Lo-Fi Update

More from the digital keychain cam. The best shots seem to be the ones I plan the least: I've discovered that the lens (if you can call it that) is sitting off-center in the housing of the camera, so any attempt I make to line up a shot is doomed to fail. I'm forced to just shoot and move, shoot and move... I don't know if I'd call the experience "Zen" but it's certainly a pleasure, trying to spot those scenes that would make an interesting shot, and then seeing how the camera "interprets" that vision.

One rule I've made for myself is "no correction or cropping." Except for the occasional black and white conversion, these shots are "SOOC," or "straight out of the camera." I'm not a purist about photographs, and I believe a little conscious tweaking of parameters or exposure times or filters is part of the art form that is photography. I am not a photojournalist, and I am not documenting without introducing my own prejudice into the images. The selection of a subject and the first cut of photos to save or rejectt introduces my own bias. Instead, I consider this exercise a surrender of control and an embracing of chance, a challenge for myself to see the unexpected and the unusual even in my familiar daily walk. All of the shots I've posted in this series are from the same four-block area around my office building. Ever time I set out with the camera in my pocket, I feel like I've exhausted the possibilities: that I've shot everything there is to shoot. Luckily, I've been wrong each time.

Eye Exercises, Part 2 - Black and White

Some more experiments from the crapcam: this time, I took some shots from my walk and stripped out the colors with the Gimp photo editing software, adjusting the white and black levels slightly to match what I'd look for in a black and white print. Shooting b&w is great fun, first, because it's easy and inexpensive to do yourself at home and is a process tolerant of failure. Second, because it's an excellent way to re-train yourself to look at shape and light as you'll lose all the color "information" along the way.

Digital experimentation is a good way to get your feet wet. Try shooting something with your digital camera of choice, then open it up in an image editor and convert it to a greyscale photo. Which of these pictures do you like better in color, and which do you prefer in black and white? My thoughts follow the thumbnails...

1) Arrows


2) Wet Shirt


3) Leaves


4) Palms


5) Landscaping




My favorites:

1. I prefer the color version of the street arrows. The red curb is completely lost in the black and white version, and I like the way the red grabs at my eye in the color shot.
2. It's close for the shirt photo. The color shot emphasizes the distortion effects of the cheap lens more, I think, but I like the texture of the black and white photo. I'm slightly in the B&W camp on this one.
3. For the leaves, black and white is the clear winner to me here. The washed-out colors muddy the photo in my opinion. Black and white is great for pointing out edge detail, in part because our eyes are so sensitive to shades and levels of light. It's not just that the color information is gone from the second picture, but other information is subtly boosted.
4. Black and white for sure. Although it's one of my favorite subjects -- a cluster of palm trees -- I think the black and white is far more dreamlike and makes you work harder to guess what you're seeing. I like pictures that make me wonder a little. The original was shot in portrait orientation which is more obivous if you live around palm trees and their unmistakable bark. Showing it in landscape adds more "what is that" to the final photo.
   
5. This is a cheat, since I deliberately chose this to illustrate how black and white can change a scene. The yellowing fronds in the color picture distract me, and make my eye hop around looking at them, instead of the pile o' stripes that I (the photographer) was hoping for.
   

More Lo-Fi Love

Rainy Day Walk

Snuck out in a lull between storm fronts to catch a few more shots with the crapcam. I was entertaining the idea of getting a new phone so I could have a pocketable camera on-hand to capture moments like this, but now I'm not so sure that I want one after all.

Today's Lo Fi Highlights

More from the $5 Walgreens keychain digicam:

(my favorite of the bunch)

Plus, a few a took yesterday that somehow got glitched up in the camera's memory, giving them the Ted Turner effect.

UPDATE: here's the camera on a Post-It note, for a size comparison.

Low-Tech Challenge: Photo Collage

In response to my own guest-posted challenge on Just Write, a first attempt at a little lo-fi cataloging of my life, courtesy a super-flimsy $5 digital "camera" from Walgreens. This is a quick survey of my desk, since I was sitting there at the time, trying to read the archaic image file format off the camera. Trying for the lo-fi, shoot-from-the-hip ethic here, instead of my usual obsessing over white balance and aperture and steady shots and focus and bokeh and... and... and...

This is a little spin around my desk area: clockwise from the top left they are...

1. Norma Jean, my Underwood Touchmaster, still looking and typing fine in this, her 50th year. I'm also hitting a milestone this year: turning 40. Perhaps I'll dye my hair to match.
   
2. My super sekrit stash of Polaroid film, snarfed from the thrift store last year. I've used up a couple of boxes now, have a couple more to go. One of them was particularly ancient, and the tiny chemical pounches inside the frame were so badly dried that only strips and blobs developed. The images are ghostly and strange.
   
3. Assorted house plants in various states of health. This particular one was from a get-well basket for one of my son's past injuries. The basket sat on top of a bookcase and was soon neglected for ages before I felt pity on the plants, divided them up, and repotted them. This is a "bonus plant" that was down to its last leaf, but is thriving by being neglected on the end of my desk. I was a chronic accidental house-plant killer as a child, so I'm trying to boost my plant karma by reviving these pity cases, and by getting them away from my wife, who has an even deadlier record with plants.
4. Perpetual calendar/pen stand. I need to swap out the nib in the pen for something narrower, as this has a cheap calligraphy nib in there right now, and so lays down an exceptionally wide line. Out of frame is the wind-up travel alarm clock. Measuring time mechanically, that's me.
5. Mementos from my kids, this one from my older daughter. Both my daughters seem taken with art, the older one declared at age four that she wants to be a children's book author dedicated exclusively to picture books "for kids who can't read." Paper and crayons litter our house, and art and photos of my kids are all over the cork board and my desk.
6. Actual work-related things. I still don't like looking up things online, preferring to have my reference materials in bound form. The O'Reilly books are the best of the best, in my opinion. I still lean on these now and then for reference at the old gray matter gets less responsive. Plus, covers featuring engravings of camels and rhinos fits my "Eclectic/Geek/Slob" design ethic.
   

Genuine nostalgia

I'm justifying this as a blogiversary present to myself, the first camera I actually remember owning and using, a Kodak Instamatic X-15. Mine (as a child) was quite possibly bought for me brand-new, given the dates when this thing was made (I was about 5 or 6.) Like finding an old favorite toy in the attic, finding this on the thrift store shelf with a box and a half of unused Magicubes was a complete nostalgia trip. The other typewriters and cameras are a sort of artificial memory I'm wrapping myself in -- I obviously never really used a typewriter or a fountain pen or a mechanical watch for day-to-day life, but that old Instamatic went with me on camping trips and visits to the grandparents. The loud ratcheting sound of the winding lever put me right back in plaid Garanimal flare pants (you whippersnappers can look that one up on your Google thingus.)

Instamatics were cheap plastic affairs, semi-light-tight since they used the 126 film format, a drop-in plastic cartridge that contained the film, rolled with a thick backing paper so you could see the frame numbers through a little window on the back of the camera. Perfect for a kid. And perfect for a big kid, too, who found directions on how to convert an instamatic to 135 film (better know as 35mm.) My conversion was even simpler, just by notching the top of the film spool and then covering the numerous gaps in the camera with black sticky-back craft foam. I ran a roll through this weekend, and am going to get the negatives done at Walgreens over lunch.

Post-lunch update:

Factoring in the amount of hacking I had to do to get this image digitized, the results are not bad.


(photo tinkered with since my yard is not blue-green)

Let's consider:

• Crappy camera to start with
  
• Using film twice as fast as recommended for the camera
• Using film not at all made for the camera
• Hand-held photograph of the negative as pressed against my (tinted) office window
• Hand-inverting the image from the negative

What's most magical to me, though, is the areas between the photos. You can get a little glimpse of this on the sides of this picture, but all between the shots it's cloudy and hazy, like gaps in memory only sliding into focus for certain moments -- the dog resting in the yard, my daughter as we're taking a walk together, the big ornamental cactus that grows down the street. The gaps are necessary due to the way 126 film was made (one hole per picture) and I overcompensated on this first roll, but the net effect is... wild.

Seeing yellow

A coworker left this little Lomolitos camera as a gift while I was on break. I'm not qure how I feel about the whole lomography "movement" -- it certainly smells faddish, especially passing off the results of super-cheap plastic cameras as arty, and the directions within are expressly defiant of all things Serious Photography (disregard framing, flash and focus distances, etc.) I've been trying to relax about all of this and snap some yellow-tinged photos just to give it a whirl. This camera is closer kin to the all-plastic cameras you'd find at the dollar store than to a true one-use camera. The film and battery can both be replaced in the Lomotios; this is lucky since I needed to do the latter right away to resurrect the flash.

Except for my typical paranoia about taking photos in public places, I'm enoying toting this little thing around. I'll work on finishing up the roll and scanning the results.