Portrait of My Cameras

I wanted to get a picture of all of my cameras. Since I was a kid I had cameras. I recall having a plastic camera with a fixed lens that shot 127 roll film (for remembering this detail I thank my dad.) When I was a pre-teen I was allowed to shoot picture with my dad's Mamiya C330 Twin Lens Reflex. My high school graduation present was a Minolta SRT-201, all black from Ritz Camera (In Wilmington Delaware in 1977, Ritz was the big camera store downtown.) I took that camera with me into the Army where the light meter broke. I sold it and bought one of my favorite cameras, a Yashica Electro 35 GSN.

Throughout my adult life I owned a Minolta Maxxum 7000, Pentax K1000, various point-and-shoot 35mm and digital, a Yashica (FX-7?), Contax RTS II, Yashica Mat-124G, Mamiya C330, Nikon F, Soviet-era Lubitel 166B, Nikon D50, Minox EC, Canon EOS 60D and HTC Inspire 4G (okay, the last one is a cellphone.) Today I have many of these cameras. I have my third Electro 35, a GS model (I love these cameras) plus six other cameras for my portrait. I used my cellphone to take the picture with a program called Night Camera. Night Camera brackets three shots to make the final picture and unlike a good DSLR, there is a major lag between shots.

I couldn't hold the camera steady enough to get a good alignment with the shots (my Canon 60D has a nice grip and a much better weight and bracketing three shots hand-held is no problem.) I needed to brace the phone in order to get the picture.

So first, here's the picture:

Now here's my cellphone on my tripod:

I used a clamp made by Cullman that I purchased in the 80s to mount lights to my tripod. This provided the perfect stillness for the three shots that resulted in the final image. I'm not sure but clamps like this one should still be available to mount on your tripod.

Use HDR Without Making It Look Like It

Okay digital photographers, have you produced HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos? When I first saw HDR back around 2006, I thought of how wonderful the images were but I didn't want my images to necessarily look like a 'HDR image.' Today I was going over photos I shot on my trip to Las Vegas with my wife in September. I came across a photo I shot of the Beverly Hills City Hall on a day trip we took to California.

To get the perfect exposure of City Hall I lost a lot of detail of the trees. The old days of making prints meant I would have to dodge and burn to get more detail and film didn't necessarily capture the detail in underexposed sections. Digital sensors do capture details in under or overexposed sections better making dodging and burning details produce better results. But that's still a pain in the butt to me. Another method would have been to shoot a series of bracketed shots and mask sections to blend together the different sections where the details show. That's exactly what HDR software does - bracket  a high contrast image and it merges them together.

But I only shot this image one time. No problem. I used Nik Software's HDR Efex Pro software and going through a series of preset samples I found the image that gave me all the detail in one image.

As you can see it did so without making it look like a 'HDR Image.' The only problem I had with the final image was that the added detail brought out a lot of chromatic noise. I didn't save the noisy example. I recommend using commercial noise rection software to eliminate as much noise as possible. I used Nik Software's Dfine 2.0 to produce this almost noise-free final image.

On occasion, making HDR images with bright colors and surreal contrast work very well. But don't overlook HDR software to correct shooting images in high contrast situations.