wow.

http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/#/0

.

because

i love shooting with all-manual takumar lenses.

because they're cheap

because despite being cheap, they perform better than a lot of modern lenses, if not competing right with the best

because it's so romanticizable to use lenses made 40 years or more ago - vietnam war, cold war era lenses

because the process of taking a picture is so much more than just with modern AF lenses - even on dslr, it's not much more than point and shoot to me

because everything about using them to take a shot is slow, deliberate, purposeful - see, compose, meter, focus, shoot

because they're built like they'll last forever - and they've done a pretty good job of it already

because they simply feel nice to use - solid, yet not heavy, smooth, yet not sluggish

because there are no snapshots with such lenses - only photos. only something purposeful and thought out

because they will never fail - only the photographer can mar the image by choosing the wrong aperture, or misfocussing, not the lens

because these lenses in particular have such a rich history about them

because there's a bit of pride involved in seeing people using $600 lenses, and getting better photos with a $60 one

but, why write about all this?




















BECAUSE FUCK STUDYING, THAT'S WHY.

shitbrixxx

well, deep cove was kinda boring. guess i'll be not winning that contest LOL. but yeah, between the fact that i'd just gone there last week (and nowhere else in between), and the lighting was kinda bland - some skies, some cloud, nothing particularly dramatic (when i got there anyways. there was a bit of mist in the woods, but not a lot,  and it got cloudier later on, which was nice). but yeah, it was also my first attempt at using only one lens, to kinda force myself to "see" with it (basically, i'm feeling guilty when i leave lenses unused so i'm trying to make myself use them (Y) though i guess if i can't/don't use them much i might as well end up selling them) (i think in this paragraph i've typed more in brackets than actual sentences), and, well, if the results speak for themselves, it was pretty boring as a photowalk so i'm not sure the one-lens thing worked (it was my 50mm, which is pretty fun sometimes, but on photowalks i've quite warmed up to wide-angles, the 28mm and the 15mm are where it's at for me), though i can't really tell if it was boring cause of the one-lensing or the repeat location, just with boring weather this time. that sentence should be included in textbooks everywhere as an example of horrible runon sentences.

anyways, this photowalk WAS of some significance in that, during it, i shot my 20,000th photo on my camera :D the photo itself was kinda shitty - just an exposure check for a long exposure (which failed, btw. LOL). but i did get a shot with a similar setup that, we'll say is what the 20k shot should've been ;D

also, the shitbrix part of this photowalk.

i slipped and my knee went into mud. my jeans cried a million tears. also, mud splashed onto my camera. at which point i cried a million tears (in my head, anticipatorily - that's a word now, mothafucka). it also splashed onto my super-tak 50. and i was wearing my white jacket so i couldn't just wipe it off. and i mean it's not like the lens was super-expensive (~$55 or so IIRC), just that it would've been pretty shitty for it to have been around for some 45-odd years to be wrecked by me. but then in a few moments it showed why it survived so long - a few wipes with my cloth, and it was good as new. i could hear some tiny pebbles when i focussed it back and forth, but eventually that stopped and they fell out or were digested by the lens or something. and, luckily, nothing got into the camera itself - if it got on the sensor i would've been so fucked.

anyways, ONTO THE PICS:

actually, first, i wanna show something: the effect of lighting and atmosphere and all that on a shot.

i took this shot last week. it was heavily foggy, with some light filtering through the dense clouds. overall, very atmospheric, and a shot that i love.

and now the exact same thing, but shot today, with some sun popping out, and no fog:

it goes from an epicly creepy/spooky/holy tree-cradle-thing to...nothing. the subject's the same, the composition is for all intents and purposes the same, but the light is different - and that's all the difference you need to make or break a shot. in fact, light probably matters more than anything else, more than whether you have an iphone camera or a nikon D3x.

i actually mainly took that shot just to put it on here and talk about it. aren't i lame ;D anyways, onto the actual photos from the photowalk:

the adage "sharpness is a bourgeois concept" is pretty applicable here. there's practically nothing that's sharp, but in this case it doesn't take away from the photo - where the main theme is the crisscrossing lines and the myriad subtle shades.

this was pretty epic at the time - the tree was kinda spotlit and the moss was practically glowing. looking back on it now though, it's a bit too cluttered to be a good shot to me.

because serial killers of the forest need to have a mcdonald's too.

i'm pretty bored with shots like these - i feel like the watermotionblur thing is so cliche, and only really works when the shot has other stuff going on, and it adds to it instead of being a  main focus. as a main focus, it's pretty lame imo.

same thing here.

photo #19,998! 19,999 was kinda shitty so i deleted it.

photo #20,000. i didn't really put much effort into editing it at all really; it's even still tilted. this shot was just meant to check the exposure (because it's easier to take a shot at 1/30 of a second and calculate from there, than to take a 240 second exposure and then fine tune after the fact :/) 

the only one i ended up liking from the few i took around #20,000. note my amazing cloning skills (the tower thing)

i don't do all that many shallow DoF shots, i  don't think, so i'm allowed this now and then ;D 

and that's it for deepcove: revisited. overall i don't think i liked it as a photowalk too much, though it could've just been because it was spoiled by my slipping in the mud and subsequent shitbrixing (though the trail was pretty boring regardless of that.) anyways, after this, i went home, changed, did some shit with some people ( ;D ) and then bussed home from there. and on the way, i got to take a shot that i'd been wanting to take since forever. as in, i tried it once when i was taking film photography in school (and idk what happened to that shot, or maybe i never ended up taking it, or i lost the negative, who knows), and that didn't work out for reasons specified in the brackets, and now i finally got to try again. it worked particularly cause i now had the 28mm lens - before, the 40mm was too long and the 15mm too wide, but now it was just right. but anyways, here's the thing (i love this shot, and for that reason alone i give half a shit what anyone else thinks of it): 

juhjuhjuh jizz.

i took this shot about 30 times, so here's the 2nd alternate version i ended up keeping. there're more lights but i prefer the top version more - gives a lonelier feel, which matches it better.

and another random shot on the bus too - nothing special this time though.

and now at this point, i'm kind of photo'd out. which is kinda pathetic cause i've gone on like, what, 4 photowalks all month? but it doesn't matter anyways because with midterms coming up, i won't have another chance for one for a week or two anyways. or maybe next weekend depending on how i feel about math. oh fuck, math....

sidenote: i love how i have more text than photos for today's photowalk. covering up my incompetence with text, ftw.

i love penis, and my super-tak 50.

so my friend made me something. and it is related to the title, i promise. here it is:

i can't be the only one who thinks this looks like row upon row of bent over asses.

wondering what this is yet? no because nobody's reading this?

here's a hint. this is the asshole of the thing.....

TIS A HANDMADE PAPER PENGUIN :D

although certain people (ie his creator LOLOL) might object, his name is tobias penis dungeonmaster. toby for short. "penis" with his friends. just so we're clear on that. and it seems pretty cute, yes?

all warm and huggable and all that creepy shit. well, once you fuck with it...

penis will pwn your ass.

also, 

<3 this lens. that sexy bokeh...okay a bit hard edged in the top right, but otherwise it's smoother than an asian hooker's skin. though how much does that really mean? okay, upperclass hooker. the ones that prefer to be called "escorts".

and yes the supertak does flare a bit with a direct light source in it (this is wideopen, f1.4)

but stop it down some (this is like f2.4...ish? whatever's between f2 and f2.8 on the aperture ring) and it's reduced to a tiny little red dimple. which is quite easily cloneable:

boom.

in more meaningful news (hah, blog, meaningful - geddit?) i are heading back to deepcove today. i was originally gonna do one of those one-lens only photowalks around downtownish or something (with the super-tak 50. because i would fuck it if i could. okay not really. it's radioactive.), but then i woke up and my mom was like i'mma go to deep cove again today. wanna come? and i was like yeah. and that's that. doesn't seem to be as foggy but we'll see. plus, one of my shots (the boat one) was potentially storytelling, but it only told half a story. i wanna complete it, make a two-frame sequence that really tells a story. why you might ask? because at stevehuffphoto.com they're running a contest for two-frame story-telling photo sequences that tell a story. the grand prize? a leica motherfucking m9. that's a $7000 camera for you. and leica isn't just any expensive camera brand. if you shoot anything more than a point and shoot, you know to bow down and give blowjobs to leica lenses. and their cameras too, but largely their lenses. i doubt i'll win but i might as well try right ? and then after that i can spend every waking moment studying bio/chem ^.^

new lens, new places, new-- i wanna sammich

cause my first meal was at 3pm today, but that was worth the epicish photowalk i went on.

my second meal has yet to come into existence. anyways, so i got one more -one last- lens, a super-multi-coated takumar 28mm f3.5 off of some dude from craigslist. and basically i am vowing a vow of lens celibacy from here on out. and buying stuff in general, really. my justification for buying this lens was

1) it's cheap
2) demand is rising for takumar lenses now that people are like pentax is jesus with the new cameras that were released
3) i have a 15mm lens, and then the closest is 40mm. a lot of the time this leaves me with a big gap in between - esp in landscape shots where i can't move too far back or i'd have to move up or down a hill or rock or there's simply no room - say a sheer cliff wall or something and i'm backed up against it, with the 40mm on. and with the 15mm, there's only so far forward i can walk before i fall off a cliff. hold your applause, i haven't done that yet. plus the 15mm is so wide there's often a ton of perspective distortion when i'm not pointing it level-y. of course, i also love that, but sometimes i just don't want it.

enter the s-m-c takumar 28mm. focal length is perfectly in between the two, and being a takumar lens, it will probably out live me. in fact, it's in remarkably good condition (random sidenote: i bought it from some chinese dude who also uses many takumar/pentax lenses. another chinese guy who uses pentax. how rare is that, huh?), the glass is practically spotless. there're some paint chips on the body but that's nothing to me.

here's the sexbomb

s-m-c tak 28/3.5 next to the super-tak 50/1.4

in some ways, this lens is kind of a runty, red-headed-stepchild of a lens. in the film days when this was made, 28mm was pretty damn wide, but now on an APS-C sensor, it's a "normal" lens, and normals tend to be pretty fast - around f2 or at least f2.8; this thing's f3.5 - significantly slower, and indoors/nighttime usage will require quite a bit more ISO, or flash. it's a screwmount, meaning it'll be more time-consuming to change lenses around, and more fussy metering, and manual focusing. and, sadly, it's not radioactive, like its brother the 50/1.4.

yet at the same time, using it in the photowalk today,  it was my most used lens. before, i didn't really get the concept of a "normal" lens. the 50mm lenses (which are normals, but only on full-sized sensors) did keep objects at the same size in real life as in the viewfinder, but it cropped out a lot of the sides of where you're looking. on the other hand, this thing, whenever i felt like i "saw" a picture, a good scene or whatever that'd make a nice photo, it fit it perfectly. wasn't too wide or too long, its field of view was perfect - didn't really feel a need to back up or get in closer.

and focusing with this thing (it's a bit more sludgey than the super-tak, but still really smooth) is surprisingly easy (it's sposed to be more difficult with wider lenses, but this is probably easier because its maximum aperture is f3.5, which is more or less what the stock screens in the viewfinder can mimic in terms of DoF - basically, what you see is what you get in terms of what's in focus, whereas with the 50/1.4, if you're shooting it at under f4 or so, there'll be less in focus than it appears in the vf).

and basically, after this lens, i now have primes of various focal lengths from 15 to 100mm, and then a 70-210mm zoom. since i don't plan on going into birding (which requires insanely expensive and heavy long lenses), i won't be needing anything longer, and 15mm is really quite wide for me already - sometimes too wide. i have a flash, i have a tripod, i have a polarizer and ND filter, i basically have anything i'd ever need. so from here on out, i am not spending a penny on photographic equipment (with the sole exception being a (keyword) cheap autofocus 28mm that's faster than 2.8 (ie if pentax makes a new one, cause no such thing exists in pentax mount right now). okay little things like lens hoods or whatever don't really count. it'd be nice to get that Timbuk2 camera bag, but i don't really need it. so, yeah, equipmentspending celibacy.


but anyways, enough of boring shit. ONTO THE PHOTOWALK.

i originally meant to go to the train tracks/factory/thing, in north van, on low level road. i drove past it a few weeks ago and it was all cloudy and it just looked such an epicly moody place. well i got there today and it just felt off to me. there were more trains there, which made it seem congested. and then my mom couldn't find parking, but we did find many signs that were saying private property and all that. at that point, i had two choices:

a) be a BEAST and say fuck the signs, and photo to my heart's desire all over the trains and whatnot. unleash my vision.

b) pussy out and go somewhere else.

if you picked B, we're not friends anymore. you're right, but we're not friends. and if you picked A, i'll buy you a drink even though you're wrong. a nice coke zero or something. cause i'm hardcore beast like that (y).

anyways so yeah, we drove over to deep cove instead, and it turned out pretty amazing because, drumroll...


it was foggy. JIZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

and of course, i made good use of the epic, moody fog hanging over the water. i went the opposite direction, into the woods. and it was awesome.

love this shot, unfortunately the trunk on the right kinda ruins it imo. a nice crop helps but i didn't think to re shoot it with better framing at the time due to there being a million hikers around me, and this tree was smack in the middle (ish) of the trail.

to me, this thing is a nice cross between batman and those fat sprout-babies in harry potter.

the s-m-c tak 28 hard at work here. the 15mm would've made me go all the way up to it to not have a ton of extraneous stuff in the shot, which would've then had a ton of perspective distortion - fun in some cases, not so much in this - and the 50 would've made me back so far up i'd fall off the cliff. and then the world would be a better place. sadface.

making good use of my polarizer here. without it, those wet rocks would be all reflective-y and just look kinda meh. not really fixable in post either, so good justification for having the actual filter. it was so dark here that the polarizer's sucking up of a stop or two of light was enough to get a good second-long exposure, blurring the water into sexiness - didn't need the ND for any of these forest river shots.

i love this shot - into the mist it goes...

the only shot i took with the super-tak 50/1.4 today. it's interesting because i was so excited about it, but in practice, i don't really need it that much. that said it's not like i'm going to write it off or anything, some photowalks just favour certain focal lengths. 

and here now is a lovely case of user error:

i had the right angle here set up with the tripod and the 28mm/3.5, that got the roots looking how i wanted. but, i forgot to stop it down to f11 and this was instead shot wide open - too shallow DoF for the shot i wanted. some hikers were approaching so i had to move out of the way, after which i took this shot:

and this time, i remembered to stop down to f11. but i didn't get the framing as low as i'd had it last time. sighs.

halfway through my hike upwards, my mom called me ( they went ahead instead of waiting for my taking photos every 30 feet ) and told me that there wasn't really anything to see from the top. since she promised a view and that was the main reason i didn't go straight to the docks, i started going back down the trail, and, thankfully, the fog was still there....

also, TEACHABLE MOMENT TIME. the following shots go 28mm, 15mm. 28mm, 15mm.

it doesn't really show up in the shots without the boats, but those with the boats - that, my friends, is what you call perspective distortion. it's not really a property of any lens, but more the focal length of it (ie, any wide angle lens, no matter how perfect, will have it, so long as it's wide enough). basically if you're that close and have that wide of angle, it'll exaggerate the size of things, whereas the shot with the 28mm, you can tell that it's a lot more natural in terms of proportions. anyways, yeah, i love all these 4 shots to death, but i can't pick between any of them. i do like the fourth one the least, cause the clouds are a bit bland...i also feel like i have too many shots with this sort of dark, atmospheric treatment to them, but at the same time, it's what i'm into, soooo...suck it. i'll post sunshine and butterflies and puppies in the summer. 

so at this point in the photowalk, it's just started raining and i have my camera wrapped in a ziploc bag while mounted on my tripod, and after i get these last shots off, i went off to meet my mom at some nearby restaurant. it was about 2:30 pm. good time for breakfast, no?

along the way, i had a bit of a photo opp for one of my school assignments -store fronts. i normally get kinda bored by such a mundane subjects, but then again at the same time that pushes me to find something interesting out of the mundane - something i've seen some really awesome photographers do, and when it's well done, it's epic. luckily, this storefront had an old, beaten-down look - i love buildings like these. bit of a fetish of mine (next to ice, abandoned barns, and atmospheric/emo water/lake/docks). 

and then i went and had breakfast.

it was good.

it had bacon. nuff said. anyways, it was a really nice day - photographically speaking. blueskywhiteclouds are nice and all, but it's just...boring. and i love my 28mm lens. it was the underdog of the trio i'd brought, really - i had the 15mm, 28mm, and the super-tak 50mm. the super-tak was faster, the 15mm, was more dramatic a focal length and fun to use, yet the 28mm took the majority of my shots today. in fact, the 50mm snapped a whopping one picture, and the 15 was almost locked in my bag the entire photowalk. it didn't  give up without a fight though - the last shots with the boat simply demanded it, but even now i can't tell which shot i like better - the 15's or the 28's.

 but the 28 has something which none of my other lenses have (besides its focal length - which is also really nice to use. i never feel like it's too much in either direction, a statement which is a bit much to make after only having gone out with it once, but still). it's simply fun to use (okay the super-tak 50 gets to join in on this too), and just the challenge of manual focussing keeps the camera out of the bag and in my hands. i already have shots that no other lens would've taken (even the 50 - it was too long in here) if it wasn't simply damn enjoyable to play around with it. nothing groundbreaking, but still:

so, yeah. it was a good day.

but now i'm fucking hungry.

brb sammich.

my nd filter has arrived and i really, really, really don't like chem.

so, first of all, my nd filter has arrived.

i do not live near any waterfalls or rivers (okay i do, but the fraser river is kinda boring), so to make the best use of this epicness, i just camwhored with it, f4 at 256 seconds ish exposures. and if you dont know what an ND filter is, basically it blocks out light so that in really bright situations, you can still do long exposures. like so:

i thought it would look cool if the food slowly disappeared over the course of the exposure. unfortunately, it looks fuckin' disgusting.

so i learned from these shots that i don't really move that much over the course of 4 minutes and 16 seconds. but anyways, chemistry. chhhhhh emistry. pronounce that with me, like you're saying chewkok. CHHHHHEMIS--fuck it. i don't like chem. and it took me a while to figure out i should put it off till the day it was due. but i should really be thanking my teacher. if it wasn't for her assigning this chem lab, how could i practice using my takumar lenseserses so much - focussing, metering - or practice the various PP effects i tried out and went crazy with, or had an epiphany that went along the lines of, wow, fuck if there're blown out highlights or totally black shadows, screw detail, if it works for the shot and adds to it, go for it, PP-wise.

past its glory days? time to throw it away? ...nah, fuck no ;D

rather odd/severe crop, this one

thank you, chem lab, for being so amazingly annoying that it gave me the perseverance to try this shot for about 15 minutes before i finally nailed the focus on the missing key

can't decide which one i prefer so here's both; i'm leaning towards the b&w though, which i'm quite happy about cause before, i was pretty shitty at b&w conversions

at the end of the day though, there's no going around the fact that chem is incredibly lame. so lame that it can counteract bacon, almost. through some horrible chemical reaction or something, probably. and as a result of this lameness, here is my sad-chemface. again, can't decide which version i like better. as a sidenote, i'm getting really good at camwhoring with manual focus lenses. i think that's a bad thing. i'm sarcastically narcissistic enough, let's not take out the sarcasm in that equation...

so anyways, chem sucks and took me forever, but i spent about 2 of the 3 hours taking pictures of stuff. but i wouldn't've taken those shots if chem didn't make me that bored and desperate, so in the end the 3 hours is still chem's fault. that's my fucked up justification, and i'm sticking with it. surprisingly though, for just normal screw-around snapshots that aren't much more than practicing manual focus, i quite like the shots that i got out of it, especially after PPing them. also, i'm really excited to go out and do some shit with that sextastic ND filter.

also, since we're on the topic of PP, here's a shot i meant to post in an earlier thing but couldn't find. basically, editing is fine unless you're making shots that look like this

and (keyphrase) try to pass it off as legit after editing it into: 

this shot was a rather self-esteem crushing attempt at slightly more advanced editing than RAW conversion.