In the past few months, I’ve gotten many questions about what camera bodies and lenses I use. I thought it would be useful to make a post about it, so I can just refer people to this post rather than answering the same question dozens of times. As of today (8/16/2011), here is what I own. Typically, I’ll use some combination of these bodies and lenses for any given shoot:
Camera bodies: Canon 50D Canon 7D Canon 5D Mark II Fuji X100 (fixed 23mm lens on cropped sensor) iPhone 4 (favorite apps: OldCamera, Pano, Hipstamatic)
Camera lenses: 50mm f/1.8 50mm f/1.4 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM II 24-70mm f/2.8
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I’ll try to update this post as my needs and interests changes.
I visited San Francisco this past weekend to see some old friends and see about a job opportunity. I was able to bring my Canon 7D with me, along with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. In addition, I brought along my trusty Fuji X100 as well. The Fuji is a phenomenal travel camera — small, unassuming, attractive, and likely to spark conversation with those who see you using it:
In addition, I did a brief photo shoot with my friend Sara. We took these photos after viewing the Picasso exhibit at the de Young museum, which, btw, was breathtaking:
Sara is one of those natural beauties, a person whose posing and expressions are so sublime that they rarely needs any direction from me. I hope these photos were able to bring out that beauty.
This is long overdue, but I thought I’d make a brief post about some of my experiences in New Zealand recently. I had the opportunity to visit Weta studios to see footage from Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Adventures of Tintin. You can find my full write-up by clicking here, as well as a partial transcript of a conversation I participated in with Spielberg and Peter Jackson (part 1 and part 2).
After the set visit, I took the opportunity to drive along the South Island of New Zealand. The rental car cost me about $450 for three days (including gas, which costs about $8/gallon in New Zealand), and I had to drive all by myself for about 1,000 miles, but I saw sights that are so beautiful that they simply can’t be matched anywhere else on earth. For this trip, I used a combination of my Canon 50D with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, my Fuji X100, and my iPhone mostly using the Pano app:
I’ve done nature photography in the past, but in general, I find it to be a challenging enterprise. On a very basic level, the technology is limiting. The human eye’s dynamic range is vastly higher than that of even the most advanced dSLR on the market. Therefore, when you’re photographing images like this one…
…it can be challenging to determine the correct exposure level. And even if I got something usable, some post work would be required (as it was in this image). Fortunately, as I’ve pointed out in the past, the Fuji X100’s dynamic range is spectacular. Obviously HDR is a solution for some of these problems, but I’m still not sure I want my images to look so obviously manipulated.
When you’re photographing a human being, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to compose an image; maybe stick to the rule of thirds, and if you have interesting background elements, use them to frame your subject in a unique way. But with nature photography, you have to be more conscious of how different elements fill the frame, how the eye is drawn to them, and how the eye moves through the image. You also have a lot less flexibility in terms of which angle you are shooting from.
Despite the challenges, I’d like to think I was able to capture a small fraction of the beauty that’s present in New Zealand. Hopefully, you feel the same way.
[A special thanks to Sam and to Sid from New Zealand for their help in allowing me to capture these images!]
Martha Southgate has a pretty articulate takedown detailing what’s wrong with The Help, whether in movie or book form (via Alexander):
[T]hese stories are more likely to get the green light and have more popular appeal (and often acclaim) if they have white characters up front. That’s a shame. The continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step towards justice that this nation has ever known is infuriating, to say the least.
Michelle Bachmann appeared on the cover of Newsweek recently, with an extremely unflattering photograph and headline. Adam Clark Estes has a nice rundown of reactions, most of which I agree with. In particular, I appreciate Jessica Grose’s begrudging defense of Bachmann:
The Newsweek cover was unnecessarily unflattering. I doubt Newsweek would portray a male candidate with such a lunatic expression on his face. As much as it pains me to admit it Bachmann is a legitimate candidate and major magazines should treat her like one.
Drew Westen, explaining how Barack Obama has failed to write or take part of a story that made sense to the American people:
The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
William Galston explains how both sides could have prevented the recent debt ceiling debacle. As Kyle Baxter puts it, “This isn’t a case of one party attempting to do the right thing for the country and the other playing chicken with default. It’s a story of two parties behaving like spoiled children.”
Alexis Madrigal makes the case that Google+ and Facebook are asking us, as members of society, to do something we’ve never done before:
Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can’t just say, “Down with the government,” with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you. But the information is still being recorded, presumably in perpetuity. That means that if a government or human resources researcher or plain old enemy wants to get a hold of it, it is possible.
The pseudonym advocates note that being allowed to pick and choose a different name solves some of these problems. One can choose to tightly couple one’s real-world identity and online identity… or not. One can choose to have multiple identities for separate networks. In the language we were using earlier, pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one’s real identity.
