Tag: photography

Photography-related posts. I talk about inspiration, settings, gear, other photographers, etc.

Black and White

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"Mouthful of Sushi" Carrollton, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5, 1/100 sec, ISO1250
 “Mouthful of Sushi” Carrollton, 2016

こんばんは！Hi, how’s it going?

So, today’s photo is one I took a couple Sundays ago when we went to Kula Sushi 🍣 in Carrollton (a suburb of Dallas). I was going through my RSS feed and came across an excellent post about black and white conversion in Lightroom and I thought I’d give it a try.

Usually I will rely on my crutch, Nik Silver FX, but I edited the above photo entirely in Lightroom mainly using the color sliders in the B&W adjustment panel. Many people think that black and white conversion is just selecting “desaturate” or “grayscale” in Photoshop, but there is so much more than that (if you want to delve into it). I’m no expert, but it’s fun to see what the different color sliders will do in a black and white image, and I enjoy learning.

Another thing about the photo is that for the past year I have been making a photo every day, and posting that photo. But today I decided I would just post this older photo. Honestly, the four photos I took today were of my phone, a couple slices of pizza, and a receipt. Not the most interesting (to me) nor the nicest to look at.

But I’m fine with posting an older photo. It’s not the end of the world, is it? Anyways, I really like the image above, and wanted to share it. 😄

I hope you had a nice Monday!

おやすみなさい！

– バロン Barron Fujimoto

In a Rut, or Obsessed?

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"Low" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/8, 1/1500 sec, ISO200
 “Low” Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは！How’s it going?

So, I’ve been looking back at my Instagram feed and I noticed that half my photos lately have been of clouds. ☁ As you may know, I am taking part in a 365 project, which is where you take one photo 📸 per day for a whole year 🗓. So, there is a little bit of pressure to find a subject to shoot each day.

And clouds are an easy subject to capture, especially if there are really nice ones hanging around in the sky. Part of me is thinking that I am just not looking hard enough for other subjects to shoot, but another part of me thinks that clouds are so cool-looking, ever-changing, and fascinating that I need to make photos of them.

My kids know that I am kind of obsessed… when we are driving I might hand the camera to one of them and ask them to take a photo. Luckily for me, they haven’t been too annoyed. In fact, I think Koa might have gotten the cloud bug as well! This afternoon as we were driving home, he pulled out his phone to take a photo of the “cool” clouds. 😄

I think I’ve come to terms with taking cloud photos… I’ll continue without hesitation since I just love them. Why not?

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In other news, I saw this notification pop up in WordPress saying I have earned a new achievement:

1337

Pretty funny, huh! WordPress has its own social network of bloggers, and it’s fun to read and “like” posts. It’s similar to “liking” on Instagram, but instead of pictures, they are blog posts. Anyways, it was kind of fun to get this notification. ☺️

I hope you had a nice Wednesday!

おやすみなさい！

– B Barron Fujimoto

Camera Charging via USB

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"USB Charging" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: SONY SLT-A77V, 35mm, f/2.8, 1/30 sec, ISO800
 “USB Charging” Cedar Park, 2016

One of the top features of my Fujifilm X100T 📷 is the ability to charge the battery via USB. Just like a smartphone, I can plug in a simple micro-USB cable and the battery charges.

This simple feature is wonderful. It fits into my daily workflow seamlessly – so much so that I rarely even think about charging anymore!

In the evening, I’ll connect the camera to my computer using the USB cable so I can import the photos into Lightroom. I then do my editing, and after that, I flip the power button on the camera to Off. If the charging light stays lit, I will leave it plugged in to charge. 90% of the time, though, the battery will have topped off during the time I imported and post-processed my daily photo. Convenient, isn’t it?

FYI, the camera did come with an external battery charger, but I haven’t used it in months. It’s so nice to not have to keep a charger around, or pop out the battery to charge it. Anything to simplify processes is a good thing! 😄

Underwater Camera

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"Nikon AW" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5, 1/7 sec, ISO3200
 “Nikon AW” Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは！Good evening!

Today’s photo is of a 1986 Nikon AW (All-weather) film camera which we have used for underwater photos a long time ago. I believe my wife got this camera back in the mid-’90s (before we met) but the history of it is still kind of murky since she doesn’t even remember buying it. It could have been a previous boyfriend’s camera… who knows?

At any rate, I thought it was a cool camera, so I kind of adopted it. 😊 It’s ugly and chunky and heavy, but it has a mutant rangefinder aesthetic which I find oddly attractive. It also feels great to hold, and when you carry it by the hand-strap, its weight makes you feel like you are carrying a deadly weapon. How’s that for personal safety!? 😆

Unfortunately, when I ran a roll of film through it a few years ago, none of the pictures were exposed correctly. I’m not sure if the motor is messed up, but I was so disappointed when I received the negatives, that I put the camera away for good. Plus, I had a new digital waterproof camera, so that pretty much marked the end of the Nikon. 📷

Maybe someday I’ll see if I can troubleshoot what is wrong with it, but I have so many other cameras, I honestly think the chances of that happening are close to zero.

But, it did have a great life, and we used it on a few vacations. If I didn’t have that camera, we would have missed many shots. Here are a couple of the photos from snorkeling in the Bahamas way back in the year 2000. Ancient history!

"Double Peace" Bahamas, 2000
“Double Peace” Bahamas, 2000
"Freedive" Bahamas, 2000
“Freedive” Bahamas, 2000

Have a great rest of the evening or day!

おやすみなさい！

– B Barron Fujimoto

Cutie

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"Cute Fish" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/7.1, 1/40 sec, ISO3200
 “Cute Fish” Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは！Hello!

Here in Austin, we’re experiencing a lot of rain. 🌧 So today’s photo is of a little guy (or gal maybe?) who is right at home in the wet stuff. Literally. Its home is water.

It’s one of my new fish, an Albino Barb. It look just like my Tiger Barbs except instead of black stripes, it has white stripes. It’s so cute, isn’t it? 🐠

By the way, it’s so difficult to get a close-up photo of the aquarium fish. I set the camera to manual focus, pre-focused about 6-inches away, bumped up the ISO to 12,800, put the camera on burst mode and waited… and waited. When a fish came into the frame, I pressed the shutter and let it capture a dozen or so frames. 📸 And I still didn’t get a really good photo. Oh well, it was still fun!

When I imported into Lightroom, I had about 340 photos. From those, I rejected using the X key. If you hold down the Shift key while pressing X and you will reject the photo and move to the next one automatically. Makes it quick to mark photos for deletion. After setting the reject flag, just Delete Rejected Photos and say bye-bye to all those unwanted photos. After doing that, I was left with about 8 photos of the three types of fish I have, the two types of Barbs, and the Siamese algae eaters.

I find it so fun to delete photos… weird huh? But hoarding photos and things that are not useful or beneficial is so unattractive to me. Ugh the clutter!

I hope you had a nice Monday. Stay dry! ☔

おやすみなさい！

– B Barron Fujimoto