Imagine There's An Image

Portraits

2007-07-03T00:51:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to work in some informal portraiture lately. Here are two of what I think are my more successful attempts.

Portraits were what originally impelled me to take up photography. That is, I was so dissatisfied with my high school yearbook picture that I was sure I could learn to do a better job. Not realizing that the problem was the raw subject material and not the fault of any photographer, I prevailed on my friend Roger to teach me about photography. Once I got in the darkroom and became fascinated with the ability to make images, any images, I soon forgot about portraiture.

People pictures, other than those of cute, small children, have never been my strong point. I don't think I really want to go through the effort to be a really great portraitist, but I'd like to at least get better at photographing family and friends.

Composition is my strong point, so I've been looking out for opportunities to combine composition and informal portraiture.

I really like this photo of my friend and co-worker John. First of all, I caught an expression that I think really represents John well. He is pleasant to be around, collegial and professional with a good sense of humor - a real mentch. Second, from a compositional point of view, I like the way the swoopy curve of the desk balances the placement of John on the right side of the photo. Overall, I think it turned out to be a decent "environmental" portrait of a happy software developer.

This next photo is, of course, our son Ben. He's an easy one to photograph, as he usually doesn't mind mugging or posing for the camera. In this case, he was just relaxing on my brother-in-law Peter's boat during our recent visit to Toronto. I thought the boat's wake on this beautiful day was a photogenic backdrop for a portrait, and the way Ben was leaning made for a more interesting photo.

OK, it's not Annie Liebovitz, but a good start.

Speaking of Annie Liebovitz, I recently took a long look at her much-heralded new book, A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005. Frankly, at $75, I don't recommend it. Many of the photos, maybe a fourth of them, are quite compelling, but the layout is not very good - many fine photos are splayed across two pages, ruined by the gutter. Further, I question if the other three-quarters of the photo are worth publishing.

Some have complained that most of the photos are just what you would find in a family album - pictures of Liebovitz' parents, cousins, and her lover Susan Sontag, over the 15-year period. I would defend her to an extent here - some of the family photos are excellent, both in the emotions they convey and in their photographic quality. But many, many more are not so good.

There are probably more photos of Sontag than any other subject in this book. A few are quite good, but most seem to be only of personal interest to Liebovitz, perhaps to Sontag's family, and maybe to Sontag fanatics. A number of these are just downright bad photos - blurred or poorly exposed.

The book also includes some landscapes, many spread across two pages. These latter ones aren't ruined by the gutter, because Liebovitz' landscapes, at least in this book, are unimpressive - perhaps they have meaning to her, but I question that they have any wide appeal.

As a photographer, Liebovitz is a bit of a puzzle to me. Here's what I wonder: she is a very talented portrait photographer, but if her photos were of ordinary people rather than celebrities, would we be all that interested and make such a fuss over her?

Shark Mouth

2007-06-16T00:10:00.000-04:00

A closeup of the shark-mouth painting on the bow of the USS Torsk, a WWII submarine permanently on display at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.

Little Bit of Something in a Lot of Nothing

2007-06-04T15:27:00.001-04:00

Way back three years ago, I wrote about a number of photographic rules-of-thumb, or useful clichés that I tend to look for and use in my shooting.

One of them is a little bit of something in a lot of nothing, and that's what I saw the other day walking down Lombard Street as one of those heroic window-washers worked his way down the side of a twenty-something story building.

This image doesn't quite fit in that category as, say, a single rose in the middle of a large, fresh field of snow, but you get the idea.

Parking Space Number 35

2007-03-29T20:58:00.000-04:00

Main Street T-Shirts

2007-03-29T20:46:00.000-04:00

Mr. Ben Rosenbach - Amazing Student

2007-02-16T16:15:00.000-05:00

It's official - Ben's interim alma mater Anne Arundel Community College acknowledges Ben's true nature (click on the photo for a larger view if you can't read the address on the envelope.)

250 W Pratt at Night

2007-01-31T22:19:00.000-05:00

Warren's encouragement prompted me, on my way back to the Light Rail yesterday evening, to stop and take some photos of one of my favorite buildings in Baltimore.

I used my new little GorrillaPod, wrapping it around a signpost across the street from the building. I set the self-timer on my Canon A620 to 10 seconds, which was enough time to damp out the vibration from me pushing the shutter release.

Rotated and cropped slightly to produce the dark triangles of "negative space" at right and at top.

Contrast slightly adjusted and converted to B&W with Picassa.

250 W Pratt - Again...

2007-01-31T22:16:00.000-05:00

It's the photo-architectural gift that keeps on giving!

250 W Pratt - Abstract

2007-01-31T22:07:00.000-05:00

When it comes to skyscrapers, Baltimore is an architecturally impaired city, but there are a few exceptions. This is one of them, one of my favorites in Baltimore, 250 W Pratt Street.

This 1986-vintage, 24-floor building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It's 360 feet tall (110 m), and its half-ziggurat profile and handsome banding make it a real standout any city would be proud the call its own.

Presenting...Kristin Jansen!

2006-12-25T12:48:00.000-05:00

Uncle SteveR is proud to present some photos by his amazingly talented niece, Kristin Jansen of Oakville, Ontraio.

As you can see, Kristin, who is in her last year of a Nursing degree, has a superb eye for composition, pattern, color, and shapes.

I would like to take some credit, even some genetic credit, for her great talent, but alas, I can't - she's my wife's brother's daughter. I didn't even know Kristin was interested in photography until we were visiting with her family this past July. Sister-in-law Sue mentioned it to me, and the next day, Kristin and I got up early and went to Oakville's picturesque harbor on Lake Ontario around sunrise. She used my camera and came back with some excellent photos.

Since then, Kristin bought her own camera, a Sony SteadyShot DSC-H2, and is making good use of it, as you can see here. About an hour ago, she showed me some of the photos she's made since I was last here, and straight out of the camera, they just knocked me out. She didn't have any photo-editing software yet, so I suggested that we download Picassa from Google, which we did, and we quickly ran the images you see here through Picassa for some minor cropping and levels adjustment.

I coulda easily picked another half-dozen or more photos, but one can only take so much genius at a time. So more to come from Kristin later on. Actually, I'll try to talk her into putting up her own photo-blog - why not?

Legg Mason in 250 W Pratt

2006-12-20T22:36:00.000-05:00

Here's a view of one of my favorite hi-rise buildings in all of Baltimore, 250 W Pratt Street, showing a reflection of the 40-floor Legg Mason building.

On a morning with good sun, if I look over my left shoulder one-half along my walk from the Light Rail to the office, this is what I'll see.

100 E. Pratt

2006-12-20T22:35:00.000-05:00

I'm always looking for interesting patterns as I walk to and from work. A few days ago on a sunny morning, the waffle-like pattern of 100 E. Pratt Street jumped out at me. I had walked by there literally over a hundred times, but just didn't "see" this image.

100 E. Pratt is an odd building. This heavy masonry facade is only a few stories tall, but stretches for the entire block along Pratt Street. Behind and attached to this blocky structure is a 28-story steel-frame tower. On top of the tower is a "hat truss" from which - get this - hangs another structure, a 1991 addition to the original (1973-1975) building. The addition is almost as tall as the tower and the same width, but it looks to be only 1 office deep. You can get a better look at this whole affair An Engineer's Guide to Baltimore. This website notes that the whole weight of the addition is suspended entirely from the "birdcage" truss at the top of the tower; that is, there's no foundation holding it up.

Those are brave people sitting in those offices!

On This Night, Let Us Light...

2006-12-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

"...six little Hanukkah candles."

That's from a song that Jewish kids sing in Nursery School to learn about Hanukkah. And tonight, we will light six candles for the sixth day of this eight-day holiday.

Today's photo of glass dreydles was part of a self-assignment to make photographs for Hanukkah three years ago.

I'd never seen little glass dreydles like these before that time. They were at the annual Hanukkah Bazaar run by our Synagogue's Sisterhood. I asked the "sisters" afterwards if I could borrow their stock for some photos.

The don't spin worth a darn, but they sure are nice to look at.

The Hanukkah dreydle has on its four sides the Hebrew letters, Nun, Gimmel, Hey, and Shin. This stands for the sentence, Nes gadol hayah sham, which means "A great miracle happened there."

The "there" means Israel, or more specifically, the Second Temple in Jerusalem. And the miracle refers to the miracle of the little jar of oil, which should have only been enough for one day but lasted for eight.

And that's why we celebrate Hanukkah 2,171 years after the event it commemorates. The miracle of the oil is why we light candles for eight nights, and, by the way, why we eat oil-fried foods on Hanukkah.

Ashenazim, Jews whose more recent ancestors lived in Northern and Eastern Europe, eat potato latkes, or pancakes. Sephardim, Jews whose families lived in places like Iberia, North Africa, Italy, or Turkey, eat sufganiot, which are donuts.

Wherever you live and wherever you are from, Hanukkah, the Festival of Light, is a time of miracles - may you each be granted a miracle of your own!

On the Way to Work This Morning...

2006-12-12T23:07:00.000-05:00

Coolidge Corner

2006-12-10T21:01:00.000-05:00

This is the Coolidge Corner stop of the MBTA, otherwise known as the 'T', Boston's mass transit system. Coolidge Corner is a beautiful old neighborhood in Brookline, where Sandy and I stayed this weekend while attending the bat mitzvah of my cousin's daughter Hannah. I didn't take any photos until just as we were leaving to go back to the airport - pretty much forgot that I brought my little camera (well, that's an indication of the good time we had seeing our relatives at such a happy occassion.)

As we stood waiting for the 'T', I noticed the early-moring sidelighting on the tile roof of the passenger shed. I'm a sucker for tile roofs anyway, and I liked the perspective of the scene. Does it do anything for you?

ShadowMan

2006-11-29T23:35:00.000-05:00

An impromptu self-portrait. I was raking leaves when I spotted a "Walking Stick" (an insect that looks like a twig) on the stucco wall of our house. After taking a few photos, I noticed my shadow looked interesting against the texture of the brightly-lit wall.

I'm holding my Canon A620 digicam - it has a nifty twisty-flexy viewscreen, and the way I'm holding it reminds me of the way press photographers used Rollieflexes to shoot over the heads of crowds in the '40s and '50s.

Citabria Abstract

2006-11-20T22:23:00.000-05:00

Tail of a Citabria (2-passenger light airplane) taken May 2003, Canon A40.

Smoke Break

2006-10-26T16:15:00.000-04:00

This photo is a tribute to Dave Beckerman, whose online journal was quite an inspiration to me a few years ago as I was considering getting back into photography.

Dave's journal was the Mother Of All PhotoBlogs - it was in essence a blog before there was such a thing.

Dave is a great B&W photographer and a great street photographer. I never shoot B&W any more and only seldom convert one of my digital images to B&W. But over the past few weeks, as I walk the final block on my way to work, I've been seeing small groups of smokers sitting on the window ledges of the Candler Building along Pratt Street. If I walk very close to the building, I would often just see a few pairs of legs, a hand or two, and puffs of smoke, backlit by the early-moning sun.

Those little street scenarios started to strike me as very "compositional," and Black-and-White-y. Well, yesterday, I had a What Would Dave Do (WWDD?) moment; I finally snapped a few shots, with B&W in mind as the final product.

I rather like it, and hope you do, too. I'm curious to see what Dave thinks.

Economic Miracle?... (yawn)

2006-10-26T09:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning, I filled up the tank on the way to work for $1.999/gallon, the first time I've paid under $2/gallon since... I can't remember. I was so excited that afterwards, I parked my car nearby and walked back to document the sign.

This morning, as I passed that same intersection, I noticed that one of the three gas stations was still at $1.999, while the one on the other side of the street now advertised $1.998.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after breaking its old 1999 record and punching through 12,000 last week, continues to advance. At work, it seems as if new people are being hired at high-paying jobs every week, and in downtown Baltimore, skyscraping buildings are going up everywhere.

Now maybe I don't live in Detroit or Cleveland, but in these parts, the economy sure looks good and seems to be getting better.

And yet, all you hear about is people complaining about how bad the economy is.

I have a theory about that, and it goes like this:

For some time now, even as we've been getting wealthier and raising our standard of living, there have been structural changes in the economy, inlcuding the "social compact" between employers and employees, all of which have introduced opportunities, for sure, but also a measure of risk and uncertainty for workers.

Much of this is the change to a global economy. It's a good-news/bad-news sort of thing (or, if you're more optimistic like me, a bad-news/good-news thing.)

Way back int the mid-90's, President Clinton told us, like a latter-day Bob Dylan, that the times they were a-changin'. It wasn't a bad thing, he said, but rather an opportunity. But it meant that people would have to take more responsibility for their lives and be more self-directed. Above all, he emphasized the need for lifelong learning, in order to stay competitive in the job market. He predicted, quite rightly, that the days of working for a single company for an entire career were past, and that people needed to become prepared and flexible in the changing workplace.

The popularity and proliferation of 401K programs, a great opportunity for employees, came at the same time that many companies no longer offered traditional, defined-benefit pension plans. In other words, the companies weren't going to look out for you, you would have to look out for yourself.

Now 401K's proved to be a classic good-news/bad-news thing. Good in the 90's as the stock market ran up incredible gains, but then bad from 2000 on as the bubble burst and trillions went up in smoke. But now good news again, as the market has recovered nicely, this time, with gains coming much more slowly, but built on real value, rather than smoke and mirrors as in the late '90s.

Oil prices began to surge by 2005. Now this was definitely a bad-news/good-news thing, but few could see (or were willing to see) what it was all about. The chatter in the public square was all about consipracies and price-gouging, but in fact, what was behing the price rise was, if you care about the human rights and the condition of the Third World, good news. No, wonderful news.

And that was that a few hundred million people in India and a few hundred million more in China had, thanks to the new global economy and (gulp!) capitalism moved from abject poverty to middle-class lives. And guess what, those five or six or seven hundred million new middle-classers have left their oxcarts and bicycles behind and are now consuming... gasoline!

And as we know, nobody, not even Stalin nor Mao, has ever figured out how to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, so oil prices went up.

Since then, the higher oil prices encourgaged companies to explore for and drill for more oil and build more refinery capacity, and what do you know... the price of gas has come back down. Fallen like a lead brick, is more like it.

The conventional wisdom during this election season is that the economy is in bad shape, but I, for one, don't buy it.

The real issue is that those of us who work for a living are now faced with new issues and realities that introduce more economic risk into our lives. To put it in simple terms, we're not getting poorer, we may even be getting richer, but we're definitely getting more nervous.

Father & Daughter

2006-10-23T22:38:00.000-04:00

It's good to be a father!

This is a lucky shot I caught at the tail end of Baltimore Flugtag.

I had been taking photos during the event with my Canon Digital Rebel and 70-300mm zoom, racked out to 300mm to get pictures of the "aircraft" plunging into the harbor.

Luckily, I still had the long lens on the camera when I spotted this young father with his baby girl battened snugly inside his coat.

The second I saw the two of them, I thought of the rear cover of Paul McCartney's first solo album. Paul had that "It's good to be a father!" expression on his face, too.

Flugtag Baltimore!

2006-10-23T21:03:00.000-04:00

Ungefähr 70.000 Zuschauer verfolgten begeistert die 23 Teams, das mit seinen tollkühnen Fluggeräten, von der 10 Meter hohen Startrampe ins Baltimore Hafen Wasser gefallen ist.

Ok, I cribbed that German, with appropriate modifications, from a web article about the Köln Flugtag last month. I must admit, my German is pretty non-existant. I usually fall asleep before I get to the verb.

Anyway, Flugtag Baltimore this past Saturday was awesome - it far exceeded my expectations of spectacle and fun. Sandy and I both went and enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

I won't go into the details - you can see that at the Baltimore Flugtag webiste here. Achtung! Office warning! ... there is a video that starts up right away on this page (you can click the "pause" button to shut it up) so wait until you get home to take a look.

Here's first-place winner, Victims of Soi-cumstance, right at takeoff. Like many of pushers, this one is taking the plunge, sans aircraft.

Here, Team Dumbo is getting up a good head of steam as they head for the end of the ramp...

... but unfortunately, Dumbo's undercarriage collapses just before takeoff - they had to unceremoniously push poor Dumbo into the drink

It was a One-Eyed, One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater! Unfortunatley, I'm old enough to remember having heard this song first-hand in 1958. This team's design was a real beauty, and it even delivered a puff of smoke from the horn right at takeoff!

Max's Maryland Flyer included a bicylce-pedal-driven propeller and really looked like it could fly across the Inner Harbor. Unfortunately, it didn't perform any better than the Flying Fireman's Hat. A wonderful design, nevertheless. Better luck next year, Max & Company!

The Oscar Flyer came complete with a removable hot dog bun. For a hot dog, it flew pretty well, too.

The Indian Jones team came complete with floatplane and Hovitos warriors in loincloth and battle paint, and of course, Indy himself in his tradmark fedora.

Morgen ist den Flugtag!

2006-10-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

Flugtag in Baltimore is tomorrow, Saturday October 21st. I'll be there, along with my DSLR and long lens, so I hope to have some decent photos to post this weekend.

I scouted out the venue this morning, adjacent to the Maryland Science Center. While I was wandering around, I ran into some of the crews, getting their "aircraft" put together. A nice bunch of people - I wished them luck.

Two-Bit Hearts

2006-10-20T22:13:00.000-04:00

Candy hearts in a "bubble-gum machine" at the Inner Harbor.

What do you actually call these machines, anyway?

More Reflections...

2006-10-19T20:43:00.000-04:00

Once again, no Photoshop filters used here, just light, wind, and water plus normal use of the Photoshop Levels diaglog to properly display the scene contrast.

These photos were also taken last Friday, along with the one in my post this past Sunday. The top one, like that last photo, was taken from the footbridge over Pier 5.

For the lower photo, I was standing on the footbridge over Pier 4, close to the end by the Aquarium. The red is from part of the Aquarium wall, and the nice blue color is the reflection of the clear moning sky.

Sunlight and Wind

2006-10-15T20:53:00.000-04:00

Last Friday morning was quite a bit breezier than before, and the additional wind made for some really interesting reflections.

I shot this one once again near the old Power Plant building, but from the other side, standing on a bridge that links the Aquarium area to Pier Six.

I think it has an Impressionist feel to it - but other than the Levels adjustment in Photoshop, there was no digital manipulation of the image - it's all sunlight and wind.

Dockside Fantasy

2006-10-11T23:08:00.000-04:00

This scene keeps drawing me back - it's the old BGE Pratt Street Power Plant and, alongside, the USCG Tanney. On clear mornings, once the sun gets high enough in the sky to clear some buildings to the east, you get fantastic reflections in the water adjacent to the Power Plant.

The upper photo is the full frame of the original exposure I took Monday morning. In the second photo, I decided to crop out everything that isn't a reflection, then rotated the image 180 degrees and flipped it horizontally. This is closer to what I had in mind when looked out across the dock area Monday morning.

Eight O'Clock Shadow

2006-10-11T22:34:00.000-04:00

Live Free or Die Hard - Bruce Willis in Baltimore

2006-09-28T22:25:00.000-04:00

Bruce Willis and company are in Baltimore this week to film scenes for his new movie, Live Free or Die Hard. If this title is too hard to remember, just think of it as Die Hard 4.

While some commuters griped, us gawkers and kibbitzers happily hung around the scene-shooting a few blocks from where I work.

Once again, Mr. Willis plays former police officer John McClane in a save-the-world scenario (I happen to very much like this series, by the way.) This one involves a plot to destroy America via the Internet, with actress Maggie Q as the Evil Hacker and Justin Long as the Good-Guy Hacker who helps McClane foil the cyber-terrorists.
I didn't know about all this action going on in downtown Baltimore until this morning, so I missed yesterday's filming, which included a dump truck slamming into a bus (damn!) The story in the Baltimore Sun identified today's shooting location as just around the corner from my favorite Chinese food take-out place, so about 3PM, I got myself and my Canon A620 over there, in front of the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse on Calvert Street. The twenty-second scene they were shooting takes place inside a car, which in reality was on a small flatbed trailer surrounded by scaffolding holding lights, baffles, reflectors, cameras, and other film-stuff.

Calvert Street at this location divides on either side of a park-like traffic island, the site of the Battle Monument. At one point, I crossed over to the island and shot a few closer-up frames. I could just make out a bald-headed guy behind the wheel of the Ford, whom I assumed was Mr. Willis (it was, I later saw.) After I got home, downloaded and processed the images from the camera, I realized that the second photo here shows director Len Wiseman working with the cameraman.

The third photo is a blowup of the upper right corner of the second - take my word for it, tht's Mr. Willis in the monitor - the smaller figure in the background with his hand on the steering wheel. Mr. Wiseman looks seriously director-ish here, doesn't he?

The last photo was indeed my last shot as I crossed Calvert Street to head back to he office. The scene now over, Mr. Willis relaxes momentarily with (left to right) Maggie Q, Len Wiseman, and Justin Long.

I was very impressed as to just how much work and how many people were involved in this one scene. One of my fellow gawkers told me that she had been there for more than an hour, and the actors had been in the car all that time, while dozens of others lit, adjusted, catered, shlepped or otherwise contributed to making the scene possible.

Mr. Willis is, I think, a fine, hard-working, and underappreciated actor. I've been a fan of his ever since Moonlighting over twenty years ago. We recently watched two of his more recent films, 16 Blocks and Lucky Number Slevin, and I very much recommend them both.

Lightship Reflections

2006-09-27T21:45:00.000-04:00

More photos this evening of the lightship Chesapeake (WLV-116) - well actually, mostly not of the lightship itself, but of its sublime late-afternoon reflection in the waters of the Inner Harbor.

I took these just before 6 PM today, as the sun, low in the western sky but not too low, gave the Chesapeake's starboard hull a full blast of reddish light. Combined with the red-painted hull, the result was a really red reflection in the otherwise murky waters of the Inner Harbor.

For some reason, maybe today's very clear sky, the bits of water that weren't red were a really nice blue.

And Boat Number 22? This is one of several small electrically-powered boats you can rent to skim around the Inner Harbor - no pedaling required!

National Aquarium at Night

2006-09-21T22:17:00.000-04:00

I stayed later at work tonight and found myself walking through Harborplace about 7:30 PM. Having my Canon A620 in my backpack, I took a few minutes to get some photos of the new Australian Exhibit wing of the National Aquarium.

There was a fortuituosly handy, solid three-sided post where I stood to take this picture. One side was oriented just right so that when I pressed the flat bottom of my camera against it, the lens pointed just where I wanted it to.

From this angle, you get a great view of the spectacular new wing as well as one of my favorite photo subjects, the lightship Chesapeake, which lent its string of lights and flashing beacon to the composition.

Philly Boy

2006-09-20T23:27:00.000-04:00

This photo is out of order, it's actually from this past Saturday, when we drove our baby boy Ben to Philadelphia. But that's because we were just too tired Sunday, after the monumental move to Ben's new home while he's attending Drexel University.

The Big Move involved the whole family, with Sandy (Mom) and sister Leah all pitching in. Ben's stuff needed a rental van, stuffed to the gills, as well as the entire cargo space of Sandy's Hyunda Tuscon. Of course, I took every opportunity Saturday to remind Ben that "...when I went to school, I had one suitcase." But then, in the Paleolithic Age, we didn't need as much because most of the "student essentials" just didn't exist back then.

Ben will start classes next Monday as a "pre-Junior" in Information Sciences. Like his old man, he grew up in the suburbs, but he definitely likes being in a big city (Drexel is a stone's throw from downtown Philly) so I think he'll be very much at home in the City of Brotherly Love.

Inner Harbor Evening Stroll

2006-09-19T10:40:00.000-04:00

I headed home from work yesterday evening at about 6:30 PM and, as usual, walked along the Inner Harbor towards the Camden Yards Light Rail station. Not being in a particular hurry, I stopped to take a bunch of photos of the vivid reflections of the old Power Plant in the glass wall of the National Aqaurium.

The old buildings, which now house a Hard Rock Café and a Barnes & Nobel, were fully "lit up" by the sun, hanging low in the Western sky. Exposure was a bit of a problem - 1/25th second using a telephoto zoom setting, but I was able to push the flat bottom of my Canon A620 against the wall of the Aquarium's ticket building to stabilize the camera.

I took about 20 shots this way, waiting each time for passerby to lend some scale and interest to the scene. The slow shutter speed emphasized the movement of all but the slowest walkers. This young family was my favorite.

Walking on a little further, I noticed an opportunity to combine two of my favorite Inner Harbor subjects - the elegant steel-wire chairs and the lightship Chesapeake, both features of the area in front of the National Aquarium. OK, so maybe you can't tell it's the Chesapeake - take my word for it. It's handsome red hull served as a fine background to show off the nice lines of the chairs.

Lightship

2006-09-14T23:21:00.000-04:00

Two views of the Lightship "Chesapeake," which now is moored at the Baltimore Inner Harbor as part of its Maritime Museum.

Green Day

2006-09-13T13:22:00.000-04:00

Another photo from last week's perfect morning light. This one took me about 15 minutes to produce - I had to wait until someone came along to give the photo some context and scale. A dozen or more people walked, ran, or biked near or in back of this large green wall, but it took a long time until these National Aquarium workers finally returned from a coffee run before I had my picture.

By The Dawn's Perfect Light

2006-09-11T20:10:00.000-04:00

OK, it wasn't quite dawn, more like 8:00 AM last Thursday and Friday, but the light was pretty much as good as it gets on my morning stroll to work. The subject matter is the same as photos I've shot many times since I've been working downtown, but the lighting was just better those two days than I remember in quite a long time. In this first photo of the USS Constellation, for example, I've been trying for months to get an image that shows off the green hull bottom as well as the nice green reflection. This time, it worked out fine, and I got some great reflections from across the harbor as well. As a bonus, the western sky in the background was still dark enough not to show up as a washed-out nothingness, as it has in many of my earlier photos.

This next photo, Pigeon Convention, is partly a result of planning and partly luck. The planning involved me keeping a baggie of oatmeal in my backpack. There were already a lot of pigeons out and about that day, and throwing a handful of Quaker's on the ground in front of me brought a squadron of them right to me. The luck part was getting that symmetrical arrangement of my feathered friends. It took a number of handfuls of oatmeal, coupled with the quick response of my Canon A620, to get this shot.

This set of "dragons", paddleboats actually, are my favorite regular subject at the Baltimore Inner Harbor. But this particular day, the early-morning lighting really brings out the shapes and the colors. I must have hundreds of photos of these boats, taken since April 2004 - but the ones I took last week are definitely the best.

The thing that really made the differnce here, as with the next photo of the "regular" paddleboats, is shooting with the rising sun to my back. I ventured out on the paddleboat rental dock to shoot these images from a perspective different from most of the other ones I've taken.

I like the anthropomorphic look of this last image. Yeah, it's a cliché, but it works in this context. What I really was going for was the colorful boats, but I thought adding a "human" subject would be a nice touch.

I have some more from last week, but I'll leave them for another day.

Urban Reflections

2006-09-06T22:25:00.000-04:00

This morning, I got a bit of photo-inspiration from contemplating one of the oldest metaphysical mysteries of all time, one that has puzzled humanity from the ancient Greeks to modern times:

If I push the Push To Cross button, will the light change any more quickly?

And as I stood by the Push to Cross station at Light Street and Market Place and meditated on that timeless enigma, I suddenly noticed, for the first time, that The Button was a nice little fisheye reflector. A little scratched, maybe, but servicable.

So here it is, for your edification. My Mission In Life now is to see if the City of Baltimore might have installed a nice, new, free-of-scratches one somewhere downtown. If I find one, you'll see it, I promise.

Meanwhile, I'll keep my eye peeled for any eye-catching mirrored surfaces downtown - maybe I can make a whole "Urban Reflections" series out of them.

Meanwhile, waiting for the Light Rail to go home this afternoon, I still had mirrors on my mind. I've shot these Light Rail "fisheye" mirrors before, but not this one at the Camden Yards station.

This southbound mirror has a nice, longish perspective view of both the tracks and the Camden Yards Warehouse (the longest building on the East Coast.) That's the Bromo Seltzer Tower way in the background, at the vanishing point of the overhead lines. Also, one of my favorite Baltimore buildings, 250 W. Pratt Street, is reflected at left.

Ernesto Blows Through Annapolis

2006-09-03T22:45:00.000-04:00

Here's what City Dock looked like Saturday morning, post-Ernesto.

Something you don't see everyday, but not even close to the flooding from Isabelle three years ago. Normally, that yellow tombstone-shaped object is at the edge of the dock. Fortunately, Alex Haley and his listeners remained high and dry.

Of course, after seeing Katrina last year, nothing else looks all that bad.

There really wasn't much damage, just a lot of cleanup around the City Dock area. Some of the dock at the far end was damaged - in some cases, there is a pronounced sag - but nothing collapsed.

Gingko Leaves

2006-09-03T22:35:00.000-04:00

OK, summer photo slump is now officiallly over for me.

As Tropical Depression Ernesto blew towards Baltimore Friday, it brought rain and wind. But being that I had planned to go out for Chinese food for lunch, I wasn't deterred. On the way back, I noticed that there were Gingko leaves all over - I love their elegant fan shape and their colors.

The place with the Gingko trees had some outdoor cafe tables that I used to "pose" the leaves for the first three photos.

The last photo is actually a Gingko leaf in the gutter with water flowing over it.

All taken with my Canon A620 "walk-around" digicam.

Hope you like them!

Summer Slump

2006-08-17T18:15:00.000-04:00

Just like last year at this time, I seem to be in a summer photo-slump. I've actually taken quite a few photos, but the good ones are few and far between.

USS Wisconsin

2006-07-06T07:13:00.000-04:00

Bike & Shadow

2006-06-05T22:34:00.000-04:00

Harborplace Field Trips

2006-05-25T21:26:00.000-04:00

I had a dental appointment this morning, so by the time I was walking through the Inner Harbor to get to work, there were several groups already hard at work touring and enjoying the waterfront.

This group of kids alongside the USS Constellation has apparently invented their own twist on the old telephone-booth-stuffing game - anchor loading. Let's see how many of us we can load up on this anchor before we start crowding each other off. I think I had almost as much fun watching them as they had doing it.

Meanwhile, a half-block further East, a group of Mennonite girls form a serene and colorful cadre as they set out to enjoy a morning field trip to Harborplace.

B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards

2006-05-25T00:03:00.000-04:00

The Baltimore & Ohio Warehouse at Camden Yards, a restored turn-of-the-century building, forms a backdrop to the 1992 Oriole Stadium.

The warehouse is adjacent to my Light Rail stop, so I notice it every day when I disembark in the morning. It's hard not to - this is the longest building on the East Coast - 1016 feet long by 51 feet wide. It's now prime real estate and houses the Baltimore Orioles organization as well as offices of dozens of other businesses.

This morning as I was walking past the warehouse, I noticed a wide-angle mirror adjacent to the building's parking lot. I couldn't resist, so here is my wide-angle take on this very long and imposing structure.

By The Dawn's Early Light

2006-05-24T23:29:00.000-04:00

The Examiner of Baltimore is a new newspaper that just hit the streets here last month. It's mode of distribution, for the time being, is by newsies doing old-fashioned hawking of the paper.. for free... in the downtown business district and the Inner Harbor area.

Examiner headquarters is in a rather undistinguished hi-rise building in the 500 block of East Pratt Street. But last week, I noticed that the southeast corner of the building makes for a nice pattern... by the dawn's early light.

Game Night

2006-05-20T01:30:00.000-04:00

Here's what I see on game nights this Spring as I walk back to the Light Rail stop to head home. The train stop is across the street, on the back side of Oriole Stadium at Camden Yards, just past where this vendor has set up.

I'm not a baseball fan, but I still find that the pre-game atmosphere cheers me up every time I walk by here.

Your Insides Are Out...

2006-05-12T03:33:00.000-04:00

No new worthwhile photos yet this week, so once again, I went fishing in the archives. I'm always surprised to still be finding a decent image here and there.

This one is from my 2003 trip to Steamboat Springs, CO to attend a workshop with Karen Gordon Schulman. My workshop ended Thursday, and Friday morning, just before leaving for Denver and our flight home, Sandy and I took a hot-air balloon ride. Here's the inside of the balloon as it's being inflated.

Take it easy...

Shapes & Shadows

2006-05-06T22:50:00.000-04:00

Bright morning sunlight shows off these elegant steel-wire chairs and their shadows dockside at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

War and Peace 2

2006-05-01T19:43:00.000-04:00

A replica of the type of cannon used on the USS Constellation guards a fleet of paddleboats at Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

More Tall Ships Arrive

2006-04-27T23:23:00.000-04:00

Yesterday two more large sailing vessels arrived yesterday in Baltimore at the Inner Harbor as part of the celebration of the Volvo Ocean Race - the schooner Virginia and the barkentine Gazela. In addition, there are smaller, but still impressive boats all over the Inner Harbor now.

The Gazela, built in the late nineteenth century in Portugal, has, according to Wikipedia "... the distinction of being the oldest, largest square-rigged wooden Class A vessel still under active sail."

The website for Sail Baltimore has information about these ships as well as more to come throughout the rest of the year.

Volvo Ocean Race Comes to Baltimore

2006-04-26T23:34:00.000-04:00

The first of several impressive sailing ships arrived in Baltimore yesterday, celebrating the Volvo Ocean Race.

This beauty is the Cisne Branco (White Swan), a ship of the Brazil Navy. At 253 feet (76 m) long and 154 feet (46.4 m) and fully rigged with 31 sails, it looks like something built in the 1800's. Actually, although it was inspired by the design of late-19th Century clipper ships, it was built just six years ago in Amsterdam.

Photo-Ops Walking To and From Work

2006-04-20T22:42:00.000-04:00

Bringing my little Canon A620 with me to work every day is getting to be a lot of fun now that I'm on an assignment in downtown Baltimore. I'm always swiveling my head, looking up and down everywhere as I go the 3/4 mile between the Light Rail station and the office.

Here's a photo of 250 W. Pratt Street, caddy-corner from where I get off of the Light Rail. This 24-floor building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is one of the few really attractive modern structures among the Baltimore skyline.
On the other hand, the building that's reflected in the water here is one that I never tire of making fun of - World Trade Center Baltimore. Unfortunately, WTCB, built in 1968, sits right on the edge of the Inner Harbor, so you can't ignore it and hope it will go away. It's a boring design that also has aged poorly, kind of a high-rise slum.

On the other hand, reflections of WTCB can be quite nice, especially if they are distorted - the distortions add interest to the otherwise yawn-provoking design.

While I was waiting for the Light Rail to take me back home this afternoon, today's Orioles game was letting out from the ballpark at Camden Yards, right next to the rail stop. It was a nice opportunity for some street photography, and my best shot of the day was of these two very loyal Orioles fans. By the way, the Birds won today 9-4 over Cleveland.

The last few shots of the day were "fisheye" images of the wide-angle mirror at the Light Rail stop. I had taken some of these last fall, but yesterday I noticed that the southbound track, the one I take going home, had a more interesting view.

In this image, you can see 250 W. Pratt Street on the left and the Bromo Tower on the right.

... and at bottom center, you can see your intrepid correspondent using a highly unorthodox camera technique.

Working Downtown Again

2006-04-19T22:08:00.000-04:00

Sandy, "the kids", and I drove up to Ottawa last Friday morning and had a wonderful weekend with Sandy's family. I was hoping to get some really good photos while there, but other than family pictures, I didn't produce anything that I'd like to post.

Ben and I took a bus downtown to walk around Parliament Hill and the Byward Market area. Ottawa's Parliament Hill must be the most spectacular location for a seat of government in the world. The complex was modeled on the British Parliament, but it sits on a high bluff overlooking the Ottawa River. So you would think that with such a grand setting, I would have brought home the bacon. My mistake was to go in mid-afternoon, and the lighting was just too contrasty to render both the brillant blue sky/white cloud background and the buildings themselves, which were in shadow. I think Ben might have gotten a few good images; as we go through them, I'll post any good ones we find.

Meanwhile, I'm on another assignment with Constellation Energy Group in dowtown Baltimore. I just started yesterday, and now that I have my Walk-Around Canon A620, I've already shot about 60 pictures on my walks to and from the Light Rail station.

The first photo above is U.S. Lightship No. 116, the Chesapeake, which marked the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay for almost 30 years, starting in 1933. It's now moored in Baltimore's Inner Harbor as part of the Maritime Museum. The building in the background is the new Australia Exhibit of the National Aquarium. I took the photo in morning light, about 8:00 AM.

This next picture is the World Trade Center Baltimore reflected in the Hyatt Hotel. I can tell you that it looks much better like this on the wall of the Hyatt than it does in real life. Taken just before sunset from the "skywalk" adjacent to the Pratt Street Pavilion at the Inner Harbor.

This final photo is hot out of the camera from this morning. The heavy rope, wound about the cast iron bollard, is one of the mooring lines for the all-sail warship, the USS Constellation, which is permanently berthed at the Inner Harbor.

The weather the last two days has been just perfect, both for photography and for walking the 3/4 mile from the Light Rail station to the office. I should be at this assignment for at least three months, and with my Canon A620 now with me all the time, I hope to produce a lot of new material these next few months.

Watch Your Lanes!

2006-04-13T23:27:00.000-04:00

Cheasapeake Bay Bridge, westbound, evening of April 1st.

Sandy drove, I snapped.

Early the next day, I snapped this shot of an empty community swimming pool in Columbia. Same camera (Canon A620) and in fact, just a few frames apart. It didn't occur to me until tonight that it was almost a replay of the previous night's photos on the bridge.

Hester Street

2006-04-12T06:18:00.000-04:00

From the archive, some photos from an August 2004 visit to New York City. Like Marco Polo, I travelled from Little Italy to Chinatown, a wonderful, colorful journey.

Update: It just occurred to me that the gentleman sitting in the red chair is a dead ringer for former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir

Beach Chair Shadows

2006-04-11T23:50:00.000-04:00

Waiting for summer ... a pair of chairs at Horn Point in Annapolis, where Spa Creek spills into the Severn River, cast long morning shadows in mid-March.

Bowling Alley Abstract

2006-04-11T08:15:00.000-04:00

I've always liked the "graphic" painted on the front of this otherwise semi-shabby bowling alley near my Mom's, and I've been wanting to try some "abstract" photos of it for a while. An overall picture of the scene is at top - not a beautiful sight as you can see.

This is the "abstract" image of the corner of the building, taken withe Canon Digital Rebel and "kit" 18-55mm zoom lens. I gave it some "under" exposure compensation so as not to burn out the white-painted bricks in the bright sunlight. The sky was already a deep blue, but the exposure shift deepened it some more.

The original exposure left some room between the top of the frame and the very top corner of the building. My West Coast friends at Friendly Photo Forum suggested I crop the photo so that the "peak" of the building touches the top of the frame - and I think that was a great suggestion. The two triangles of "negative space" that this creates at the top blance the "positive space" shapes of the main subject.

2006-03-30T06:55:00.000-05:00

We'll be heading up to Ottawa in a few weeks to visit Sandy's family. I think Ottawa is a beautiful little city... between April and October. Actually, it's very beautiful any time of the year, but since I am a total cold-weather wimp, and since Ottawa is the second-coldest capital city in the world, I try to stay away November through March.

So anyway, I'm already thinking about photo opportunities there. Our last visit was in mid-April 2003. I took two old film cameras with me and my then-almost-new Canon A40 2MP digicam. This time, I'll be going all-digital.

But the main difference, of course, is not the equipment, but the photographer. I now have three whole years additional experience - thousands of photos, and I've learned a lot from all that. If I have a chance, I'll try shooting some of the same scenes I did three years ago and see if there's a difference.

Big Fish Grill

2006-03-28T22:48:00.000-05:00

A nice bit of neon, that!

The Big Fish Grill in Crofton, Maryland is a new, well-received seafood restaurant.

Besides the excellent food his establishments serve, restauranteur Harvey Blonder is justifiably admired for the architectural flair and noteworthy decoration of his several restaurants in the Annapolis area.

I took this photo as part of an assignment for Harvey's wife - Big Fish Grill had just opened late last summer, and she wanted some large photos to give him as a Christmas present. It all worked out pretty well.

Cable Spools

2006-03-28T08:04:00.000-05:00

When I was at a photo workshop in Steamboat Springs in 2003, I threw my little 2MP Canon A40 P&S digicam into my camera bag. It turns out that I took about twice as many photos with it as compared to film SLRs I brought along for the workshop.

This is a photo I took on our last day, following a hayride and just before our barbeque dinner.

Stetsons

2006-03-25T11:57:00.000-05:00

I went spelunking into my digital archives and found a few photos from my workshop with Karen Gordon Schulman in 2003.

I had never played with this Stack O' Stetsons image before, and thought I'd give it the Scott Kelby B&W treatment that I described in my previous post. What do you think? I'd say it turned out pretty good.

The original image, straight out of my old Canon A40 2MP digicam, is below. I always thought theat there was a decent photo in there somewhere. Cropping very tight to get rid of background distractions and converting to B&W to emphasize the shapes brought it out.

News flash 3/25/2006 10 PM ... well, what do you know - I posted the B&W image on Usefilm.com today, and ended up with another "Donor Image of the Day" award.

Better B&W From Digital

2006-03-25T00:29:00.000-05:00

OK, I'll let you in on a secret - much of what I've learned about Photoshop Elements is from Scott Kelby's excellent books - I think he's written one for each version so far - the latest is The Photoshop Elements 4 Book for Digital Photographers.

One of the things I know very little about is how to get a decent B&W image from a color digital photo... but yep, Scott goes into that, too.

Here's the general outline to how he says to do it:

Open the color image in Photoshop Elements.

Make sure the foreground color is Black and the background color is White (or as Scott says, just press the "D" key - this will set your foreground and background colors exactly this way.)

Go to the Layers palette and choose Levels from the Create Adjustment Layer drop-down menu (it's the half-black, half-white circle icon.) Once the Levels dialog comes up, just click OK.

Now again, from the Layers palette, chose Gradient Map from the drop-down menu and just click OK on the Gradient Map dialog. This will give you a B&W image, and you should notice that it already looks better than just using the standard commands to create a grayscale image (Image/Mode/Grayscale, or Enhance/Adjust Color/Remove Color.)

Here's where you can tweak the B&W tones a bit. First, in the Layers palette, double-click right on the Levels thumbnail to bring up the Levels dialog. Select Red from the Channel drop-down list, and then play a bit with the black-point slider to the right to increase shadows until you see what you like.

Without clicking OK, select Green from the Channel drop-down list, and this time try dragging the white point slider to the left to increase highlights.

Again, don't click OK yet - now pick Blue from the Channel drop-down list and try playing with the highlights (quite a bit) and the shadows (just a little.)

You can go back and forth between the 3 channels, tweaking away - just stop when you're happy with the look, then finally click OK in the Levels dialog.

At this point, mush the layers you created into one layer with the Layers/Flatten menu. The file still has color information in it - if you want to save file space, you can turn it into a grayscale file with Image/Mode/Grayscale.

For this photo, once I got to this point, I applied local contrast sharpening as I usually do (see this post for how to do that) and then final sharpening. You can see the results in the second image - compare that one to the standard remove-the-color version at top. To paraphrase those laundry soap commercials - whiter whites, blacker blacks, and just nicer overall tonality.

Amazingly, I even got an excellent B&W print of this second image on my 3-1/2-year-old Canon i850 printer. I would have expected some tinting, at least in some areas of the photo, but this print looks like an old-fashioned paper-and-developer B&W print (I doubt that this will work out so well for every image - normally you need an inkjet printer that's designed to do B&W, such as some of the higher-end Epsons.)

If you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, check out Scott Kelby's books - he packs them with excellent practical how-to advice.

Double-T Diner I

2006-03-24T07:29:00.000-05:00

Looking for something completely different, I came across this photo of the Double-T Diner in Ellicott City, Maryland.

I put the roman numeral "I" in the title of this post to goad me into taking some more photos of diners. There are several in this area, including seven Double-T Diners owned and operated by the three brothers Korologos.

Donor Image of the Day

2006-03-23T22:48:00.000-05:00

I was pleasantly surprised that a photo that I just posted to Usefilm.com was selected as "Donor Image of the Day." I took this one last weekend from the Eastport side of the Spa Creek Drawbridge in Annapolis, using my carry-everywhere Canon A620.

Besides acting as an online portfolio, Usefilm.com also allows for member-to-member feedback on photos. In this case, I got some very good advice from Hugo de Wolf, a talented photographer from Haarlem in The Netherlands.

Hugo suggested that the lamp on the left side of the photo was detracting from the main subject. He also made some good suggestions for slight recropping of the image.

I took his advice, and the result is the second photo here, which I think benefits greatly from Hugo's kind comments.

Dank u heel veel, Hugo!

Please Allow Me to Repeat Myself...

2006-03-20T20:28:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned before, I really like repeating patterns. Here are two that I found on a walk around Annapolis' Spa Creek this weekend.

By the way, these were both taken with my Canon A620, and I've printed excellent full-frame images (about 12-1/2" x 17") from them.

Yet Another Kid on Fountain Photo ...

2006-03-16T07:31:00.000-05:00

OK, so he's a big kid. After posting that older photo yesterday, I realized I had photos of Ben in the same exact location - Bethesda Fountain in Central Park - the epicenter of New York City as far as Ben and I are concerned. Every visit we make to the city requires the obligatory pilgrimage to Bethesda Terrace. We may arrive at it from one of several directions, but we always end up here.

This photo is from our recent Drexel/NYC trip last month. Ben had climbed onto the fountain and asked me to take some "emo" photos of him - so he put on a serious face for the first few frames. Then I made some wise-guy remark that prompted this expression. Sorry, Ben - I like this better.

Bethesda Fountain Towhead

2006-03-15T22:22:00.000-05:00

Another photo from the Archives. This one was also taken in my pre-digital days, Summer 2002 to be exact, on a day trip to New York City.

The camera was a Soviet-made Zorki 3M, built circa 1956, with a Jupiter-8 50 mm f/2.0 lens. Metering was with a hand-held Lenigrad-2 meter (I love those old Commie brand names!) Media was Fuji 100 color print film with rotgut drugstore processing; the file was created from a 4x6 print scanned on a flatbed scanner.

I stumbled across this old file today, and although I liked the image, it didn't have much snap - not something that I would want to post. Then I realized I had not given it my 80-20 Photoshop Treatment - so I did that and it responded quite nicely.

Lawn Chair Flyer

2006-03-14T00:40:00.000-05:00

Nothing much new to post in the last few days, so I'm falling back on that old standby, dusty old photos.

This one is from the Annual Hot-Air Balloon Rodeo in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in July 2003. There were lots of spectacular balloons that day, but this fellow was my favorite balloonist.

Taken with an All-Commie East German rig: a Praktica MTL 5 mounting a CZJ Sonnar 135mm f/3.5 (the slide film was Kodak, at least.)

Juxtaposition

2006-03-11T13:00:00.000-05:00

Colliding Circles

2006-03-01T13:37:00.000-05:00

Unfinished words
flying like birds
Colliding circles in the sky

from Unfinished Words
The Rutles

Being a big Rutles fan, when I saw the sunlit ends of this stack of storm drainage pipe, it immediately made me think "Colliding Circles."

The phrase presents a compelling image in the Rutles song, Unfinished Words, which was released on the Archeology album in 1996.

What? You don't know about The Rutles? I'm shocked... yes shocked and stunned ... very stunned.

I didn't stumble across this until recently, but there's a great story behind "Colliding Circles", and if you're a Beatles fan, you've got to read it. Here's a link that explains it all, including the Rutles connection.

Oh yeah, the photo? I took it this morning on the way to work as I was passing by a stormwater drainage construction site. My Canon A620 was on the seat next to me (natch!) and I got to fire off a few shots before the sun went behind the clouds and the luminous rust was no more.

Photoshop 80-20 Rule

2006-02-28T22:15:00.000-05:00

Believe me, I'm no expert in Photoshop, but I've found that like many things in life, there is an 80-20 Rule that seems to apply. That is, you can get 80 percent of the benefit out of Photoshop by using 20 percent (or less) of its considerable array of tools.

Here is an example of that - Except for cropping, it's the first series of steps that I use on a .jpg file out of my camera. It only uses two tools, Levels and Unsharp Mask, and takes about two minutes if you do it slowly. But it really has improved the look of my images.

Now I happen to use Photoshop 4.0, a "ligher" version of Photoshop, but the same steps apply to honest-to-gosh Photoshop.

	Here is an image that, except for cropping, came right out of my Canon A620. I took it through the window of a tailor shop on Tenth Avenue in NYC on a cloudy day. The color balance is off - too blueish- and the image just has no snap - it's as dull as the weather outside.
	The first thing I did was to bring up the Levels dialog (CTL-L). What I want to do now is key Photoshop into the blackest black in the image. To do that, I selected the Black Point eyedropper (the one on the left) and clicked it on that black patch (I think it's a hole) on the sewing machine.
Next, with the Levels dialog still open, I picked the White Point eyedropper (the one on the right) and clicked it to what I wanted to be the whitest white in the photo - in this case, the top of a white spool of thread.
	Before I closed the Levels dialog, I picked the Gray Point eyedropper (the one in the middle) and clicked it on something that should be medium-gray, in this case, the tailor's sweater.
	I've repeated the original photo again here, so that you can easily compare it to the color-corrected image below.
	Here is the color-corrected image that results after setting the black, white, and gray points and clicking OK in the Levels dialog. Compare this image to the original. Note the skin tones seem about right, and the overall bluish cast is gone. Also, the overall contrast is much better - it's as if you stripped a layer of dirty transparent film off of the photo.
	At this point, I usually do something that I recently found on the excellent website Luminous Landscape - it's called Local Contrast Enhancement and it's dead simple, but I find it makes a big difference. Using the main menu, select on Filter/Sharpen/Unsharp Mask, which brings up the Unsharp Mask dialog. Select an Amount value of 20, a Radius value of 50, and a Threshold value of 0 (zero.) Before you close the dialog, click the Preview checkbox on and off a few times to see the effect. This technique adds a lot of snap to an image with almost none of the adverse affects of sharpening.

You can see the difference between the last two photos above. In the final photo, I applied Local Contrast Enhancement.

If you'd like to learn more about why this works, there is a good article here on the Luminous Landscape website.

Depending on what I'm going to do with the image (i.e., display it on the web or print it,) I usually do some "normal" sharpening as a final step, again using the Unsharp Mask.

I hope you find these few simple steps useful. I'll try to add some more Photoshop tips over the next few weeks. But if what I've shown you today isn't a great example of the 80-20 rule, I don't know what is.

1955 Desoto

2006-02-27T22:29:00.000-05:00

Impulse Photography with the Canon A620

2006-02-25T13:46:00.000-05:00

One of the great things about having a good-quality little camera is that you can do impulse photography. Sure, you've heard of impulse buying - well this is the same thing, but with taking photos. You can't impulse buy unless you have money, or more likely a credit card, on you. Likewise, you can't impulse-photograph unless you've got a camera on you.

And this has been the absolute best thing about the Canon A620, as far as I'm concerned. It's small enough that I take it with me pretty much everywhere, and when the mood strikes, I'm ready to shoot.

I was in Annapolis this morning - not scenic Annapolis, but a few blocks away in the nothing-doing-nothing-interesting part. After my business there was over, though, I remembered seeing a nice photo the other day taken at Acton Cove, which was only a few minutes drive away. Acton Cove is on picturesque Spa Creek, and I had my Canon A620 in my jacket pocket, so there you go.

No big deal - just a few photos on an impulse. Little time expended and little risk involved. If I end up with nothing good, who will know?

The little punt that was tied up at the small public dock at Acton Cove had a nice shape, and with a little Photoshop to compensate for the flat lighting, I ended up with a pretty nice impulse photo.

Before I headed home, I needed a sheet of black mat board, so I headed over to Art Things, which was right on the way. They always have some sort of nice display on their porch, and this time, what caught my eye was a container full of different-colored, retractable Sharpies.

Out came the Canon A620, and I took a quick photo. Whoops, I got that little shakey-camera icon on the LCD, and sure enough, the shot looked a little blurry. A few button presses, and I switched from ISO 50 to ISO 200. Picture taken, problem solved.

Impulse satisfied.

Drexel Road Trip

2006-02-21T07:07:00.000-05:00

Last Friday was our Road Trip to Drexel. Ben is in his second year at community college, taking courses with an emphasis on computer programming and information systems. In looking for a place to complete his undergraduate degree, he became very interested in Drexel University in Philadelphia.

So Ben arranged for us to visit Drexel last Friday, and we were off before the sun came up. We took the obligatory Start of Road Trip pictures in our driveway at 6:30 AM Friday morning. As you can see from the first photo, Ben was totally fresh and alert as we prepared to roll out.

We had an appointment at 9:30 at the office of Drexel's College of Information Science and Technology, where we met Erin Stauffer, who is the Advising Manager at IST. Erin was just the right person to help Ben sort out which courses he can transfer credit as well as which courses would be good ones to take over the next few months at community collge (e.g. sociology, economics, etc - the non-core courses that would be less expensive to take and get out of the way locally. It looks like if Ben takes some summer courses and a normal load this fall, he can enter Drexel in January '07 as pretty close to a Junior. Ben's leaning towards the 5-year program, which would give him the opportunity to have two or possibly three 6-month co-op periods.

After lunch, we had a nice tour of campus. Drexel is part of what's called University City, which includes University of Pennsylvania and Temple. It's a large neighborhood with a funky college-town feel, but right across the Schuylkill River from downtown Philadelphia - within walking distance, actually, of the center of the city.

Besides the academic program, one of the things that attracted Ben to Drexel is that it's in a real city - big buildings, good public transit, the works.

Well, his application is in process, and it's now time for me to find out about financial aid... and maybe see about a second job as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Or maybe I can work alongside Ben at Starbucks.

After our visit to Drexel, we headed north at about 4:30 PM ... destination: Secaucus.

The idea was to spend Saturday in New York City, and not wanting to spend New York City hotel prices, we had found, on Hotels.com, a ninety-nine dollar (taxes included!) room at Meadowlands Plaza Hotel in Secaucus. The room turned out to be just fine - a decent-sized, comfortable, no-smoking room with two queen beds with a great view of NJ Route 3 and a free breakfast - what's not to like?

After getting to our room, we dumped our belongings and headed east on Route 3 for some dinner. In the cold, clear night air, we were treated to a spectacular view of the nightime Manhattan skyline just a few miles away. The Empire State Building was in red, white, and blue livery for Presidents' Day weekend, and the crown of the Chrysler Building blazed just over its shoulder. So joke all you want about Secaucus, but the view is amazing.

Saturday morning after breakfast, we drove the three miles to Hoboken, where we left the car for the day. Before catching the PATH train into the city, I took Ben into the Erie-Lackawanna Terminal, where we reprised my classic 1973 photo, Man on Bench. It really helps to schlep around your own photo subject.
By the way, on the outside, the Terminal looks as decrepit as I remember it in my Stevens Tech days over thirty years ago. But walk through the doorways and you'll be surprised at finding one of those glorious turn-of-the-century public spaces - nicely maintained, too.

After our quick photo session at the Terminal, we walked next door to take the PATH into New York City. Now, Ben is a huge fan of the musical Rent, having seen it five times live and twice in the movies. He's always wanted to go to Life Café, a real-life restaurant that's prominently featured in the story. So we disembarked the PATH at 9th Street in The Village and went in search of Life Café.

He had an address of 10th Street and Avenue B, for which I chided him that there was no Avenue B in Manhattan - he must be thinking about Brooklyn. But after much walking towards the East River, we did indeed come to Avenue A, then Avenue B and Life Café. Score one for the kid against the Old Guy Who Thinks He Knows All About Manhattan. So we had lunch at Life Café, commemorated with a photo of Ben on location.

After lunch, it was time to head up to Central Park. A few weeks ago, I saw some amazing photographs of a new building, the Hearst Magazine Tower, that was nearing completion, and I wanted to take a look. So we schlepped many long avenue blocks back to Union Square and took the Q train to 7th and 57th Street.

Coming out of the hole in the ground, we walked over to 8th Avenue, and... wow! This is a really impressive 600-foot building, not your typical glass-and-steel box. Well, glass-and-steel it is, but decidely different than anything else on the island.

The 42-floor building is built on top of the original 1928 6-floor Hearst Building, a masonry art-deco design from 1928, which now acts as an architectural base for the modern tower

Rubbernecking at the Hearst for the next block or so, I suddenly heard Ben exclaim, "what is THAT!?"

It took me a second or so to see what he was seeing, as a huge, silvery tower emerged in my vision, sort of like a Klingon vessel coming uncloaked. The mirrored surface of the tower was doing such a good job of reflecting the adjacent blue sky and clouds that it almost blended in invisibly at first.

As we walked up to Columbus Circle, it tuned out that there was not one but TWO of these towers! This all turned out to be the Time-Warner Center, a spectacular commercial and residential development built in place of the boring old New York Coliseum.

The towers stretch for 55 stories, topping out at 750 feet (229 meters.) They include a mix of residential apartments and rooms of the Mandarin Hotel, part of a luxury hotel chain. All apartments feature floor-to-ceiling windows (no thank you! I'm getting airsick just picturing it.)

So Mr. Knows Everything About Manhattan had been completely oblivious to all this spiffy new architecture happening on the West Side. Well, you learn something new every day. I took a few photos of Time-Warner, but this neighborhood, with all its new buildings, is a place I'll have to come back to again (preferably when it's considerably warmer than Saturday's 33 degrees) and take a lot more pictures.

Ben and I crossed Columbus Circle and walked up Central Park West to the Dakota and took the Women's Gate entrance to the Park, walking by Strawberry Fields and over to Bethesda Terrace, our favorite part of the park.

As we were getting really cold, we figured we had truly proven our love of New York and decided to finish our visit with a clockwise walk around the south end of the boat lake.

We walked around the Loeb Boathouse (one of these days, after all these years, I'll go inside) and traversed the wonderful, huge rock that sits astride the lake on the west side of the boathouse. Then back onto a trail that leads along the shore of the lake, heading towards Bow Bridge.

As we stopped for a minute at a rustic little pavilllion, I glanced up at Bow Bridge and saw something that looked... unusual. Three people walked to the middle of the bridge, placed themselves in a line along one side, and lifted violins to their shoulders. "Hey, something's about to happen!" I called to Ben.

And something indeed did happen - one of those amazing New York moments. A young man and woman walked, arm-in-arm, onto the bridge, and the musicians started playing the theme from Love Story. We ran to the west end of the bridge and watched the man go down on one knee and propose. Wow. I got a little fahrklempt, I can tell you. I think I left a tear or two on the eyepiece of my camera as I took this photo. It was beautiful - a great ending to our visit to New York.

Family Photos

2006-02-16T22:20:00.000-05:00

I don't take nearly enough family photos. Is that a typical shortcoming of an artsy-fartsy photographer?

Speaking of family, though, I was at my brother's a few weeks ago, and my sister-in-law Janice asked to take some photos of their two cats, Target and Mittens.

This is hard stuff. Years ago, between college semesters, I was the local "photographer to the dogs," but dogs are very easy compared to cats. Now I have a real appreciation for good cat photos.

Tomorrow, Ben and I are driving to Drexel University in Philadelphia. Ben has appointments with admissions and the computers science department. Now in his second year at community college (a true educational bargain!) he's very interested in continuing at Drexel next year.

After our visit to Drexel, we'll have dinner and then head up the Jersey Turnpike to stay at a motel overnight, then off we go Saturday morning to park in Hoboken and spend the day in New York CIty. Photo opportunities!

Overlooked Iconography

2006-02-10T07:04:00.000-05:00

Not much time over the past week for making new photos or writing anything too profound, so I'm falling back on the old tried-and-true routine of spelunking among old CD-R's for photos I might have overlooked.

And what do you know - I found one from Baltimore Commie Camera Day 2004, which took place at the Inner Harbor in April of that year. The overlooked image was actually the very first one I took that morning, kind of a warm-up shot in anticipation of the serious photo action upon meeting up with my SovCam Comrades.

But as I looked over the old images, I realized that what I had was a decent photo of the Pride of Baltimore II, a replica of an 1800's Baltimore Clipper built to commemorate Maryland's historic role in shipbuilding. Pride II sails frequently to the four corners of the earth and serves as a goodwill ambassador for Maryland and the Port of Baltimore.

So what found is an iconic image that says, "Baltimore," and one that might just sell.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that in the background is the frigateUSS Constellation, a Baltimore landmark.

My Camera History, Part VI

2006-02-08T06:41:00.000-05:00

In 1979, I mentioned to my friend Mike Tzougrakis that I wanted to get a small camera for Sandy, then my fiancée. After all, it just wouldn't do for her to keep using a Kodak 110 camera.

Mike said, "I have just what you need," and showed me a little Miranda rangefinder, which I ended up buying from him. I gave it to Sandy, and a short while after we were married, after I had sold all my other camera equipment, it became the only camera in our family for a while. By then I had gotten rid of the Minolta SLRs, finally, all my Leica equipment.

The Miranda Sensoret was acutally a nice little camera and served us well. Pretty spiffy, too - unlike the photo above, ours was a "professional black" model. For Sandy, it was great, since it had a programmed shutter, so other than focusing, there was nothing else to do. And focusing was easy with a good, clear coincident-image rangerfinder.

The little 38mm f/2.8 was sharp enough, and overall, the camera was a good performer. For it's time, it was more or less in the same league as the Konica C35 and Minolta Hi-Matic F - all good cameras. Interestingly, the Sensoret was the only rangefinder ever made by Miranda, a Japanese camera company that otherwise was born and died (1953-1978) making only SLRs

Most important to me, this is the camera that took most of the pictures of our first year with our first child, Leah, born in 1982.

The Jew In The Lotus

2006-02-03T23:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday as I arrived at the parking lot at work, I noticed an unusual little red car parked away from everyone else. Not knowing much about fancy cars (I drive a Hyundai, after all,) I had to get right up and read the emblem to learn that it was a Lotus.

Well, a nice red car with interesting lines on a sunny day - why not take a few photos? I pulled my Canon A620 out of my satchel and started to snap. Now I know a good swoosh when I see one, and I liked the black swoosh design on the door, so that's what I concentrated on.

Today, as I looked at the photos on my computer, I realized that the last one, the real close-up, had my reflection in it. The caption for that photo popped right into my head.

The Jew In the Lotus

Clever as that may seem, the credit goes to writer Roger Kamenetz, author of The Jew In the Lotus, a fascinating book I read over 10 years ago. Kamenetz had been invited to attend and chronicle an historical meeting in Dharamsala between a delegation of American Jews and a group of Tibetan Bhuddists, including the Dalai Lama.

The title is a play on words, a reverent pun of a mantra used in the Lama's tradition - om mani padme hum, "the Jewel in the Lotus."

I remember the scene in the film where Kamenetz revisits Dharamsala after the book was published. He presented a copy to the Dalai Lama, who read the title aloud and for a second looked slightly puzzled.

Then his face suddenly brightened, and breaking out laughing, he said, "The Jew in the Lotus! That's very good!"

My Camera History, Part V

2006-02-02T08:14:00.000-05:00

This post will probably be the shortest one in this series, because for me, the cameras were forgettable.

After my OM-1 outfit was stolen, I got a very nice settlement from the insurance company, enough to replace everything fully. So I set out to buy pretty much the same thing: two camera bodies, a 24mm wide angle, a zoom in the 75-100mm range, and maybe a power winder.

At that time, the Minolta XD-11 had just come out, creating quite a stir in the amateur photography world. It was a compact camera, about the size of the OM-1, but with exposure automation - both shutter priority and aperture priority, selectable. Of course, you could also turn off automation and use it as a match-needle (match-diode, actually, the age of electronic Wunderplastik cameras had just begun.)

So I went that route, buying an XD-11, along with an XG-7 as a second body. The XG-7 was similar, but with only aperture-priority automation plus manual operation. I also got a 24mm Rokkor lens and a zoom.

But I just didn't care for these cameras - I don't know exactly why. I think they just didn't feel as good as the OM-1's did to me. I know that technically speaking, there was nothing wrong with either camera or the lenses. Just didn't like them. I probably should have stuck with OM-1's, or maybe even an OM-1 plus an OM-2 body (the OM-2 had the option of aperture-priority automation, but in essentially the same mechanical body as the OM-1.)

After a little more than a year, I sold all the Minolta equipment for $600, a considerable loss, and I have no photos that have survived from these cameras. Most of the pictures I took during that year were with my Leicas and the Minolta CL.

My Camera History, Part IV

2006-02-01T21:43:00.000-05:00

Just shoot me. Kill me now...

... because I once had a Leica M3, a beautiful, clean one at that, and then sold it two years later.

I bought the M3 DS (double-stroke) in 1978 or 1979, I can't remember exactly when - I guess it's just too painful - at my favorite little camera shop, Olden Camera, just off Herald Square. I think it was something like $350 or $380, and that included a screw-mount-to-M-mount adaptor for my 50mm collapsible Summicron. I don't think I could touch that same camera today for under a thousand dollars. Maybe I shoulda invested in Leicas instead of the stock market.

The funny thing is, as beautiful and precise and fondle-able that camera was, I just don't remember taking a whole lot of pictures with it. I don't think I have a single photo that I can put my hands on right now that I could definitely say was taken with the M3. Don't ask.

But it gets worse. I also bought a Minolta CL in 1979. The Leica CL and Minolta CL were compact M-mount rangerfinders made by Minolta and jointly designed by Leitz and Minolta. Sort of like a Buick and an Oldsmobile. Anyway, the CL was a truly amazing design - it was even smaller than my Leica IIIc, and yet totally modern and innovative, sporting a throught-the-lens spotmeter - I think that was a first for an interchangeable-lens rangefinder.

The CL came with a very sharp 40mm f/2 Rokkor (the Leitz version were called Summicron), and it was capable of mounting other Leica lenses, either M-mount or using an adaptor, old screw-mount lenses.

I did use the CL more than the M3, but still not an awful lot compared to my earlier cameras and the Leica IIIc that I still had. At least, compared to the M3, I have one or two yellow slide boxes that are marked "CL" to show for it.

My Leica era came to an end by 1981, by which time I had sold all three cameras.

I know, I know.

My Camera History, Part III

2006-02-01T08:12:00.000-05:00

As I began to use my Leica IIIc alongside my Nikon F during the middle '70's, I started to wonder about a more compact SLR. Here again, my friend Rich Schnabolk, the former Kowa owner, influenced me. Rich had started using an Olympus OM-1, and I was very impressed with how compact it was.

In 1977, I sold my Nikon F and used the proceeds to by my first OM-1 body and 50mm f/1.8 Zuiko lens.

Though smaller than any other SLR at the time, the OM-1 was full-featured and even a "system" camera - with a full range of lenses and accessories available. The little camera had a very solid feel, and surprisingly, a brighter and larger-appearing viewfinder than contemporary cameras.

I was very taken with the OM-1, and in short order, bought a second body (black "professional" model, no less!) and a 24mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens.

In October 1977, on a business trip to Brunei for GE, our team stopped on the way over in Hong Kong. One of my collegues, a fellow photographer, joined me in an expedition to the photos shops of Kowloon on a mission to by some equipment. I left Hong Kong with a nifty Zuiko 75-150mm zoom and a power winder. So by this point, I had a nice little outfit of OM-1 equipment to work with - the first time I had anything more than a camera and its normal lens.

Momma Don't Take My Kodachrome Away...

With the Leica, I shot mostly black-and-white film. But with the OM-1's, I went after slides in a big way. Now that I had a range of lenses and two cameras, I felt, I could crop my shots in-camera.

In my job at GE in those years, I travelled extensively overseas, and the little OM-1 outfit proved to be a good fit for travelling and travel photography. The kit came with me on trips to Frankfurt, Zurich, Milan, Paris, Jeddah, and of course, Rome.

Because I was in Rome on several occasions for several days each, I eventually accumulated an especially big stack of yellow boxes of Ektachromes and Kodachromes of the Eternal City, shot with the OM-1's. My friend and GE collegue Mike Tzougrakis pointed out on more than one occassion as he stood near me hearing the weeeee-chunk! weeeee-chunk! of my power winder that that sound was music to Kodak's ears.

Alas, my OM-1 period was too short... and not because I necessarily wanted it that way. In December 1978, I came home to my apartment from work one evening, and after about a half-hour, noticed that the venetian blinds on one of the two windows was rattling in the breeze.

Breeze? In December? Before I even looked at the window, I shot a glance to the corner of the room where I always left my camera bag... and it was gone!

And sure enough, the window leading to the fire escape was open - I wuz robbed! A few minutes later I heard a shout from the apartment upstairs and a commotion in the hall. Whoever had hit my place also hit most everyone on the five floors on that side of the building.

Besides my entire OM-1 ensemble (it was all in that one bag,) the thief also made off with an old Crown Graphic 4x5 press camera and, sad to say, that Dad's Kodak Retina, the camera with which I had learned photography.

But all was not lost. Still sitting in a drawer was my Leica IIIc with its Summicron lens, along with a Weston Master V light meter.

In fact, almost nothing was truly lost - the cameras were all on a rider to my renter's insurance policy. I wasn't very careful with just about anything in those days except my cameras.

More Canon A620 Results

2006-01-31T07:46:00.000-05:00

My experience with the new Canon A620 continues to be very satisfying.

One of the things mentioned in a number of the A620 reviews was a tendancy towards excess contrast and burnt-out highlights. I haven't really found that to be a problem so far.

Speaking of highlights, although the A620 does have an option of displaying a histogram right after an exposure, one thing I do miss is that it doesn't blink the areas in the photo where highlights are clipped. This is something that has become standard on DSLRs and higher-end digicams, such as the Canon G-series.

Something else I haven't mentioned is speed. Speed of operation, that is. The A620 has the newer Canon DIGIC-II image processing chip, which is supposed to be much faster than the original DIGIC. As promised, my experience has been that wake-up time and shot-to-shot time is indeed very fast - actually better than my Digital Rebel (which still used the old DIGIC chip.) Part of the performance I've seen may be due to the RiTek 66x 1GB SD Card that I bought with the camera. With the Digital Rebel, I've been using standard old rotgut CF cards from PNY and SanDisk. One of my next purchases will be a faster card for the Rebel.

My Camera History, Part Deux

2006-01-31T06:44:00.000-05:00

After college, I came back to Batimore, where I got my first engineering job, and where I lived for four years, until 1975.

On a day trip to NYC in late summer of 1973, I bought a Leica IIIc at Olden's, along with a Canon Seranar 50mm f/1.8 lens. With 2 or 3 rolls of Plus-X in my pocket, I was suddenly a Leica photographer, in the company of Cartier-Bresson and Eisenstadt. I had parked the car in Hoboken, and after returning there, I sneaked a shot of this gentleman reading his Daily News in the Erie-Lackawanna terminal.

That Leica, when I bought it, was already 33 years old, but it was a thing of beauty. Compared to my Nikon, especially with its heavy and clunky Photomic T finder, it was a featherweight, and a pleasure to carry around. For some reason, compared to an SLR, the rangefinder mechanism and all the fine knurling on the various knobs gave it a feeling of watch-like precision. It may be a guy thing, but I found myself often picking it up at odd times and playing with it - not shooting pictures, just looking through the viewfinder and rangefinder (two separate windows in the old screw-mount Leicas!) and focusing it, and dry-firing it.

The Serenar was a really excellent lens, but I had really wanted a Leica lens so as to be more "authentic." A year after buying the camera, I purchased a near-mint collapsible Summicron 50mm f/2.0. I wasn't disappointed, as this turned out the be the best lens I've ever owned prior to the digital age. Besides its amazing optical performance, it was also a better physical match for the small camera than the heavy Serenar. With the Summicron collapsed, I could slip the whole package into a coat pocket.

Here's another "Man on Bench" shot, taken in New York's Central Park, September 1974, with the Summicron. I was living in pre-Urban Redevelopment downtown Baltimore at the time, which seemed pretty boring to me, so I tried to get up to New York City a few times a year for picture opportunities.

And here's one to show that I'm not afraid to get right up close to a subject and look him in the face! Check out the classic mid-'70's painted t-shirt and slightly pre-disco hairdo. This shot taken on Madison Ave in NYC, August 1974.

Like these photos here, most of what I took with the Leica was black & white. After Roger's thorough training and several years of experience developing and printing B&W during college, I wouldn't let anyone else develop or print my negatives. During those first post-college years, my darkroom was a tiny hallway between the bathroom, bedroom, and living room in my one-bedroom apartment. There was a door to each room, so I just closed the ones to the bedroom and living room, set up a table in the hallway for my enlarger and trays, stuffed towels under the closed doors to block out stray light, and I was in business.

Just one more Leica photo for now, this one from the time after I had moved to Manhattan to work for GE....

Rue Foyatier, this oft-photographed stairs, climbs up the Butte Montmartre in Paris, ending near Sacre Couer basillica, the highest point in the city. It was a soggy, overcast day, and I wanted a somber, lonely look. I waited with my Leica IIIc and this solitary lady obliged me by starting the long climb upward. December 23, 1977.

And here's a shocker... the other day, I used Google Image Search to Google "Rue Foyatier", and of all the photos in cyberspace, this one is the first one!

My Camera History

2006-01-30T14:36:00.000-05:00

I was reading Dave Beckerman's blog (aka, The Mother of All Photo Blogs) the other day when I noticed the Photography Articles menu item. One of Dave's articles was called "Camera Addiction", sort of his camera history, and it struck a familiar chord with me.

So I thought, why not give my own history of camera addiction?

At age 17, it was a swinger that got me started.

Well, to be precise, it was a Swinger - a gray plastic Polaroid Swinger.

The camera was a very thoughtful high school graduation gift from my father's Cousin Ellen and her husband, the late Harold Siegel. I even remember the date - June 12, 1967 - the sixth day of the Six Day War - my parents had invited some family and friends to dinner in honor of my graduation.

Our genuine fear of a week earlier that something terrible was about to happen to Israel had been replaced by the elation of a complete victory for the Jewish State, and that added to the happiness of the evening.

I hadn't expected this wonderful gift, but I was genuinely delighted with the Swinger. The next day, I loaded up with the roll of film the Siegels had included and became a photographer.

The Swinger took a smaller version of what was then the regular roll film pack for Polaroid cameras. When you looked through the finder, part of what you would see was an indicator that said either "No" or "Yes." If you turned the red collar around the tall white shutter button, assuming that there was enough light for a successful photo, the "No" would eventually morph into "Yes," which meant that you had adjusted the exposure properly.

I realize now that it was what's called an extinction photometer - but a pretty effective exposure assistant nonetheless.

Swinger came with a manual, but you really didn't need it - Polaroid had a jingle-equipped commercial that told you all you need to know about how to use the camera - and the aggressive advertising campaign caused that commercial to also permanently embedded the price in my brain... "it's only nineteen dollars and ninety-five!" Hey, $19.95 was nothing to sneeze at to a 17-year-old in 1967.

The great thing about that little Swinger is that it whet my appetite for being able to do more with photography. I asked my friend Roger, who I knew was an avid amateur photographer - he had a Pentax H1a single-lens reflex, which at the time, seemed to me a magical mystery marvel of technology.

Roger showed me all about shutter speeds, f-stops, and focusing, at which point I dug out of a dusty bureau drawer my Dad's "real" camera, a Kodak Retina 1 (Type 010). Sure enough, there were the shutter speeds, there was the f-stop control, and here was a scale, in meters, for focusing. And by scale, I mean just that - this model of the Retina was a "scale-focuser", which means no rangefinder or other focusing aid - you have to use your calibrated eyeballs. But it had a pretty decent Schneider-Kreuznach 50mm f/3.5 lens, and not having a rangefinder also forced me to learn about hypefocal distance and use of the camera's depth-of-field scale. With Roger's tutelage, I soon was taking "real" photos with this "real" camera. Roger even gave me an old GE DW-48 light meter, and so I was in business.

Roger and his dad had built a nice darkroom in their basement, and during that summer, they often invited me over to use it. The first time I saw one of my photos starting to "come up" in the developer tray under the safelight, I was hooked.

That fall, I started college at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. I joined the camera club, hung out with other photo enthusiasts, and made good use of the well-equipped darkroom that was available to us. Being a 35-cent, 15-minute ride from Manhattan didn't hurt either, as I was presented with plenty of subject matter.

During the school year, I became good friends with my classmate Rich Schnabolk, who was a more advanced photographer than me. Rich actually had an SLR, albeit a Kowa SE, which I used to rib him about. Nevertheless, I wasn't too proud to use the Kowa and Rich was a good enough sport to lend it to me from time to time. And from humble beginnings... that Kowa made me lust after a "real" camera, that is, an SLR.

During the summer of 1968, I worked at a photo store nearby. The owner had just bought a new Nikon F Photomic Tn, and offered me his 3-year-old Nikon F Photomic T at a very cheap price. And suddenly, I was a big-time Nikon photographer!

Back at college, I was a yearbook photographer, then photography editor in my junior year. We had bought a Yashica Mat 124 TLR that year, and digging around I found an old Crown Graphic 4x5 press camera that hadn't been used in years. I took both of them home with me during the summer, and I made good use of the TLR as a dog photographer (or, as Mom used to call me, Photographer to the Dogs.

Post-college cameras coming soon....

BIG Prints from Canon A620?...

2006-01-24T07:07:00.000-05:00

Sure!

Here are two prints I made this weekend. The slight cropping I did on the vertical photo resulted in a 12-1/2" x 17" print, while the horizontal shot stretched to 12-1/2" x 18-1/2", which is a big as I make 'em on my 13x19 Canon i9900 printer.

The prints are excellent - good enough quality that I would offer them for sale. They're certainly better than anything that I was able to get printed in my youth from Kodachrome or Ektachrome slides.

I also made a 12-1/2" x 17" print of Red Boat in Fog, which I matted and framed - and I've already had some people express interest in buying it.

Would I say the large prints are as good as those from a DSLR, like my Digital Rebel? Well, not entirely. If you put your nose up to the print and look closely at evenly-toned areas, like clear sky, you'll see more noise in the A620 prints. But at normal viewing distances, it isn't a problem for many photos.

For prints like the two shown here, there is a very small ratio of evenly-toned areas to highly-detailed areas, and the highly-detailed areas make up the main subject, so your eye doesn't tend to go to any areas that might be noisy. In a photo like Margueritaville, however, a large part of the picture is of the sort that shows noise - and it is more obvious in that photo - you can see it in the water. Whether it's too much noise will depend on the viewer and other subjective matters - for example, the boat's owner probably wouldn't mind very much.

My overall verdict is that the Canon A620 is certainly capable of making images that can be sucessfully printed at 13x19. The key is sticking to ISO 50 - maybe ISO 100 - and watching out for large, evenly-toned areas that might show a lot of noise. The bottom line is that I'm very happy with the A620 - it fits the bill for what I was looking for... a take-along-anywhere-and-everywhere camera that can also provide big prints.

A Grateful Immigrant

2006-01-20T06:42:00.000-05:00

Fifty-five years ago today, my family came to America, bringing me, just shy of my first birthday, with them.

I won't go through the story again, but if you like, you can see it here.

I just wanted to say that I am grateful to the United States of America and to its generous citizens for bringing us here.

I am grateful for the crew of the troopship that carried us here, the USNS General C. H. Muir, and I am grateful to the staff at Ellis Island in late January 1951, who housed and fed Mom and me (I caught measles on the boat and had to be quarantined for 10 days) and took care of my medical needs.

Greetings to all my brother and sister immigrants! We've adopted and have been adopted into a pretty amazing and wonderful family.

Hangin' In There (cont'd)...

2006-01-17T07:17:00.000-05:00

Thanks to a suggestion by the talented Warren T and others, here is a composite of the 10 photos that I sold to the mortgage company.

Sorry for the small sizes - you can see most of them more clearly in either my "Annapolis" portfolio or my "Baltimore" portfolio on Usefilm.com.

Hangin' In There...

2006-01-16T07:34:00.000-05:00

Here are, in situ, some of the ten photos that a local mortgage company bought from me to decorate their new office. They are all 13x19 prints made on my Canon i9900 printer from images out of my Canon Digital Rebel.

That $25 course I took last winter at a local craft shop on how to cut my own mats came in handy on this job (they wanted framed and matted photos.)

I have to say, with all due modesty, that the prints do look pretty good. One thing that still amazes and delights me is that, at least as far as color prints go, I can get far better results from a digital image out of my DSLR than I ever was able to get with prints from 35mm transparencies.

Editor's Note: Based on a comment by one of our more astute readers, it's clear that the writer of this post did not clearly explain what's going on here. It should be noted that what was sold was 10 large, framed photographs. The photo that accompanies this post shows a few of those photographs after they were hung in the mortgage company office.

We have threatened to reduce his salary if he continues to write in this foggy manner.

Canon A620 - My First 150 Shots

2006-01-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

Spending the last two weeks with a digicam after over two years of using a DSLR has been both jarring and rewarding.

I'd forgotten how much I've been taking for granted with my DSLR. ISO 400 is probably the most significant. For two years, I've been running around taking photos with the resolution of Kodachrome 25 and the effective film speed of Tri-X. What a deal! The relatively large (22.7 mm x 15.1 mm) sensor of the Digital Rebel has, relatively speaking, large pixel sites. Large pixels translates to less noise. On the other hand, the Canon A620 has about 17% more pixels than the Digital Rebel crammed into a little 7.2 mm x 5.3 mm chip - that's one-ninth the area of the DSLR sensor. So while you can crank the A620 up to ISO 400, you don't want to.

I've been sticking to ISO 50 or 100, and that means that at times, I get the little "shaky camera" icon on the LCD screen, indicating that the shutter speed is kinda low.

The other thing that's come to me is that for eighty percent or so of my picture-taking, looking through an SLR viewfinder beats looking at an LCD screen. Not that the A620's screen isn't excellent - it really is. As these things go, it's big, bright, and has that twisty-flexy feature for those shots where you want to use it as a waist-level finder or shoot over the heads of the crowd. But in bright sunlight, it still gets washed out and hard to see. Also, holding up a camera and looking at its back is just not the steadiest way to hold a camera.

And so far, that's about it for the downside. Other than these two things, I really like the A620. Also, keep in mind that what I've said so far applies to small-sensor digicams in general and doesn't represent a shortcoming of the A620 itself.

Canon's designers did a great job of making the A620 easy to operate. Pretty much anything you would want to do on a frequent basis is easy to get at with a press of your right thumb of one of the logically laid-out controls on the camera back.

There's even a "Custom" mode that allows you to instantly get to your favorite settings by turning the mode dial to "C." For example, the "rock-and-roll" shooting mode (hold down the shutter button and it keeps taking pictures) normally resets to single-shot mode when you turn the camera off and on. But you can save the multi-shot mode as one of settings for your Custom mode (which is what I do.) I'm sure this was mentioned in one of the several reviews I read, but I don't remember seeing it - so I was pleasantly surprised by this feature.

The camera provides for lots of flexibility for those of us who think of ourselves as real photographers. In aperture-priority mode, which I use, you can easily set exposure compensation, flash exposure compensation, change auto-focus zones, and even manually focus the lens.

One of my favorite features is the option to display a grid on the LCD that divides the frame into thirds, horizontally and vertically. Sort of a rule-of-thirds detector, and it helps keep straight lines straight, when that's what you want. I wish the Canon DSLRs had this (I think Nikon D70 does?)

Of course, the main reason I bought the camera is that it's small enough to take pretty much everywhere. So far, I've done just that every day since I got the camera. I either put it in a jacket pocket or shove it into an old 1983 Canon Sure-Shot case and throw it into the bag I carry with me to work.

And it pays - today I stopped by the Severn River on the way to work and, in the morning fog, took the pictures you see here today.

In conclusion, so far, so good. I'll be using the A620 a lot over the next few weeks and will have more to say, especially about its ability to deliver big prints.

Stay tuned.

Canon A620 Walking-Around Photos

2006-01-12T06:58:00.000-05:00

Canon A620 Insta-Test

2006-01-04T00:19:00.000-05:00

OK, it really isn't much of a test, but I got home late tonight to find my new Canon A620. These photos are the results of about 15 minutes of scientific testing - I just rested the camera on the shelf where I keep my Glorious Commie Cameras and snapped a few photos.

The second image is about 1/7 of the frame of the first photo. As far as resolution goes, this camera looks very promising.

I printed out a section of the photo, equivalent to about 12x17, on 8-1/2 x 11 photo paper, and at first glance, the quality is superb. It looks like good 11x14 and even 13x19 prints will be possible, under the right conditions, with this camera.

More to come soon, once I get to try it out in the real world. As of tomorrow, I start carrying the A620 with me pretty much everywhere I go.

Squeeze in a Few More for 2005...

2005-12-31T20:17:00.000-05:00

Trying to squeeze in just a few more photos on the last day of 2005. My new camera is still enroute - tantalizingly shown on the UPS webstite as having made the trip all the way from California, arriving at the UPS hub in Laurel, only a few miles from here, early this morning - I guess I'll have to wait until Tuesday after all.

Mais Que Nada

2005-12-29T08:20:00.000-05:00

A Brazilian Jet!?

Hey, they samba pretty good down there, but they build commercial jets?

Yup - on our recent trip to visit the In-Laws in Toronto, we flew 3 out of the 4 legs on Embraer ERJ145 regional jets.

All in all, it was a welcome change from the Fairchild F.27 puddlejumpers that we had become used to on these trips.

And I hear that on Wednesdays, they server feijoada.

Walkaround Camera

2005-12-28T06:35:00.000-05:00

Since I've been downtown, there have been any number of photo-opportunities I've passed up because I was walking around camera-less.

Well, you know, sometimes, I just don't want to schlep my Canon Digital Rebel. So I've been thinking for some time about buying a small "walkaround" camera to keep with me pretty much at all times.

Last night, after much research, I took the plunge and ordered a Canon A620. You can read all about it in this review at Digital Camera Resource Page, where the photo below comes from. Other good sources are here, here, and here.
I also considered an SD400, like the one we bought our daughter Leah for graduation earlier this year. But I finally settled on this larger form factor - it's about the same size as my first digital camera, a Canon A40. The A40 still serves well - Sandy uses it all the time for her kindergarten class, and I even take it along sometimes.

At 2MP, the A40 can yield surprisingly good 8x10 prints - but that's about the absolute limit. I wanted a camera that could give me great 11x14 and 13x19 prints. With a 7MP sensor, the A620 might fit that bill - it's hard to say until I try it (keep in mind that pixels aren't all the same - the 7MP of the A620 are each much smaller than the 6MP of my Digital Rebel - and that translates to noise.)

I ordered the camera and a 1GB SD card from Newegg.com, an outfit that I've used many times before for both computer and photo equipment. They tend to be very fast in terms of shipping, so maybe by New Years' Day, I'll have something to tell you about my new Walkaround Camera.

Moonrise Over Legg-Mason

2005-12-23T09:13:00.000-05:00

It pays to keep looking up! Heading back to work from my excursion to photograph 300 E. Lombard Wednesday, I happened to see this waning moon hanging in the sky near the Legg-Mason building.

Now, by the way, the two building in this photo are not among the few handsome ones that Baltimore has to offer. Oh, they look OK here, but you should see them full-face.

The Legg-Mason Building (background,) finished in 1973, was designed by graduates of the Louvered Cupboard School of Architecture. To add insult to injury, the 529-foot building is the tallest in Baltimore, and indeed, the tallest building on the Eastern seaboard from here to Charlotte.

The foreground edifice, The Gallery, well... it's just too awful to include in the same post - it'll have to wait for another time. Like an aging actress, The Gallery actually has a good side, or maybe even two good sides, but the front - the facade facing Harborplace, is a Frankenstein-like assemblage of mismatched pieces.

That horror story, however, is for another time.

Skywalker

2005-12-22T04:08:00.000-05:00

300 E. Lombard

2005-12-21T11:15:00.000-05:00

The Baltimore skyline, in my humble opinion, suffers from a dearth of decent architecture.

As I've said before, my admitedly untutored view of what makes for good architecture is strikingly similar to Justice Potter Stewart's famous take on pornography - "I know it when I see it."

And in strolling around downtown Baltimore over the past few months, I ain't seen it.

At least not much.

Most of the structures built during the '60s, '70's and early '80s are unimaginative glass-and-steel or masonry-and-glass variations on the International Style. That is, one building looks pretty much like the box that the neighboring building came in.

Harborplace, the early-1980's development of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, is an exception to the Baltimore Bad Architecture rule. The original buildings, two low-rise retail pavillions set at right angles along a nicely-bricked waterfront, was innovative for its time. It still looks pretty nice.

Yesterday, I was meeting a collegue for lunch a few blocks from where I work, and I happened to walk by 300 E. Lombard Street, brick office tower with a distictive wavy facade. I'd walked by this one many times before, but must have had my head down. For Baltimore, this is a pretty nice building!

I walked right up to the curve in the facade and looked straight up - cool! Definitely a photographer's target. Also, approaching the buliding from the east along Lombard street, you're treated to a nice brick-and-dark-window banding effect - clevely offset-doubled because of the wavy front side of the structured.

A little research turned up the fact that the building was built in the early 1980's and originally a Rouse Company property, Rouse being the very same developer of Harborplace.

Nice job!

USCGC Taney

2005-12-20T07:02:00.000-05:00

More reflections taken in downtown Baltimore. This one includes the totally unreflected USCG Cutter Taney, a WWII-era ship that is now part of Baltimore's Maritime Museum.

As I started taking pictures here, a group of terns were flying in and out of my frame. I set my camera on rock-and-roll and kept the shutter button pressed whenever I saw them swooping across my viewfinder.

By the way, I didn't like the placement of the piling - it was at about the halfway point of the bottom of the image. So I cut-and-pasted it into the corner, and cloned over the "hole" it left with water and dock edge.

Here's the original scene in the small photo. For some reason, the piling location botherred me. With the piling in the corner, I think it serves as a "base" for the lower right corner of the frame.

What do you think?

More Playing with Reflections

2005-12-19T22:06:00.000-05:00

BillG and Melinda - Persons of the Year!

2005-12-19T13:26:00.000-05:00

I don't know much about that guy with the shades on the 2005 Time magazine Persons of the Year cover, but I do know quite a bit about the man and the woman flanking him.

There isn't much more that I can say about BillG that I haven't already said in this post, so let me just offer my congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Gates for the well-deserved honor of being chosen as Persons of the Year by Time.

Oh, yeah, and mazel tov to that guy in the middle. I hear that he's a real mentch as well.

Looking in the Abstract

2005-12-12T06:29:00.000-05:00

It must be hard for non-photographers, or non-artists, to walk with me. I'm constantly stopping to look at some bit of the mundane, something ordinary that everyone, including me 90% of the time, would just pass right by.

When I think about it, it must be a funny sight. I'll suddenly stop and stare at something, cocking my head this way and that, like a bird checking out a worm.

On this particular stroll through Annapolis, I stopped to photograph this waterfront warehouse, built around 1800. The whitewashed stone walls and the red doors always catch my eye. This time, though, it was something much more micro than macro - the shadow of the fence at the base of the building on the right.

I thought that isolating that part of the scene, including only a part of the red door, the brilliant white wall, and the shadow, would make a nice abstract.

And I think it worked. The image above makes nice use of shape - the triangles, texture, and "color/non-color." And all I had to do to get it was to mentally zoom in on a piece of the overall action to isolate something entirely different.

So there it was, hiding in plain sight. All I had to do was a little cropping and some levels adjustment and final sharpening in Photoshop. Well, actually, there was one more thing - for some reason, I liked the flow of the image much better after I mirrored it in Photoshop. It might be one of those cultural things - because I'm an English-reading human, I'm used to seeing things flow from left to right?