Photography Appreciation

I have yet to see a digital mode that really looked like true black-and-white to me. I am also not impressed by fake grain. On the other hand, one of the nice things about digital displays like my SXRD projector is that they do very nice "true" black-and-white imagery -- classic B&W films look absolutely stellar. So maybe I am just missing something.

I'm not sure. I really don't know enough about photography or modern technology related to photography to comment. However, since photography is a passion for you, perhaps it is worth a little research to find a suitable alternative?

Well, I have some serious research to do right now on how to run a village, so that may get put off a bit!

One approach:

Not the approach that I would have chosen.

No worries. I won't tell anyone.

Since East appears to have abandoned this thread in favor of cars, I will offer a few on-topic photos that I took out of the window of a commercial airliner a few years ago:

I've often looked out the window on aeroplanes and thought "that'd make a nice shot." But I've never reached for the camera. I suffer from horrible motion sickness and it is debilitating. Gravol is my friend.

Well, you might have wasted your time. It is extremely difficult to get a decent shot through airliner windows. Resolution and detail suffers, and exposure is difficult.

I'm sure I would have bollixed the shot, which is another reason why I didn't bother. Incidentally, your photographs are impressive. You cannot tell that you are shooting through an airline window.

Wow nice pictures. Somebody I know still shoots 35mm and even that is damn near impossible to find where I live. I can remember in the 90's being excited to go pick up my pictures after they had been developed to see how they came out. While its nice to be able to retake a photo that came out poorly it also takes out the surprises that make it fun. It seems that cvs and wallgreens are the only stores that even still develop film

The grain on those pictures is somewhat magnified due to the fact that they did end up a bit underexposed, so I had to boost the contrast significantly. That can make the grain stand out more.

Yes, I will miss film!

A few more shots taken from airplane windows. The first is of a mall we passed over somewhere between Chicago and Ohio:





The second is of the outskirts of Minneapolis on landing approach. Note how low it is -- this is why you should never live near a metropolitan airport:





And here is one taken on the approach to Kansai airport in Osaka. Not a great shot, but the only aerial shot of Japan that turned out:





And, to bring it back to earth, here is one that I took inside Kansai airport:

The mall shot looks like you've zoomed in on a bionic insect.

Airliners also fly that low when landing in Calgary.

It is really pretty interesting when you look down and see how LARGE the people & vehicles look -- I feel safer when they look like ants!

Here are a few taken by somebody I know on a different forum:









You can see more of his work here

Here are some photos of sloss furnace, Once widely considered to be the heart of southern economy, today the facility is preserved as a landmark. Despite landmark status many areas are in poor condition.

Interesting shots. I am not a photographer, but are those photographs purposely overexposed or manipulated? The colours appear heavily saturated in some shots.

This amazing shipwreck is all that remains of the Maheno. It accidentally became beached after a tow cable snapped. Several efforts were made in vain to get the ship unbleached at high tide until it was ultimately abandoned and left to rot. Even to this date its a breath taking sight.

The one taken of the city is definitely over exposed. I don't think those light trails were added after the fact.

I like the Blade Runner "hell landscape"-style shot under the photo of the waterfall. And yes, the city shot is definitely a long exposure. Speaking of which, here is one that I took at Navy Pier in Chicago looking toward downtown at night. Not a spectacular shot per se, but I took it freehand with only the railing at the left to stabilize me, and an exposure of over a second:





And another freehand lengthy exposure that I took of some spider crabs at the bottom of the Osaka Aquarium -- thank God for an f1.2 lens and some luck with not shaking!






And how about Chicago again -- this time taken from across the lake in Indiana?

The crab shot looks like something out of a 50's era sci-fi horror.

Not too far from the truth -- the shapes in the background are people standing on the other side of the glass; those crabs were a bite out of four feet across!

That's what I had assumed, but I wasn't sure if the water was distorting the perception of size. I guess not. Imagine coming nose to nose with one of those while snorkeling or diving!

It was flat glass in that particular tank. Some of the shots that I took at Osaka were in tanks with curved glass and are a bit distorted. I had never even heard of spider crabs prior to actually seeing the monsters, so I looked them up when I got home. The four foot versions that you see in the tank are nothing -- in the wild, they can grow up to 12 feet from tip-to-tip:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_spider_crab