Last of the season.

Let the petals fall.

Fujifilm X100S.

From our rose garden at the old house. October 2014.

Fiddlin’…

… in the digital darkroom.

I played around with one of my shots from last Sunday’s car show over in Round Rock at Centennial Plaza. This is the badge and right front-end of a silver colored Porsche 1600/356. 1956, I’m guessing.

The original photo was color, taken using the vivid setting available in the Sony RX100M3.

I use an older version of Photoshop, CS5 Extended, or Photoshop 12. I haven’t yet fully embraced Adobe’s subscription model and this rather old version still works on my trusty old 2012 Mac Mini.

I have the free version of the NIK software bundle installed and use it often for both color and black and white edits.

I haven’t yet fully embraced their subscription model…

For this shot, I used the Silver Efex Pro 2/030 Film Noir 1 filter to make the conversion to BNW. Love the grain from this filter. There are plenty of settings to mess with, including film types, vignette, and brightness/contrast. I also removed the image border.

Next I used the Photoshop burn tool to darken up the letter “P” at the top of the badge. I was pretty much shooting into the sun at ƒ/1.8 and a it got a little blown out, but there was enough there to recover.

I like that blown-out area to the left of the badge, framed by the badge and the curve of the fender, with the trees in the background and the fender’s shadow fore.

A pair of Jacks.

Macro Jacks, that is.

Diggin’ ’round in the archive. These are from May 2013.

A pair of shots, one made with the Olympus E-PL3, an extension tube, and the Lensbaby Composer Pro + Sweet 35, the other made with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 and the Wanderlust Pinwide.

Cool that I wrote about how I made the Pinwide shot on Flickr. “I found it while I was out back watering the roses. It was corroded and covered in dirt. I cleaned it up a bit with water from the hose and let it dry.”

It was corroded and covered in dirt.

“I took the picture later in the day. The sun was on its way down allowing a sliver of light to peek under our old and slightly uneven garage door. I got the shot by laying on the garage floor with the Pinwide less than an inch away from the jack.”

I love the shadow and contrast, not to mention that gorgeous blurry bokeh at the top and swirl at the bottom of the EPL-3 shot. Pretty cool.

Diggin’ ’round in the dirt has its rewards. Same with the archives!

 

A tiny, tiny hole.

April will be here before you know it.

I’ve been using the Wanderlust Pinwide since 2010 and love that little thing, but it has its flaws. The main problem being it’s made from plastic.

The first one I purchased lasted almost a year with careful handling, but then I took the GF1/Pinwide combo with me on a 2-week trip to Italy – along with three other camera/lens combos – and by the time the trip was over the small tabs that hold the cap to the camera had broken off.

I was fortunate that Pinwides were still available for purchase and picked up a couple more. I’m still using one of them, careful to remove it from the GF1 body when not in use. The other still has the cellophane wrapper around the little tin container, unopened. Plus I still have the Slit.

When I saw the Thingyfy Pinhole Pro S11 advertised on a few photography sites I was curious, certainly. Aluminum. Clean design. Reasonably priced. Really cool. Why not?

I ordered it online at their site. Got an immediate email order confirmation saying I’d get an email notification when it shipped. In about 15 days, the email said. Waited for that shipping notice. Never came. Yes, I checked spam. I pinged them via email, Twitter, Facebook. No response whatsoever. Finally got a shipping notice via email and waited another week until it arrived.

Aside from the unimpressive customer service, the S11 is a pretty nifty little gizmo.

The unboxing was Apple-like. Great package design, inside and out. Really nicely done.

They offered a threaded aluminum lens cap for an additional $10, but the S11 came with a plastic clip-style lens cap, which was good enough for me.

I did order the 58mm UV filter, though.

I shot a few hand-held pictures the same day it arrived in the mail, using the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1.

The GF1  was next, a few weeks later.

While the 11mm focal length is the same for both the Pinwide and the S11, the hole/aperture in the S11 is slightly larger, 0.14mm to 0.11mm for the Pinwide.

Another cool little gizmo.

Looking forward to this year’s Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day on Sunday April 28, 2019.