jessiclick

Flickr DILO (Dec. 21st, 2005)

2005-12-22T15:35:45Z

PhotoStitch - Ottawa River

2005-12-19T06:23:07Z

I'm pretty impressed with how this whole PhotoStitch thing works.

I made another stitched image which is about 20,000 pixels wide by 5,000 high. It's surprisingly quick and easy. This is definitely a tool I'll be using more and more, I think it's fantastic. One of my favorite photo projects back in high school was creating a panoramic image by standing in one place and piecing photographs together. I took five 8.5x11" black & white photos of a pond in the winter and mounted them on a blue backing. It's actually a really horrible photograph, not well focused, poor contrast, very grainy. Still, I really like it. Would be interesting to go back to the same spot now and re-take the photo, see what I can come up with digitally. The original was done on Agfa 100 b&w film with the Canon FT QL, compare now with the Digital Rebel XT (which is new, as opposed to the FT QL which was about 30 and in need of a tune-up at the time). Sounds like a project for this week.

Photo Software.

2005-12-19T06:17:35Z

I have a lot of options for photo software, so I think it's time I started to mess around with the various tools and figure out what works best for me. So far all editing has been minimal, hopefully that will change as necessary. I've largely been more interested in composition but I have been getting more and more into technical details as time goes on.

I have a number of programs for uploading photos, for editing photos, cataloguing and stitching together. I just now tried uploading pictures to my Linux machine, and posting to flickr. I'll have to come up with a systematic way to go through this - start looking at catalogue options what works best there - I'll likely choose iPhoto. Minor touch-ups, major touch-ups, etc etc. Maybe I'll post a little review of the various things I try ... yeah, a review, how's that.

Here's what I'll be working with:

Windows 98
. ArcSoft Photo Studio 5.5
. Canon Photo Record 2
. PhotoStitch
. Nero Photo Show Express
. Flickr Uploader
. MS Paint
. MS Image Composer

Windows XP
. Jasc Paint Shop Pro

Suse Linux
. GIMP
. F-Spot Photo Album
. Inkscape SVG Vector Illustrator (I don't even know what that means)
. OpenOffice.org Draw
. Skencil

Mac OS X (10.3.9)
. GIMP
. iPhoto
. Canon software comparable to Win98, it came with the camera.

Expect reviews on some of those.

In the mean time, here is a photo I took this evening.

$12 Slide Scanner Tutorial

2005-12-10T20:24:43Z

$12 Slide Scanner

This website was brought to my attention: Slide 2 Digital - seemed like a good idea, so we decided to try one for ourselves. A quick trip to Home Depot and we were off. A suitcase full of slides of Europe & North America in the '50s & '60s waiting, we went ahead and made this little attachment for my Canon Digital Rebel XT.

We're going to use a few simple supplies to turn this:

Into this:

Here's what you need:

. Digital SLR Camera with a lens (I used a 55mm lens)

. Lens Shade (mine is 60mm, it looks like this)

. Rubber plumbing coupling (mine is 1.5-2.0")

. Foam Tape

. Exacto knife (something to cut into the rubber plumbing coupling).

. Close-up filters (I used +6)

That's it! This is a "$12 Scanner" 'cause I'm assuming you already have a dSLR, exacto knife, close-up filters and a lens shade. These are obviously all useful independently in their own right, so the only thing to add is some plumbing gear. The coupling was about $7and the tape about $4.

Time to put it together.

Here's what you do:

What you're going to do is create an extension for your lens that the slide sits into so that you can take a picture of it as it fills the frame. Put your dSLR and filters aside, it's time to make the extension.

STEP ONE: Make sure you've got what you need and that it all fits together.

The lens shade will attach directly to the camera. This probably saves a considerable amount of work.

The rubber coupling sits inside.

Foam tape will help everything stay in place.

STEP TWO: Put it together; it's easy! Wrap the foam tape around the small end of the rubber coupling. Use your exacto knife to cut four small pieces out of the large end so that your slides will stay in place. This part is kind of tricky and not so fun.

RESULTS! This is what you get. Sorry, took the picture before the slide-bits were cut.

There's more! This is where the filters come in handy. Attach the filters (+6, here) to your camera lens (55mm). You'll be attaching the lens shade over top of this, the filters do their job acting kind of like a magnifying glass. By now, the frame will nearly be filled with the slide image.

*CLICK!* Snap away - this should be done with your camera situated on a tripod and using careful focusing. You can do it automatically or manually, whatever is most comfortable but remember that your slides are sitting at the end of the lens, so they will twist and turn as you make your adjustments. This is okay, 'cause you can just rotate things as necessary on your computer. To get a nice even light source, you should face your camera at your computer screen with a white background. Open up Microsoft Powerpoint and put a blank slide to "full screen" slideshow viewing mode.

From here, upload the picture to your computer.

Use your favorite photo editing software to take crop the image and do any minor touch-ups as necessary. It seems to work pretty well, I have even given negatives a try by simply holding them in front of the camera and messing around with the results on my iBook.

My Camera Story

2005-11-20T22:30:47Z

My First Camera(s)

Most of my cameras have been gifts or not my own, truth be told.

The first camera I ever had of my very own was a Kodak Advantix 2000. Remember that craze? That was about eight years ago - I remember because one of my aunts had just had her first baby, and everybody loves taking pictures of the wee ones in their lives. The camera came with this little box that held the exposed and developed film along with index cards. The index cards were the coolest thing, I thought, about the whole Advantix system. It was fun having my own camera and having my own pictures. My friends, my way of looking at things. It wasn't just that the cameras recorded what was happening in my life - the same could be said with the doubles of prints I got from family and friends, looking at my mother's photo albums - it was that my camera gave my record, not a record.

For as long as I can remember, I've liked to record little things - not just the faces of the people who were there, but a clumsy shot of an entire room - that's where we were. A picture of a place sitting, this is the colour of the table cloth at the wedding.

Shortly after the Advantix camera - by the time I entered high school - the Polaroid JoyCam was all the rage. The pictures were small but not too small and let's face it, it was cool to have things instantly - or just about. The image slowly fades in, waiting until it looks really done! Trouble is, it's expensive. Also, people tend to want the Polaroids you've just taken. It was a Christmas gift, so I have all these little Polaroid 500 film images of Christmas trees, lights, and my family. I like those images.

I found photography interesting but at this point it wasn't much of a hobby. I didn't go out of my way to take pictures of things, it wasn't how I would spend an afternoon. I'd be going somewhere, doing something, and decide that I wanted to take pictures of the folks who were there so the camera would come along.

SLR & The Dark Room
In my final year of high school I took a photography class sort of on a whim; thought it would be an easy credit to give me a bit of a break from homework amidst my more demanding courses. I wound up spending loads of time on my photography - taking pictures, developing negatives and prints. I used my father's old SLR - a Canon FT QL. This thing was heavy, and I had access to two lenses. A standard lens and one that worked quite nicely for portraits. Since the camera was quite old, the 1000/s shutter speed wasn't working quite right. It was so cool to take pictures and make some parts blurry and others clear, learn about different kinds of film, crank the film in and out of the camera by hand, and above all else - work in the dark room.

Taking pictures was pretty cool - but developing prints was incredible. I could be lost in that for hours - during spare time throughout the day, over lunch hours, after classes were through. Some folks were out playing sports, but by the end of my high school career I was finished being involved in that (didn't enjoy it anymore) and now spent most of my free time in the dark room with dim red light, stinky clothing-ruining chemicals and the radio.

As the year came to an end, so did my dark room experience - but I still maintained an interest in SLR photography. I liked the control of it, holding a small automatic camera just felt silly.

An SLR of One's Own

Gifts, like I told you. For Christmas in 2001, I was given a Canon Rebel G SLR. It was great - had some automatic settings when I wanted to click through a few snapshots of friends. Had all the manual control of the old SLR.

And, I could develop things at home - negatives only, but it was great to have a piece of the dark room at home.

By now, I was really interested in it - the art & science as I wrote about prior to having a photo-specific journal. I knew we had some old cameras in the house from my dad & my grandfather, I'd taken a brief look when I was taking my photography course. Recently, though, I wanted to know if they still worked, so I've begun trying them.

But first ...

Digital
I really didn't want to get into the digital thing for quite some time. I didn't think the quality could possibly be so good, you had to remove the film and developing prints, and everything was back to point-n-shoot. It couldn't possibly be for me.

Then, my family gave my dad a Nikon CoolPix 2000 and I got to give the whole thing a try. It was incredibly easy, and while I didn't think it could replace film what was amazing was the ability to shoot countless images and share them instantly.

Last year, I was given a digital camera of my own. A Casio Exilim EX-Z30, which has enabled me to take some great digital images and even videos, something totally new to me.

Camera Museum
Recently I decided to test these old cameras in my house. The discovery of flickr helped renew my interest in photography. Like many, I take photographs so that they can be looked at, and not just by me. A community of amateur, beginner, and really excellent photographers talking about photographs and photography - very cool.

So, first on the agenda was to try the Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera - worked perfectly, I think this is a great camera. Unfortunately, the film will stop being produced Q1 of 2006. Luckily, the Polaroid website has something explaining how you can use 600 film with the camera (instead of the Time Zero film). I also tried using the Adox Golf 63 camera. This was my first experience with 120 film - the little square pictures your parents used to take. Amazingly, this camera worked as well - fairly well, although there is a light leak. Not bad for a 50 year old camera - the bellows were replaced once, maybe 30-40 years ago.

Those are my dad's cameras. We also have one of my grandfather's old cameras, a camera he used to take slides all throughout Europe. That camera is the Agfa Ambi Silette, a camera I like to photograph. It takes regular 35mm film, so I've thrown a Kodak colour roll of film in there I'm just waiting to work through it.

So. That's the basic stories with the cameras up until this photo-journal. Sheer curiosity in some instances, the desire for attention, the need to be creative in others. As things progressed I have moved into another phase...

Digital SLR
It's here - a few days ago, got into the world of digital SLR photography. I was long hesitant but finally made the switch, insisting for now (though several have told me otherwise) that I will never give up film completely.

What I am enjoying so far is the ability to play around with the wonderful control of a manual SLR camera but get the results right away. I think the learning will be much faster now and with the ever-increasing quality of digital images, I won't be sacrificing in that department. What is missing is the dark room post-process, but that currently isn't happening even if I stuck with the Rebel G.

So here I am, at last, with a Canon Digital Rebel XT - and with all this new learning, I decided it was time to dedicate a blog just to photography.

A kind of notebook. So that's where I am now. :)

. jessiclick

The Gear.

2005-11-20T05:14:40Z

Thought it might be a good idea to start out with a bit of info on the kind of stuff I use. I love cameras and photography but really do consider myself to be a beginner-intermediate photographer. Hopefully this space will help me to develop technical knowledge, because my primary focus has always been twofold until recently - first, enjoying it. I do, that part is easy. Second, composition. I've grown to be fairly comfortable with that element, but have lost a lot of the technical knowledge I'd developed years ago. As I enter digital SLR photography, I figured it would be a good time - and this would be a good space - to basically take notes. :)

The Gear
. Adox Golf 63 (1952-1958)
. Agfa Ambi Silette (1957-1961)
. Canon FT QL (1966)
. Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera (1970s)
. Kodak Advantix 2000
. Polaroid JoyCam
. Canon Rebel (2001)

. Nikon CoolPix 2000 (2002)
. Casio Exilim EX-Z30 (2004)
. Canon Digial Rebel XT (2005)

. Velbon CF586 Tripod (2003)

. Film by Agfa, Ilford & Kodak
. Sandisk SD 512MB Card; CF 1GB Card

. Polarizing Filter
. +1, +2, +3 Filters
. UV-Haze and Haze-1 Filters
. Medium Yellow Filter

. Home darkroom kit to develop negatives in b&w

For my Rebel XT, I use the following three lenses:
. EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 (from my Rebel G days)
. EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 USM (designed for dSLRs exclusively)
. EF 75-300mm f/4.0-5.6 III (works well with both).

agfa ambi silette

Actual details on my experience with and use of all that gear will come soon as I post my 'story' if you will on the development of my photography hobby. Photos of the gear will appear, too, there are a few already over on my flickr account.

. jessiclick

Candle Filter Test

2005-11-19T05:20:58Z

candle filter test

Welcome.

Tonight I'm basically setting things up, so stay tuned. Substantial updates to come over the weekend including a breakdown of all the gear, my photo history, and of course - pictures. This for me is a place of learning - so all posts will be very photo-geeky. Interested more in composition and just checkin' out the good stuff, the pics? Feel free to head on over to my flickr photostream.

I will try my best to make use of tags and reserve memories for a few truly memorable entries. I welcome feedback, criticism and praise, links of interest, suggestions of other photographers to check out.

Thanks for stopping by!

. jessiclick