Home Schooled

Right now over at the Strobist website David Hobby is running the Strobist Bootcamp II. The current assignment is to take a real estate or architectural interior photo of a residential living space with the intent of using it to help sell the property.

Since I have gotten back from vacation I have been asking everyone I could think of if I could shoot their house. It seems that either everyone is out of town or that no one trusts me around their expensive furniture. Oh well, there is no place like home. So with the deadline looming I decided to just go ahead and get it done in my own humble apartment.

I broke out my sparse little kit of old mismatched flashes only to find that one of them had retired and refused to work any more. There are lots of lights in the apartment so I went with what I had and spent an hour opening and closing blinds, turning lights on and off, moving furniture and adjusting the power output of my two remaining flashes. I’m fairly happy with the results though I can think of a few things I might to differently the next time.

Strobist info: Daylight creeps in from behind the camera through the horizontal aluminum blinds. I was hoping that there might be some interesting patterns cast on the foreground by those but no go at this time of day.
Shortly after I started, I came up with the idea that I wanted a diffraction star in this shot so I have stopped down to f/22 and opened the shutter for 2 seconds at ISO 400. I started out with tungsten white balance on the camera and gelled the second flash but with a fair amount of ambient in the beginning it was coming out way too blue. I ended up using the “shade” setting for white balance because I wanted more of a warm fuzzy feeling. It would be easy enough to dial things down to daylight balance but this seems more cozy somehow.
There is an overhead bulb in the hallway right along with a table lamp hidden behind the wall between the arched openings. The dining room is on the left with a chandelier that has 6 bulbs. I pulled the shades off of four of them to make that a little brighter. There are also 4 table lamps in the dining room. The kitchen is behind the dining room on the left and is being lighted by a fluorescent ceiling light above the sink. There are also windows in the dining room and kitchen but they don’t seem to be adding much to the exposure.
One of my flashes broke so I am down to just two at the moment. One flash is in the fireplace with doubled up orange gels. It is set to 1/4 power. Both flashes were triggered with a Cactus V2 radio. The other flash is in the hallway on the left side sitting on a table and aimed at a mostly white painted canvas so that it bounces some light around that area and hopefully illuminates the framed photographs on the opposite wall.
I pulled out the clamp I had borrowed but I forgot to use it. I was going to put the Nikon flash on its little stand but I couldn’t find it right away so I just laid both flashes on their backs instead.
No stands, just my tripod backed against the wall with the legs splayed out so I could get a lower vantage point. I did learn that perfectly arranged furniture has nothing to do with architectural photography. The camera has a slightly different idea about perspective and geometry than the eye so the furniture gets moved around so that it makes sense in the photograph rather than conversational seating groups.
I used the histogram on the camera to tweak the final exposure so I didn’t need to do much in post processing except to clone out a couple of pesky dust spots.
It occurred to me after the fact that I could have turned on the light in the hallway on the left. My goal in this shot was to be able to see into as much of the space as possible. Normally I would shoot from one corner but I wanted the fireplace and the piano really takes over the space in the opposite corner so I was force to shoot from the center instead.
I thought that those hurricane lanterns in the fireplace would act as gobos for the flash but it didn’t work out that way. Also I think I would have like to add a diffuser to the table lamp in the center because it is still a little too hot. I did think about the perspective up and down and could have changed it but decided on this because I wanted to include the edge of the carpet. Now that I think about it (and the lack of that extra foot of space) I could have just moved everything in the room forward about 12″ and I would have had it made. That piano is pretty heavy though…

Retro Rocket

I finally got around to taking a couple of snaps of my new house guest. It’s a Spartus Rocket camera which takes 127 film. This one has never ever been used which is interesting to me. It even came with an instruction sheet and a couple of Kodak film mailers.

I usually confine my camera shopping to thrift stores which is pretty hit and miss. This one came from an antique mall so it cost about double what I would have paid at the thrift store. I didn’t have to pay shipping like the times when I buy something online so when you figure the savings on shipping it is still a reasonable purchase. At least that’s what I tell myself. The fact is when you are in love with things you will pay just about any price or sleep out in the rain… Oh, that’s when a man loves a woman. It’s best not to love things too much or you will soon be disappointed. I’m trying hard not to become a collector of things because that is much too serious work for me, so I occasionally adopt a misfit or rescue a castaway from the junk store to bring it home and wash away the dust and polish the plastic as best as I can. We are flawed and scarred and live well together. I like listening to their old stories that no one else wants to hear anymore. It is all fine with me.

This one is simple and unpretentious. It has a shutter button and a film winding knob and that is about it. No bulb setting, no adjustable aperture, no shutter speeds, no timer, no tripod socket. On the other hand my digital camera came with an instruction manual that is around four hundred pages long.

One of my favorite things in life is going through the airport security line and having the TSA agent ask me to turn on my box cameras. It takes about five minutes to explain to them that there are no batteries. It usually requires a supervisor. To be honest that is about the only fun I have discovered about airport security lines or “security theatre” as I like to call it.

When I look at this little camera the thoughts begin to flow and I think of the fifties and sixties. Cars with fins, the race to space and traveling across country in the back of a blue Rambler station wagon. It has taken longer for the future to get here than I thought it would and it’s not entirely what I expected. For those who can afford the benefits of science and modern life, things are pretty cool but of course not everyone is so fortunate. Mostly people seem to want things and value them over each other. Too bad, that’s not the future we were hoping for.

Outside My Window

Fennville, MI. July 2009.

There is a knife outside on the windowsill
Placed there a long while ago
And it lays there still
And just inside on the table
Sits an empty jug of homemade wine
I fear it was the potent kind
The makes you nervous
And makes you loose your mind
When you are sitting alone in the wintertime
It’s best to leave the knife outside

I had not noticed the knife at the time I took this photo, other things were on my mind so the fact that it is lying there seems like a little bonus and gives me something to think about. Next time I am in Michigan, I should set out on a little day trip of my own so that I can stop whenever the scene dictates. It’s not so bad traveling with one other person but traveling in a group requires to much diplomacy to insist on stopping at every old barn or rusted out truck. If nothing else, traveling with others teaches you to work fast so as not to test the patience of your companions to the limit. Well at least not the extreme limit.

I took this photo at a slight angle to avoid my own reflection and then skewed it back to the proper perspective again in post processing. Sort of the poor man’s view camera but it works wonderfully to adjust the the angles if not the depth of field and you can do it after the fact when there is time to yourself to contemplate things like knives on widow ledges.

Champagne Velvet

More Michigan finds for the viewfinder. I like signs and painted metal. The person who designed this must have had a day job working for the highway department because to me it looks like a worked over road sign. Maybe that was the idea in order to get you to pay attention.

The beer with the million dollar flavor... I guess a million dollars probably doesn't buy as much beer as it used to when this sign was made. At least I still have my million dollar tastes if not the flavor (or the million).

There is some additional information about CV Beer at www.cvbeercollection.com that looked interesting if you want to take a look. If I collected things I would have been tempted to buy this sign but I collect photos instead which makes loading the car at the end of the vacation a lot more simple.