautiful MP and pass the M6 on to someone else. I’m sure I’ll regret this. (It’s the second time the camera has been sold, but the previous buyer returned it, for spurious reasons). Onward!

There are always cameras loaded with film scattered around my house. I don’t go out much, so sometimes I’ll pick up a camera and take a random photo just for the feel of it and to use up some film. These photos are almost always one of three things: Myself, my dog, or my desk/workspace.

I know that film photography and Emacs are completely unrelated, but I have been thinking about both of them quite a lot recently.

This has been a tumultuous week for me, photography-wise. Early in the week, I made this silver gelatin darkroom print of a 35mm frame of HP5 film.

I took the MP on my walk and was determined to shoot an entire roll. It was overcast, dreary, and the path I walk is pretty boring, but I did my best and made it through the roll.

I like the way prints look with a small black border around the image, like this:

I tried, I really did. The Wise Old Internet guided me into changing my film scanning process from a dedicated flatbed scanner to using a mirrorless digital camera setup. I did everything right. I bought good equipment and the right software.

Here a few from a recent roll using the Leica M3 and the Leica 50mm Summilux-M ASPH.

Dogs, myself, and cameras are about the only things I’ve been photographing lately. I just don’t seem to have any ideas. Well, that’s not true; I have plenty of ideas, but I’m too lazy to act on them. So, I sit around the house and shoot what’s in front of me.

I watched the following video by Ramsey Spencer yesterday and I’ve been fuming about it ever since: What a load of elitist bullshit. I realize he’s just trying to make a name for himself so people “click Like and Subscribe, guys,” but grrrrrr!