The Shellye Valauskas Experience

My friend Shellye decided that she was going to have a concert on her birthday, which I think is pretty awesome. It was held at Best Video in Hamden, with a semi-controversial video about Equador playing in the background. (There was a pretty gruesome scene about cuy that the crowd cringed at. Shel had her back to it, so she only saw our reactions to what was going on.) At the end of the night we were treated to Lithuanian coffee cake, which was pretty spectacular as well.

fr EYE day

hey hey, it's fr EYE day!

I apologize for missing last week; I've been fighting off a cold. I'm back and I've got a few posts lined up for next week. Until then, check out this cool hazel eye. It's got contraction furrows and freckles!

fr EYE day

hello and welcome to fr EYE day!

I feel like this is one of the better examples of central heterochromia that I've taken. That's when there is a different color in the center of the eye than the rest of the iris.

Family Beach Visit

We had a visit from the Bronx Napolitanos over the weekend and since the weather was so nice, we went down to the beach. Grace and Hannah had a blast.

I even got a turn flying the kite.

Grace collected plenty of shells and rocks.

Mom came across this fantastic shirt for the Fibber Flies and passed it along to Nick.

A few portraits of Hannah

Hammer Time!

And a little goofing around with the wide angle lens.

EOS M Concert Photography

 Noam Pikelny and Friends at Stage One in Fairfield, CT

 The Flesh Tones at Two Boots in Bridgeport, CT

It might seem silly to down grade my camera set up, but there are times when I don't have a photo pass or just want to go to a concert to enjoy the music. At the same time, I get anxious without a camera. The best solution for me is to have a smaller set up, with only a couple of lenses. For the most part, the EOS M camera has done a great job. I bought the converter ring with the camera and can use all my Canon lenses on it. While the camera has some issues focusing in low light, I can swap my lenses over to manual focus, except for the kit lens which does not have manual focus.

I've included a few examples from the past two concerts I went to. Both times, I used the kit 22mm lens and my 85mm 1.8 lens. I'm really happy with the results from the 85mm lens, which I don't tend to use on my DSLR that often. It's fairly compact and fast, which makes it great for the tiny EOS M. I kept the ISO down to 3200 for the Noam Pikelny pictures, but cranked it up for The Fleshtones to about 6400.

The only real camera issues I had were when the band members jumped onto our table. The 22mm lens didn't have enough light to focus and I couldn't control it. You can see that tried to focus on the background.

I was glad I brought along the EOS M for this show because I would have missed the reactions of my friends in the last shot. It's not every day that the lead singer performs on your table. The camera performs better than my last point and shoot and is about the same size. I'm going to test out my pancake 40mm lens with this set up next.

fr EYE day

happy fr EYE day!

Yashica Mat 124-G Test Roll

I've always wanted a medium format camera, so I finally bought one from Joey, the amazing man behind Awesome Cameras. I put a test roll of Fuji Pro 400 in the camera, just to make sure the camera was in working condition, and attacked my friends. The battery for light meter in the camera was long dead and they aren't made anymore, but that didn't stop me from shooting. As I'm relearning the Sunny 16 rule, I brought along my EOS M as a back up meter. For the most part, my exposures were spot on, erring on the side of over exposed which is completely salvageable once the negs were scanned. Since I wanted the roll scanned quickly, I brought it to Milford Photo; development and scanning ran me about $20. I'll be looking for a better price online.

What I learned from the test roll was that I need to work a bit more on my focusing. I've definitely gotten spoiled by my SLR's auto focus. I learned that I'm not as steady as I once was with slow shutter speeds; the picture of Steve indoors has a bit of camera shake blur in it at 1/60th of a second. Some of my compositions are a bit off because I wasn't sure if what I was seeing in the view finder was what the camera would really take. There was a slight hiccup in the film winding after the first picture of Addy, which caused me to lose a frame at the end of the roll. Other than that, I really like the bokeh of the lens and was pretty happy with the results, especially in the picture of my mom.

 Donna (Hey, her sweater is sharply in focus)

 Mario (Way too much dead space)

 Steve (Slow shutter speed)

 River of Ice

 Addy 1 (With a slight light leak on the bottom of the frame during winding issues)

 Addy 2 (Poorly focused)

 Flowers

 Mom

Hurricane Lamp (how did I not notice the bottle of Alkalol in this shot?!?!)