Oct 21stHow am I doing?
Well, the year is quickly drawing to a close. Fall color is quickly flying past, and it’s time to take look back at the “New Year’s resolution post” and check progress.
- Get Organized. Nope. Not an inch of progress. I did manage to give the site a face lift this summer, though. 
- Show Off. Currently working on selecting some pictures to make LARGE living room sized prints from. Contests? I’ve entered a few online that weren’t outright “rights grabs” where you have to give up all your rights to your photo whether you win the contest or not. Last night, though, I actually did win a place in my very first photo contest with this shot:
I guess the winning photos will be in the newspaper sometime in the near future, so I guess I get another 15 minutes of fame. Sharing online? Some sort of consistency would probably help. Still struggling there.
- Try something new. Well, just about the time the weather was getting nice enough for me to start getting out the Bender, we had to go and move. Now that the year is nearly over, I’m finally pretty much done with all that, so I hope to start playing with that again. I’ve been looking at large format printers since the summer. My husband may have just made it possible for me to actually acquire one of these, and I believe there is still a rebate going on for the one I want which will make the price much more appealing, so it’s possible that by the end of the year I’ll be delving into the other end of the photographic process – making prints worth putting up on the walls.
- New perspectives. While the technical skills continue to improve making it easier for me to reproduce in two dimensions what I see in three, I’m still fleshing out how I uniquely see the world.
- Do some good. It’s a pleasure to use my photography skills and equipment in service to Christ. It’s probably an odd thing to do, but I told a pastor here, “You know how some people dedicate their babies? I dedicate my cameras.” And I do. It’s God who has given both the equipment I have and the skill to use it, and when I get a new camera or lens, I take it to church with me and lay it on the altar and dedicate it to the Lord’s service first. Do I get a lot of pleasure from it that’s not at all related to serving the Lord? Absolutely! But if that ever begins to take first place in my heart, I have a tangible reminder of where my blessings come from and who really owns “my” stuff, and that’s a blessing too. I’d still like to explore this area in more depth, though. As far as teaching, since my daughter is the one who inherited my Rebel, I get the pleasure of throwing her a tip or new technique to try now and then, as well as watching her progress.
- Challenge myself. The photowalks have sort of come to an end during the moving process. Not to say that it will stay that way forever, but . . . . Taking pictures of people I don’t know. Is it only photographers who react badly to having their picture taken? Maybe just some photographers.
- Start a project. The only “project” currently in the works is trying to decorate the new place with some of my photographs. Mostly, it’s my own indecision holding that one up. I finally made some small prints of potential candidates while mom and dad were here, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
- Take my camera everywhere. Definitely. Good move.
Here’s another picture entered in last night’s contest that didn’t win. Enjoy.
Jan 3rdZooma Zoom Zoom
Normally, a 210 mm lens on a 4×5 format would be at the short end of the telephoto range or at the long end of normal. When you’re only capturing a small part of the image area, however, that long normal/short tele turns into quite an apparent multiplication factor. This photo was taken with the new Bender-Canon set up from my back yard of the top of a fairly tall tree a couple of houses down. Still have a lot to learn. In fact, I feel like I’m starting all over in some ways. Praying for warm weather and calm winds.
Dec 28thWhat do you get when . . . .
What do you get when you marry this:
With this:
???
You get the Bender-Canon Digital View Camera.
After coming across someone else who had used a simple T-mount adapter to join their Canon to an 8×10 view camera with some highly interesting results, it seemed like it was high time I got to work on the 4×5 kit I had purchased so many years ago. That poor kit has survived 2 moves, an attack by mice, and being used for a Bible lesson twice in which I dumped the entire kit onto the floor for the kids to try to figure out – sans directions (the point being they wouldn’t have any more luck putting that kit together without the instructions than we do trying to put our lives together without the maker’s instructions-i.e., the Bible). Anyway, all of that without a single piece lost or broken . . . .
EXCEPT for 2 of the 3 monorail riders which I had broken when I first started to build the kit in 1995. Jim at Midwest Photo Exchange was a great help, both with selecting a lens for the new system, as well as spending some time looking at the original design and sending photos to someone he thought might be able to come up with a replacement. The next time I went to Columbus, though, I ended up going to Woodcraft and picking up some T-Trac and oval 1/4 x 20 nuts which worked perfectly – if the tripod gets knocked over or some other disaster happens, the camera will break into little tiny pieces long before there is enough force to make the front and rear standards or the tripod mount come off the T-Trac, and the whole setup is rock solid once everything is tightened down. Other modifications included getting rid of all of the original L-screws except the ones holding the back in place, using different material for the bag bellows than the kind of rubbery black stuff that came with the kit (Thanks, mom, for the great sewing job!!), adding rulers to various points on the front and rear standards so I have some idea of how much I’m moving one standard in relation to the other, and adding a slotted lensboard holder like I saw at Midwest Photo instead of the original L-screws.
TRIPOD TROUBLES
I quickly realized that the tripod that came with my Canon kit was going to be totally inadequate for managing 7-1/2 pounds of camera. I had seen some Induro tripods at Midwest in the $100 range (which may still be an option some months down the road), but after reading some on tripods and heads, I realized that to really do it justice, it was going to cost quite a bit more to get a stable platform for the new camera combo.
THEN, I remembered that there was a telescope mouldering in my basement with a tripod that looked an awful lot like some of the wooden-legged tripods I had been seeing. Quick check – sure enough it’s still down there and just needs a little rinse off and a way to mount the camera to the tripod. Once again, everything is rock solid when tightened down. I don’t know how long the old telescope tripod will hold up, but as long as it does, I’ve got some really smooth pan and tilt action in my tripod head, along with a good solid platform for the camera.
Here are some samples with the new setup:
(Please forgive the less than inspiring subject of the first photo. The camera was barely starting to take shape, the bellows was just pressed into place without being secured in any way, and I was basically holding the Canon in mid air in the approximate location it would be held by the camera board and T-mount adapter which I had yet to design and build with the camera and my head under a dark cloth to keep out too much extraneous light. It’s a wonder I got the focus as close as it is, but I could have found something more aesthetic than the pile of trash I had been collecting. )
