Adventures of a Quantum Cowboy

Dawn at Beale's Point, on Folsom Lake in northern California.

I’m definitely a morning person.  Mornings are awakenings, new beginnings, a clean slate of possibility.  The nostalgia of sunset and the thrill of the night have their appeal; but the still silence of morning carries a certain clarity of being that other times of day lack.  Mornings are pure.

Those of you who know me will agree that I seldom stop moving; I am always on the go, and generally if my schedule isn’t at least slightly overbooked, I’m bored.  But morning photography without conversation, absorbing the new day with observation and without comment, is my zen, my one place of quiet that I reserve for myself every now and then.

Near my parents’ house in El Dorado Hills, CA is Lake Natoma.  Some months ago, I took the XT and my tripod out there.  I always underestimate how cold the pre-dawn darkness can be nearly everywhere (though it is especially acute in dry climates, be warned).  Fortunately I had some thin gloves, but it never seems like I can manipulate the camera controls accurately or fast enough.

Still reflections in the morning light at Lake Natoma.

A sturdy tripod is essential to good morning photography.  Even still hands and image stablized lenses can’t cancel the blur from the long exposures necessary to get the ethereal effect from not-quite-still water.  And you’d be surprised at the often surreal look of a a night time shot that has been “soaked” for a long exposure in the low ambient light.

Winds are typically calm or non-existent inland, though near large enough bodies of water this is not often true.  When you can get still water in the mornings, look for the multitude of reflection shots you can get in anything, from little pools, to puddles, to lakes or the ocean.  In the shot at right, the water is so still adn the reflection so clear that it would be difficult to tell whether or not the image were upside-down.  That shot taken with as wide an aperture as I could get to offset the twig in the foreground, and a relatively fast shutter speed for this time of day (1/10) to give the focus point a crispness through which I tried to convey how mornings make me feel… and this shot comes pretty close.

In the half light of just before dawn is one of the best opportunities for bird shots as well.  Most birds, especially those who feed in or near water, are going to be early risers for breakfast.  I’ve got a few photos in the queue to be processed of birds in the morning… as usual, I’ll get to it “eventually.”  In the meanwhile, may I recommend sampling some of the zen a weekend early morning gives you!

Birds, a bench, and a bum near the Santa Monica pier.

The most recent addition to my photographic arsenal is the Blackberry Pearl 8130 smartphone.  Obviously it lacks anything close to power and creative flexibility of my SLRs, but it *is* notably portable and generally always on me, something I can’t say about my significantly less easily portable SLRs.

You can read the full CNET review of the phone if you’d like, but the essentials are that it’s a 2 MP camera with 5x zoom and a small flash unit that allows for limited user control of white balance, quality setting, and color effect.

My general impression is that it’s a fairly decent camera for what it’s designed to do… that is to say: spontaneous shots meant to document or for odd creativity.  The low resolution means large scenes tend to get this sort of smeared effect, which can be kind of cool.  For example in the photo at left, slight overexposure of the background has grayed out the sky, and this combined with the los-res smearing and the ’sepia’ effect, the image is given a very apocalyptic feel.  Detail on any one part of the image is quite low, but the overall impression is actually strongly delivered in my opinion.  While it runs counter to my usual style of trying to capture detail, I must concede that this could be a source of new experimentation for me.

Extreme contrast test, walking from Santa Monica Pier to Venice Beach early evening.

Color fidelity is in general quite poor, and I think most of the color ones I have taken could do with a bit of sat boost.  However, I should point out that I have until now only tried the camera out in situations for which I have already admitted that the device is not designed - large scenes with a moderate to large amount of detail.  This is what I usually like to take when doing city and street shots, so I’m not really surprised that this is the bulk of what I have.  Sometime in the near future, I would like to try usign the Blackberry camera on photographs where there is a single point of focus, one which is quite close up and filling the frame.  I suspect that these will turn out much better and more interesting.

Good photography depends only partially on equipment.  Cheap and low-key stuff can turn out good photographs, you just need to bear in mind the different aspects of what you are using.  Apparent shortcomings can be turned into very creative advantages in the right hands.  Sure, if you want to do a particular kind of photography, you may need special equipment; you won’t get very far trying to photograph birds without a decent telephoto, for example.  But good composition and creativity are qualities that are completely independent of equipment.  The important thing for a photographer to remember is that, regardless of your equipment, don’t fight what you’ve got; see where the natural intersection is between the equipment you have and where you are, and go for it!

Ok, wow.  I don’t know if I still remember how to use WordPress, its been so long!  Anyway, so the new house is finally starting to look mostly the way I want it to, but there is quite a bit of work to do yet (I’m sure it never ends).  I haven’t quite gotten my photography lair set up yet, but at least the machine is operational.  Turned out that the copy of WinXP I had on there was not legit, so the activation period timed out while it was mothballed… I fire the thing up to find that Windows has locked me out.  So I ordered a new legit copy of WinXP Home off of eBay, installed the new OS, and xferred all my photos over from the backup drive.  Ugh.  I wish I could just pony up the cash for a nice Mac system for photography, but the funds just aren’t forthcoming these days.

Anyway, I’m up in Sacramento with the family for the holidays, and today is a nice quiet day at home… good thing I brought my entire drive up!  I’ll be combing through and posting today.  Hopefully multiple times, but we’ll see.

I hope everyone had / is having a great winter holiday, and that you and your families are well.  And please forgive me (again) for yet another long bout of not attending to my photography.