Tag Archives: photography

Pictures of Auckland (where OSDC 2013 is!)

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It’s getting close to time to head to Auckland for OSDC and a few days ago I blogged about how I’m speaking there). I’ll be speaking on MySQL In the Cloud, As A Service and all of the challenges that can entail as well as on The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration. Both of these talks draw heavily on the experience of Percona (my employer) and with experience from helping customers with all sorts of MySQL deployments and in our experience in producing our own high quality software.

I was in Auckland earlier this year, so thought I’d share some pictures of the wonderful city in which OSDC is being held.

Firstly, New Zealand has some pretty awesome wildlife. This is possibly not the best example of it ever as there are way more odd looking birds than this one:

Auckland

The waterfront is quite nice, and when we were there earlier in the year it was awfully nice weather for it:
Auckland

I’m pretty sure there isn’t going to be a triathlon in Auckland for OSDC, but I’m still hoping to get out for a run while there (anybody else up for one?). We left home at something like 3:30 in the morning and got some silly early flight (6am or before) and were totally walking around the city a little like zombies, realising that we simultaneously wanted to go for a run and sleep.

Auckland Triathlon

We were meeting friends from Seattle and managed to spot this coffee place down by the water. I didn’t try it myself, but I’ve certainly had good coffee at other places in New Zealand.

Seattle coffee in Auckland, New Zealand

Streets at night:

Auckland@dusk

And if I haven’t already convinced you that Auckland would be a great place to be, here’s a crappy cell-phone snapshot of a variety of New Zealand beers – a tiny, tiny fraction of beer you can get in New Zealand (the microbrewery scene is amazing)

A selection of NZ beer

Go register for OSDC 2013 right now: http://osdc.org.nz/tickets/

Adventures with Velvia 50

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I’ve finally gotten around to uploading a bunch of photos I’ve had sitting around for quite a while now. Recently I finally got around to shooting some Velvia 50, after now several years of meaning to. This is all 35mm with a Nikon F80 and likely all with the 50mm lens. I’m quite pleased with some of the results, slightly more so for the ones not in full direct bright sunlight, but they were much better light for photos anyway. The downside of Velvia 50? Not a portrait film at all.

Manly Lizard

Rocks, waves, Manly

Coffee at the lighthouse

Cape Otway Lighthouse

MySQL Community Portraits needs your $$

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There’s an Indiegogo fundraising effort for Julian Cash to come to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this year to take your photo! I’ve thrown in a bunch of money to help make this happen. Why? It’s much much much cheaper than getting any professional photo shoot done, and it’s by the awesome Julian, who makes pretty awesome photos.

You’ll get full resolution images too! Basically, this is the cheapest way you’re going to get this quality of photos done of yourself outside of dating a professional portrait photographer. Since I’m not dating a professional portrait photographer, this is an excellent and affordable way to have some truly awesome and up to date photos that I can use.

I went and bought the Gold level sponsorship as I feel that $250 is a small price to pay (especially considering Julian’s previous excellent work). You can support it with more $ or less $ (even $0), I chose $250 as it meant I could claim, at least for a short time, that I’ve over half funded it :)

Making B&W Prints

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Hong Kong street

I’m getting better at making prints, and starting to understand how all the bits fit together properly. I’m finding myself disappointed that I’ve shot colour sometimes :)

The light-sealing of the darkroom (also known as laundry (also known as brewery)) is not exactly pretty… but it does work:

Making my own B&W Prints

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I managed to light seal the Laundry (not pretty… but it worked) and started playing with one of the enlargers I bought recently. I had a bit of an inkling from some reading I did ages ago about what I had to do to make prints.

I didn’t really have any developer meant for prints… so I just grabbed some Rodinal and dived right in. Basically started with the lens wide open and around 0.5 to 1 seconds exposure.

Because I was just experimenting, I skipped a stop bath (did a rinse though) and then straight into some fixer.

Here are the results of my experimentation (photos taken with my phone of the drying prints)

bench (print)

Leah

Contrast these with the scans of the negatives:

dedicated bench

by the water

Stand Development

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On advice from one of the guys at Vanbar (the “local” – meaning still a drive away, but at least in the same city – place for photographic chemicals) I tried stand development for the roll of Efke 25 I had shot at Burning Man.

Stand development differs from normal B&W film development in that a) it takes longer and b) you don’t agitate. You just leave the film sitting in the chemicals for a while…. in this case, one hour. I used Rodinal, which is a pretty nice, easy to use and versatile developer (incidentally, it’s also the oldest photographic chemical still sold and in use – patented in 1891).

Anyway, I got some good images out of it (I think). Here are some from a roll of Lucky 100SHD I shot:
Lebanese Doughnuts @ Oasis Bakery
going riding

and here’s some from the Efke 25 that I shot at Burning Man:
Jay and Suzanne washing up
Mel & Ellery
Yazz and Suzanne
constructing

Kodak Portra

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I started to realise that I was liking the look of photos shot on Kodak Portra. I wanted to shoot some of it to see what I thought. I bought a pack of 5 rolls of 160VC from Glazer’s just before heading to OSCON.

Here are some of the shots I got:
Selena

Dustin

Mark

Helen


(granted I didn’t press the shutter release, but I like it)

HiPurr Camp!
Is the one that sealed it for me. This was the “ahh… I can use this for all sorts” shot.

All of these were developed and scanned at the Walgreens down the street. I could probably do better scans of some… but this was awfully less work for me.

I am really liking the skin tones from it. The vividness of colours also comes through while retaining excellent skin tones (certainly not always the case). I may even end up shooting some at Burning Man (did buy more rolls yesterday!)

There is (of course) more being added to my Kodak Portra 160VC set on flickr.

Dynamic Range Theory

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A great video podcast is Meet the GIMP. It’s quite accessible and has some useful information. The recent(ish) episode on Dynamic Range Theory is useful if you’re wondering why images look different through your eyes, on an LCD and on paper (and what the hell the difference between RAW and JPEG is).

Kodak Ektar 100 – fun with colour negative film

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I’ve been writing a bit about my adventures with Black & White film and developing myself. I haven’t (yet) developed my own colour negative (C41 process) film. I do hope to do so at some point in the future – even though I can get the local lab to do it for $4 a roll, it’s nice to be able to do this yourself.

When I was young, I also took photos. I still use that camera sometimes too. Recently I’ve been scanning in the first ever slide film I shot – a roll of Kodachrome when I was 8 years old. I do like the look of Kodachrome, and am sad that it’s going away.

Last year, when I was in the US for Burning Man, I got introduced to Kodak Ektar 100. With the promise of colours that remind you of Kodachrome, I grabbed a bunch and headed to San Francisco and then Burning Man.

I liked the look of a bunch of stuff I shot. For example:

San Francisco beach at dusk

Golden Gate Bridge

Pier 39San Francisco in late afternoon

Barbie Death Camp

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Sun peeking under the man

Recently, on my trip to Hong Kong, I shot some too. The above was all shot with an old Ricoh SLR, when I was in Hong Kong I used my Nikon F80 and the 50mm f1.8 lens.

One of my favourites was of this little statue:
Statues in walkways

In Hong Kong a lot of buildings are interconnected so you can walk between them without having to go outside (where it’s hot and humid). There are bits of sculpture in the buildings around the Rackspace office. This is one near the hotel I was staying with. During the morning and afternoons, these walkways are filled with people, exactly like streets…. but a floor above and indoors.

I’m adding more shots from Hong Kong to my Flickr Photstream as the days go on.

I really like this film. I even don’t mind it for people… the first was the test shot (have I loaded correctly, things winding, wonder if this shot will work) in the hotel lobby in San Francisco. Leah:

Leah

I should learn to scan better (I have since, this was probably the first image I scanned using my scanner, certainly the first Ektar frame). Another two people images I like on Ektar are:

Amy in WhiteChristine with spoon!

Dare I say that I always seem to find the Ektar colours to be relaxed? I like it. The blues really shine through. Reds are also really nice (heck, I even love the yellow), and I plan to go and investigate how I can combine these colours in interesting ways on film.

Reciprocity failure

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“As the light level decreases out of the reciprocity range, the increase in duration, and hence of total exposure, required to produce an equivalent response becomes higher than the formula states” (see Wikipedia entry).

Those of us coming from having shot a lot of digital, especially when you’re experience of low light photography is entirely with digital are going to get a bit of a shock at some point. Why didn’t this image work exactly as I wanted it to? Why isn’t there as much.. well.. image!

You’ll probably read things like “you don’t need to worry about it until you’re into really long exposures” or maybe you’ll start reading the manufacturers documents on the properties of the film and just go “whatever”.

Ilford Delta 3200 Professional is one of the films where you have to start caring about it pretty quickly. Basically, you need to overexpose once you start getting exposures greater than ~1second.

In decent light, handheld with a pretty quick exposure, things look great:

leah

But whack things on a Tripod and have a bit of a longer exposure you’re going to start failing a bit. Even though I like this shot, I find that it’s just not quite got everything I would have liked to capture. Just exposing a bit more I think would have done it. I had to do too much in scanning and the GIMP…

under the bridge

So I learnt something with this roll, which is always good.

Playing with multiple exposure

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So, I discovered that my D200 had a built in “multiple exposure” option. While you can do exactly the same thing in GIMP (or Photoshop I guess) a whole lot easier (for one, you get to see what’s gonig on), we had been discussing Holga earlier in the night… so I felt it kind of appropriate to not really see what I was doing.

Leah playing guitar hero, me sitting across the room only slightly distracting her with a camera.

Guitar Hero

Maybe I will end up getting a Holga one of these days… being restricted can be fun.

First roll through the Nikon F80

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A little while ago I bit the bullet and bought a Nikon film body – a F80. May as well have a film body that’s a bit automatic and takes the same lens mount as my digital.

So, I got it and thought “hrrm… I better run a roll of film through it to make sure it works”. Off to the fridge i went to find the cheapest, shittiest roll of film possible… I found “Walgreens” brand film. Manufactured by one of many, bought for cheap, and run through the F80.

Some shots turned out pretty good. I have the full set (most of the roll) up on flickr. A few choice ones are:

Which due to some nice accident of lighting, turned out pretty good. IIRC this was pretty late at night and I was editing photos as Michael came over (bringing much needed beer).

Slides and beer, do you need anything else? I just like this because it’s a snapshot of what I was working on (well, kinda, I was mostly just manipulating digital images).

Leah and I went bushwalking… so had to snap a shot of her. I do like the Nikon 50mm as a portrait lens. The film… well… it was cheap, but not too bad actually.

A shallow depth of field can be a lot of fun. Although not entirely sure how I feel about the bokeh….

Which has some odd colours. Nice, but odd.

I like my “new” body. It’ll be fun.

Photos of Burning Man: Getting to Black Rock City

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This year was my first burn. More amazing than I could have imagined. I think it was day two when Brian caught me saying “so, next year what we’re going to do…”

Due to the harsh environmental conditions, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of taking my digital gear (it ain’t cheap) and had the idea of handing cameras to people and having a kind of communal photo album (planning for a larger scale implementation of this next year). So… I went purely film. Several older and smaller compact 35mm cameras that I picked up either for nothing or next to (no loss if lost or dead!) plus a Ricoh SLR was my arsenal.

Now… that means I need film.

I mainly shot the new Kodak Ektar 100 and a Kodak Ektachrome E100VS. For the smaller, cheap 35mm ones, I just used some Fuji Superia.

trees in Portland

Trees in Portland

Firstly though, there was a stop in Portland to a) recover from jetlag and b) hang out with Eric, Wendy and their dogs. I do like Portland, quite a lot actually. While there, managed to get some work done, fiddle with some SPARC hardware that Eric has, enjoy excellent vegan ice cream, enjoy awesome vegan food (both at home and out) and walk around both downtown and up in the hills. Portland (and Oregon) is certainly pretty.

trees in seattle

Trees in Seattle

Before heading to Burning Man, I was in Seattle, where Leah joined me to prep for (and then go to) Burning man.

Then Leah and I were in San Francisco for a day. This is when I started shooting exclusively film for the first time in… well.. Since 2002 (I got my first digital camera for linux.conf.au in 2003)

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Leah enjoying going around San Francisco

We actually did some touristy things… so I saw a bit more of San Francisco than I have before. One issue with mostly being around San Francisco just before/after the MySQL Users Conference is a severe lack of time/energy to go for much exploring. Preparing is exhausting, and afterwards I just want to really chill out – usually heading out to some forest or down to Santa Cruz or just hanging out with cool people.

Across the Golden gate

Going over the Golden Gate Bridge

One of the most surprising things was running into David while just walking down the street. Although knew he was in town, and we’d planned to all go down to Burning Man together, actually running into somebody in the street always surprises me.

I’m pretty sure this was the first time that I went across the Golden Gate Bridge. Seen it, taken photos of it, used said photos as my desktop background, but this was the first time going across it and looking back on the city. Manual focus, moving bus: epic amounts of fun… I’d kinda forgotten how much fun this could be.

Sun going down in San Francisco

Sun going down in San Francisco

There are things I like about San Francisco, but if I had to call somewhere in the US home, Seattle and Portland are both much higher on the list. Maybe it’s because of the wonderful coffee of Seattle, or the laid backness and awesome vegan food of Portland or if I’m just delusional and think it’d be possible to catch a Nirvana gig in Seattle.

In the evening in San Francisco we met up with David again and went down to the beach. It was pretty. Somehow, I deluded myself into thinking “ISO 100 Film, no tripod, cold, sunset…. Photo time!” I did get one I quite like too:

The Sun setting over the water, San Francisco

The Sun setting over the water, San Francisco

After what can only be described as a “I love side impact airbags” car crash on the way back to the Hotel (everybody okay: shaken, not stirred. also not our fault), headed back for a stiff drink, some sleep and eagerly awaiting the drive to Reno and then Black Rock City.

Waiting in line to get into Black Rock City (for many, many hours)

Waiting in line to get into Black Rock City (for many, many hours)

It was not a short wait once we got to the gate. We did, however, not too long after sunrise, make it to camp. I have no idea where I shot this from… but it was before we got to camp (or at least the first photo of us helping to set up):

People arriving at Black Rock City: first thing in the morning

People arriving at Black Rock City: first thing in the morning

More to come… including setup of Pi Camp!