Tag: Saturated Color

A Kinder, Gentler Age.

I like old cameras, I like old film, and I like old houses, so this image gave me a happy. I’m not so fond of the pickup truck, but you can’t always get everything that you want.
Cape May, New Jersey is the last town heading south on the Jersey shore. It’s a throwback in many ways – more civil – calmer – and less overtly obnoxious than the glitz and over-the-top ostentation of the New Jersey beaches to the north. It’s not like they don’t show off here, they’re just more subtle about it and adhere to community set standards. And what that creates is a beautiful town with grand old houses that make for wonderful photography.

About the Photo: This shot was made with a small, handy Ricoh AF-5 point-and-shoot camera – manufactured around 1983, and shot on long expired Kodak Gold 400 film, most probably from the 1990s. The house is at least 100 years older than either, and the truck, well who really cares?

The great thing about the Ricoh is that it’s cheap and small and has a great lens – a 38mm f/2.8. It produced such lovely colors and awesome grain, even with ancient film. On beach excursions with this camera, I usually bring a quart ziploc bag with me to keep it safe from water and to keep it free from sand. And then I slide it into my backpack pocket to have a great, light and compact film camera always ready to go. One that I don’t have to worry about.
Cheap film cameras (relatively cheap, anyway) are great. I purchased this one five years earlier for $20. I see they’re now going for $75-$100 on ebay. Retro fun doesn’t mean that you have to break the bank, but as these cameras start to disappear, it’s getting more expensive every day.

Salad Days: Storytelling With Fuji XT2 Color Rendition

Doing a photoshoot in a supermarket was never high on my list, but there I was on vacation, three thousand miles from home, with only a travel camera and a kit lens. Luckily the camera was a Fuji XT2, and lens was Fuji’s XF 18-55mm f/2.8-4, the most capable kit lens I’ve ever used.

 

I was walking by the vegetable section in the produce department of a Fred Meyer’s Market near Portland, Oregon, when I saw this explosion of color, and even under the horror of fluorescent supermarket lights, I knew I had to capture the color and symmetry that some anonymous produce department person – someone who obviously should be working in arts – had set up to delight and entice the ravenous soccer moms of the Pacific Northwest.

 

This should not have been an easy task but two factors worked to my favor. First, this supermarket periodically sprayed their produce with a fine mist of water, which kept the carrots and beets damp and vibrant. Second, the Fuji XT2 handles colors magnificently. These little crop format cameras have an uncanny ability to continuously knock me out of my shoes with how they render colors. In this case, the camera’s processor made mincemeat out of the bad fluorescent lighting and left me with very minimal post production tasks.

 

To me, the resulting photo captured all of the shades and promise of late summer – when the photo was taken – promising the bounty of the harvest time to come.

 

I have smaller cameras and I have bigger, more capable cameras, but to me, the Fuji XT-2 is the perfect travel camera, providing all of the features I need in order to hit any creative needs that might come up on location, thousands of miles from home.

Nighttime Street Photography

 

One of the greatest advantages of digital photography is that now you can photograph the night like no one ever could before.