Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

I’ve been back out in my garage these last few nights, shooting snow crystals.

I like the garage. Last year I had the roof fixed, so I can no longer see the sky while under its shelter. The temperature was cold – in the low 20’s (Fahrenheit). For an hour or two the snow fell in fairly clear and intact crystals, so I had the chance to grab a few specimens before the snow again degraded into sleety pellets, and then stopped all together.

The snow fell pretty fast, so the individual crystals that fell were often bound up with the detritus of the atmosphere. Many shots had bits and pieces of broken crystals littering the glass around them.

It was also another bountiful night for 12 armed crystals – this seems to be the year for them. With another single 12 armed crystal, and a 12 dendrite crystal appended to a common six pointed snow flake. At this point the twelve pointed snow flakes are getting to be a bit less rare – but I have yet to encounter an 18 pointed snow crystal.

In terms of quantity, this winter has produced more good shots than last, but I have yet to get a shot that is really top drawer in terms of quality. Both my lighting setups and the snow have been less than ideal. It always takes a while to re-learn the lighting, and with each re-learning there’s the chance to come up with a new and different take on things. As for the quality of the snow crystals – the atmosphere is constantly churning them out in all shapes as sizes. Its really just a matter of being there when the right one falls, though they only fall for a few moments. 

More photos from last night:

It’s been snowing in West Michigan these last few days, as winter makes a belated entrance. And of course, I’ve been out trying to get a few good snow flake photographs.

While the temperatures have been colder (but not very cold) and the snow has been falling, it’s dlear that winter is waning. The days are already noticeably longer, and the trees and bushes are starting to bud out – perhaps a bit early due to the warm weather of the last few months, but then not far off schedule.

I’ve been using my older digital camera – the Pentax *ist-D – for the snow crystal shots, simply because it supports the older style TTL flash, that will work with a reverse mounted lens on bellows and extension tubes. The newer K10D camera requires a lens that it is communicating with the camera body via contacts on the lens mount in order for the TTL flash to work.

While I’ve had a chance to get out an do some shooting, the snowcrystals have been a bit a lackluster so far this year. So far we’ve seen an abundance of small, sleety pellets (really uninteresting to photograph) or large, frosty, effervescent flakes that lack almost all detail and crystal structure.

There have been a few interesting specimens though. I’ve seen at least two new 12 armed crystals (one of which is shown here) and possibly a third – I say “possibly” because it might just be two 6 armed crystals that happened to get stuck together in the center. It’s hard to say. (One of the 12 armed crystals is not shown, simply because it landed on the glass plate at an angle and so the photo of it is pretty poor – but good enough o show 12 distinct dendrites.)

The other interesting subject is a capped column crystal – a wee tiny thing that landed on the glass plate today, scarcely 1 mm long along the long axis. I slapped on all the extension I could find, and shot away at it – still getting a small image in the finder but an interesting (and for me unique) shot nonetheless.

Otherwise it’s been the same old stuff. I’ve been taking photographs of snowflakes in my garage since 1999. Since then I’ve only had four or five productive sessions in February, and only one or two in March. So if history is any indicator, this season will be coming to end just as it has gotten started. But then – who knows – maybe history isn’t an indicator, and if climate change is really happening, maybe history is really just bunk at this time.

Well – I’ll be watching for more snow crystals in the next several weeks, counting down the days till spring and summer.

Somehow a fruit fly seems to always be buzzing around my monitor – I’m not sure where it comes from (and since its been around for weeks it can’t be the same individual) – perhaps they are coming from the plants I brought in from the yard. But at any rate, it’s just a spec, but a tiny reminder that the insect photography season will be here in a wink of an eye. 

A few days ago it snowed. Normally, that would not been an extraordinary statement for mid January in Michigan. But this year the sight of snow in the air or on the ground is a true rarity.

It started to snow early in the evening, and I rushed out in an exuberant attempt to get a few snow crystal shots. Unfortunately – it was too warm. The temperature was hovering around the freezing point and the snow crystals that I caught melted shortly after touching the glass plate that I use to capture the flakes for photographs.

I was about to throw in the towel, when the temperature suddenly dropped – just a few degrees, but it dropped quickly, in a few minutes. And suddenly the snow crystals weren’t melting as I caught them. For a few short minutes – maybe even half an hour – the snow fell in fairly clear and clean crystals.

I managed to get a few acceptable snow crystal shots in the brief window of time, but then the snow turned sleety, and then it stopped.

It may yet snow again tonight, and the forecast calls for it tomorrow, but for now that half hour was a small window of opportunity, and I’m glad I was able to peer though it.

More photos: 

A few years ago I uncovered a Holga 120 camera from my father’s photo collection, and I’ve been a devoted user of it ever since. The sheer simplicity – no real aperture settings and one fixed shutter speed – makes it a compelling camera. You can forget all about all that technical stuff while you are out shooting, and then try to compensate in the development and printing stages.

These days I’m in a heavy digital camera mode – and as I was playing around with a new digital SLR last week, and started to wonder if it would be possible to fit the lens from a Holga onto the DSLR.

The Holga lens popped right off the body, with just a quick twist. At that point it was just a question of figuring out how to mount it on the camera body.

The first attempt was to put the Holga lens on an extension ring. I wasn’t sure how far the lens should be from the sensor to achieve optimum focus, so I taped the lens to the smallest extension ring available – a 12mm ring – and gave that a try. Unfortunately, that was way too much extension – and while it would be good for close ups, it would not work out for general shooting.

So, onto plan B – chop a hole into the center of a body cap and mount the lens onto that. The back of the lens assembly (which includes the aperture) actually extends just a bit into the body cavity.

Here was a setup that worked – after testing it out with the lens taped in place, I glued in onto the body cap with superglue, and then waited a few days to take it for a spin (didn’t want those super glue vapors settling onto the digital camera sensor.)

This setup worked out great. The lens seems to be close to it’s optimum distance from the sensor, and object that are more than 10 or 12 feet away come into focus – if you can cal it that – quite well.

 

The effect of the lens is interesting – not as interesting as a real Holga, but fun still.

With a real Holga there is a ‘sweet spot’ near the center of the frame that is relatively sharp. Along the periphery of the image, the lens introduces significant distortions. A real Holga also has had significant vignetting – especially if you remove the film insert.

With the DSLR, the sweet spot fills most of the sensor area, so you lose the great distortions that would appear along the edge of a 120mm exposure. You also lose the great vignetting that a real Holga produces.  

In addition, the 60mm lens is a moderate telephoto on an APS sensor DSLR. IN 35mm terms, a 60mm lens on small sensor DSLR is the equivalent of a 90mm lens. The same lens, on a medium format camera, is the equivalent of a 30mm on a 35mm camera.

Well – what are obstacles but things to get around. The lens distortion is there, and the digital sensor seems to accentuate color distortion, chromatic aberration, and flare even more than film – so there’s a fair trade off. Vignetting can be crafted post exposure in Photoshop. A while a wide angle might be more interesting than a telephoto, it’s just a function of seeing and composing a little differently.

 

At the end of the day – I like the results of the Holga lens on the DSLR body. Whenever the sun comes back, I’m looking forward to trying some digital infrared shots using the Holga lens. I ‘test drove’ the Holgified DSLR yesterday and today. Yesterday I hit the lake Michigan shore line and the lighthouse at South Haven, along with the Allegan forest. Today I wandered around the hinterlands, stopping off at a remote country cememtery and also snapping a fading evangelical billboard.

The cemetary was a weird place, since there were lots of small American flags lying in the dirt all around the headstones. At first I thought that it was vandalism - but then I saw so many flags dangling from their sticks by just a few threads. You’d think that people would show a little more respect for their country, and have the foresight and sense of responsibility to take down their flags when they are ratty and falling apart. 

 

Note: This is an update to my original post on the K10D, which can be found HERE. 

It’s been a couple months since the Pentax K10D first arrived, and I’ve managed to squeeze out just over 2500 images – granted most of the cats and holiday decorations. But it’s given me plenty of time to play around with the camera and get familiar with it.  

So here are few more thoughts an observations about this camera:

• 10 megapixels makes a difference:  Intuitively, I didn't think that going from 6 to 10.1 megapixels would make much of a difference. But then, intuitively, I initially didn't expect a 6 mexapixel camera to rival 35mm film as well as it did. Looking at the results I have to say that there's a noticeable difference in detail between 6 and 10 megapixels. I'm not quite ready to abandon medium format for some particularly demanding uses, but my initial reaction is that 10 megapixels delivers an image quality as good or better than 35mm film.

• Chromatic Aberrations on older lenses: Maybe it's because of the increased pixel count, maybe its due to the how the RAW images are processed, but I'm noticing more chromatic aberration on the Pentax K10 D than I noticed on the *ist-D. My Kiron 105mm f 2.8 macro, for example, had a minor degree of CA on the *ist, but a significant amount on the K10D. While it's largely correctable in the RAW converter, I suspect that a few more older lens will be falling by the wayside as this becomes my primary camera.

• Shake reduction:  Still works great! It's amazing how quickly I've gotten used to shooting hand held 1/15th of a second shots.

• Dust Removal:  The K10 has a dust removal setting, where it knocks the sensor around to shake off any dust specs. This works extremely well! After several trips to the woods and the beach, I still have yet to even blow off the sensor with a hand blower. I've actually got shots with notable dust specs on the sensor, that disappear after running the dust removal process.

• Banding Noise: This seems to have created a big hub-bub in several user discussions of this camera. on line. It's a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion. To begin with, this camera is extremely low in noise, and I have yet to see any noise problem (banding or otherwise) in any shots that were well exposed (over even a stop or so off the mark.) However - a significantly under exposed shot that is  'pushed' several stops in the RAW converter will begin to display noise (go figure) and that noise does seem to have a banding pattern to it. It's particularly noticeable if the image is converted to a monochrome shot using the channel mixer, as the noise can be more prominent in one channel than another. (In my experience the problem can appear in either the red or blue channel.) Of course, ISO 1600 is more subject to noise than lower ISO levels, so the problem can be more noticeable at this setting. Personally, I don't see an issue with it since any shot that's even close to properly exposed avoids this problem.

• Battery Life:  I was somewhat concerned with switching to rechargeable batteries with the K10D. After all, the *ist-D would run off any old set of 4 AA batteries, and a set of AA lithiums could last 1500 exposures or more. Thankfully, the rechargeable batteries in the K10D seem to last well beyond the 750 exposure Pentax estimates (since I don't use the flash, that is probably a main reason why they last longer.) I still bought 3 backup batteries just to be sure I'm never caught without.

For now that seems to sum it up. Overall, this is an excellent camera and I've been having a great time getting to know it.

Since this is a review I should comment that I have no relationship with Pentax at all, other than purchasing and using their gear.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves." -- Wm. Shakespeare

Yesterday, for the first time in far too long, I headed out to photograph along the Lake Michigan shoreline. My destination was one of my favorite spots – the Northpoint Conservation district, located just north of the VanBuren State Park.

I shouldn’t blame the weather for my lack of productivity these last few months, but I do. It’s been dark, bleak, and uncannily warm this winter. Most winters are dark, bleak, and cold. There’s something about stepping out into frosty cold morning air that snaps you out of the malaise that cloudy bleak days bring on. To some extent, winter’s cold is an antidote to the winter blahs – and stepping out into a dark morning in 30 or 40 something temperatures just deepens the sense of malaise.

Well, again, I shouldn’t blame the weather.

So yesterday I schlepped to Northpoint with the Pentax K10D. I really love this camera, though I haven’t had a chance to do much with it yet. At Northpoint I snapped a variety of landscape shots, pictures of trees, shots of the ruins that are claimed to be Al Capone’s incomplete villa, and photos of the big lake.

Not much came of the day. The two shots I like the most are shown here, more are in the image stream. “Lake Michigan In January” is my favorite of the day. Two years ago I took in an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s waterscapes. My shot is obviously inspried by (and derived from) his work. But what the heck – it was the first time I could stand on the bluff overlooking the lake and not have to worry about the wind blowing the camera over. A good degree of manipulation was applied to this shot – the vignetting in particular is a post exposure construct. But ultimately, I like how it looks.

“Fungus and Leaves” is my other pick from the trip. (You know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when you sing the praises of fungus.) The warm weather has left the fungus green. (I’m no botanist but I’d swear fungus doesn’t have any green chlorophyll in it…) Well, maybe the algae that lives on the fungus is green. Anyhow, the green fungus and brown leaves on a dead tree limb that was sinking into the muck made for an interesting study.  

Oh, I wish it would get cold and snow…

But the fault lies not in the weather, but in myself. Every second in every place there are great photos waiting to be taken - but woe the milky eye (or spirit) that cannot see...