Be honest, now. We all identify.

Gaaah! I want to kick myself.

Here are a few photos I took with Lomography’s Redscale XR 50-200 film. I bought just ONE PACK of this last December when I visited South Korea, an afterthought to my splurging on T64. I thought, I DIY my own redscale so why buy lots? Since it’s on sale, let’s try one pack.

So, one pack = 3 rolls. The first thing I did when I got back to Manila was sell one roll and give another one away, leaving me with just this one roll. I’m in love. But I’ve no more! Gaaah!

All shots taken with a Konica C35, variable settings on the ASA.

Must find more of this film stock. Now na.

Animal Appeal

There’s a slight premium tacked on of course. But, then again, you are paying for something quite out of the ordinary. The press release says these are limited to only 2,000 units, but isn’t clear whether that’s 2,000 for each model or all three. In any case, these will still make quite the impression on whomever you’ll gift these to.

What’s your favorite?

Personally, I like the Fisheye 2, with the green adding an almost amphibian quality to the otherwise reptilian case. Plus, it’s the only one among the three I can pull off carrying around.

You’ve probably already shot the hell out of your new toy. Are you pleased with the results? If this is the very first time you’ve used a camera, a film one at that, you may be wondering: where are all the awesome shots I was expecting? Where are the crazy colors? What happened to the vignettes? Why’s it too dark? Why’s it too light? Why’s it all black? This is, of course, if you’re honest. Many new photographers like to convince themselves that their photos are award-worthy, even though they’re just photos of random clouds.

We all want to be better photographers, and the first step towards becoming one is admitting there’s a lot to learn. That means you. That means me. Photography requires us to understand some things, the basics, before we move on to the meatier stuff. To help everyone along, especially the beginners, I’ve decided to embark on a series of articles on the fundamentals of photography. Rather than go all technical, I’ll be focusing more on the basic principles of the art and craft.

I’m not a professional photographer, just an avid amateur, so this serves as a refresher course for me as well. I don’t live and breathe photography the way folks like Scott Kelby or Kevin Meredith do, so a return to beginnings can only serve to deepen my own understanding of this hobby.

We’ll tackle topics like exposure, shutter speed and aperture. ISO/ASA as well. Basic composition and framing, depth of field, panning, the Sunny 16 Rule of course. If I can find guest bloggers, that’d be great, a breath of fresh air to be sure. All that and more. But, I am asking for your forgiveness in advance. I can only write these when I find the time. Some weeks, it’ll come fast and frequent. Other times, it’ll be an agonizing drip-feed. Gotta prioritize writing that puts food on the table, heh.

Well, that serves as our introduction to the course. Now let me go and prepare the first lesson. Cheers.

Fifty years ago, Olympus released the PEN D, a small half frame camera with a brilliant 6-element 32mm Zuiko lens. It had a selenium meter, uncoupled so you wouldn’t have to be a slave to its whims (or be stuck with a dead camera after the selenium went dead). Aperture went from the fast f/1.9 to f/16 at its most narrow, shutter speed from 1/8 to 1/500 a second, including a bulb setting for really slow shutter action. Like the Olympus 35 UC, the PEN D had a clever way of setting exposure, based on EV, which made it easy to maintain proper exposure settings while tweaking aperture-speed combinations. Focus is, like the other PENs (except the PEN F series), by scale focus guesstimation as well.

Of the PEN D, I have two, one with a meter that still works. The other one is easy enough to use via Sunny 16 rule or with a handheld meter. As always, image quality is stellar. Being half frame, the camera gets you 72 shots for a 36-exposure roll, which is great if you’re on a tight budget. The contact prints are just so retro cute.

Thought I’d shoot a bit of camera porn for the fans. For some reason the soundtrack won’t play at 360p, so just play it at 240p or 480p. At 360p you hear the koi pond waterfall in the background.

It's 2012. Smile, please.

It's 2012. Smile, please.

Photo by SWSmith Photography

Just two days until we bid farewell to the year that was 2011 and welcome in the Year of Our Lord 2012, most likely with wonderfully excessive displays of pyrotechnomania. And while I don’t recommend strapping Roman candles to your boobs and setting them alight (a la Katy Perry), I do encourage everyone to crank up their cameras for some firework photography. While luck factors a lot in shooting pyrotechnics, there are some techniques to put into play to improve your shots. To help those who may not have a clue how to go about capturing a massive chrysanthemum bloom in the sky or a Catherine wheel in furious spin, here are ten of the best tips I’ve learned.

Photo by Daita

1. Go full manual
Forget aperture priority or shutter speed priority or full-on auto. If you want to take even decent firework shots, you’ve got to get a camera that lets you adjust your controls (speed, aperture, focus) manually. If you rely on your camera’s on-board metering system, chances are, their readings will be out of whack.

2. Set your shutter speed to B(ulb)
A slow shutter speed is key to capturing a nighttime mid-air explosion in all its glory. It takes time for a pyrotechnic starburst to achieve its maximum diameter, and you’ll want your shutter to be open all that time. With the Bulb setting, you have control over how long your shutter will stay open, long or short. I typically play around from 5 to 10 seconds. Also, you never really know when the next rocket will go off, so keeping your shutter open longer increases your chances of catching a few choice explosions.

Photo by Probably Okay!

3. Set your aperture between f/8 and f/11
The first impulse when taking low light shots is to open your aperture wide. This isn’t the case with fireworks as these things are quite bright, even if the background may be pitch black. Stopping down to f/11 is generally fine, even if you’re shooting with low ISO film. Also, keeping your aperture narrow maximizes your depth of field.

Photo by Wablair

4. Focus to infinity, then pull back ever-so-slightly
Manual focus, remember? Since fireworks are designed to explode at high altitudes (from 200 feet to 1200 feet depending on the size), all you need to do to get good focus is to focus to infinity, then pull back slightly to take advantage of the hyperfocal distance. With your narrow aperture, depth of field will be very wide indeed, keeping your subject in sharp focus.

Photo by Alternakive

5. Use a tripod
Since you’re working with very slow shutter speeds, it is imperative that you keep the camera absolutely still. Any vibration in mid-shot and you’ll have a mess of squiggly lines of light instead of the graceful parabolic light trails you want to capture. If you don’t have a tripod, make sure you have something else to keep the camera steady, like a beanbag or tabletop. No handholding, unless you’re the Oblation.

6. Use a cable release
Vibration is the enemy; I cannot stress that enough. If you have a cable release, use it so that you don’t have to touch your camera while you keep the shutter button pressed. Alternatively, you could use your camera’s self timer (though this won’t work on B, so set your speed from 5 to 10 seconds) or remote so you can trip the shutter without shaking the camera.

7. Add a context
While fireworks shots are pretty, they get boring pretty fast if you can’t provide a context to them. That’s where a foreground or a background comes in. Play with silhouettes, of people watching the show in front of you, for instance. Capture the way the fireworks illuminate buildings. If you’re by a lake or any body of water, you can capture reflections there. If you’re doing a photo essay, take photos of the folks on the ground, the spectators, the revelers, the fraidy cats, too.

Photo by Jeff Tinsley for the Smithsonian Institution

8. Find a good vantage point
Location is everything. If you’re shooting skyward, make sure you’ve got a clear field of vision, with no trees or electric lines to mar your shot (unless you want ‘em there). If you want to include other elements, such as people or environment, make sure you suss out where you should set up your tripod where you can frame everything you want. It also pays to be upwind, because that way the smoke blows away from you, and not between your lens and the pyrotechnics.

Photo by Hekris

9. Use a low ISO
Again, because this is a low light situation, there’s an instant impulse to use the fastest film we have in our fridge. This is a bad move, mainly because grain in our shots will only mess up what we want to show, and fast film means more grain. ISO 100 or even ISO 64 is good for fireworks photography, since the actual subject is very bright.

10. Enjoy the occasion
Take it from me: it doesn’t pay to get a killer shot if it means you neglect your party. This is New Year’s Eve – live a little! Point your camera down and take photos of your family and friends. Turn on your colorsplash flash. Grab a drink, get drunk, take party shots, fall down. Even if you didn’t get your perfect fireworks shot, there’s always next year!

Photo by Kettukusu

HAPPY 2012 EVERYONE!

Have a ball this Christmas!

With just under 24 hours before we hit Christmas – in this slice of the world, at least – this might be a tad late. But, if you live around these parts, chances are great that you won’t be taking down your Christmas lights until well into the new year. There’s still time to do this!

By “this,” I mean using creative aperture techniques to add shape to background lights and highlights. See the above photo? Look at the stars. See how they shine for you. No, that is not a Photoshop trick. I’ve transformed the pinpricks of light coming from a string of Christmas lights into five-point stars by modifying the shape of my camera lens’ aperture. In this case, I am using my favorite lens for this type of shot: the Lensbaby 2.0. If you don’t know what a Lensbaby is, just follow this link.

Lensbaby lenses don’t have adjustable iris apertures the way most lenses do. To adjust the opening, either to open it wide or stop it down, you have to insert aperture disks manually onto the front of the lens. Normally, those aperture disks just have circular holes punched into them, corresponding to a particular aperture size, say f/8 or f/2. What’s neat is you can also have aperture disks with different shaped holes. In this case, a star-shaped hole.

When you focus a lens with a modified aperture on a subject, that subject will appear sharp and in focus (uhm, yeah). The out-of-focus background highlights, however, will take on the shape of your aperture, which could be a five-sided star, a heart, the Thundercats sigil, the bat signal, whatever you can carve onto an opaque disk that you can fit in front of your lens. The more out-of-focus your background highlights are, the stronger the effect.

I’m using a Lensbaby in my samples, but you can easily do the same thing with any manual focus lens on a film camera or digital. Just cut out a mask you can put on the front of the lens, covering the glass completely except for your creatively carved opening.  If your lens has an adjustable aperture, open it wide and just let the mask dictate the amount of light that enters. Compose your shot with a subject in the foreground and your Christmas lights in the background. Meter accordingly (I use Aperture Priority on my Canon then just compensate by tweaking the EV) then shoot.

An alternative to the Lensbaby and the utterly DIY method is to purchase the Bokeh Kit from Photojojo.com. But if you check it out, you’ll see how easy it is to just go for the DIY method (and save US$25).

More experienced photographers might notice that I am avoiding the term “bokeh.” I’ve found that the mere mention of this term opens up a can of worms as there seem to be different notions as to what it is exactly. Some describe it as the overall quality of a background blur. Others say it only refers to background in the highlights. Others throw it around when they just mean out of focus areas. So, I’m sidestepping all that and just using the term “creative aperture.”

Look at the stars. See how they shine for you.

Oh and let’s throw in a couple of non-Christmas animations for maximum effect.

Raimund at the Drums

Buddy on Bass

Not Quite Open, Not Quite Closed

After a herculean yet ultimately futile effort to get to Seoul’s Chungmuro district, where all the vintage camera stores are, before closing time, I made a mad dash to Hongik University, where Seoul’s Lomography store was located. The cabbie dropped me off in front of the school, which sits in the middle of a hip and happening area, full of restaurants, bars, galleries and boutique stores. I asked some students to direct me to the Lomography store and after some gesticulating and stabbing at my iPad, we all came to an understanding. They’d walk in the general direction and I’d follow them. Thanks, guys!

I reached the store almost half an hour after closing time but was lucky enough to find them still open (not closed, would be more accurate). They let me in and I was able to see and touch, for the very first time, Lomography’s Lomokino and metal La Sardina cameras. Tasty.

Bought a few packs of T64 (see previous post) but had to bug out quickly as the night was getting long in the tooth and the clerks looked like they needed to get on home. Farewells and smiles all around.

Lomokino, Lomokinis

Tin Can Cameras