Still Life – Cat and Poinsettia

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Trying out an ultra wide angle lens I’ve had for a while but haven’t used much. It’s a Sony SEL16F28 16mm f/2.8 Wide-Angle Lens with the Sony VCLECU1 High Definition Wide Angle Conversion Lens, which makes it about 12mm. Taking into account the crop factor this becomes the 35mm equivalent of 18mm – still pretty wide. A couple of problems to overcome: how to get the foreground and the background tolerably in focus; how to deal with the dark interior and the bright outdoors. I’m not sure that I really overcame the first. The background is still rather fuzzy, but at least it’s not totally blurred. The contrast problem was addressed by using HDR and then further processing to make it so that it didn’t look too much like HDR. All in all I’m pleased with the result.

The Poinsettia is a usually thought of as a Christmas flower, so I’m amazed that it’s still blooming in June!

Chinese Garden – Lasdon Park and Arboretum

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Top of one of the arch/gateways.

We went with some friends to an antique show held on the grounds of the Lasdon Park and Arboretum. While the ladies when around the antiques show I went for a walk with my friend Ken. I’d heard that there was a Chinese Garden somewhere and I hoped to find it. The Lasdon Park website describes the Chinese Garden as follows:

In 1997 the County became a sister city with Jinzhou in China. A Chinese delegation came to the park and lived here that summer to construct an ornate pavilion and along with the help of the Parks Department, developed a garden surrounding the pond near the western end of the park. While the pavilion is quite aesthetic it is challenged by climate. Every 5 years or so we must restore much of the paint and wood work at the pavilion.

In an earlier post I mentioned that some other friends had given me some old cameras. I had one of them with me: A Canon Eos Elan IIe with 28-80mm Zoom Lens and I was keen to try it. I had a slight problem, but I’ll talk about that in a post on the camera itself. Here are some pictures. Since I didn’t know how well the camera was working I only had low resolution scans done.

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Bamboo.

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Another arch/gateway.

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Distant Pavilion.

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Closer view of the Pavilion.

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Closeup of the Pavilion.

Photography Today – From the BBC

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Audience 1 Florence, 2004 by Thomas Struth

Is photography art? Today the answer is simple, indeed photography is more popular than ever and arguably the visual art of choice for the masses, but half a century ago the debate still raged.

In a new book, Photography Today, writer, artist and lecturer Mark Durden analyses more than 500 works by 150 artists from the past 50 years, exploring the impact of various genres, from pop art to documentary.

Here Durden offers his insight on ten important photographic works from the book”.

via BBC News – Photography Today.”

The ten (from 150) photographers chosen for the article are: Thomas Struth; Sarah Jones; Peter Fraser; Saidou Dicko; Alfredo Jaar; Anna Fox; David Goldblatt; Joel Sternfeld; Gillian Wearing; and Erwin Wurm.

As you can imagine when you do this kind of selection it inevitably leads to often passionate discussion as to why some are chosen and some are not. See this discussion from Rangefinder Forum, which gets into the photographers selected as well as a broader discussion about art and photography. I liked the Andy Warhol quote: “Art is what you can get away with”.

To my eternal shame I’d never even heard of 8 of the 10 chosen (although I’ll now certainly try to find out more about them).