Eggs.

Everyone should take a picture of eggs, the possibilities are endless.  Here, I held the eggs and framed them by holding my hand over a black bowl.  I added the B&W effect using Iris PhotoSuite and played up the contrast (all from the iPhone).

Tonight in my photography club we were creating still lifes.  While waiting for everyone to show up, I picked up an egg – a thing of beauty.  So perfect! So symmetric!  So symbolic!

While others were setting up tripods etc, I edited this and posted it, thus giving people one more reason to respect the iPhoneographers among us.

Somesville, Maine

On a gloomy day during a week-long excursion to Bar Harbor in Maine, I took the morning off from climbing and kayaking adventures for a leisurely drive around the island.  All of a sudden I came to a screeching halt when I passed a cozy building with a sign saying “Port In A Storm Books”.  A bookstore!  That’s almost better than a granite cliff!

I spent a blissful two hours inside and emerged with a stack of reading for later and noticed this mystically beautiful sight behind the parking lot.  No special processing here, even the vignetting was natural from the light glowing in the background.

Just looking at this picture takes me back to a moment of peace I will always treasure.

Crazed comet.

I hate it when these things crash to earth right outside your house.  Fortunately, that didn’t really happen, it’s just my imagination at work creating disturbing images.  This one was fun to do and I won’t say how I did it because it would spoil the effect.

The interesting thing for me about creating this was that when I let my imagination just go where it wants, sometimes I’m really surprised myself. It wasn’t my dark intention to create an image of destruction, but once I got going on it, it needed to be done. It’s the sci fi addict in me I guess, so I just went with it.

One of those hazy foggy Maine early-morning hikes a couple of years ago.  Can’t remember which mountain this was, not that it matters.  Coastal fog wrapped the summit, which steeped it in atmosphere and mystery.  Sometimes I prefer that to seeing views, which have never really served me as the reward for a hike.

This was actually taken with my Nikon D70 and edited in Photoshop, which was the way I was working back in the ‘oughts.  I’ve been looking through old prints and finding interesting stuff, which I will post occasionally; it’s all quite different from what I’m doing now.

The new blog header (old cameras in a store window) is another of those old prints I uncovered, from my street photography obsession.  More of those to follow, I’m sure.

Jack and Tricia.

I love the intimacy you feel, even though you can’t see what they’re doing.  Jack (the navy pilot) has very precise, perfect knots in his shoes.

This is another Jordan Lake shot, they are probably ogling the eagle nest or some such, and did not notice what I was doing.

Hipsta-matic.

There is a quirky little interest that some photographers have — what used to be really bad is now highly desirable.  Old crummy and funky Instamatic cameras, old box cameras with plastic lenses that have weird distortions and inappropriate flashes in the exposure — these are highly desirable cameras now.  People haunt yard sales and thrift stores looking for these because of their unique “flaws”.  You probably don’t realize it, but each Instamatic has its own unique “fingerprint” of distortions.

Of course nobody has a darkroom any more, and you can barely even buy film any more, fergoshsakes.  So it was only a question of time before people started creating digital versions of these old chestnuts, the very same cheap cameras that were so irritating at the time.  But the VERY best part of this fun craft is that you don’t need a special camera, the effects can be put on after the image is taken.  Many photo editing programs now have this feature, in addition to grunge, textures, etc.

My favorite, though, is an app called Hipstamatic on the iPhone.  It is unique because you get an image of the back of one of these old cameras, with a little viewfinder and a button on the screen to tap, so the experience is very much like using an old Instamatic. And the image is saved with the Instamatic effects: yellow and green tints, mottled light, distortions, weirdly cropped.

Personally, I love this. I gravitate towards grainy, blurry images anyway, because they seem spontaneous and more about the moment being captured than the craft of getting everything pixel-perfect.

The buddha pic above is an unretouched Hipstamatic print, just a little cropping.  These prints come out better without the cropping though, because it puts a white border around the (square) image, the way prints used to look decades ago.  Either way, it is nostalgic and evocative.

Frost.

I just installed a WordPress app on my iPhone, so that I can blog from the same device that I’m taking pictures with and editing them with.

This is a shot out my back door, with boosted contrast but no other effects overlaid.  Good tonal range and impressive detail on the frosty grass.