I did less work than I would have liked in 2013. Various factors led to this, but mostly I spent the year either chasing client work that never came through, planning & putting work into personal projects that have yet to be realised (ahem, the webcomic, mostly), or actually enjoying myself with extended family. There […]
Samir is cleaning his Canon G9 camera. It’s a few years out of warranty and always comes back from vacations to India with dust specks. Far too annoying a problem to ignore, far to small a problem to pay a fair deal of money to get repaired professionally any more.
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A very happy new year to you all! Let’s hope all the rumours about 2012 aren’t true, and if they turn out to be, let’s hope Bruce Willis or someone sufficiently Bruce Willisian will save us anyway.
Here in Dubai, meanwhile, we kicked things off with a mildly exploding building.
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I recently acquired a new old lens, a Pentax SFX-era F1.4 50mm autofocus from the 1980s. While it is a lens ideally suited for night photography, I recently had the chance to give it a whirl while out and about. Here are a few of the good photos I got.
The Index is one of my favourite buildings to look at in Dubai, and not only because a friend of mine lives there. This Foster & Partners building is perfect for the Dubai landscape, with its pleasingly retro angles and box grater shape, its use of textured materials. And yet it’s completely different to the chrome and glass towers that make up most of the city’s skyscrapers. Chief among them is the Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world, of-late Tom Cruise’s personal dangling venue of choice. I’m fairly indifferent to its design, though I guess it could have been a lot worse.
Despite the modern image of the Emirates being a glass & chrome metropolis, drive a little out of the city and you’ll end up on a road that looks very much like this, no matter where you go…
…and once you get bored and decide to return to the cities, chances are you’ll end up in a traffic jam that looks very much like this, no matter where you go!
It’s a small concession that once every couple of years, when you do get stuck in a traffic jam you at least get to see some aerobatics. (Also, I really, really need to clean all the dust spots from my camera sensor.)
The lens, by the way, performs admirably, even shooting straight into the setting sun. You can’t see it at this size and treatment, but I can read the number plates on most of the traffic in this shot.
These last two shots further demonstrate how marvelous this lens has turned out to be. Both of them are shot through a very dirty window, with harsh corridor lights behind and above me casting all manner of reflections on the glass. The second one, in fact, was taken at a sharp glancing angle to the glass. It’s a wonder I managed to get anything at all!
Needless to say, I’m only scratching the surface of what this lens can do, and future experiments will follow.
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I’ve been searching for old, strange lenses for my Pentax K200D digital SLR ever since I bought it over two years ago, since I quickly realised that I could effectively use any number of great lenses stretching back over Pentax’s long and colourful history. Last year I acquired an adapter for the M42 mount, which allowed me to use a forty-something-year-old Zenit Helios 58mm f2 lens after some modifications to the apeture pin. I’ve been using the all-manual lens through much of the last year, getting back my skills at manual focussing — no small feat in a lens with such a fine and shallow depth-of-field. It has performed admirably and produces pictures of distinct character.
Out of the blue, the other day, I stumbled upon a camera store in a small mall in Dubai that I have often frequented for coffee and a sandwich, but never explored. They had dozens of old cameras and lenses, including several Pentax models, of which I immediately spotted a Pentax SFX, and more specifically its 50mm F1.4 SMC autofocus lens. I acquired it for a bargain (around $70) and even got a UV filter thrown in for free! Due to some other chores that needed to be done, I didn’t get a chance to properly test it, but heading back to the car I fired off a quick shot of my brother in the back seat.
Note that this was taken with me awkwardly turned around in the front passenger seat, with the only illumination being a single street-light and a shop window across the two lane road. The results are more than adequate, and quite the step-up from the F2 zenit lens. The autofocus helps immensely in poor light, and I can’t wait to give this lens a good workout. It’s a good deal younger than the Zenit — the SFX was released in 1987. Like the Zenit, I imagine it will sit on my camera most of the time.
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I am a lazy cook. No other way to say it. I have no patience for slowly stirred sauces, carefully watched pots, or preparations that need fifteen different components plated at the last minute. If it all sits together in a bowl and I can eat it with one utensil, then so much the better.
I am also a stubborn cook. Stir fries have often tantalised me, and every time I try my hand at one I learn a little more, make it a little better. I’m at the stage now where I can’t quite bang out a hundred plates of noodles that all look and taste the same, but the outcome is generally tasty, and even when my own pantry conspires to throw me a curveball, I can generally deal with it.
Today’s conundrum: the urge to eat fried noodles, with all the correct ingredients I like in fried noodles — except for noodles themselves. The closest thing I had was a packet of linguine — not the regular kind, which is a fine substitute for stir fries (spaghetti is too), but a dark green basil flavoured one.
Nevertheless, I soldiered on, and above is almost everything that went into it besides salt, pepper, oil and a last minute squirt of Sriracha, i.e.: an egg (fried as an omelet, cooled, cut into strips), noodles, celery, carrot, baby corn, garlic, asparagus, mushrooms — and mixed for the sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, and sesame oil.
Put them all together and you get this. It didn’t taste half bad, though after a while the taste of basil completely disappeared, and that was a bit disappointing. Guess the noodles would benefit from a more delicate saucing than being tossed around in soy sauce, sugar and sesame oil until good old Maillard reactions do their magic.
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It’s been nearly six months since I last went to Bombay; a trip I have mixed feelings about, since I mostly went for my cousin’s wedding, and despite being there for a month weather and schedules and general fatigue conspired to keep me grounded most of the time.
I took a lot of pictures — thousands — but most of them are personal, of family and friends, and I don’t share those. Looking through my haul before committing them to DVD backups (remember, kids: back up frequently, often, and in multiple mediums), I found that in between the personal photographs I had snuck in an artistic one here and there.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I had got a lot of photographic toys that month. One invaluable purchase just before we left for India was a cheap manual flash and a wireless trigger. It helped out a lot in the finicky lighting of the wedding venue, and while I still have no idea how to use it effectively, a lot of fun was had experimenting with my equally photo-crazy cousins — such as in the shot above.
Sometimes you’re stuck at home with nothing to do, and when the urge to photograph strikes you’ll point a camera at anything just to scratch that itch. This isn’t a bad thing, as you can get plenty of interesting pictures around the average household.
And sometimes, all you need to do is look at things in isolation.
Speaking of isolation, a willing human subject is always a good thing to photograph, and if they aren’t made up and feeling pretty first thing on a Sunday morning, you can still get a good photo out of the rest of them.
At last! A chance to go out. Planting myself firmly in the front passenger’s seat, we set off for Navi Mumbai. The good thing about any Indian wedding is that there is always the possibility of traveling somewhere for it and various ancillary functions.
I had just attached my 58mm manual zenit lens, this was my first time taking it out of the house — and it was stuck at F2 since I hadn’t modified the aperture pin yet.
Considering all these factors plus the moving car, and my general failure at taking to new things (or old things, for that matter), some of these pictures didn’t turn out half bad.
The joy and excitement of doing something new and unfamiliar is sometimes just the thing required to make you stop over-thinking things. Sure, many of these pictures could be better, had I spent hours and hours getting to grips with the lens at home, learning its finer points on pictures of bottles or something — but a trial by fire (or a trial by moving car on insane Indian roads while manually-focusing at F2, as it were) is often the best way to do something new.
Put another way: you need raw brick to make a solid building, even if said raw brick is never seen by any of the occupants. Look, a cliche metaphor and an appropriate picture to go with it!
In the end, of course, thinking about things helps, and whenever you get a chance you should definitely stop to smell the flowers, and maybe take a photo or two.
Keep Looking. The photos will find you.
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(NOTE: All the photos in this post, shot in colour, were post-processed by simple saturation, contrast and gamma alteration in IrfanView, hands down the most simple and invaluable image viewer and editor on the planet. I’ve been using it nearly every day for 14 years now. If you haven’t, then do give it a try.)
Last year when I went to India I enlisted the aid of a cousin who was coming in from the States to bring me a bunch of photo equipment — most of which I subsequently never used, except for the M42 mount adapter ring that allowed me to use my old 58mm manual F2 Zenit lens on my Pentax K200D digital SLR.
Because the Zenit has sat on my camera for the past six months (I love it!), I have not really given much thought to using the other lens I got, a 500mm mirror lens. Mirror lenses are odd beasts, behaving like reflector telescopes rather than straightforward lenses. The upshot is they’re a shorter size for more zoom, and give you odd donut shaped bokeh.
The downside is that this one, a Samyang 500mm F6.3, is heavy, super-sensitive to focus, and has a very steep learning curve. Also, since I live in Dubai I’ve been too afraid to take it out with me and try it, mostly because I don’t want someone to think I’m wielding some strange super-weapon and toss me in jail.
So, I basically haven’t touched the thing in ages, but thought I’d at least see what I could get around the house in 5 minutes.
I got, um, one.
Not that I was trying very hard, and oh man do my hands ever shake. Need to fix that. Deep breaths, cut down on coff–naw.
Truth be told, I bought this thing mostly for the donut bokeh, which I think looks quite pretty.
And here’s another shot of the beast, to close this post out.
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I took pictures of rocks, and also some buildy things. Then I messed around with them in the GIMP. It was fun.
(UPDATE: I took out two of the crappy ones with the bad gradient skies and replaced them with two slightly less crappy ones)
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At some point after I returned from India I thought I’d just set the camera to B&W (cyan pass, JPEG) and shoot an entire card. What’s the use of a digital camera if you can’t just practice for a while?
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