Usually Woody does all her cutest things in the most impossible lighting conditions, and runs off if you even say the word “camera” or reach for one. Worse, she finally realized that phones have cameras too. But this time, it was bounce card to the rescue.
This is also one of those times when my camera’s crop factor works in my favor. I have to stand further away when using the 50mm. And since I am a “big galoot” whose every movement sends Woody running away, that extra distance means I (probably) won’t startle her with my oafishness.
The downside of accepting this challenge: I had to boost ISO and exposure compensation in all these pics, and that gave me a nice stuck pixel to shoop out of every pic.
EXIF data. Every cameraphone I’ve had has done something stupid with EXIF data. And by “something” I mean EVERYTHING. So I have to open up EXIF Pilot, and…
- Copy what it says in the “Date Time” field over to “Date Time Original” and “Date Time Digitized” (which are almost always blank). This magically makes the rest of the data appear.
- Delete anything in the “Image Description” field, because wordpress likes to make the attachment page’s url based on whatever’s in there (usually something useless like “exif_jpeg_t422″ or “SAMSUNG”).
- MAYBE SOMEDAY: change the “Camera Model” field from something cryptic (“HERO200″, “GT-I9000″) to the human-readable name of whatever phone actually took that pic.
- OH GOD, NO: try to restore all the EXIF data that Vignette strips out. (I’m shit out of luck with Retro Camera, because it doesn’t save an original/unaltered copy.)
- HAHA, YEAH RIGHT: stop being so OCD about stupid crap no one cares about.
Since that’s a whole lot of work for some crappy phone pics, I’ve been sitting on them for a while. Too bad, because I have, like, OVER SIX HUNDRED new cat pics. I am not even exaggerating.
Since I will probably never be able to afford a speedlite*, I tried a much cheaper solution: using a piece of white paper bounce the built-in flash off the ceiling. My first test subject was the impossible-to-photograph Woody:
More impossible-to-photograph kittehs »
So I’m finally doing another camera dump, since it’s been a couple weeks, and I notice something weird with the file numbers. The last pic I took on November 14 was IMG_3991. Then I didn’t take any pics for almost a week, due to crappy weather and such. The next pic, taken on November 20, was IMG_9012.
Did aliens abduct my camera and take over 5000 pics? Did I go to a really awesome party, and not remember a thing? Did aliens abduct me and take me to the awesome party? Where ARE these 5000 missing pics? A-and what were they of?
ZUH?
This is my new bab(b)y. It was $50 cheaper than the Canon equivalent, and got tons of good reviews (as long as you exclude all the hardcore “super-pro” types compaining that it won’t withstand a nuclear blast). Plus, macro mode and free lens hood.
Sodium gods, let thy ramen noodles give me the strength to heft this mighty lens!
(That’s me.)
So. I have this friend, and she has this Pentax DSLR. She also has all these sweet lenses from her old film camera, but couldn’t get the digital camera to accept them. A couple weeks ago I put one of them on (the vintage 50mm that took the following pics), and this time the camera said, “yes sir, how may I help you?”
I told it to take some sweet pics, and also to have a hella trippy depth-of-field on the ones I take from a distance.
The camera said, “OK, but everything else is going to be manual.” *
Today, through the magic of inter-net and reading manuals and randomly mashing buttons, we managed to get her camera to accept all the other lenses, including this enormous beauty.
HUGE ups to Pentax for never changing their lens mount. (It’s ok that Canon changed theirs back in the 80s, since I’m starting from scratch anyway.)
*Much later (still today) I realized I could have just switched it to aperture priority instead of being a klutz on full manual.
