Pic of the day (2014-03-01)

Handsome Street
Ugly people are not allowed!!
O.K.

I suppose street photography isn't always about trying to suggest sublime bullshit with pictures.

Pic of the day (2012-05-01)

50mm, f/2.8, 4 seconds, ISO 800, 5 minutes of tweaking.

Half of these you could blot out of the night sky with a single outstretched hand.

Gear Talk: EF 50mm f/1.8

I had lent my cheapshit EF 50mm f/1.8 to a coworker for a few weeks and, suprisingly, I did come to miss it. Just got it back last week and I spent the afternoon fooling around with it (and only it) on the camera.

Having a variable zoom range is handy, but zoom lenses just can't beat prime lenses when it comes to smooth bokeh.

This shot was achieved by using custom aperture. Said aperture was made using state of the art materials and equipment, namely...

a box cutter, an index card, and a black marker pen.


Another new accessory that I had crafted for this lens is a lens hood.

Without lens hood

With lens hood

Of course, the lens isn't designed to be mounted in the reverse position, so it's not really surprising that this configuration is prone to glare, which kills the image contrast. Surprisingly, a cardboard tube from a roll of tissue paper did improve the image quality somewhat.



Other shots for the day, all taken with the 50mm.

2 of 3 resident felines

A bath towel 

Window screen 

Microfiber cloth for cleaning lenses 

Tip of a dart 

A spray nozzle

The afternoon sun

Pic of the day (2012/04/02)

I climbed up the 30-foot-high water tower again for another round of astrophotography (for time lapse this time). As usual, the weather wasn't cooperative for long, so I thought, "Screw this, let's just do a pic for that competition."

Having only one dSLR and no volunteers to rely on, I had to make do with a point and shoot on a tripod. Currently hoping that the composition and deliberate ambiguity would make up for the lack of manual controls, noise reduction, and resolving power on the IXUS 105. Also, the pic's cropped a bit since 3:4 aspect ratio doesn't work too well for portraits.

Incidentally, that's the 600D in my hands. I was planning to use the Lensbaby fisheye for the timelapse, but that wasn't very visible so I slapped on the EF-S 18-135 instead.

I suppose that the astrophotography sessions could also count as a workout of sorts since that typically involves ascending and descending this structure 5-10 times as the hours pass.

Homage (Pic of the day: 2012/03/26)

Paying tribute to predecessors, this post is dedicated to my dad's retired second-hand Canon AE-1, a camera from the late 70's/early 80's. It's two generations older than the currently existing EOS system, and the damn thing is older than I am.

There's a little mold on the lens and the rubber eyecup's feeling all stiff now. Those things aside, it could still pull off a few decent photos, but the lack of 35mm film and LR44 batteries keeps me from giving it a shot.

This pic, of course, was taken using my own EOS 600D.

Pic of the day: 2012/03/20

And here's Up Dharma Down performing at an event last year, 2011/08/05. Props to Gil for letting me borrow his Canon IXUS 300 HS (a.k.a. IXY 30S) to take this shot.

I also borrowed Gail's camera in an attempt to take a better shot a few minutes later, but I returned it after 5 seconds when I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to operate a dSLR. Back then, all I've ever handled were point and shoot cameras. Needless to say, all those buttons and dials were intimidating.

Pic of the day: 2012/03/01

A picture of my sister and her fiancé, shot in god-knows-where, California, taken on 2012/01/16.

They actually took me to the river docks for landscape pictures, but it turns out that my favorite shot for that day featured them instead. The lovebirds were playing around like kids, and I was lucky enough to be facing their direction at that moment for this candid photograph.

I wish this could have been composed a little better; maybe zoomed in a bit for tighter framing and pointed a bit lower to omit some of the blue sky instead of his feet. Still, it's not bad for a stolen shot... except it looks too much like a friggin' car ad.





Sidenotes:
Incidentally, they're done servicing my camera and I am to pick it up this Saturday just in time for an opportunity for more practice. Everything's still covered by the 3-year warranty, so I don't have to pay squat. It would have been nice if they could have done it faster though. If only CPS requirements weren't so high...

Pic of the day: 2012/02/26

Yet another picture from the IXUS 105.

This was taken at Villa Escudero on December 30, 2010. The subjects? Don't know them, but I couldn't resist taking a pic as well when they struck a pose for another photographer. The lady on the left has pretty impressive flexibility; I've taken taekwondo for years and I couldn't replicate her pose at all even with a good dose of stretching. And she just pulled it off, out of the blue, and on unusual footing to boot. Ballet training, I suppose.

Since the pose only lasted a fraction of a second, I didn't have the time to properly zoom using my own camera. As such, what I have here is a crop of the original image.





Sidenote:
And now that I've reached 591 pictures hosted on imageshack, it seems that anything older than the 500th oldest image will eventually be deleted. Guess that's what I get for not reading the fine print.

Pic of the day: 2012/02/25

Yet another sunset from my window.

I called up Canon's service center yesterday and, unsurprisingly, my EOS 600D still isn't available.

Pic of the day: 2012/02/19

Today was my grandmother's 95th birthday.



She reminds me of the appliances of ages past: sturdy and stubborn as hell. She's already outlived several people from my generation.