Archive for the 'Photography' Category

My parents bought a 5 acre block of land on the outskirts of Murray Bridge at the end of 1984 and wanted to plant a row of native trees along the northern boundary to provide a wind break, a visual barrier from our neighbours, and a haven for birds and other wildlife.

These first two photos were taken (we think) some time in 1986 when we planted the trees. The photos aren’t great quality – they were taken on a cheap “instamatic” style camera using Fuji 126 cartridge film. The resulting negatives are 28mm square which proved too large for my film scanner or 35mm film strip holders - so I had to rig up a dodgey scanning mechanism using the medium-format film holder on my flatbed. Seemed to work okay – some of the other photos I scanned actually turned out quite well – although the colours are not great.

Planting Trees - 1986

This first photo shows the family working together to dig holes and plant the trees (I took the photo – but I was helping too!). This photo is taken looking south towards our property (I’m standing on our neighbour’s land).

Planting Trees - 1986

The results after we had finished – three rows of trees, a total of nearly 50 plants. I took this photo looking east along the boundary (I’m standing near the north western corner of the property). The scrub you see in the background is on the property too – the new trees should serve to link these trees to those along the western boundary and beyond.

The trees we planted 20 years ago

20+ years later, the trees are doing really well – not all survived, and there is quite a variation in height amongst the trees – but many have done really well and are now quite tall. This photo is taken looking north near the middle of the property. Mum took the photo for me yesterday - so it is up to date !!

The trees we planted 20 years ago

Another shot from Mum yesterday, looking north-west towards the spot that I was standing when I took those first two photos!

Simon circa 1985

This is the last of the old school photography class photos I’ll upload for now. Not taken by me, but taken of me. I guess I was about 12 or 13 at the time.

I think the photo turned out quite nicely once I spent a few hours removing all the scratches from the scanned version (it was very badly scratched !!).

Pretty much spent the weekend scanning photos.

I’ve now completed scanning all of the negatives (that I could find) which pre-date my use of Kodak Picture CDs. This means that I have a digital image (of varying quality) of every photo we’ve taken. There are a few missing photos from early on, which I suspect are either at my parents house (I used to borrow my father’s camera back when I still lived at home), or at my in-laws house (we used their camera for the first few years of marriage). I’ll have to see if I can track them down and scan them too.

The first batch of photos that I had Picture CDs burned for, was my very first trip overseas to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – back in January 2000. Ever since that trip, I have had a Picture CD done with every roll of film we had developed – although I became increasingly disappointed with the quality of the scans (especially now that I’ve seen what my film scanner can achieve !!). I stopped taking film photos altogether in February 2006.

I just counted the film I’ve now scanned … 63 rolls of film up until the end of 1999 (including new years eve). I also spent some time sorting through the remaining unscanned negatives that have a Picture CD (from Jan 2000 and later) and labeling them all to make sure I have everything. I count 99 more rolls of film to be scanned !! That’s going to take a while.

While scanning the negatives over the weekend, I decided to also re-scan our wedding photos. When we got married, the photographer we used took a mixture of shots using 35mm and medium-format cameras, and he gave us the negatives !! (So glad we didn’t use one of the larger wedding photo companies which keep the negatives and charge you a fortune for reprints !!). I scanned the 35mm negatives with the new film scanner (turned out really well !!), but of course the medium-format film won’t fit – so I have to use my Epson flatbed scanner for them. I had originally scanned them a while back, but it was using older software and I chose a lower resolution, and I wasn’t that happy with the results.

I decided to rescan the medium format photo negatives at the full resolution capability of the scanner (3200dpi), using the same software (Vuescan) and settings that I had been using for the Nikon film scanner. I’m really happy with the results … although the files are big. 35 million pixels for the medium format scans @ 3200dpi … compared to the 35mm scans @ 4000dpi which only come to around 20 million pixels. Over 100MB per photo (that’s for a raw DNG format … the JPGs are 4 – 5MB per file). The 35mm scans come out at around 60MB for the raw DNG files, and (interestingly) about the same size for the JPG files.

Yes, I have 2 files for every scan - a raw (unprocessed) DNG “digital negative” file, plus a compressed JPG (which is easier to work with for preview purposes). Any editing I do of the photos, I do on a copy of the DNG file, which is lossless – meaning no loss of quality like you can experience with JPGs that are edited multiple times. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is great for basic color and tone adjustments, plus cropping and simple dust spot and blemish removals … but for serious editing, I send a copy of the file to Photoshop CS2 in PSD format, and edit there. Lightroom keeps track of all the various files for me (including my DNG and JPG files from the scanner) and automatically groups them into “stacks” – which makes managing them very easy.

I’m very happy with the results overall – and once I’ve finished scanning, I’ll start editing my best and favourite photos and upload them to the photo gallery and show them here on my blog.

Latest stats: 16,232 unique photos (18,463 total files) … 121GB of disk space taken.

The Engine of Progress

More photos from school photography class. This time of a motorcycle engine – one of the teachers drove this very loud bike (I don’t remember what make it was), you could hear him approaching well before he arrived.

I liked this photo – it was visually interesting, although I would have preferred it to be framed a bit better – perhaps taken from slightly futher away.

A Matter of Perspective

Another shot from School photography class back in 1986.

Again, not fantastic (I was only 13), but it shows an interest and appreciation of the effect of “perspective”, something I was to explore in much more detail during technical drawing classes in later years.