I’m relaunching ev-15.com with new software and a new focus. I guess technically it is a photo blog of sorts but it is not really intended to be that.
At this point the site design is unfinished and and the RSS feed is half done and it needs some more work on the back end, but I like where it is headed, so enjoy.
I spent another few days in Massachusetts this week, working on wind projects. I had three distinct projects to visit, one I have been working on for a while and two to kick off. I started in Boston, visiting Nut Island to take some photographs and Deer Island to discuss progress. Then it was off west to Worcester (Wooster) to kick off a wind study on a grey Wednesday morning. After Worcester it was off to the cape to kick off a similar study in Wellfleet. The cape is quiet in January, and up in Wellfleet many people only live in the houses they own a couple months out of the year. Must be a tough life.Â
Photos from a walk to the reservoir.
The Olympus E-410 digital SLR I ordered last week arrived yesterday, so I took it downtown today for a test run. The camera handles nicely. It’s lightweight and comfortable to hold even though  it doesn’t have the now-standard hand grip that came to being around the time Canon switched to EOS from the manual focus FD cameras. In terms of width and height the body is no bigger than my Canonet rangefinder, but like seemingly all modern SLRs it is deep, especially with a lens attached.
The stock 14-42mm (28-85mm 35mm equivalent) lens is fairly good, and the camera and lens together handle quite naturally. The viewfinder is small compared to a 35mm SLR, but I got used to it fairly quickly, and it is bright and works well for framing. Manual focus on the kit lenses is a by-wire system with no distance indication (and it only works when the camera is on) but it isn’t difficult to use relative to any other autofocus SLR (split ring focusing screens have gone the way of the dodo, sadly). Autofocus is relatively quick and quiet and the overall setup is snappy.
I took to it pretty quickly, and treated it like I would treat a film SLR. There was plenty of sunlight, so I set the camera ISO to 100 and raw capture, and turned off the screen. I also turned off the record review function and shot as if I had film. When I got home I loaded everything up and started working with the results.
It’s different than working with negatives and a scanner, but the basic idea is the same. The in-camera settings produce good looking files, but a little post-processing seems to help quite a bit. One thing I am still working on is getting the colors that come out of the camera to feel more like what I would get from the films I typically use. The blues of the sky are very blue, and a little more intense than I am used to seeing from film. To be fair, the sky was very blue in real life.
I went back to the pictures I took in Central Park, and significantly expanded the gallery.
After spending way too much time trying to figure out how to plug my galleries into wordpress, I decided to plug wordpress into my galleries. A few bits of procedural code, a half dozen functions, and a fight with mod_rewrite later, my photo galleries are back.
But for now I want to link to the pictures I took on Sunday and tell you a little about the weekend. On Friday I met Sam, Ric, and others for First Friday, in the Crossroads district downtown. There are a lot of galleries and some studios that open up for the evening, and for a brief period of time KC proper seems like a city, rather than a collection of buildings. Last Friday there was a big stage set up near 19th and Wyandotte with a choir singing stuff, though they didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic.
One of the places we went to was this cool printing shop that had a big collection of old presses and the like. From the look of things they were still in use. They had atypical Kansas City postcards, and a wall covered in custom band posters detailing all of the bands that came to KC and Lawrence that I failed to see. I’m going to have to try harder in the future.
Our group ended the night at a restaurant called Pangaea, which is on 39th street just a little ways west of Southwest Trafficway. Good food and great presentation there. I was impressed.
I didn’t really do anything on Saturday that I can recall.
On Sunday I went downtown in the early afternoon and walked around a lot with two cameras and a light meter. The few people I did see also walking around seemed a bit shady, but no one bothered me or anything. I saw the current state of construction of the Sprint Center, which is no longer a giant hole in the ground. The Power & Light District is going up right across the street from that, and even though I’m cynical I am holding out some hope that they can help bring downtown up a bit.
I also made it to Union Station and the Liberty Memorial for the first time in what might be more than three years. I’m not entirely sure but that seems right. The nice thing about Union Station is that it seems just about impossible to take a bad picture in there. The trick with photographing the Liberty Memorial is to avoid taking the normal pictures: the entire Memorial from a distance or a shot looking up to the top of the tower. Neither gives a good impression of how massive that pillar really is.
No, I’m not going to go on any sort of rant here. I’m getting too old for that. I just wanted to post a direct comparison of a picture I took on Fuji Superia 400 color negative film with a Canon T70 and scanned on an Epson 3200 Photo (too much technical detail wow sorry about that) with the same picture taken at the same time of the same thing but on my Canon A540.
Now before we go too far, this comparison isn’t really fair. I’m comparing an SLR with a large, heavy, high-quality lens to a cheap point and shoot with a tiny little zoom lens. That’s not even remotely equal. Still, all I really want to do is show the difference between how the highlights are rendered from both cameras.
Film
Digital
I was able to recover some detail in the leaves on the digital shot but it also ended up looking grey and kind of lifeless. I could probably spend more time trying to match the film but that wasn’t my point, and like I said this isn’t really a competition.
I went with Adam and JoLynn to the Overland Park Arboretum today. It’s a ways out of the main part of town, down at 179th street west of Highway 69. I never even knew it existed until last night, but I’m glad Adam mentioned it. It’s like a combination of McFarland Park and Reiman Gardens in Ames, and it’s enormous.
The weather was very cooperative. It was around 80, with a nice breeze, blue skies, and puffy white clouds. You really couldn’t ask for a better day.
I took maybe 50 frames with my T70 on two rolls of Fuji film, and about a dozen shots on my little digicam. I’m taking the film in tomorrow over lunch, but I’ll put up a couple digital shots right now.
Berries!
One of those roofs that gives shade without really being a roof.
The tree with leaves all up the trunk.
My uncle gave me his 35-105 zoom lens when I was in Pittsburgh. It was an amazingly nice thing for him to do, and now I’ve put up the first photos I’ve taken with it. They turned out pretty good, especially considering the light i was working with. Note that the last two pictures are actually from my tiny olympus, I just didn’t have a better place to put them.
