View allAll Photos Tagged captureminnesota
The fall colors along the river were mostly past peak, but the trees around this small waterfall were looking really nice.
The Mississippi River is striped by the lights of downtown St. Paul, topped by the big red one on top of the First National Bank building.
Prints available at Greg Lundgren Photography
A beautifully clear evening in Lutsen, Minnesota. After a late night of fun it was around 3:30 a.m. when we realized how clear the sky was. Dan and I went outside and set up four cameras to capture star trails, then went inside and hit the hay. We woke up in the morning and grabbed our cameras. Love how the cameras can take the insane cold with no problem. It was about 13 degrees F when we were setting these up.
Prints | tumblr | Capture Minnesota | 500px | Facebook
Crown Graphic | 135mm Optar | f/4.7 | Fuji Acros | Graphic 23 6x9cm back | 15s | 10-stop ND | red filter | Rodinal (1:100)
This star trail photo is a composite image comprised of 192 stacked photos taken over 106 minutes.
Nikon D5100, Nikkor 70-300mm at 100mm, 30 seconds, f/4, ISO 640
A panorama of the Minneapolis skyline including the new Vikings stadium taken shortly after sunset on a warm December evening.
"For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack." -Rudyard Kipling
I had an opportunity to finally get out an shoot again...It has been way to long and so looking forward to getting back to flickr. I have been involved in another photo project www.captureminnesota.com/users/KarenHunnictt that is wrapping up. It has been a good experience as it allowed me to re-think some of my images. Again, looking forward to catching up!
The newly reconstructed Lafayette Bridge over the Mississippi River near downtown St. Paul adds some orange to this twilight image.
An unseasonably warm December has left the Mississippi unfrozen (so far), creating this opportunity for a mirror image of the St. Paul skyline and the Robert Street bridge.
Prints | tumblr | Capture Minnesota | 500px | Facebook
Crown Graphic | 135mm f/4.7 Optar (wide open/titled) | Arista/Foma 100 (@80) | R60 filter | Grad ND filter | Rodinal (1:50)
The large format adventure continues.
When I woke up yesterday morning and looked out the window and saw all of the puffy cumulus clouds racing across the sky, I knew I had to get out into the windy city and shoot. For me, the recipe for an interesting urban landscape is:
- 1 part clouds, preferably cumulus or cumulonimbus (thunder heads); not too heavy
- 1 part wind, though not too strong (a gust knocked over my camera yesterday)
- 2 parts interesting light (can't get enough good light)
- A dash of patience/luck
- 2 or 3 filters, here, a red filter to separate the blue sky and the clouds (darkens the blue) and a graduated neutral density to further darken the sky and bring the exposure of the sky down a bit; a larger problem with digital's narrower dynamic range; not so much for film, luckily
- 1 part interesting subject
Gosh, I can't believe I just made a "recipe" for a good photograph. What a hack. Anyway, I'm trying a new film for my 4x5 work. I was using Ilford HP5+, which is nice, but a bit too grainy and expensive for me. 99% of my large format work will be on a tripod, so why not use a slower film. Note, the HP5's grain was not horrible, at this size, you'd have to be pushing Tri-x in Rodinal to get noticeable grain, but I wanted as little grain as possible. To get that, I'd have to shoot a new emulsion like Acros or Delta or TMax, which are all out of my price range. Enter: Arista EDU Ultra, Freestyle Photo's house brand film, a rebranded Foma from the Czech Republic. It's an old emulsion, so it's going to be grainier than the above-mentioned films, but hopefully less-so than HP5. It's also less than half the price of HP5 or almost any other film. Plus, I can develop it using 10ml of Rodinal, which makes my developer go a long ways, especially if I'm only developing 2-4 sheets per time. 250ml of XTOL goes pretty quickly with frequent tray developing, even if it is cheap. The bottom line is that I get to shoot a classic emulsion for way less than $1 per sheet. Not bad. I've heard that this film curls a lot, but in 4x5", the film is physically too big to curl, unlike 120 or, heaven forbid, 35mm. I just laid the sheet on the scanner, didn't even put a piece of glass over it!
So I'm really digging the film and the fact that I can use my old Nikon 52mm diameter filters with the adapter I cobbled together. This includes a Cokin graduated ND filter which suits the slow photography I'm doing better than 35mm snaps with the big contraption strapped to the front of the lens. Here's my new slow photography workflow:
- Hem and haw about where to go shoot for the day (10min. to the entire day if I'm really indecisive)
- Go to location
- Find the shot (this is the most important step)
- Set up tripod
- Affix camera, level
- Open up the lens
- Put old oxford cloth button down shirt on over ground glass
- frame and focus and employ movements (I tilted and did a front lift here)
- meter (incident meter; the scene was front lit, so I figured that would be ok. I'm not fancy enough to do zone with a spot, though I carry a digital camera as a spot meter or to double check exposure)
- choose initial exposure and aperture
- decide to use filters or not
- adjust exposure for filters (why it's good to carry a small notebook for calculations and to write down exposure comps for filters, etc.)
- adjust exposure for reciprocity failure for longer exposures
- install filters onto adapter ring, place on lens along with hood, if necessary
- close lens, test shutter, put on cable release
- cock lens
- pull out film, install
- double check lens to make sure it's closed
- pull out dark slide
- look at scene (no people or cars or other distracting elements, if possible)
- press shutter
- put in dark slide
- tear down or make another exposure
It's a pretty deliberate process, but it means that a higher percentage of my shots become keepers because I'm so invested in each exposure.
All analog all day.