Category Archives: Cameras

Black and White, Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Washington DC

Street Portraits

May 12, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Just some random captures of people out and about. I want to get better at street candids, so I’m practicing. These are a few good examples, at least I think they’re good, for me.

I saw this man crossing the street early in the morning, loaded down with his bags. I don’t think this shot would have worked in black-and-white – the hodgepodge of tweed jacket, American flag logo bag, Adidas bag, and the plastic shopping bag wouldn’t pop if they were tonally similar.

I’ve posted the boy on the bus sleeping before. This one DOES work better in black-and-white because the brightness of his hat and shirt contrast with his skin color and give him a very peaceful, almost angelic look.

This man is watching the overhead sign announcing the upcoming station. I caught him in an unguarded moment, doing what everyone does on the train. Hard to tell if he’s a tourist or a local.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Jaleo, In and Out

May 12, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I’ve walked past the giant red JALEO letters in the window of Jaleo, a Spanish tapas restaurant downtown DC, for years, wanting to photograph them but never really getting it the way I want. The first shot comes the closest. To get what I’d like to get, I’d have to stand in the street, in the winter, and cut down the trees out front as well. So this will have to do.

A view into the restaurant. Photographically, what interests me in taking an image like this is the visual layering that happens – there’s reflections in the glass, the big red J, the people at the table, the pendant lights leading you away deep inside the restaurant, the other patrons at tables in the rear. Sociologically, this is another indictment of the modern life – two people at dinner staring at their phones instead of interacting with each other.

It’s a sad commentary on how inward-focused we as a society have become that it is socially acceptable for two people (or more!) to go to dinner together and interact more with their digital devices than with the other human beings at the same table. We’re there to do one of the most basic and most pleasurable things two or more humans can do – share a meal. Put down the damn phone at the dinner table!

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Commuter Diary, Part 11

May 12, 2015 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

More in my Commuter Diary series. These are more about the people on the train and in the station than they are about the stations and trains.

The man in the suit stands out not only from his attire but also from his posture and from actually standing apart from the other riders on the platform waiting for a train.

This was a visual experiment for me, to see what it would look like to follow a moving subject. This man was talking furiously on his phone, pacing back and forth in an erratic elliptical orbit of a spot on the platform.

The flow of people is remarkably sharp given the length of time I had the shutter open for (several seconds). The repetition of people’s shapes going down the escalator is from the escalator being turned off and them walking down, so they pause just long enough between strides that they register over and over again. I’m going to re-try this experiment and see how many repetitions I can capture.

Another typical experience in the daily life of a commuter – watching the person in front of you as you ride up the escalator.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Street Style

May 11, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I’m still learning how to shoot candid street scenes. This is a relative success story. I got on film what I imagined when I composed and shot this image – shallow depth of field emphasizing the boy with the red sneakers and mirror sunglasses. I saw him coming toward me, guesstimate focused a distance, then clicked the shutter when he hit that point. There was another shot I took on the same walkabout of a little boy clowning around on one of the bikeshare bikes that I had to guess the focus, and I missed, which was very disappointing because it was a cute composition.

I’m on the fence about the crop, though. Does it draw too much attention away from the boy in the red sneakers?

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

World Health Organization in color

May 11, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I’ve been photographing the World Health Organization building in black and white, regularly, because the architecture lends itself so very nicely to geometric abstracts. Here it is in color, to show a different take on photo abstraction and the creation of meaning in an image.

World Health Organization, Sky 'V' — World Health Organization, Sky ‘V’

World Health Organization End, 'Monolith' — World Health Organization End, ‘Monolith’

The building itself was designed by Uruguayan architect Roman Fresnedo Siri. In 1961, Siri won an international design competition with his arc and cylinder concept. Construction was begun in 1963 and the building opened officially on September 27, 1965. There are bronze plaques on the face of the tower representing each of the 29 member nations.

Cameras, Color, Macro, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Planter Box Waterer

May 8, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I saw this hose connector for watering the planter box down the street from my office and the blue handle contrasted perfectly with the new green grass around it. The light filtering through the tree leaves above the planter box made dappled patterns in the grass and softened up the scene so that the contrast was created through color as much as it was through brightness and darkness. The shallow depth-of-field really makes the blue of the handle pop out even more against the sea of green.

It was also the perfect opportunity to test out the macro capability of my Tele-Rollei with the Rolleinar 1 close-up set.A friend of mine had advised me that the Rolleinars made for the standard Rollei work just fine with the Tele-Rolleiflex. There were a separate set of Rolleinars originally designed for the Tele, and they look somewhat different. I was concerned that the parallax-correcting prism for the viewing lens in the Rolleinar set for the standard would over-correct and the composition would be off, but it doesn’t, as can be seen here. The pump handle is in exactly the spot I composed for.

Black and White, Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

World Health Organization Recap

April 26, 2015 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

A recap of the World Health Organization images I’ve made. There are more coming, but they’re on several rolls I haven’t had a chance to process yet (I’ve got to get a couple more shot to run a batch).

This first one is in some ways the most graphic of the bunch, if not the most abstract. In winter, near sundown, you can see this bare tree in front of the white marble wall on the end of the building. There’s the contrast between the black organic shape of the tree against the white rectilinear grid of the wall.

The rest of these don’t bear commentary because you’ve seen them before here on my blog. Go back and re-read the posts ( here, here, here, here, here, and here) for the details of my thoughts and ideas about the images.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Washington DC

Portrait of Simon

April 22, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

This is a very dear old friend of mine who I’ve known for close on 20 years now. We originally met on an IRC chatroom (that’s really dating me – how many of you out there even remember what that was?) and stayed in touch long after. Simon came to visit me when I was living in Baltimore, then I ran into him again several years later at Chatuchak Market in Bangkok, quite unplanned and unexpectedly. Several years after that, he returned to Baltimore, this time as a graduate student. Now he lives outside DC and we get together periodically to keep up with what’s going on in our lives. We were having dinner the other night at a newish Italian restaurant in my neighborhood when I took this- he was just perfectly lit by the setting sun coming through the window. I think this perfectly captures his jovial inner spirit.

I had the Rolleiflex sitting on the table next to me after taking this picture, and the women at the table next to us saw it and remarked on it. We ended up having a good fifteen minute conversation with them about photography and using film and old cameras. This is why I call the Rollei “the happy camera” – it gets so many people talking with you about photography, and always in a positive way. Everyone has good feelings about this camera.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

The World War I Memorial – in color

April 21, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

The World War I memorial, taken toward evening in early spring. The grass is obviously getting green but the trees haven’t come into leaf yet. Once the trees have gotten their leaves, the memorial is all but invisible from the road behind it.

This is still one of my favorite monuments on the Mall because of its simplicity, and because it is doing double-duty – there is no national World War I monument, so this monument to the fallen from the District of Columbia stands for all the soldiers and sailors of that conflict.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Cherry Blossoms, 2015

April 19, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

As a Washingtonian, I normally avoid the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin area at Cherry Blossom time like it was ground zero for the Zombie Apocalypse. The cherry blossoms may be beautiful, but the groves are so overrun with tourists with necks snapped back in positions normally reserved for car wreck victims as they stagger mindlessly about, blocking traffic, walking into your camera’s frame of view and not moving while THEY compose a shot, and pointing with arms at full length like the walking dead in the general direction of everything and nothing at the same time. Most of my photographer friends who want to shoot the blossoms do so at the crack of dawn when most tourists can’t be arsed to get out of bed to go see them. At which time I, too, can’t be arsed to get out of bed to go photograph them because I have a day job.

That said, there are other places to see cherry blossoms around DC that aren’t completely overrun. There happens to be this tree, for example, on the George Washington University campus in the front yard of a fraternity house no less. I caught this one on one of my lunchtime walkabouts. This was also with the Tele-Rolleiflex, shot basically straight up into the tree from a standing position (the tree is in a yard several feet above the sidewalk, so it was easy to stand beneath it and shoot up into the blossoms).

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