Tribute To Lomography

I had a chance encounter with a broken Holga camera during my morning walk. This camera, along with the Diana, had something of a cult following owing to their simple meniscus lens design which made the quality of the images produced pleasantly inconsistent. To quote Wikipedia, the Holga “often yields pictures that display vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other distortions.” Even if this Holga was fully functional, I doubt that I would have taken it, seeing how expensive film is, and that I no longer have the processing equipment to develop it, let alone make prints from the negatives. The whole movement of using a "toy" camera to create photographic art was given its own name: Lomography.

Full Description Here.

Fujifilm XM-FL 24mm f/8: I wanted to experiment with this lomographic effect, so I bought this lens from a dealer in Japan some years back. I paid less than $80.00 for it. I recently found one for sale on eBay for $200.00. I bought the silver version because it was $5.00 less than the black version. Also, it appears to be quite rare on this side of the Pacific because Fuji USA never saw fit to import this novelty lens.

Lenses like this are often called Body Cap lenses due to their ultra compact size. In fact, it's easy to miss the tiny lens opening during a casual observation. It  has a fixed aperture setting of F 8.0 and has three different filters setting identified by notches on a rotating filter wheel: Single Notch places a protective filter over the lens to fend off dirt and scratches, Double Notch produces cross stars for some additional sparkle, and Triple Notch provides a soft focus effect.

Today's photos were made with the Single Notch setting, which basically means no special effects. On casual examination, the images are reasonably sharp.

See Trials: My first excursion with the lens was made during a heavily overcast morning, which made the lens' lack of contrast pretty obvious. This image was given the "Smartfix Preset" in post production, which didn't help matters much.

I made no White Balance adjustments to compensate for the cool early morning light. For the most part, these images are Right Out Of Camera (ROOC). I need to pay more attention to my cropping.

The lens has been set so that everything from 1 meter to infinity would be "sorta" in focus.

Since I was working in the dawn's early light, I set my ISO to 3200 to insure a reasonable exposure time. This shot was made at 1/170 of a second.

This was an appropriate photo for a toy lens.

No doubt about the address here.

A car makes a left turn onto Cole Street.

Brewery sign as seen from the parking lot in the Inner Sunset.

Sometimes yellow becomes the new red.

A splendid idea: Spend a day making sidewalk art with chalk.

Here's the date and the time.

Chalk of choice.

 Good advice. Image adjusted in post production.

A discarded robe collecting wayward leaves. Image adjusted in post production.

I enjoyed using this "toy" lens. Let's do it again, but with some strong sunlight. It certainly challenges the notion of "sharp" versus "focused" images.

So far, it seems sharp enough for the web.

Memorial Day On The Peninsula

 

There is one certainty when photographing community events, and that is you never know when a better image may come along. Unlike editorial photography where there is a specific goal, photographs submitted from events may not have a specific person or thing to highlight, so it is up to the photographer to make an image that best represents the "vibe" of the gathering. This weekend there were two different events, and each served two different purposes.

The lead photo was from the annual flag planting ceremony at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. It had been cancelled last year due to the pandemic, and many still took the precaution of wearing a mask. Most of the participants were Scouts for the area, and now that young women are becoming more common in local troops, I really wanted them to be represented. 

Lens Choice: Normally I would bring my "big guns" to the event, and when I was shooting Nikons, my kit composed of a three bodies: One with a 24-70 2.8 Nikkor on a  D600 (full frame) body, a 70-200 2.8 Nikkor on an APS body, and a Sigma 150-600 lens on another APS body, if I remember correctly. I always carried the Sigma, as one time I actually needed its long focal length to do some major visual compression. I don't know how much all this stuff weighed, but I do know I was always exhausted when I was done.

This year, I had an epiphany: Since I was shooting outdoors, I didn't need to bring those F 2.8 lenses, which are quite dense. My Fuji kit consisted of a X-T1 with an 18-55 F 2.8-4.0, the Fuji X-mount "kit lens". My X-T2 body was fitted with a 55-200 F3.5-4.8 lens. I still carried a third camera, a Nikon D7200 riding on a 200-500 F 5.6 Nikkor, the lens that replaced my old Sigma. In terms of perspective, I had a focal length for any situation, and lightened my load by a considerable amount. 

Directing My Subjects: For the record, I did some directing on my two young subjects. This was limited to having the "flag lady" kneel when she planted the flag, and had her hold the unused flags a little higher for better visibility. I'm not pretending that I didn't have any contact with the subjects, which is a basic tenet of ethical photojournalism, but to my defense, they were actually installing the flags, so I wasn't actually influencing what they were already doing.

Proud Fathers: I worked with these two Scouts for quite some time, so before long their fathers drop by to see what was going on. After introducing myself, I asked if they'd like to have a photo with their daughters, and they were delighted. Think about, it only took a minute or two to make the shot, pretty much exactly where they were already standing. I must say that the Goddess of Lighting was watching out for me, because all of the photos taken in the series had the soft lighting of a cloudy-bright day, so there is plenty of form-defining shadows in their faces. It doesn't get any easier than that.