Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’ve continued to shoot using my Jive Thirty Five at Nathan’s Street Hockey Games.

ISO 400, f/2, 1/125

The best part about this game was the comeuppance three of the members of the other team received. These guys are brothers that had played on my kids’ teams in the past, but this year they’ve decided to participate at a different YMCA. When we entered the gym 20 minutes prior to the game, they started talking smack non-stop about a) how our team was going down, b) how they made the team last year when they were on it, and c) how we were just going to be crushed.

I love the celebration in the background of the second shot

At the end of the first period, they were losing 4-0. Mid-way through the second period (6-0), I walked by one of them who was still keeping up the bravado claiming that we were “going down” just as soon as he could get back on the court. To which I added “and scoring 7 goals.” The final, by my tally, (the Y doesn’t officially keep score, but all the parents and players try to) was 8-1. Boy was their celebration long and boisterous when they scored that one point. For the rest of their team, I was happy for them. For the sake of the three brothers, I really hoped for a shutout. No, not terribly sportsman like of me, but I think their egos needed a bit of a smack-down. That smack-down came when the final point of the game was scored by our team directly from the face off at center court–the oldest of the brothers was the goalie and had no idea it had gone through. I was too busy talking with the other spectator-parents to notice the mood of the three brothers at the end of the game.

Photographically, the biggest challenge is that with the open aperture, the depth of field is so narrow that it looks like most of the pictures are blurry. They aren’t–its just that the net (or the glove, or the spot on the floor 3 feet to the left of the player) are sharp, but the DOF is so narrow that everything else goes bokeh.

So, maybe next game I’ll try to compromise and shoot at ISO 800 and f/4. That’s still better than I could have gotten with my kit lens at 35mm (f/5.3) but it should render more of the photo in focus. And of course shooting kids moving at broken-neck speed makes keeping the focus point on a face challenging. Fortunately we’ve entered the digital “spray and pray” era, and I can shoot 100+ shots only to post nine.

I have a new camera phone, the LG Lotus. When I looked at the properties of one of the pictures I took using the phone (to see if it stored any EXIF data in the file), I found this: Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, my wife pointed out that there was a thick blanket of fog all over town.  I had been inside playing games with the kids, so I hadn’t really noticed. But after she pointed it out, I started thinking about all the cool “atmospheric” photos I might be able to make.

Around 12:30AM, I loaded the camera gear into the car and headed out to see what I could find. My first stop was a near by train track, hoping to find some signal lights. No such luck–no lights in the area, and fog too thick to be safe wandering up and down the tracks. As I was driving away from the tracks, I noticed that stop lights where casting a nice tunnel of light, so I went to a nearby intersection that I imagined would be picturesque. Only there wasn’t any fog in that neighborhood.

At that point I was on High street, so I figured there would be lots of interesting lights and signs as I drove down through campus and Short North. The fog continued to be patchy, such that areas with interesting lights didn’t have fog, and foggy areas didn’t have interesting lights.

Finally I made it to the south end of  Short North where there was just enough fog that I figured I could make a few shots. I found a parking spot and went to pull out my camera and tripod. Except that the tripod wasn’t there. I had grabbed my “light bag” which normally has two light stands, two umbrellas, and the tripod. For whatever reason the tripod wasn’t in there, and I hadn’t double checked before I left.

I was so frustrated at myself that I compounded the first mistake with another–I didn’t even try to make a shot without the tripod. This, to me, is the bigger mistake. I know how to hold a camera in a steady stance up to 1/10 second. I know how to brace a camera against a light pole that probably could have gotten me 1/4 second. And we’re talking foggy, so the grain of ISO 1600 wouldn’t have been a problem. Would 1600 + 1/4 been enough to capture a dark, moody, atmospheric shot in an urban bar district? Almost certainly.

So I returned home after an hour of driving in the fog with nothing to show for my efforts.

I did not make this shot. But I should have.

The caption is my lesson for last night:

Forgot to take my tripod and had to use our car for support.

Today while doing some Christmas shopping, Anne and I came across a shirt that I really wanted–it was a black t-shirt with a sketch of one of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are, my favorite childhood book. Along the bottom of the shirt was the quote “Let the wild rumpus begin”.

I thought about that for a moment. I tried to ignore the voice in my head saying “something just ain’t right”. I showed the shirt to Anne and exclaimed “How cool is this!” But then I just couldn’t ignore it any longer: “Isn’t the line in the book ‘let the wild rumpus start’?” She was pretty sure it was “start” not “begin” also. I just couldn’t buy the shirt with the lingering fear that the quote was wrong, so we went to a nearby bookstore to confirm the quote. Yup, we were right, and the idiots at Warner Brothers who made the shirt couldn’t even get it right. T-shirt Fail.

Maybe the line was changed in the movie, and it is “Let the wild rumpus begin” and it wasn’t an edit failure. OK, then it is a script writing failure. The book has maybe 100 words. I can totally understand expanding on the book, but there is no good reason to change the most iconic quote of the book.