An epic Christmas break...

[compilerbitch]

Just back from a few hectic days. Christmas itself was marked by a visit from doseybat, mum & sister (see pics below). Then Chanukah dinner at livredor's parents (wow - really great to finally meet everyone I'd heard about). The last three days consisted of picking up 791point43 from South London and then trundling all the way to Aberystwyth (on the coast of Wales, about half way up), spending a great (but cold) day there, then a long trundle back to Cam with Bat. A great time was had by all. I was presented with a Christmas Scorpion:






Aaargh. No, I do not have the guts to eat it, however edible it may claim to be.

Anyway, although I kept to my usual forgetting-to-take-a-camera rule, I did manage to grab some nice pics of doseybat's sister Natasha:







Isn't she just so photogenic???

And one of Elena, the Bat Mother:





(She will probably boil me in oil for that photo, but I like it)

Comments

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

um wow nice photography
what di you shoot them with
and i know its not a BFG10K :)
X

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Fuji Finepix 6900. For the portraits, programmed exposure mode, autofocus on, built-in flash enabled. The scorpion lolly was photographed in macro mode, no flash. All images were processed, cropped and recompressed in paint shop pro -- the B&W images started life as colour, then were forced to monochrome and contrast enhanced (a lot), tweaked by hand so that the skin tones came out right, with a small amount of dodging and burning by hand.

The kind of thing that used to take me about 6 hours in a darkroom, back in the 'real film' days!

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

goes off to google finepix 6900

um er wow on the camera and then wow again on all the post processing. My idea of post processing is the odd crop and doing stupid things with artistic effects - i recently managed to make alexa_robinson look like a rug - for my next attempt i will attempt to make look more like a furry animaal

whats dodging and burning?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Actually, I didn't do anything I wouldn't/couldn't have with B&W film. In film terms, I'd have used something like Tri-X, ideally 2 1/4" square format, then printed it by hand on a very hard (grade 5 or more) paper.

In film terms, dodging is done with a piece of card on the end of a wire that you wobble around in the relevant place while the paper is being exposed by the enlarger -- it results in part of the frame appearing lighter than normal. Burning is kind-of the opposite -- you use a large card with a hole in it to overexpose part of a print (i.e. make it darker).

Doing this digitally is essentially the same, but much quicker, cheaper and less messy. The Fuji is strictly speaking not as good as my old Bronica, but given my penchant for seriously push-processed B&W the resolution really isn't a problem. THe results I'm getting seem pretty good so far, but as I'm only really getting back into doing this stuff for the first time in about 15 years, I have a fair bit to catch up on!