RIDE LONG AND SMILE

I recently acquired a pair of old film SLR's with a nice selection of lenses.  One of the cameras is older than me and both are fully manual Nikons.  There are batteries for the light meter that illuminates symbols inside the viewfinder to tell you if you are over or underexposed.  With that you then adjust the shutter speed or aperture accordingly to capture the image.  The focus is also manual.  Very simple and bombproof!  And the method for ensuring a crisp manual focus is ingenious! Be sure to click on the pictures to view them larger. I loaded one of the cameras up with some expired black and white film I had laying around and the other with expired color and went on a road trip.  The expired color still worked okay, but nothing to really write home about. It was a little faded and lacked some of the contrast and vibrancy, but not bad. I think new color film will be much better! The black and white film pr...

Last night I got out after work to experiment with light on a sweet (borrowed) titanium Budnitz.  That bike is quite an urban ripper.  I set out to see if I could get some shots that would possibly be used in some way for upcoming marketing stuff for work. When I arrived at my first location the light was almost perfect, but fading fast - too fast as it turned out.  This was the scene of where I would spend a bunch of time playing around with light: As you can see the sky had already started to turn by the time I got the flash set up and positioned.  Oh well, still an interesting shot: After a few other methods of lighting I decided to start practicing "painting with light".  All three of these similar photos were taken with a 30 second exposure, plenty of time for some light painting.  So, I grabbed a bright light, triggered the shutter, and began painting the light where I wanted it and trying to minimize shadows by shining the light at...