Posts from the ‘Camera Gear’ Category
70000th photo, at the MCA in Sydney
I’m making good progress with my five-year old Canon EOS450D camera.
As I continue to click away, I’m aware of the grind on both camera and lens(es). But with some luck and care, I’ve flipped the “number counter” on my camera a seventh time with over 70000 exposures to date.
I headed out to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Australia in Sydney to visit the “JEFF WALL Photographs” exhibition. Jeff Wall is also from my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, and while I was in Vancouver earlier this year, I’d seen a number of his photos on display in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection. With the exhibition in Sydney, the opportunity arose for a coherent perspective of his work.
The following is one of my favourite Jeff Wall pieces, called “A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai)”, which is on loan from the Tate London for the MCA exhibition. Wall’s work is based on a Japanese woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshû Ejiri), AC 1830-33, housed at the British Museum.
Beautifully constructed and a wonderful homage to Hokusai’s original, Wall’s photograph is presently mounted in one of the last rooms of the exhibition; so, there’s plenty of room for people to wander into the space and to admire the scale and movement of the photograph. With that in mind, I stood towards the back of the room, and I began photographing people standing in front of the photograph. It didn’t take long to find two people standing in the right place and leaning towards each other in conversation – the visitors providing complementary well-timed superposition to the photograph.
The “JEFF WALL Photographs” exhibition is free of charge at the MCA Australia from 1 May to 28 July 2013. The MCA Australia can be reached with CityRail to Circular Quay station or with Sydney Ferries to Circular Quay Ferry Wharf.
Previous rollovers :
• 15000th photo in Berlin, Germany
• 25000th photo in Vancouver, Canada
• 50000th photo in Berlin, Germany
• 60000th photo in Vancouver, Canada
I made the photos above on 5 May 2013 with the EOS450D and Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com.
Toppling 60000 photos at home in Vancouver
Throughout 2012, I traveled around the world (RTW), where I managed to make the 25000th exposure here in Vancouver in January, and 50000th exposure in Berlin, Germany in October. Thankfully, my 5-year old entry-level digital-SLR camera survived the trip, and is still delivering decent photographs.
Given the number of photos I continued to make, I knew I’d flip the “number counter” once again when I completed my RTW and returned to Vancouver. Sure enough, I turned the counter over for the 6th time in under 5 years.
I returned to the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), world famous for their collection and archive of cultural art, sculptures, and monuments from First Nations’ peoples along the Canadian west coast. With my previous visit to the MOA taking place over 20 years ago, my return was a happy one. The visit itself will be the subject of another post, as I highlight here the 60,000th photo, one of the “Haida House exhibit”.
The accompanying caption reads:
The two Haida houses reconstructed here on the grounds of the museum were probably the first of their kind to be built in the 20th century. The larger house represents a family dwelling and the smaller one a mortuary chamber. Both demonstrate the traditional Haida post-and-beam architecture.
These houses were designed by John Smyly and constructed by John Barnes of the University’s (UBC) Physical Plant, under the direction of Haida artist Bill Reid. The work took 3.5 years, from late 1958 to early 1962. The houses and poles were first installed at Totem Park on the west end of the University campus, and were relocated to the grounds of the Museum of Anthropology in 1978. The big house is equiped with a fire pit and lighting so that it can be used for workshops, receptions, and theatrical performances.
The house poles and three of the four free standing Haida poles were carved between 1958 and 1962 by Bill Reid with the assistance of Douglas Crammer, of the Nimpkish Kwakwak’wakw (Kwagiutl) band of Alert Bay. The fourth free standing pole, a copy of the Masset house frontal pole, was carved by Jim M. Hart, a Masset Haida, under Reid’s guidance. It was completed and ceremonially installed in 1962.
Previous rollovers :
• 15000th photo in Berlin, Germany
• 25000th photo in Vancouver, Canada
• 50000th photo in Berlin, Germany
… I might be wrong, but there seems to be a distinct pattern … or?
I made the photo above on 30 January 2013, and this post appears on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com.
50000th exposure at Berlin Tempelhof
It’s an achievement : fifty thousand exposures with a single digital-SLR camera. The four-year-old camera has taken a beating, but the camera continues to chug away with reliability.
Tempelhofer Park is an open space on the grounds of the former Tempelhof Airport (THF) in Berlin, Germany. It’s a big thrill to be able to walk on what used to be a runway; I can almost hear the roar of plane engines and sense the vibrations of aircraft rolling along the rough pavement.
My 50000th exposure captures some of the ways Berliners are using the recently converted space.
Previous marks:
• 15000th photo in Berlin, Germany
• 25000th photo in Vancouver, Canada
I made the photo above on 19 October 2012. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com.
Lose zoom-lens = gain new view with prime-lens
I wrote here about the camera gear I brought with me on my around-the-world (RTW) trip in 2012.
I spent three weeks on New Zealand’s South Island in July 2012. Just as my transport was about to enter Milford Sound, my 18-55 mm zoom kit-lens died with the auto-focus mechanism failing to engage. Without a distance gauge at a given setting for focal length, the lens became almost impossible to use, except at the widest (18mm) or tightest (55-mm) focal lengths.
I kept at it while I was on the boat in the Sound, but my shot-completion percentage plummeted, and the time to set up or fiddle with the lens went way up. The other lens I had was the 70-300 mm zoom-lens, which was for the most part too long for what I wanted to photograph.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at all: both camera and kit-lens are 4 years and 4 months old (as of writing). The difference, however, is that the camera-body is still churning away …
For two months, I’ve been using the 50mm prime or fixed focal length lens on the camera. With a 1.6-times crop factor, the field of view is effectively 80mm, which is more appropriate for a portrait-type lens. It’s been challenging, and I’ve had to do the following:
• “memorize” the available field-of-view I have with the prime lens,
• evaluate carefully whether I can make the shot, and
• if necessary, move around with my feet to get closer or farther from the scene to make the shot.
Recent articles by John Neel and Haje Jan Kamps speak to the advantages and challenges of using a prime lens.
Even if the lens is a little long, the result above with the 50mm prime is very decent.
While I’ve been very happy with what my 50mm has delivered, I’d given some thought to purchasing a wider prime (i.e., 24mm or 28mm), but these primes are outside of my present budget. For about $100, I’ve purchased the upgraded version of the 18-55mm kit-lens, known as the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II. This lens is supposed to deliver improved image-stabilization performance compared to its predecessor. Version 2 of the kit-lens is still light in weight and light on the wallet or budget. Above all, it’s great to “regain” access to wider-fields with a lens almost identical to the one I lost.
Naturally, I made all of the photos above. This post is published on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com.
25000th photo in Vancouver
January 6 is known as Three Kings’ Day or the day of Epiphany.
A slow epiphany surely came about over the last few years (hence, the present RTW!), but walking around Vancouver’s famous Stanley Park on this cool grey morning made me realize two things:
- I really am back in the city where I was born and raised. Since leaving Vancouver in 1994, coming back to visit has always bordered on the surreal. But this time, I’m sticking around for a few weeks, which adds a little more flavour and substance to the present visit.
- The four-digit number-counter on my camera was close to ’5000′, which meant exposure number 25000 after rolling over the counter twice already.
After clicking a few frames for the signage around the lighthouse nearby, the following is the 25000th exposure with my Canon 450D:
- 1202h PST, 6 January 2011
- Brockton Point, Stanley Park, Vancouver, Canada
- EOS 450D camera + EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens : 1/100s, f/5, ISO100
For a bonus, how about two more of my hometown …
I made the three photos above with the Canon EOS450D (XSi) and the Canon EF 50mm prime-lens. This post appears originally on Fotoeins Fotopress (fotoeins.com).
By the way, I also marked the 15000th exposure with a blog post here and the 20000th exposure on Flickr.
