sleeping

so much hangs on how well the girls sleep. at times they take it in turns to wake throughout the night. the soupy fog of prolonged sleep deprivation has to be experienced to be believed. last night G had a new sleeping bag and she slept 8 1/2 hours straight, which hasn’t happened for a long time. i love the magic sleeping bag.

unmade

nothing gets done around here unless it has to get done, and even then it has to join the end of a long list. bed making doesn’t feature on the list. this was taken in the early light, i never imagined before how busy it’s possible to be before 8am. the focus is slightly fuzzy, as am i at this time of the morning.

the first of the new batch, the first day of my new challenge - describing motherhood. (although not much change in my style or choice of subject matter, i see).

sling

one of the purely pleasurable aspects of having a new baby is the chance to dig out all my old slings. unsurprisingly i value them almost as much as textiles as baby carriers.

pate

i don’t exactly crave when i’m pregnant but i really miss the things i’m not supposed to eat. the pate was well worth waiting for.

(i missed a day)

spiky

dangling

rock a bye baby on the tree top… such a small piece of metal to keep safe something i hold so dear.

full moon

entonox

the best bit of childbirth (not counting the bit at the very end).

spoons

catching up on pictures i took but never posted 6 months ago.

thirty

i remember this being a horrible grey day with much too much walking.

kodak express camden
monoprint

my newest toy. i have very much to learn, but i’m having fun doing it. i have to learn how to make the best of the format and the lens and to move out of my comfort zone of predictable shots (it’s so much wider than i like it’s much harder to control what gets into the frame). i have to learn how to use a lightmeter. (or not)

or failing that how to improve poor exposures in photoshop (duplicate layer, blending>soft light to correct overexposure, blending>screen to correct underexposure). i have to learn how to see into the corners. i love this shot - everyone’s staring at the loony woman pulling the guy in the cart around. thing is, i didn’t see any of this through the viewfinder as it’s so damned dark at the edges. i have to learn to accept the happy coincidences. i have to learn to keep my fingers out of the way (hence the crop). i have to learn how to move counterintuitively to keep the horizontals horizontal (everything’s flipped left to right in the viewfinder). and i have to find out whether i can scan my negs on our flatbed scanner. these are all low res scans from the lab, handy for a quick post but useless to demonstrate the fun of 6×6 negs and the amount of detail they capture. i’m rather fond of this shot, it’s exposed exactly as i saw it, i’m pleased that it has detail in the sky and the shadows.

or “learning to use the basic image controls on my camera” or “histowhat?”

shamefacedly i have to admit i mostly point and shoot with my nikon. i keep it set on P so i have fingertip (well, thumbtip) control of shutter speed and aperture, i do adjust exposure compensation and the focus bracket, i change iso and swap out lenses, but otherwise i don’t get into the intimidating array of tweaks and adjustments available.

i take a lot of backlit pictures (small house w/windows each end) and while i know i should be using fill-in flash i find it too intrusive. so i use centre weighted metering and crank up the exposure for the faces and get a load of blown highlights. now i’m not sure if there is much fixing to be done in this situation save finding a better angle, but the search for some answers has been educational at least. lets take it as read that every sentence from now on starts “i never realised that…”

the d40 has a “highlight” preview mode that flashes areas that are clipped. you scroll down with the controller during playback to get this view (along with all the other info viewing modes) and all pictures will play back as you take them with this view until you select another. what you do with this information i’m still slightly sketchy about, i guess you just take another shot until it stops flashing, or you’re happy that the flashing areas are non-critical (i.e. not on the baby’s face ).

on the way to the flashing highlight view i stumbled on the histogram too. i assumed that a well exposed picture will have the curve towards the centre, but that was the long and short of my knowledge until i read this article at the ever informative-to-the-point-of-brain-ache luminous landscape. now i know that histograms “just are” it seems that reliance on histograms is mostly a hang over from when preview screens were rubbish, but handily the D40 has a large bright screen that provides an accurate preview of the image. i like ken rockwell’s take on it: “The best way to evaluate exposure is to look at the picture, not a histogram. Histograms are a way to measure exposure more objectively for those who can’t see very well.”

ken is very keen on colour histograms though, since the red channel is likely to blow ahead of the others, and i can attest to the resulting weird colour effects. on the D40 pressing ok during playback brings up image adjustment options. choosing filter effects>color balance brings up an rgb histogram (i.e. a separate histogram for each of the 3 colour channels). again the camera remembers your settings so you can just press ok 3 times during playback to bring it up.

it seems one thing i can do that should definitely improve my highlights is to stick with lower isos, which apparently have greater dynamic range. i’ll also have a play with the different metering modes now i have a slightly better idea of what they do.

fun with histograms

PHOTOICON ONLINE FEATURES: Polanoir Gallery The Instant Fix

interesting article on the marketing of old polaroid technology to young photographers. while i frequent both polanoid and unsaleable (well, at the latter i sporadically go and look, fill my basket then empty it again as i’m unable to justify the cost, then wander off to ebay and get distracted by something else entirely… but i digress!) i wasn’t aware that they were affiliated - and part of a co-ordinated marketing push, according to photoicon. i for one am all in favour of this kind of niche marketing/hype/whatever, if it can support the continued production of a variety of weird and wonderful film formats long after mass consumption is history. unfortunately that also means those who want it generally find themselves paying over the odds for the privilege.

i cottoned on to sx-70s after seeing the polaroid kid’s pictures in jpg last year and realising that polaroid doesn’t have to mean crappy. aside from the photographer’s skill in producing such engaging portraits, the sharp focus and shallow dof that the camera can give were a real eye opener for me (although my manual focusing isn’t a patch on the sonar it turns out ). that and the fact that the cameras are such desirable objects and amazing pieces of engineering had me sold. i managed to pick up some sx-70 film on ebay for a song (it can still happen!) and while i do really love those blues *dreamy sigh* i’m not confident enough in my ability to make the most of the film to be prepared to pay the huge premium it now commands. i’m happy to carry on using 600 film with a pack filter, although i wonder whether there’s a real loss of sharpness due to the thickness of the filter - all my sharpest shots are on time zero. perhaps i should ask santa for a pack of blend film so i can compare and contrast?

i’m definitely going to try to pick up my 365 project, taking a picture every day. the discipline was really useful and it moved my photography forward even in the short time i managed it before G was born (i think i got to day 35). it’s very likely that i won’t post every day, but i’ll try to take the picture at least. which reminds me, i must post up the missing pics i took but never blogged.

and i’m going to up the ante. producing pictures that i find aesthetically pleasing is one thing, but actually trying to convey something, to tell a story, is something else entirely. it’s something i’ve never tried and there’s every chance i’ll be rubbish at it but there’s only one way to find out. so over the next month (from next thursday, G’s half birthday) i’m going to have a go at describing what motherhood means to me in pictures.

Process C-22 - Old Film Processing service - UK, Europe, Australia, Japan and Worldwide

a long overdue heartfelt thankyou post.

never having won anything in my life i was impossibly delighted when my name was pulled from josie’s hat in her anniversary draw at mr monkeysuit. to have someone so talented make a baby quilt just for me (well, i suppose technically it was for baby G ) was a dream come true.

but that delight was nothing compared to how i felt when the quilt arrived, just a few days before G (note impeccable timing in contrast to my own belated effort). i posted briefly then but wanted to share more of the details of this wonderful quilt: the fabric choices, the pieced sashing, the softness of the backing, the wonderful spiralling square quilting.

i was really blown away by the quilt and honoured to have won it. we use it every day and G loves it too. more pics.

catherine buca’s photography has a certain something. an atmosphere and aesthetic that draws me in totally, i could stare at them for hours. and now i do

as soon as i found out that catherine sells prints through her etsy shop i knew resistance was futile. maybe it’s her ttv work that inspired me to put the prints in thick perspex block frames, effectively placing another lens between the viewer and the image. i’m sooo happy with both the prints and the presentation.

craft content

the blanket finally arrived about 2 weeks after the baby. i don’t even remember weaving the ends and working the edging in those hazy early days, but i must have done as here it is. inspiration for the simple picot edging came from a blanket my mum crocheted for M when she was born. it turns out that cashmere is the perfect fibre for a baby blanket. the more it gets (machine!) washed the more its gentle fuzz blooms.

more yarn info in this post.

festival

the original is sharp and detailed. the scan is not. the festival was fab.

hello *waves*

am warming back up to intermittent posting and hopefully to the 365 too, but don’t want to make too many promises. G will be 6 months at the end of this month, so that would be a nice neat break if i can manage it.