Guest Contributor – TomD – 11FEB2024 – Photo Talk

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

I’ve done a LOT of studio type macro. If you want the easy way to do macro shots its with a lighting setup. I’ll attach a shot of my light box setup below. BTW: Important that the lights be 5000 kelvin color temp (daylight).

how to 1.jpg
how to 1.jpg

Light box (above). That’s my old Sony A850 on the tripod. I build the light holding framework around the box with PVC tubing. I’ll also post a shot of what I was mostly doing.

A Mexican coin shot using the light box. One reason straight on lighting alone won’t work is that it won’t create the shadowing that defines the shot.

Don Quijote.jpg
Don Quijote.jpg

 

Speaking of cameras, I’m about to acquire another body. It’s been about 6, maybe more, years since I gave my ASPC Sony a6300 to my wife and went entirely to full frame, full sized cameras. When it comes to photographic quality, you can’t beat them, but they lack in one really important respect: full frame, full sized cameras are too big and too expensive to carry constantly. I kept the A6300 with a Zeiss 16-70 f4 with me almost all the time. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket or console and be available. It wasn’t exactly cheap but but if it was lost, stolen or broken, it wouldn’t be like the $5K-$6K hit for one of my full frame bodies + a Sony GM series lens. And, frankly, you would would have to look very hard to tell the difference between most shots from my 6000 series cameras and the full frame cameras.

A significant portion of my favorite shots have been serendipitous.

The wife is attached to the 6300 so I’m about to get a newer A6600 for less that a thousand and I already have the big investment, the lens selection in hand.

Recharging the Batteries

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I’m gonna talk about fun stuff today.  I need a break from Biden and his mush-brain.

I was watching a YouTube video by one of the guys who provides me with pep talks on photography and he said when you’re feeling uninspired the best thing to do is grab your camera and look for inspiration.  Well, Camera Girl has been haranguing me for the last couple of days about the return of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard to the swamp.  Now this is an annual event.  The same pair of mallards (I think) return every late winter to the local water and graze on the slime and ooze and raise up a passel of youngins.  Some of my favorite shots of the mallards involve heavy snowfall.

At the same time, they are very annoying because they tend to retreat from me and my camera whenever I try to capture them.  But this year the battle is stacked more in my favor.  I’ve got the Sony 200-600 lens and with its extra reach I can still get reasonably close up shots from what the mallards feel is a safe distance.

So, I went out this morning with my A7IV, the long lens and my monopod and picked my way between thorn bushes and mud holes until I was at a respectable one hundred feet from the ducks and banged out maybe a hundred exposures.  I used single shot autofocus and a comfortable ISO 1000 to get the short exposure time I needed with the long lens.

The ducks are kind of funny in that the male and female look totally different from each other.

And they have slightly different behaviors also.  The male is more confident while the female seems more cautious.  His head seems to be mostly underwater while hers is above.

He ranges around more while she is mostly still.  And interestingly, I’ve adopted the idea that they work for me and require my approval in order to feel legitimate.  Well today they got the official thumbs up from the king.  I provided them with the royal nod and now they can get on with perpetuating their species without fear of their charter being pulled.  I told them that I am following their careers with great interest and expect to review their progress sometime in the early spring when the latest cohort is swimming and quacking around the puddle.  After all Dunwich must be populated or duckulated or whatever duck increase is called.

I was looking for inspiration today and sure enough, it was fun.  And that got me motivated to download all the files on my camera and at least look at the mallard shots I just took.  And that is the evolution of a good day.  A little research, a little field work and a little work in the office and I have a few nice shots of the neighbors and a nice little illustrated post for the site.

All right.  Now I can stand to hear about what mush-brain has done today.  Hopefully something harmless like taking credit for the invention of shoelaces or something.

Biden’s Greatest Hits

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Here is five minutes of Biden battling to speak a coherent sentence and failing completely.  I’ll warn you this is harrowing.  I think going forward the Dems trying to get him re-elected should just provide him with yes or no questions to answer and nothing else.  That should make it at least a 50/50 shot.

The sad thing is I still think the odds are he’ll be the president for the next four years, assuming they can keep his body somewhat animated.

Generation Skink

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Joe Biden has been officially declared senile by a federal special prosecutor.  And because of that he’s allowed to break the laws surrounding classified documents.  When I heard that, I think I felt like the district attorney did at the end of the courtroom scene in the movie “Miracle on 34th Street.”  It’s when the defense attorney reads off the official mandate for the post office to only deliver mail to the correct recipient and then he has thousands of letters to Santa Claus poured onto the judge’s desk.  It’s absurdity stacked onto absurdity until it all comes tumbling down.

Look, it’s all too much.  Even the Democrats who are running the lawfare can’t keep track anymore of where the landmines are buried.  The only thing they haven’t unleashed yet are killer drones with Donald Trump’s face programmed in as the target.

So here is the sad, impoverished remnant of America that the Left and their corporate lackeys have created.  Everyone not in the 1% is struggling just to feed and house themselves, with nothing left of the American Dream whatsoever.  So now Generations Y and Z will get to see what it means to own nothing and be glad.  Glad will just be code for powerless.

I’m very interested to see if they’re really as “with the program” as their representatives on the news say they are.  From my point of view living in a closet and eating crickets seems like a fate worse than death.  Even in the depths of the Great Depression I think the lowliest American aspired to better than eating bugs.  So, I’d like to believe that our descendants haven’t devolved into creatures that eat the same food as our pets.

So that’s what I’m interested in finding out during this election year.  Because I guess that Donald Trump might make a pitch to the younger people.  If I were creating his commercials, I’d show stock footage of people living during 1980s and 1990s and highlight the fact that they lived in houses and ate meat and drove cars that didn’t have to be plugged in for ten hours at a time.  I think he could make the case that living like the generations before them is a relatively simple decision.  You just have to vote for people who believe that Americans deserve to live in the modern world and not move back to the medieval period.

Now maybe it’s too late.  Maybe the kids have become bug-eaters and they don’t mind living in a box.  If that’s the case then very shortly all of the old world will be phased out along with internal combustion engines and freedom of speech.  So, it should be very interesting to see what happens in November.  I’ll have to say a part of me wants it to happen so I can stop thinking about it.  If the Dems take the White House, then only red state residents will still be free and we’ll get to see if they have the guts to finally make a stand.

So, bring it on.  Dementia Joe or Gavin Newsom or Hillary Clinton or even Santa Claus.  It doesn’t matter.  If this direction is the way that the young people want to go then I won’t be able to care about this country because their point of view is just too pathetic for me to consider.  Americans, if they had anything they always had pride.  Anyone who eats crickets and lives in a box by definition has no pride.  So, make your choice kids, are you Americans or some kind of pet lizard.

Helen of Troy (1956) – A Movie Review

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No spoiler alert needed.  It’s just that bad.

I’ve read chunks of the Iliad in Homeric Greek.  Unlike some of my professors who preferred it to the Odyssey I’m more partial to that more human scale sequel.  But I profess that there are scenes in the War Poem that are evocative and stirring.

I watched a 1950’s sword and sandal “epic” called “Helen of Troy.”  They somehow roped in Sir Cedric Hardwicke to play Priam in this spectacle.  I guess his salary ate up most of the salary budget because not another name of an actor or actress was recognizable to me except a very young Brigitte Bardot who played “the slave girl Andraste” mostly with her clothes on.

The movie had a budget of $6 million and in 1956 that was a lotta dough.  And you can see where they spent it.  There was a cast of extras that must have numbered in the thousands for the battle scenes and the elaborate props like siege towers and war engines not to mention the walls of Troy and the giant horse must have cost a bunch to make and then burn which of course they did in the last scene.

And it made about $3 million at the box office so it lost a lotta dough.  And I can see why.  The acting is shockingly wooden.  The script is laughably bad and the fight scenes look as if the combatants had never seen a sword or a spear used, even in movies.  My favorite fight is the duel between Achilles and Hector.  Instead of hurling their spears at each other they use the butt ends as cudgels and only after pounding away at each other for a while does Achilles skewer Hector as if he were a pork roast.

Mercifully the gods are completely omitted from this remarkable cinematic monument.  That surely would have been too much.  But humans suffered enough here.  Some of the Trojans are portrayed sympathetically.  Unfortunately, none of the Greeks were.  Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Patroclus are all presented as swine of one variety or another.

The action of the war is compressed from ten years to something like a weekend.  Hector and Achilles are finished off within five minutes of each other and before you know it the wooden horse is unloading its deadly cargo of Hellenic hoplites.  As the final credits are rolling Helen is on the trireme headed back to Sparta and she muses how even though Paris was just brutally murdered by her once and future husband Menelaus and his henchmen in the preceding scene and died the beautiful death, in a sense he would always be there with her.  Or something.

You know I like bad old genre movies.  If I’m in the mood I can watch Demetrius and the Gladiators or Quo Vadis.  They’re full of bad acting and historical inaccuracies but somehow, they manage to allow me not to suspend disbelief but rather, to revel in the conceit that I and the moviemaker both get to wink at each other and still enjoy a fake Age of Caesar or Bronze Age Greece that he’s conjured up.  But this thing is not that.  It’s too completely pointless and the characters are too unlikeable.  Pass!