Throughout the entire day storm clouds have been threatening us. With the help of a friend I finished shingling the soon-to-be wet photo studio. I’ve had ideas galore swimming through my head as to what I’m going to attempt when it’s ready. Here’s a shot of the rain clouds that have been slowly surrounding us. We keep hearing thunder and every 30 minutes we’re battered with heavy rain but it hasn’t developed into a real storm system yet. Beware, this is an 800kb jpeg.
All my free time has been spent setting up a darkroom in an old shack on the acreage. My fiance’s father has used it for everything from slaughtering animals to hanging meat to storing power tools. I spent many hours washing the walls, vacuming up the cob-webs and repainting the interior. Today I ripped all the scrap sheet metal off the roof, revealing two large holes in the ceiling. These holes were leaking water into the shack and the sheet metal was the father-in-law’s attempt to stop it. I replaced all the rotten wood and laid down tar paper. I will re-shingle the roof properly this Sunday.
To add spice to the marinade, some kind people let me borrow some 35/120mm darkroom equipment while I hunt down a 4×5 view camera and enlarger within my budget. The stipulation was they get access to the their equipment when they need it, which I found very reasonable. When I’m finished fixing the shack I’ll be moving the equipment to the new studio and setting up an apparatus to hold water and maintain its temperature. I’m probably going to hook a small laundry room sink to the water barrel for feed-water and hook the drain to a barrel outside. The barrel will be circulated with an aquarium pump and it’s temperature will be held with an aquarium heater. I don’t know how well that will work during the winter but I think, when winter brings its -20 winds, I’ll be questioning the temperature of the entire shack before worrying about the water.
It’s going to be a lot of work but I feel it will be worth it. My usual approach to photography is a careful, planned method, even when shooting digital. I’ve worked in a darkroom with 35mm before but doing things such as Zone developing is tough for an entire roll of film. Shooting on sheets just feels like it will “be the right thing to do.” Not to mention that they can scan into 1.5GB images!
We headed home early due to the threat of a hail storm looming over the eastern edge of Calgary. Luckily the threat abated and the garden will be safe. The sun passed through some extremely dense clouds, however, and I just HAD to snap a panoramic together. I stitched them together with PTGui then processed the image further afterwards.
The final image is 13890×2574 pixels. If it were printed at 240dpi it would be about 58×11 inches. This is fine and dandy but I just wish I could display images like these like they’re supposed to be: in person. I’m getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger on purchasing a traditional 4×5 view camera and setting up a dark room. I really need to create some images that can make an impact in person to complement the images I share on the web.
I’ve been shooting with a Zeiss manual focus lens for almost a month now and I can safely say my manual focusing ability is getting better. I’ve previously had frustrations with auto-focus on wide angle lenses because I usually want to focus on a single point and doing that is tough. I either have to pick the point with the camera’s controls, or focus the center point and re-frame. Picking a focus point wastes valuable time and re-framing often leads to out of focus shots.
It takes me about a second, sometimes two, to get a shot in focus with the Zeiss. When I try to manually focus my Canon lenses it’s horrible. The focus rings have “slip-play” where I can move them slightly and the focus mechanism inside isn’t moving. There’s a gross grinding feeling of plastic-on-plastic, even on many of the higher end L lenses when I handle them in a store.
So overall I am VERY satisfied with my Zeiss 35mm F2 Distagon. I am no longer nervous to bring it for an event and I’m sure I will consistently get many good shots from this lens. After using it for a month I have to say again, it’s highly recommended.
Out of curiosity I daytripped to Kananaskis Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. I was disappointed when I arrived to discover I forgot my 35mm at home and was left only with my 85mm. I decided to stick it out and see what I would come up with. I turned off at the first “tourist area” which turned out to be a popular kayaking/white-water-rafting spot. I walked along the creek and found some guys using body boards on the white water. I was thankful I had the 85mm with me and shot a few pictures of the guys trying to stay in a powerful eddy.
My manual focusing Zeiss 35mm Distagon F2 is turning out to be a serious winner in astrophotography compared against my Canon 85mm F1.8. The reason why is because the Zeiss has a true infinity focus stop. Most auto-focus cameras allow focusing past infinity so that when the camera’s searching for focus it doesn’t harshly slam against the infinity point. This makes focusing subjects at true infinity, such as the night sky, difficult.
This time around I didn’t bring the Scotch Mount out either because I’m sorting out some issues with it. It seems as though cranking it from it’s fully lowered position gives a sort of “double exposure” instead of a smooth continuous movement. It appears to require a 1/4 turn or so before it starts moving.
Without the mount, the 35mm’s field of view was much more forgiving for a moving sky than the 85mm’s. I had to shoot at 15 second exposures with the 85mm while I shot at 30 seconds with the 35mm. Even though I took twice as many exposures with the 85mm, thus theoretically having the same exposure, the 85mm couldn’t record all the detail. I think it didn’t help that it was virtually impossible for me to properly focus the 85mm because my 5D classic doesn’t have live-view and the screen is messed up.
So in the end, in my case, the Zeiss 35mm proved the winner for astrophotography, giving even more versatility to this awesome lens.
The weather has been rainy and stormy and I’ve been getting home late almost every evening. However, today I saw something I probably haven’t seen for 3 years: a rainbow. I took a snapshot of it.
I drove all the way to the Highway 21 and 564, about 40km east of Calgary in order to get away from the light pollution. I’m glad I did the results were worth it.
I first tried shooting with my Scotch mount. Unfortunately I didn’t put much effort into where it was aimed and took pictures of an uninteresting section of the sky.
Afterwards I re-aimed my camera at a section of the Milky Way and fired off as many 30 second frames as I could until my battery died. I only got 3 frames fired off but fortunately I got some half-decent results.
Clear skies are predicted for Calgary tonight according to the Calgary clear sky chart from cleardarksky.com. The humidity is supposed to be at 100% but the weather network doesn’t report rain overnight. Hopefully it will be rain free.
One problem with photographing the night sky is light pollution and Calgary has its share of it. This is a chart created using data from a Calgary light polution map from cleardarksky.com. You have to go pretty far from Calgary to get away from the light pollution.
Our acreage sits right on the border where it goes from red to orange so I’ll be driving East along the 564 until I reach the 21 and go about 10 minutes north from there. It’s a 30 minute drive each way for the promise of much better night time photography. I’ll give it a shot.
Alleyways in an urban setting always have interesting things to photograph and the damp surfaces in the alleyway between 7th and 8th Ave downtown Calgary made things very photogenic. It’s that dank, dirty atmosphere that I find in an alley that’s such a fascinating subject.
I’m really beginning to like this Zeiss 35mm lens. It hasn’t come off my camera since the second day after purchasing it. It’s the perfect walk-around lens.
