Riding the Rails

It has been a couple of great days. Lots of beer, lots a friends. Last night, in particular was good. Met a woman who has suggest that I photograph her this summer, just some fun stuff, her and a few friends and maybe another photographer or two. Could turn out the be the best summer of my life (and if so, I'll just have to try to top it next year).

So right now, I'm editing photos, scanning, checking the blogs I usually read, and listening to some Ani DiFranco. There was an excellent post by Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer about why a photblog can be about just photography. Here's the relevant piece, Mike says:

Photography is mainly about life, and the world. It's about people, events, feeling-tone, places, animals, history, death, modes, conditions, politics (yes, politics), poetry, colors, evidence, personal identity, nostalgia, artistic expression, all sorts of things...and it's about responses as well. Photography is a recording medium that can be used in innumerable ways, for every sort of purpose under the sun; it trades in information and meaning, in the observance or in the breach, and the loop it proposes is a communications loop, between subject, photographer, and viewer and back around again, twisting and rebounding and reverberating betwixt and between subject and object in its implications—and it makes no sense to ignore all these significations. In other words, when looking at pictures of the homeless, it makes no sense not to discuss homelessness—or any of the many issues that pertain to the fact of subject, or to the pictures and the act of making them.

That much is clear here, isn't it—at least cumulatively? If this website has a theme, that is probably it. If T.O.P. were "only about photography" in the sense of being restricted to the phototechnical, it would be like a website about writing that discusses only pencils and word processing programs, or a blog about music that concentrates mainly on piano tunings or a conductor's stance on repeats. It would have to ignore far more than it includes. Which is fine for them what wants it, but it certainly ain't for me.

Amen brother.

So what makes today's photograph significant, besides its having been taken by lil ol' me;)

Tomorrow is set to be a long day. We're going to Penticton with plans to leave the house by 6am. Getting any extra sleep on the way there is out of the question because I'm traveling with with people who, though they can go for hours without speaking to each other in the course of a normal day, appear to be physically incapable of going more than five minutes without speaking if placed in a vehicle (I know, I've timed them).

The pic was taken in the Penticton Rose Gardens in July of 2005.

Man am i tired. Maybe i should remove coffee from my diet, see if that helps.

A back lane in Grand Forks, taken last August.

Last night was good. I got a few shots from the area of the posted photo previous, before the misting drizzle turned into light rain. Then i went downtown and managed to steal a couple of shots from underneath a well placed awning, before taking a break from the rain with a couple of pints at the Winnie.

Some may be wondering why i didn't pack an umbrella, and it is a valid question, especially considering that i lost out on two or three potentially excellent photos for being without a wee portable awning of my own. While i have shot with the aid of an umbrella in the past, i've found that it tends to be more trouble than it's worth, usually. In the middle of the day, umbrella in one hand, camera in the other, auto-focus on etc., etc., things are tricky. Throw a tripod into the mix and things become downright cumbersome for one person to handle alone (and after dark the 'fun' only multiplies).

Under such conditions an assistant would be most helpful. Now if i can just find someone crazy enough to want to walk three or more miles in the rain while occasionally stopping to hold an umbrella over a camera instead of their self, for no money, and even less glory.

*I crossed paths with this critter on the Trans-Canada Trail in Grand Forks last August. It's taken me this long to figure out how to crop the photo.

Last night was a bit rough.

I've been looking into new equipment purchases, a 13" printer and a 35mm f2 lens. I know I can't afford either right now, but I can look and try to figure out where what I want when I finally have the cash. The lens that I really want is a Carl Zeiss, now the Canadian Zeiss distributor doesn't mention the 35mm on their site, but they do mention the 50mm f1.4 and by comparing the the European prices of the two lenses I can deduce that the Zeiss 35mm would cost me roughly $1200CN before taxes. Suddenly the Nikon AF 35mm f/2D at $400 doesn't sound too bad, despite mediocre performance and construction. As an added bonus, the Nikon lens won't disable the TTL metering on my overly computerised F55 (I will get Zeiss glass, it'll just be later than I'd hoped).

As for the printer, I'm looking at an HP B9180. Unfortunately I live in the interior of British Columbia, so the boxstores that the Canadian HP website directs me to and tells me to "call for availability" not only won't have the printer, but (based upon visits to their respective websites) don't even stock the ink cartridges. Looks like I'm going to be forced to buy online. (oh and the HP Canada site is a byzantine mess, at least as bad as Nikon Canada's was the last time I entered that hell)

The photo is Grand Forks, last July, shot near the Station House Pub. There had been a couple of deer down that I had wanted to shoot in the long grass using the other end of my 28-80mm zoom, but by the time I'd set up the ol' tripod to deal with the low light and long-ish shutter times they'd buggered right off, so I reset and took this.

It's interesting (to me anyways) that here I am, approaching my 100th post and yet half the time I still struggle to find something to write in this thing. Really, how much do I have to say? So much of my time is spent "doing nothing," waiting for I don't know what.


Maybe I just need to get out more, even if I don't particularly feel like it. Just grab myself by the scruff of the then neck and out.

*The Kettle River, shot from on the old rail trestle by Pope & Talbot Grand Forks, 8:30pm, 14 July 2006.

Well happy spring festival of Dionysus St. Patrick's Day. I'm just getting ready to go out for my first night of carousing in a fortnight (I've been saving up), but thought I'd post something first.

I'm actually somewhat proud of this shot, not for the composition or anything so mundane, but rather because of the amount of work that I had to put into getting the final output. The negative was fairly badly scratched, it looked as though a mouse had stepped on it while skittering around, either that, or the world smallest cat had taken a swipe at it. So I fixed that between scan settings and Photoshop, and did a bunch of other nit picky stuff that isn't part of my normal routine.

The old (as in no longer in use) rail trestle over the Kettle river, into the back end of Pope & Talbot. Shot 15 July 2006 in Grand Forks, BC, Canada, at 9:00pm.

Went out photographing this evening. Unfortunately there was a high level haze that left the sky a rather unappealing shade. And this haze was thick enough in the west to leave the light fairly flat. Still, I did snap a few pics of some deer that I came across, and I won't complain about a two hour walk under fairly nice conditions.

I might get out tomorrow if the whether' nice enough (I think I saw something about rain for tomorrow) and if my shoulder's up to it (I need to find some different way of packing my tripod around).

Just a cute puppy pic for U today.

One of the things I never did when I lived in Penticton, was hop the bus out to Naramata, although I had started to think about it around the time that we moved. When I was there, it was just a small shuttle bus on the route and there's no reason to think that's changed but the service is pretty regular, five times a day during the week and four times on Saturday. I know this because I was just on the BC Transit web site.

I had been thinking about taking the local shuttle bus out to Greenwood, but that not going to happen. The shuttle bus is from Greenwood to Grand Forks, one round trip, once a week (there is a wait of a couple hours between entering GF and leaving again).

While I'm slightly disappointed, I can't say that I'm especially surprised. There are some pretty major differences of scale involved: Naramata's 4-5 times the size of Greenwood, and Penticton's about 8 or 9 times the size of GF.

Today's photo was taken from my back yard (well from 150-200' to the right of my backyard) on 1 February 2006 at about 8:30am (I have mentioned that I'm generally an afternoon-night person).

Well the snow's been melting around here, I'd say that it's more than half gone, and the temperatures have been fairly mild over the past, well, week or so. And we're supposed to have a mix of sun and cloud just about everyday this week, so I think I've got a pretty good chance to go out and snap some pics, probably on Wednesday or Thursday.

I watched Logan's Run last night (I bought the DVD last Wednesday, along with Blade Runner), I'm a bit surprised with the PG rating given the violence, nudity, sexuality and apparent drug use, particually since Blade Runner has an R rating for the same reasons. Admittedly Blade Runner is darker, grittier and has more violent content, but both movies get a Canadian Home Movie Rating of 14A. But then the Canadian Home Video Rating System (which only applies to video rental/purchase) is a very different critter from MPAA system. The MPAA rates Benny & Joon as PG while the CHV rates the movie as R (roughly equivalent to NC-17 in meaning and intent). *sigh*

The pic is of the north face of the Penticton Law Courts, downtown, near Okanagan Lake and the casino (and City Hall, but who cares about that?). Shot 7 July 2005.

We picked up our new motor-home yesterday. It might be serviceable to our needs, but I find the layout awkward and limiting. I suppose that's the price that has to be paid for having a permanent bed at the back of a 25 foot class C.

In other news, I'm getting somewhat annoyed with my ISP. To put it bluntly, Shaw has dropped my IP five times in the past three days, that I've noticed. As far as surfing goes, I've only been online maybe four or five hours on any given day, and I don't pay too much attention to whether or not my IM can keep a connection while I'm scanning film or otherwise occupied with non-internet tasks.

The pic is of Dusty, aka Fuzzbutt, shot in our backyard in Penticton about a year-and-a-half ago.

Well, the rescanning continues apace, and I've come to a decision about rescanning the negs I've made prints from. I'm only going to rescan the ones most likely to benefit from the reduction in graininess. That's gonna mean 20 fewer rescans, and more importantly it means only having to re-edit 5 instead of 25 images. And hey, If I ever get bored, the negatives are still there.

I other news, the family is getting a new (to us) motorhome. Our soon to be former home away from home is almost 20 years old, and the time and energy that it now takes to keep the old girl running can be better spent just about anywhere else by my 75 & 3/4 year old grandfather. Our new motorhome will be a bit smaller, but it's only four or five years old. We go to pick it up in Kelowna on Thursday.

Today's pic is another of my early SLR shots from Penticton, shot on 1 July 2005.

Well, I've scanned/rescanned everything I wanted from the 12 numbered rolls from 2005. That didn't take that long, of course there were only about 60 images in there that I felt were worth the disk space to begin with. The next 14 rolls I have to rescan have closer to 180 "worthwhile" images.

The only real advantage I have in all this is that I kept notes of the scan settings I used for each image. What this means is that, for the most part, I won't have to do preview scans and fiddle with settings (some of which require rescanning the preview) before I get right into the main scanning.

Having played around a bit (Nikon Scan can be used to edit post scan) I've found that the USM settings I had been using had more effect the grainier the base image was. The noisier the grain, the more the USM increased the noise. Oh well, I things go well, I should be all caught up again in a week or three (that's including all the post work that has to be redone, well most of post work that has to be redone).

This shot was taken in Penticton in June of 2005. I don't know if I'll ever make a print out of it, but I do like the play between the mural and the two vans.

I'm having one of those days, weeks, months, years, lives.

It looks like the past four month's work may have just gone down the proverbial shitter.

I've been scanning some of my older work and noticing really harsh grain and had been blaming the film (I was using a different film then, a store brand, but still). So anyway, playing a hunch, I turn off all sharpening in the Nikon program and boom, problem solved. So now I have to go back and rescan, at the least, the six to eight other rolls of this particular film that I had scanned with preliminary sharpening done in the scanning program.

But here's the rub, if the "bad" film scans better without the sharpening what about the "good" Fujifilm I've been using for the past 18 months (giver or take). Am I going to have to rescan the 15 to 20 rolls of Fuji Superia I've shot (not to mention the editing of all these rescans). The answer is yes, because as much of a pain in the ass as it's going to be, I am an anal prick when it comes to image quality (which happens to be the second biggest reason that only going after a 13 inch printer, I'd rather make a superb 12x18 than a mediocre 20x30).

Now to go and bang my head against that brick wall I've building for the past four months.

*note: I think it only fair to mention that the problem has much more to do with me than it does with the Nikon Scan program. My understanding of unsharp masking comes from my experience with Photoshop, in which the "radius" of the unsharp mask is expressed in pixels, while in Nikon Scan that same "radius" is expressed as a %. I also have no doubt that there are other differences in the way in which the two programs handle USM procedures and effects. Add my inexperience with film scanning itself, specifically just what a 20 mega-pixel scan of film X should look like on a computer screen at 100% magnification, and, well...