Photography – Page 46 – Random Connections

A New Camera Strategy

April 18, 2012 Tom 8 Comments

Photography

My new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 arrived yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to really put it through its paces, but so far I’m impressed with the few photos I have taken. The LX5 won out over a whole slew of contenders, and the decision to get it means a new strategy for my day-to-day photography.

The contenders included the following:

An exact replacement of my S70 in the form of a refurbished S70
An updated Coolpix, such as the S100
A different small camera, such as the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10
The Canon S100
and the one I bought, the Panasonic LX5

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A Good Time to Explore – Photo Editing

April 17, 2012 Tom 3 Comments

Photography

For lunch I decided to stop at our nearby hibachi chicken place. This was the fortune in my cookie. Of course, I had to eat it.

I snapped the photo with my iPhone, and was surprise at how well it turned out. What really punched it up, though, was the application of a photo filter in Aviary.

Which brings us to the issue of Aviary and Picnic. For many years if you wanted to edit photos online in Flickr, Picnic was the way to go. It was offered as a menu option in Flickr, and had some basic editing and enhancement tools in the free version, and more filters and other editing tools in the paid filter.

Aviary, on the other hand, was an excellent suite of multimedia tools, encompassing music editing as well as image editing. It was pretty much browser-based, but stand-alone from other hosting options.

Then came Instagram, and everything changed. People got hooked on using vintage filters to quickly change photos from an expensive camera into something that looks like it was taken with a cheap camera. Effects that used to require Photoshop and some technical expertise could be replicated in seconds with Instagram’s filters. It seemed everyone wanted in on the action.

Camera Dilemma

April 10, 2012 Tom 3 Comments

Gear, Photography

The camera gods have not been smiling upon me lately. On our recent excursion to Shoals Junction my trusty Nikon D50 DSLR’s mirror got locked in the UP position for several panic-filled minutes. The camera was already showing its age, and I’ve been putting away a bit of cash for a replacement, but the incident made me think that might come sooner rather than later.

Then my little Nikon S70 decided it was going to die on me. Well, not quite die, but give up the will to live. Every image is now fuzzy and the colors aren’t right. I tried tricking the auto-focus into working correctly, but with no luck. Even under optimum conditions the images were washed out and out of focus. I think it’s in worse shape than my D50.

That’s put me in a quandary as replacements are concerned. I know I’m going to replace the DSLR with another Nikon. I’ve got good lenses, so it makes sense just to replace the camera body when the time comes. I also like the control and flexibility a DSLR provides. But what about the little point and shoot?

Old Dorchester and ACE Basin

April 8, 2012 Tom 1 Comment

Photography, Travel

I’ve been able to take off on a few excursions over the last couple of months, but Laura really hasn’t had a chance to get away. With her mom in Florida, and since we had at least one day in common for this spring break, we decided to escape down to the Charleston area. However, we weren’t interested in the city itself, but the outlying areas to do a bit of bird watching. Our goal for the first day was the ACE Basin, and Beidler Forest for the second day.

Driving no the interstate was pure madness. It seems that everyone was out for a weekend away. We decided to get off of the interstate and explore some of the side roads. Laura’s comment was that “South Carolina is much prettier once you get off the interstate.”

We drove into Orangeburg, then headed south. On Highway 61 we saw a sign for the community of Sixty-Six. I’d never heard of it before, so we decided to check it out. It was an old railroad community that didn’t turn out to be much. I may have to do some further research. We did drive through Branchville, which has “the oldest railroad junction in the world.” Laura wasn’t sure about that claim, though, so I filled her in on the history of “The Best Friend” of Charleston, one of the first railroads in the US.

Searching for Shoals Junction

April 4, 2012 Tom 4 Comments

History and Genealogy, Local, Photography

It’s spring break for most of the Upstate school districts, and I wanted to search for a few ghost towns. Mark Elbrecht and I had bounced around some possible targets, and after looking through the South Carolina section of the Abandoned Rails website, we decided to try to find Shoals Junction, at the end of the abandoned Ware Shoals line. We would also hit a couple of other smaller communities and see what we could find. Turns out we could hit lots of communities – eight of them in all. I’ll try to summarize them here.

Ware Shoals

We set out down Augusta Road eventually reaching the eastern terminus of the railroad in Ware Shoals. We took a turn through the town, then headed down to the river. We drove through the riverside park, then circled past the power generation station. There were several workers, and we felt awkward stopping for photos. We retraced our steps upstream and headed beyond the bridge crossing the Saluda River. We soon reached the Ware Shoals Dam.

At the top of the dam water is diverted into a canal so that it can be routed through the power turbines below. With the recent rain lots of water was flowing over the dam.

An old masonry staircase led down to the river. As sign pointed to the “Fishing Trail” and “Canoe Portage.” I guess the portage was around the dam, but I couldn’t see where one would take out a canoe at the top of the dam. I guess it would be more obvious if I were on the river.

Brothers Retreat at Jocassee – Part Four

March 27, 2012 Tom No Comments

Family, Photography, Travel

And so it was only two of us left. Chip had to get back to family, and Stephen had to get back to church. Houston and I got up, had a quick breakfast, then packed up the mountain of remaining food and gear into our trucks. At the Devil’s Fork State Park store we checked out and each bought souvenirs. We both bought copies of Claudia Hembree’s “Jocassee Valley” book, and I bought two more stickers for my kayak.

Sometimes after weekend like this it’s nice to step back and do an overview. We decided to do that quite literally. We left the park and headed up Highway 130 toward the Bad Creek Project. We had taken Laura’s mom up here for a picnic sometime back, and it has fantastic views of Lake Jocassee. This time, on our way up, we encountered a family of turkeys.

At the overlook itself we had clear views of the places we had paddled the day before. We could see where the Whitewater River enters the lake, and even had a view of the Lower Falls. We could also see where we had stopped for lunch and other places along our paddle route.

Colleton Museums and BBQ

March 12, 2012 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Photography, Travel

We had made a successful escape from Donnelley WMA. The ACE Basin was behind us, but not forgotten. We would be back, and we would conquer it, haints and curses be damned. However, on this particular Saturday, we still had lots on our plate. That phrase turned out to be truer that we could imagine.

Upon escaping Donnelley, our first objective was food. We drove through some very historical areas of Colleton County without stopping to admire them. Our target was Duke’s BBQ, located just off of Highway 15 to the northeast of Walterboro.

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The Curse of Boynton House

March 11, 2012 Tom 44 Comments

Photography, Travel

Boynton House sits abandoned and forlorn in a remote corner of the Donnelley Wildlife Management Area, part of the ACE Basin. It was once the main house for a vast rice plantation. Now the wooden filigree is falling apart, and bat guano fills several of the rooms. On this particular trip, we also found out that it is cursed.

Normally we do a paddling trip the second Saturday of each month with the Lowcountry Unfiltered group. This time we decided to do something different. One of our members, Rob Dewig, has a new job with the Colleton County Museum. We wanted to check out his new digs. We also planned to do a bit of bike riding in the ACE Basin.

I got up far too early on Saturday morning and drove on down to the Lowcountry. Five other hearty souls joined me at the main kiosk for Donelley. It sounded like a disciples convention – Thomas (me), Matthew, James, John, James, and a young guy whose name starts out C-h-r-i-s-t. (Christian, Jimmy’s son). Yeah, we were in for trouble of Biblical proportions.

Camera Obscura – Part 2

March 7, 2012 Tom 1 Comment

History and Genealogy, Photography

Last time I gave a brief introduction to the camera obscura, describing what it was and a tiny bit of the historical background. This time I’m going to cover my personal experience with these systems.

I started playing with cameras when I was about 9 years old. My first was a hand-me-down Brownie Box camera that I got from my sister, Glynda. Unfortunately, none of the photos I took from that era survive, but I still have that camera. That old camera wasn’t much different from a pinhole camera – just a basic light-tight box with an aperture and some sort of capture medium (ie, film.) As a teen I spent one summer making actual pinhole cameras with my brother, Houston. We experimented with various styles made from oatmeal boxes and brass shimming with different aperture pinholes. Again, none of those images survive.

While my father was principal of Gray Court Owings School, my brothers and I had the run of the place. We found an old unused closed that had been used as a changing room for basketball teams long, long ago. The room was under the stage, and had running water. It was the perfect place to commandeer for a dark room, so that’s where we set up our chemicals and enlarger. Stephen and Houston did more of actual dark room work, but I remembered that location, hidden away under the stage of the old auditorium under a trap door.

There was a long lull while music, college, rock climbing, and river running (somewhat in that order) took precedence over photography. 16 years after building my first pinhole camera, I found myself teaching a unit on light to class of gifted 7th graders at GCO, and I figured the best way to convey some of the concepts was through photography.

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Camera Obscura – Part One

March 6, 2012 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Photography

One of my favorite websites is Atlas Obscura, a self-proclaimed “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica.” Last week they highlighted a similarly named location, the Camera Obscura of Santa Monica. At that point it all came flooding back to me, my obsession with the camera obscura and my nascent photography interests. So, of course, you know what that means – blog posts on the subject – lots of them.

So, over the next several posts I’ll look at the history of the camera obscura, including my particular history with the subject, We’ll take a look at some locations that feature cameras obscura, and I’ll even try to built and photograph one of these beasts. We’ll see how it goes.

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