Category Archives: Photographs

David Hockney passes

Paintings, Photography

The greatest living artist.

David Hockney, Yorkshire born artist and some time Angeleno, has died aged 88. A two pack a day man he chose to disregard his doctors’ advice and outlived the lot. Clearly he had what I think of as the ‘Keith Richard gene’.

Acrylics, giant murals, iPad and iPhone paintings, Polaroids – Hockney did it all. And his sense of fun, his sheer joy of seeing, pervades all. After graduation from the Royal College of Art Hockney was soon selling his prodigious output, having always been a workaholic, and moved to Los Angeles the first chance he got. Heck, if you were from Yorkshire – what Monty Python once called ‘The Third World’ – you would have moved, too.

While Hockney denigrated photography as ‘not really seeing’ he was an adept user of the medium, never less than with this cover for a newly revitalized Vanity Fair:



Hockney’s shoelaces.

Then there’s this exceptional Polaroid collage of an intersection in the California desert:



Highway 138.

The book of that deYoung exhibition linked in the opening of this piece remains available and is a great introduction to (later) Hockney art.

The Knipex SW40 adjustable wrench

Motorcycles

Every motorcyclist should have one.




Click the image for a larger version.

Six things make this tool special:

  • The jaws stay parallel at all times – try that with the usual adjustable wrenches which are designed to round nuts and the heads of bolts, AKA The English Bodger Wrench or Crescent wrench.
  • It has a unique ratcheting design which allows the wrench to be used as a ratchet when turning nuts and bolts, torque forcing the jaws to firmly clamp the object. Try that with the EBW. As the ratcheting feature cannot be overridden, flip the wrench over (showing the inch markings) when unscrewing a nut or bolt.
  • The adjustment range is a large 0 to 40mm with 10-40mm clearly marked in the cut-out window. Set to 0mm they behave like pliers. The handle length is 180mm/7”.
  • The push button adjuster sets all the common metric sizes exactly – 6,7,8,10,12,13,16,19,22mm. Inches are marked on the other side.
  • It’s made in Germany, where you want your tools to come from.
  • It is a thing of beauty, an heirloom tool you will be passing down to your offspring.

I keep one in my motorcycle’s under-the-seat tool kit. You know, from the days when bikes and cars came with tools:



Everything you need in one kit.

Given my bike is now 51 years old – a 1975 900cc BMW Airhead Boxer Twin – I think you may forgive the stains on the tool pouch. Note the presence of a spoke wrench (real wheels wear spokes), a spare centerstand spring (just in case), feeler gauges for adjusting the valves with a set of carb needle reamers underneath, and a cheap stick-type tire pressure gauge which is dead accurate and requires no batteries … and little space.

You can find the Knipex at Amazon – other sizes are made but this 40mm one covers everything you need on a bicycle, motorcycle or car and fits neatly in the toolkit. (I get no financial gain if you click that link).

Cheap? Nah. You want cheap you get the English Bodger Wrench version. Every motorcyclist should have one of these in his toolkit, and if he rides an old British machine two would be in order ….

At the bird box

Nikon lenses, Photographs

Bird photography for the lazy man.

I set the camera up with a long lens on a tripod on the patio, with a wireless shutter release fitted:



The Nikkor 400mm f/5.6 ED IF Ai-S lens on the Nikon D800.

Then I repaired to the office whence I have a great view of the bird box and banged away when the bird(s) arrived. Now if only I could get something better than a common sparrow ….



The view from the home office.

And here are a couple of happy results:



Common sparrow.



Common sparrow with prey.

Nikon D800, 400mm f/5.6 ED IF Nikkor at f/22 on a Linhof S168 tripod.

I made the box from odd wood scraps and it has been nothing but a joy.

Helicon focus stacking with electronic flash and the Leica SL2-S

Leica, Macro, Photographs

Better modeling.

For an index of all Leica-related articles click here.

While the ring flash light works well it’s totally shadowless, meaning there is no modeling of depth as there are no shadows. Desirous of adding these, I experimented on a macro of a beautiful portabella mushroom using my ancient remote flash trigger on the Leica SL2-S. The transmitter goes in the hot shoe and the receiver plugs into my Novatron studio strobe power pack. Despite dire warnings in the SL2-S’s instruction manual that use of non-approved triggers might damage the camera I had at it, knowing that the transmitter works faultlessly with my Nikon D800, so I guessed all would be all right with the SL2-S. And it is.

I first wrote about this trigger in 2006 when using a Canon 5D and you can click here for details. Doubtless similar devices remain available inexpensively on eBay. The transmitter in the camera’s hot shoe is used wirelessly and the SL2-S must be set to use the mechanical shutter. As the Instruction Manual confirms, flash will not be triggered in electronic shutter mode owing to the possibility of rolling shutter banding effects.

For the image below I wanted to get the base of the mushroom’s stem sharp, with the focus range extending all the way to the beautiful folds. This necessitates no fewer than 77 exposures, the full travel length of the lower rack on the Leitz Focusing Bellows II. Helicon Focus Pro handled the DNG files with aplomb, rendering the stacked result in no time. Maybe 30 seconds. I’m using an Apple Mini M4 in base configuration. The resulting stacked file in DNG format came in at an economical 64mB. And boy, is it a cracker:




Click the image for a larger version.

The 135mm Elmar was set to f/16, the three Novatron strobes at half-power, handling the 77 exposures, one every 2 seconds, with aplomb. I confess I closed my eyes to avoid the worst of all that flashing. Probably the first time I have taken a photograph with my eyes closed.

Leica SL2-S, Leitz Focusing Bellows II, Leitz 135mm Elmar lens head, three Novatron studio strobes, shutter set at 1/125 second. ISO 400.