Focusing

Happy 200!

May 22, 2008

Quietly, the other day, this blog passed the 200th post milestone. Those who gasped with horror as I dashed away my summer earnings on a camera last year may not have expected me to stick with this. Keeping this blog current has been a really fun distraction since then. I look forward to my 400th post!

I want to thank friends and strangers who have taken the time to comment on here. Getting comments is where most of the fun in doing this comes from, and those of you who are regulars really fuel my hobby.

It's especially been fun getting to shoot around with Tony, which we have gotten to do a couple times since last year. Here's another plug: check out Tony's brand new blog! Designed by yours truly [well, to be clear: Tony came up with the look, I just supplied the code that makes it tick]. Tony's style and perspective are a lot different than my own, I think. It will be cool to see him post photos of places we have been to together to see how differently we can see the same thing...

Graduation was last weekend. The recent posts of the birds and carriage came from an excursion with my relatives to Grant's Farm. Graduation was a lot of fun, but I'm not gonna lie, it takes a lot of energy to entertain a dozen people for three days! I wish I saw my family more often. Hopefully one of these days I will live closer...

Over the summer as I study for the bar (and start working?) I hope to push the photography to a slightly higher level. As it is I have been just kind of shooting whatever is happening in front of me; in the coming weeks I will try to do more to set out deliberately to photograph certain places and scenes. I would like to do more long exposure stuff (although I am worried about getting mugged in the city...).

I will also be updating the site with a few small improvements. You may notice two right now: In the navigation links I now have a "random" link that will take you to a random post from any point in the past. Also, when you jump to the thumbnails page from any given post, the photo you jumped from will be highlighted in red, and you will see the right page of thumbs (before, it used to always jump to a page of the 20 most recent photos, no matter where you were linking from).

I have a few more site improvement ideas that I will be working on soon.

About this photo: I took this in the Wash U gym this afternoon ("Where oh where can I get the number 200," I thought?). It was deserted except for a 100 yr old guy and an 80 yr old woman. I was lying down on the floor with my big ole' camera trying to shoot the "200" plate on the tri-pulldown machine. The guy wants to know,

"So, what's this all about then?"
"Oh, just shooting. It's a hobby."
"Oh... So for repairs or something then?"
"Nope, I just like the pictures."
"Oh."

He was clearly unsatisfied, and kept watching me. I took 34 shots of the number "200" till I thought I had enough to find one I liked back at home. The guy comes up to me as I am clicking through my batch on the viewfinder.

"Well, guess you have quite an album then!"
"Yup. Sure do."

He thought I was completely bat shit.

Comments [post]

100 Most Recent

amy
May 30, 2008 - 4:19pm
wow! congrats jeff, that is amazing. i am so incredibly impressed with all of your pictures and your talent! keep it up :)

jeff
May 23, 2008 - 5:31pm
thanks for the feedback!! the dof effect is actually somewhat intentional. I shot this on a angle originally - on both the "z" as well as the "x,y" plane. Here is the original. I kind of like the softness at the edges for this shot, but I hear what you are saying about nice, crisp macros. This photo actually has a little less of the extreme dof than most others I took, like this one. I find that the macro lens needs an awful lot of light... It's more or less impossible to take a handheld macro shot indoors without a flash - even at 1600ISO/f.2.8. Even the shot I posted (with flash) is 1600/f.4 - pretty sensitive. So, without a tripod, I typically find I am dealing with a very shallow focus plane for closeups. That's one of the reasons this shot is kind of cool, I think: you have both foreground and background elements that are only millimeters apart but that fall in and out of focus over a very short distance.

JimDrobish
May 23, 2008 - 11:03am
The image is soft on the sides. I think I would prefer the numbers to be sharp. I went back and looked at some of your earlier macro shots and the lens is sharp in the corners (see coins and money shot), so the softness here must be the result of the depth of field, but I'm a little suprised there's so much difference center-to-side. Is the surface flat? If it's dof, a smaller aperature would extend the range. On the other hand, maybe you prefer as is. What do you think?

JimDrobish
May 22, 2008 - 11:58pm
Hey Jeff congratulations on making your photoblog the great success that it is. Keeping a photoblog was a stroke of genius. It gives incentive and purpose to taking great photos and pushing your boundries. It also can give you some feedback/critque. I look forward following your progress as you travel the road to #400.

jeff
May 21, 2008 - 11:54pm
thanks buddy. btw, since i posted this i uploaded another little innovation: i changed the format of the nav buttons, date, and i added a caption. i found that i was adding captions in text anyway, so it was about time to do it formally. it's a pain to walk back through though and convert. for the time being, anything without a caption is just "number whatever the number of the post is"

Tony
May 21, 2008 - 9:26pm
Jeff, congratulations! I'm really proud of you man, this thing has just become so amazing to tune into. I love seeing where you are and how you've advanced. The highest compliment I can give you is this; you have developed your own aesthetic and style and it's addictive. I love seeing your shots and trying to think about why and how you've taken them. This post is awesome and a great way to commemorate your 200th. Good on you buddy!