Big Body, teeny pixels?

This is my newly unearthed dinosaur -- the Nikon E2N.
It's big.
It's really big...
It's like holy cow big...
It's like nearly-the-size-of-my-head big... If you tied it to me and threw me in the lake, I would drown in minutes... If someone breaks into my house, I'm not going for the baseball bat -- I'm grabbing the E2N. It's like trying to shoot with a bowling ball. It's a camera built for Hulk Hogan.
Or Godzilla...

The only drawback? The big fella's only got 1.3 Megapixels.:( Ha. Rachel's cell phone has more.

The memory card is a Flash ATA card (with a whopping 15MB). The card itself is the size of an iPod. I put a Tokina manual lens with Nikon mount on it, which worked, but I can't get the battery to stay charged long enough to take more than ten pictures at a time. At some point, I'll post some. If I can take any decent ones. Check out more massiveness: http://www.nikonweb.com/e2n/



By the way, these shots were taken with my Canon 40D. With significantly more megapixels.

-Jon

Rio, Part III: In the Favela

Here are some pictures I took last month of life in the favela. These people were there to visit the medical clinic we were hosting, which was in the favela of Dende on Governor's Island. We were there for five days, with a pediatric and dental clinc, a pharmacy and an eye clinic, which is where I worked (can you say 'precisa de oculos'?) All are shot on my Canon A-1, using Ilford 400 B&W. See more ahead:






In Rio, the slogan is "BASTA", which means 'enough'. Thanks for looking.

Pano at the Lake. Good times for all.

Back out to Long Hunter State Park.. we decided to try some Pano shots and here is the result. See more...

On Location: These are taken using between four and six portrait-oriented shots. The trick is to find an exposure that is in a median range for the entire scene, set the camera accordingly in Manual mode, and then leave it. When taking the shots, be sure to leave about 1/3rd of each frame overlapped by the next.

Post-Production: They were batch color-corrected in RAW format and then stiched using Adobe's Photomerge. We still did plenty of color adjusting, dodging and burning, as well as contrast enhancement using a method we learned that applies curves to the single channels rather than the image as a whole.

The first two are Rachel's and the last is mine. Thanks for looking.

Rio, Part II: Surroundings

Here are some more of my pictures from Rio. This is a little different from the tourist side posted previously. They were all taken with a Canon A-1 film camera on Fuji Superia film.

Here are the eye-charts we used to help find eyeglasses for locals in the favela. And here is the cow-tongue and pork lunch.




























Some Brazilian "barbed-wire".



Thanks for looking. More to follow.

You want Independence? Get a remote!

In the spirit of July 4th we decided to experiment with shooting some fireworks... in the photo sense of course. After hunting down a moderate view away from boisterous crowds we set up our tripods and got to work. Follow the link to see more images and how to get them. Without much of a zoom on my Canon Xsi's stock 18-55 I ended up with some nice shots but a little more cropping in post-production. It did force into most frames the ever iconic AT&T tower which I decided to keep in most shots. I lacked a remote so I decided to take advantage of some longer shutter speeds keeping mostly between 0"5 and 2"5. The quicker speeds I used for faster barrages and slower speeds for larger less frequent explosions. The Nashville display is synced to the symphony so we had the benefit of musical queues for prepping speeds and the like. I kept my F-stop at F8 for most of the evening. Although towards the end I found F9-10 with quicker shutter speeds minimized shake and maximized the skyline. All in all a fair shooting but high hopes for next year having a better vantage point up wind from the smoke and remotes!

Bounced off-camera flash

Here are some pictures I took of Rachel. I used my 580 EX II on a sync cable to bounce the flash down and toward the wall in front of her.

What I like here is that the wall I bounced off of had a gold / yellow hue, which comes out in the skin tones. There is no significant ambient light, so all the light comes from bouncing off the large wall surface behind me. I got a surprisingly soft light this way, which replaced the use of a large gold reflector.