Black and White Photography Blog

Ah, they were good.  (In front of the Met.)  I could’ve listened to them all day.  Beautiful harmonies.  I always have to remind myself when I’m shooting singers that there isn’t going to be any sound with the photo.

I just got an email from my ISP that they’re upgrading my account and one of the things they said was:

If you have any databases, they will be upgraded along with your website. During they upgrade, your existing database name and database username will change to include 14970_ before them.

For example, if you have a database “sales” it will now be “14970_sales”. If you have a username “saleslogin”, it will now be “14970_saleslogin”. All database passwords should remain the same.

If you have any applications or scripts that connect to databases, you will need to update your configuration information. This includes things such as WordPress Blogs, Bulletin Boards, Forums, etc.

——— Any wordpress gurus out there that can tell me what exactly I’ll have to reconfigure?

The IR flash bounces all over the place on this silvery structure.

I spent the morning at the Metropolitan Museum with the IR flash. (Remember - no flash.) I also photographed with flash in the various photography galleries where no pictures at all are allowed.

I stumbled across Miguel Marrero giving dance lessons under the Bethesda Overpass. I did a bunch of infrared flash shots in this dark area.

Fifth Avenue, across from Engineers Gate.

Engineers Gate - Central Park.

John Purroy Mitchel (July 19, 1879 - July 6, 1918) was the mayor of New York from 1914 to 1917, and at age 34 the youngest ever; he was sometimes referred to as “The Boy Mayor of New York”. His grandfather, John Mitchel, was a Presbyterian Young Irelander (Irish nationalist supporter), and a renowned writer and leader in the Irish independence movement.

Mitchel ran again for Mayor in the highly-charged wartime election of 1917. He narrowly lost the Republican primary to William Bennett after a contentious recount, but ran for re-election as a pro-war Fusion candidate against Bennett, the anti-war Socialist Morris Hillquit and the Tammany Hall Democrat John F. Hylan, who won the election without taking a clear position on the War. (Mitchel barely beat Hillquit for second place.)

After failing to get re-elected, Mitchel joined the Signal Corps Army Air service. He died thirteen days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, in a training accident in Louisiana, on July 6, 1918. Mitchel fell out of his aircraft at 500 feet and plummeted to the ground, dying instantly. It was thought that he had forgotten to fasten his seat belt. (From Wikipedia)

Wow - what a way to go. A mayor of New York fell to his death from a plane.

I spent an hour or so in the park last night with the infrared flash. Photographed runners etc. but the most interesting subjects for night infrared (at least last night) were the statues, and architecture.  The buildings of New York are just so different at night with the IR flash.  More to come…

There have been a few leaks about the 50D and a number of people - well - two - have sent me links.  Thanks Markus and Elliot.

Here’s a link that leads to a bunch of other links about the Canon 50d camera.

As I’ve said before, the only thing I’m interested in is the extra pixels, although as my eyes go from looking at too much infrared light (who knows what that’s been doing to me) the face recognition technology will be helpful.  But seriously - I think by the time I can’t focus on faces properly I should hang up the camera.

My father’s house for breakfast. My sister Joan is making the face (bottom of image). My father is at 9:00. I’m there obviously at 12. At one o’clock is my sister Nancy. And at five is Joan’s fiancee, Freddie. Shot into the lamp that hangs over the breakfast table. The things that look like crop circles are placemats.

Basically what I did - was stand by the first car of the shuttle and wait to try and catch people running to catch it. Since there is always another shuttle in a few minutes, it is very New York to see how desperate people are to catch the train before it leaves to go to Times Square (from Grand Central). The flute player, just rides the trains back and forth. There are tons of cameras photographing me as I photograph the dash to the train.

The infrared flash is great for these deep rich black and white photos. I like the results better than what I did last summer with the flash and HIE film. But it is really not very good for color. I suspect this is because it was setup for HIE film which is a bit higher on the spectrum. In other words, the flash is similar to using an 87 infrared filter, and the camera is set to pick up from 720 nm. The combination is excellent, as I say for black and white, but not useful for color IR. So what you’ll see, if I’m using the flash will be in black and white. When you see color infrared, it’s either the straight camera, or in a few cases I’ve actually used the dinky “normal” on-camera flash for fill. This gave an interesting effect in the photograph below of the sky and trees, where the flash hit trees and brought them up so they had some punch against the sky.

And yes, the flash gives “sensous” results with people, but it is very rare for it to “see through clothes.” Generally, it gives this sheen to the clothing and outlines are more pronounced than they’d be with normal film or infrared film.

As far as technique with the IR flash goes: it’s pretty straight forward. I set the camera to manual, and the shutter speed to 1/200th (which is the highest sync speed on the camera). Figure out what a reasonable f-stop is going to be, usually about f5.6 or f8.0.

Then I just adjust the flash for the distance, i.e. with the Vivitar it’s set to either “yellow” or “red”. The flash adjusts itself based on what is returned to it’s sensor. At most, I’m off by a stop or so.

You can’t really use the flash in other “creative” modes since the camera doesn’t recognize it. It fires, but it doesn’t take into consideration what the flash is doing so in a typical dark scene it’s going to want to open the aperature or slow down the shutter speed.

M. says I’m complaining over trivial stuff because I expect the camera to be able to read flash light in AV or Program mode - but is that asking too much. I’d need a dedicated flash to do that. Whatever, results are very pleasing to me so far.

On other notes, since the subject sees the flash unit on top, or sometimes I use it off-camera with a cord, they expect it to go off. The fact that they don’t see the invisible flash makes the situation even more confusing for them. The guy’s got a flash, but I don’t see it going off. Guess he didn’t take the shot. It’s actually a good street-photography decoy.

And okay - a couple of quick notes about using the Canon 350 XT:

- My pinkie (sp?) finger on the right hand is blistered because it wants to go under the camera.

- There are some custom functions that I normally use on the 40D that are missing.

- It is freakin’ tiny. The buttons are tiny. The viewfinder is tiny. I have trouble pressing some of them and may get my fingers sharpened.

- Did I say it was lightweight. I don’t expect it weighs more than the Vivitar 285HV flash I’m using.

- The battery life is short, very short compared to the 40D battery. One battery is usually showing low by the end of a few hours of shooting. With the 40D I could go a week or more before the battery indicator moves to low.

To solve the blistered pinkie finger and the battery issues I’m end up buying the battery holder which uses two xt batteries.

But for something that right now is sort of in the experimental phase - it was a good choice. If money was no object - i.e. if I didn’t need to think about it - I’d rather use it with a larger more sophisticated camera (think 5d, 40d etc.)

NEXT STOP: Some museum where they don’t allow flash photography. They actually don’t allow flash photography on the subway but I’ve yet to see any tourist rounded up for that.