Tokina Test

After watching the birds in the previous post, I wondered how it would be to shoot macro stuff with the long Tokina lens, and walked through the patio gate and captured the frame shown here. 


The tricky thing about shooting macro with a long lens is the distance from the subject. It is really a tripod shot, though this one was hand-held. 

Waiting for Lunch

These two still-downy youngsters waited quietly for lunch for twenty minutes on the telephone wires. Their patience paid off when their mother arrived with worms. 


My Nikon 18-105mm didn't have the reach for this shot, so I used the old Tokina 70-210mm manual focus zoom (105-315mm equivalent).

Kodak Sensor Again

This one is another frame of the old mill in Bellona, NY. Kodak DC 3400 2.1 Gigabyte Kodak sensor, 38-76mm lens (equivalent).

Pastels

This photograph was made during the last, golden light before sundown at Anza Narrows in Riverside, California.

Antelope Hills

The aforementioned Antelope Hills, that is. The photo above was taken on a Lumix FX01, not the older Kodak camera. Every time I've traveled from Flagstaff, Arizona on Route 89 through this area, I've stopped to look at the hills.

The map shows the general shooting direction toward the hills. Antelope Hill is beyond, and obscured by, the ridges on the right. Route 89 travels north toward the Navajo Reservation. Route 180 rolls north toward the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

To my senses, there's something prehistoric, perhaps neolithic about the area. I can easily imagine dark masses of bison and antelope moving between the shoulders of the hills... 

Movement

A couple days ago I remarked to an old friend that for a guy who isn't a sports shooter, I seem to shoot a lot of sports. The sequences above and below were shot at f/8 with a 1/250 shutter speed. Preferring blurring balls and bats, I didn't want to completely freeze the action with a faster shutter speed.

Hillside Poppies

These poppies were shot in 2010 at Diamond Valley Lake, a man-made reservior near Hemet in Southern California. 

"When Life Was Good"

This photo has been floating around since one day last year when I ran into a rider who was close to my (middle) age who had just restored a 1973 Honda CB 350 like the one in the photo, though the bike he restored was red. The photo is not mine, but I can't find the owner.
Near the pumps of a service station, we talked about the bike and the restoration for a couple minutes. The 350 was all stock, just as it should be.
I looked the bike over and nodded. "Very nice." I said. "It takes me back."
The proud owner nodded back. "That's what I like the best about it. It takes me back to the Seventies, when life was good..."

The Mill

This old grain mill is in the hamlet of Bellona, in Yates County, New York. I lived in Bellona for several years during the sixties when I was still in school, so I was familiar with the mill and the stream that originally powered it, Kashong Creek. 
On the day in 2005 the photo was made with the Kodak DC3400, it was the only digital camera I owned. The camera was quite slow compared to the digitals I use now, a Nikon DSLR and a Panasonic Lumix. Both of the newer cameras are now out of date by several years, but I don't anticipate newer cameras any time soon...    

Bristol Dry Lake

This photo was taken in the desert near Amboy, California after a time of rain in early March, 2010, which explains the yellow blooms. 
Amboy's volcanic crater sits on the west shoulder of the dry lake, and the town itself is on the north of the old lake shore. This viewpoint is looking east-north-east over the briny lake bed toward the Old Woman Mountains. 

In The Canyon

Sycamore Canyon, that is. These photos were made during a hike in Sycamore Canyon on April 21, 2011. Like every Spring, the hills are green from the winter rains, and the wildflowers are in bloom. Being on the edge of the desert, the greening won't last long. The verdant hills will slowly fade within a couple months, with the plants turning various duns and browns as they dry during the approach of Summer. The plants fringing the hills on the edge of the desert are typically dry eight or nine months of the year, so the green is a temporary visual treat.

The hillsides are blooming. This is the best time of year to photograph wildflowers in Southern California, whether you are heading deeper into the desert, up into the mountains, or across the farmlands in the valleys. Below: Isolated yellow blooms.

As shown in the long view of the first photo above, most of the more prominent flowers in the canyon run toward yellow. The spray of red shown below broke up the dominate color, if only in a small area.

Planned Obsolescence

Not that I planned on it. But it seems likely that my Kodak DC3400 had an estimated expiration date of a decade. The DC3400 was released in 2000, if I remember correctly (and there's no particular reason to believe that I do). 
Mine was bought by my wife Lisa in 2001, and I used it during a trip to New York a few days after 9/11/01. At the time it was a nice "high-tech" point and shoot camera. For a consumer camera, it had a large at-the-time 2.1Meg sensor. And I always liked the way the Kodak sensor handled color.
In recent weeks, the images written to the CF card have been degenerating in quality at times. During the last few days I haven't been able to make the camera write images to the card. Sometimes it writes the framework of the file, but it doesn't put any photo information in the file. I eliminated the CF cards as possible culprits, since they work fine in another camera. 
So I have officially pronounced the device dead. The ceremony with monosyllabic chanting, rattling vegetables, and bird feathers will be held later.
My most distinct memory of using that camera was stopping a long motorcycle ride in 2004 to get a photograph of the Antelope Hills north of Flagstaff, Arizona. That photograph remains one of my favorites, largely because of the way the sensor and camera handle color. The color is rich, but there's a subtle difference between Kodak color and the output of other digitals.

May

There's no particular reason for the photograph. I had been thinking about various color and black and white film types, which somehow led me to the flowers with the digital in hand.
This is the second blooming of the year for this plant. I'm wondering if the plant will survive it's first desert summer.