Snow on the Equator
Just a random shot with a Jupiter-12 on my Canon P.
We’ve not had much snow this winter so this kind of struck me as ironic. I don’t get out of the office much during daylight hours in winter so this was a lucky shot.
The pedestrian mall in downtown Burlington has a brick and granite north-south line running down the middle of the street with names of cities around the world set in granite blocks a proportional distance from the line as well as where the Equator would fall.
Perkins Pier, Lake Champlain, Jan. 1, 2012
Gave my rangefinders a break to test out the Canon FD 100mm f2.8 on my Canon EF. I had recently picked up. Turned out to be a bit awkward as I had a sore wrist and the camera is really heavy. Still, a beautiful machine, well made and solid.
Canon EF Vivitar 19mm f3.8 - not exactly the rig I was shooting with.
This was shot with my 50mm f1.2, the lens I had on the camera at the time because had been shooting indoors that morning. I hadn’t used this lens in a while and I forgot how shallow the depth of field is wide open – little room for focusing error. Quite a few frames turned out with focus just a bit off. The EF body is like an old F-1, but with a fixed prism and shutter priority AE. You can see both the shutter speed and aperture in the finder. There’s not much written about this camera but Wikipedia has a pretty good overview here.
Happy New Year. Here’s my favorite photos from 2011, in no particular order, agonizingly trimmed down to 8 shots. I tried to take at least one photo a day this past year, and mostly succeeded, but I’m not sure I accomplished much in the effort. My favorite photos were those taken when I had the time and had both hands free, an increasingly rare combination these days. In 2012, I’m shooting for taking enough photos to come up with enough to post one decent effort once a week.
Bike path, Oakledge park
Spring flooding, Burlington waterfront
February ice storm, Kalamazoo
Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
Pacifica Beach
Pacifica Pier
San Francisco Conservatory
Ikebana
Balda Super Baldina
Back to writing about cameras again, rather than photographs. This is a Super Baldina with the down-market Baldanar f2.8 lens. It does the job. I love the pop-out lens and good to be shooting a real rangefinder again. The camera fells solid, well-built. I like the heft and decently bright viewfinder. The shutter travel is long and took a bit of getting used to. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a real chance to give it a work out as my life is kind of full right now.
A couple of samples shots taken on expired Fuji Superia 100.:
Altix Altissa Classic 35 with Meyer-Optik Trioplan 50mm f2.8
An old viewfinder camera, rather than a rangefinder, with the down-market triplet lens. I’m just happy it works. The Altissa is from the late 1950s, heavy and solid with a less than squinty viewfinder. This one is bit fogged so it’s even more difficult to see, so I ended up using an auxiliary viewfinder for many of the shots. I only shot a test roll, then left it at the camera shop for weeks because life intervened. In fact, I haven’t had much time for my cameras of late.
A couple of shots from the Altissa on Ilford HP5:
Shime-daiko
Just a random shot taken at our local taiko-dojo with my Canon P.
On the shores of Lake Champlain
Welta Weltix
An August evening on the shores of Lake Champlain.Pretty popular spot for a walk in the summer. I eye-balled the light and the distance. That meant aperture wide open and the lets focused to infinity. I was testing a Welta Weltix, a 35mm folder at least designed in the 1930s, although made, I believe, even after the war.
There isn’t much more to the camera than the lens and the shutter. The shutter speeds run T, B, 1-1/300 sec, and the lens is a Steinheil Munchen Cassar, 5cm f 2.9. I’ve had the camera for a couple of years, but I never bother to put film in it until recently.
This was not an easy camera to shoot despite the lack of controls. You have to look at the lens to set the aperture and distance, and cock the shutter manually before you can squeeze off a shot. The viewfinder is also very dim and small. None of this makes for a quick snap. The upside is that I tended to think a bit more about a photo before pressing the shutter release.
Drumming hands
These three drummers were beating the skin outside of an opening for an exhibit on Haiti – photos, paintings by Haitian artists and a documentary. The exhibit was in at the Flynn Dog in Burlington, and the people involved included members of our local Taiko troupe. That’s Stuart Paton, founder and artistic director of Burlington Taiko, on the far left.
This photo is from the same roll as the last few San Francisco photos – an orphan roll that I didn’t finish off until I got home – all taken with the Canon P rangefinder with the Jupiter 8 50mm F2 FSU lens on Ilford HP5 film.
Here’s what the drummer look like:
Drummers
Surfers at Pacifica Beach
One last shot from our Bay Area trip. A weekday afternoon on Pacifica Beach, which also goes by Pedro Beach for the San Pedro Mountains that crowd against it. This is the south end of the state park, with houses crowded right against the water. We wondered how they fare when a storm hits. The jumble of wooden buildings over the water reminds me of some of the waterfront scenes I remember from Southeast Asia. I like the way the line of rocks gives way to the line of sand, then to the surf and finally the water.
Tarrantino's on Fisherman's Wharf
One more shot from Fisherman’s Wharf. What I like about this photo is that unless you look closely at what people are wearing, it’s difficult to tell when the picture was made. Certainly the subject, the retro-looking sign, but also the tone and graininess gives it a vintage feel that fits mood of the street scene.
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