Hasselblad with a cheap homemade lens

One of my experimental jags lately has been using a homemade lens on my medium format camera. The two element design of this lens leaves a lot to be desired: it is sharp only in the center of the image and has severe curvature of the focus plane, which allows only one part of the photo to be truly sharp. But I think the effect can be arresting, especially with casual portraits. Here are three pictures of the fellow photographers I spent last weekend with in Placerville.

Kerik Kouklis, who lives in Placerville

Matt Magruder - an Austinite photographer

'Ike' Eisenlord, a Minneapolis photographer

A weekend in Placerville

I am having a great time with four of my photographer friends in Placerville, California. Kerik Kouklis kindly offered both his home and his family’s tolerance for four of us out-of-towners during a fun midwinter weekend. Bill Schwab, Ike Eisenlord, Matt Magruder and I all showed up on Kerik’s doorstep on Thursday evening. We spent a great time shooting wet-plate collodion tintypes on Friday. Kerik has a great selection of silly props, and everyone got a chance to take turns as both models and photographers.

Kerik explaining to Bill the basic parts of a camera - body, lens, etc.

The pace was exhausting. Occasionally we had to get up for beers.

Kerik: I'm not kidding Matt, just stick your head in the box and I promise there is a really good looking girl in there

Field Marshal Fog directing his minions to the next great photo

Uber-photographer Bill 'The Hunk' Schwab signs yet another autograph for one of his groupies

I decided to work a half day on New Year’s Eve, 2009, and that morning woke up to the first nice winter fog we’ve had in Houston. I drove by Lake Woodlands, and decided it would be worth stopping for a few minutes to take some pictures. The water was like glass. A few members of the Woodlands Rowing club were out on the water in their skulls working up a sweat. Birds calmly flew around. The quiet during these heavy fogs is amazing. I felt as if I could hear somebody sneeze from a half mile away.

The newer digital cameras are inexorably pulling away from the capabilities of traditional film for night photography. Particularly if you shoot in color, the ability of digital cameras to properly color balance all the artificial light sources is a huge advantage in using digital for taking nighttime photographs. The super-sensitive sensors now available on even very small cameras give us the ability to walk around with no tripod and take some very high quality photos that contain very little objectionable noise (digital grain). Here are a few photos I took with a GF1 at ISO 1600. All of them are handheld, and all were exposed using the manual exposure setting on my camera.