Couple days ago (thursday?) I had to go into the city to pick up an air compressor. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a big shop tool. Powers other kinds of tools, like nail guns and die grinders and pretty much everything else. Nice to have around the shop. Anyway, I looked at the route and instead of taking me across the bay bridge, like I’m used to, it said that it was 10 minutes faster to go through marin, to 101, and then south over the Golden Gate. So that’s what I did.
Now normally, I would look at a set of directions like that and say, oh, it’s probably not worth saving ten minutes, or, surely it can’t be that much better, but this time, I’d just gotten a rented camera in the mail. I’m trying out the Nikon Z8 over the weekend, and so a creative ‘shortcut’ was just what the doctor ordered.
The z8 is a remarkable camera. The autofocus system is incredible, but also incredibly complex. I never really got into all the focus tracking continuous blah blah, even back when I shot an F5, so this thing might as well be an alien space ship from that perspective. When I put it in single point servo mode, though, it’s incredibly fast and accurate.
These pictures were all shot with that camera and the 40mm f/2 nikkor. This sample I like a bit better than the one that I rented with the Z7 when I tried that camera. From a moving car, sometimes things are a little blurry. I’ve always liked shooting from the car, driving or not, and this camera does it really well.
Everything about it is fast as fuck. turns on fast (looking at you, Leica), switches between back lcd and viewfinder fast, shoots 20 dang frames a second if you’re into that sort of thing. The exposure meter hysteresis, the time it takes to react to big swings in light values, is also super fast. This is important when the camera is in your lap, and you try to quick-draw to get a picture of something you’re passing on the road.
After this little jaunt, I put on an adapter that lets me use the camera with my m-mount lenses, and it’s actually also really good with those, just like, manually focusing. I wish there was some kind of focus confirmation, instead of just the edge detection it has. Maybe there is and I haven’t found that setting yet! who knows.
Anyway, yeah. more as it develops… probably back to leicaposting soon.
Posted on 2023-07-29T21:16:02Z GMT
Been trying to get out on walks more often lately, not just like, the half mile to the little bodega I like, but longer peregrinations. This wasn’t recent, was in fact last year. The little walks, though, they do seem to help.
I haven’t been neglecting this here web site on purpose, I promise. A lot is going on, and also I seem to once again be in that place where I can’t make any photos I don’t hate. the long dark tea time of the soul. It’ll pass, and then I’ll look back at the stuff I was doing now, and be like, that wasn’t bad at all. Or maybe it is and I’ve finally lost the plot. Can’t lose it if you never had it, I suppose.
Posted on 2023-07-21T08:08:54Z GMT
Some people would have had a day like this, taken one or two group selfies, posted them to instagram, and called it a day. I, on the other hand, took maybe a hundred pictures, waited six months, made selects from them, let them sit another two months, killed the duds (photos that just don’t work for whatever reason), did proper toning and exposure adjustment on the rest, and then now I’m posting them to my own damn web site.
Instagram is not my friend and it’s probably not yours either; this site, to steal a line from my friend Robin, “… doesn’t collect any information about you or your reading. It aspires to the speed and privacy of the written page.” That’s why it’s fast, despite using the biggest images I can get away with. There’s no bullshit loading that you don’t see. Anyway. Here are some nice pictures from a lovely day in the park with friends, sometime last year.
Some people might say, matt, why you gotta go so hard, and to them I say: I don’t know any other way to be. If I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do the thing. I picked up the camera when I was fourteen and I’ve been taking pictures seriously ever since.
Posted on 2023-07-02T19:58:38Z GMT
This was a great party. It had everything: a pitch deck for a sci-fi show, kimonos, live bands, a pot of soup (maybe it was chili?), hand drawn illustrations, comics, and photos by yours truly. On the walls, that is. Also I shot some pictures too. Ahkil (above, center) knows how to throw ‘em.
While I was there, everybody who had brought an art that wasn’t performance got to get up and say a few words. I said: “My photos are mostly about being in the right place at the right time. Perfection only lasts a moment. Anyway I’m glad to be here with you all right now.” I can’t think of a better way to sum up my work. Right place, right time. Serendipity by another name. Or maybe it’s finding what here and now is the right place and time for? Mostly it’s just a matter of looking and seeing.
This guy was really good: Byron Mayhew. Great guitar playing, good singing, original songs. Great energy.
Then there was the second band, John Turkey’s Nightmares. Solid rock ‘n’ roll. Less of a singer/songwriter vibe and more of a energetic explosion. Everybody was dancing about halfway into their set.
Here is a link to an installation photo of my stuff. 24x36” prints from my designjet. I just barely remembered to grab a photo of the photos at the end of the night, and it’s a little motion blurred, so it’s a link for the curious not a bloggable picture. We Have Standards.
Posted on 2023-06-08T07:47:20Z GMT
