photography

I’ve been slowly working on scanning our Honeymoon pics from Norway. The project was going along quite well until I opened what I have scanned in Photoshop tonight to start doing some tweaking. Everything - every one of the 40+ pics I had scanned, straight from negatives, was blurry. Remember, I have a B.F.A. in Photography, and was using a Nikon camera (arguably some of the finest lenses out there). So I’m guessing my scanner is what’s turning my beautiful pics into garbage. Which isn’t surprising since it’s a 3-in-1 scanner, copier, printer.

I’d love to get access to a really high quality film scanner so I could get my entire portfolio saved digitally. I’d hate to buy something like that, since after I had all my old photo’s scanned it would be pretty useless. Meanwhile, I’m a bit frustrated with my new digital camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT - but it’s only a minor frustration. It takes really sharp pictures and there’s plenty of manual control, which I absolutely demand out of a camera. My one pet peeve is 2 things that are inter-related so I’ll only count them as one: under low light it has a very hard time focusing. But I’m not talking darkness, I mean subdued light; maybe overcast skies; and the sensor does not seem to be as sensitive to light as I would like. In a room where an ISO 400 should handle the job, it’s telling me I need to use ISO 800.

This could be my lens - in fact, both these problems could be the lens that comes with the camera. I’m going to have to eventually invest in a straight 50mm lens. I’ve been using zoom lenses for years now on both my film camera and now the digital, and I have never been terribly happy with the quality - they tend to be a bit on the fuzzy side.

Anywho - click on our Flickr Badge (below, right) to see the new (old) pics.

Objects in mirror are not as large as they appear…

My brand spankin’ new web page is finally up! Though not complete, I have uploaded several of my still-life and portrait photographs. Anyone who had my old site bookmarked should update their bookmarks, as I had to change my hosting company, and now have my very own domain name. You can get to it by following the link that says “mike’s photography” in the menu at the right. Any updates to the site itself will be posted here on this blog, since I didn’t want to clutter my photo page with updates, which probably won’t be happening too often after I get it up and running. But keep checking back over the next few weeks, I still have two more categories of photographs to upload. And once I finally get my scanner, updates should happen much more frequently. Any and all comments, questions or concerns about the anything on that site would be greatly appreciated.