50mm Prime + Photo Trip

It's been a while since the last time I posted anything on this site. During this hiatus --not to imply that I was an avid blogger, far from it; I have accrued a total of....one new lens. I had been preoccupied with the potential possibilities of possessing the 18-200mm VR lens instead of the 18-135mm, as well as quickly upgrading the body to a MA frame. Turns out though, that I would end up spending fully x2 what I had set as my budget....not that I already didn't spend close to 2K on what I have, but taking into consideration the difference for the upgraded gear, I would be spending about another 1.2K. Just writing about this is making my stomach churn!

In short, I ended up keeping my zoom and adding the world famous 50mm. I spent about an hour or so at the local cafe playing around with it and quickly realized why it was such a famous lens. It's FAST! Both the AF and the aperture worked really well indoors, whereas the 18-135mm would take what felt like hours to. It also helped me learn a bit about framing and composition the hard way. With the 18-135mm I could sit in a car and just zoom at what I wanted to capture (eg. the pictures I took after the storm featured below were all in car), while the 50mm actually forced me to move back and forth and orient and reorient myself at least a dozen times. This was something that became really annoying (and embarrassing) really quickly! I also learned (the hard way) why it's a portrait lens and just how limited my ability to shoot with it really was. Aside from items/products placed in a light box or of portraits, this lens was incapable of taking much of anything else --at least at my stage. I know Henri Cartier-Bresson only used the 50mm...but then again, his setup cost more than a house! The pictures embedded in this paragraph are the ones I took just a few minutes after purchasing the prime as well as some from the CONTACT photography festival at the Art District.

All the talk about how amazing the 50mm is...is stupid. I hated it. I took less pictures (that I actually didn't mind) with the 50mm in 3 weeks than I did with the 18-135mm in the first 2-3 days! I did learn quite a bit while having the 50mm attached to my body because after switching back to the zoom, I experienced first hand what barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and image sharpness and clarity degradation is. I was also able to build my self a quaint little schema linking photography jargon with experiential cues (...taking cognitive sci. really raped me in ways I am not ready to express lol). Yah, anyway, I now have a basis to compare AF speeds with. On the slow end, we have the glacial 18-135mm. On the fast side is (by comparison) the 50mm scramjet. Also, my 18-135mm is a DX so it does not have an aperture ring, whereas the prime does...although I never actually used it as I can simply adjust the aperture dial on my camera. [just an aside for other music addicts...get your hands on the new Maroon 5 album...great music]

During this hiatus, I have also had the opportunity to go on my first "photo trip", which wasn't much, but first times are not meant to be bragged about, just to build off and improve on. I have told this story at least half a dozen times, embellishing it in some way every time of course (for presentation)...but I am including it now just to contextualize one of the pictures I am going to be posting. The creature you see before you was this hideous creature that tried to hump my face. I was kneeling to take angled shots of geese and this thing creped up from behind me and by the heavy panting I just dismissed it as a dog or an ungainly child that had one too many pastries, alas it was this grotesque bird. I cried. On the inside. Seriously though, it bothers me that I cannot seem to identify it as anything other than a breed of geese (perhaps bred as livestock?) Anyway, it was the only one of it's kind in the whole of the pond. It was actually rather sad to see it so dejected and ostracized by the other geese there...maybe if it was a bit more attractive? Pfft...animals, so unabashedly shallow. The pictures taken that day were at a small place about an hour north of where I live (Unionville...lol "-ville"!!). I had some assumptions about the townsfolk going in...but the balance of beautiful women were favorable :D
must be the clean air...I also had reverted back to the 18-135mm by then (except for the framed shot of the trees w/the arches).

It's crazy late and I am making less and less sense so, ciao for now.


All pictures are property of Habib Ahmadzai and of Prime Photography and cannot be redistributed or used without authorization by owners of the images contained on this webpage Copyright © 2007.

Post Storm Shadows

The much delayed post-storm, in-car photos: Are dismal at best. Of the 40-60 photos I took while moving around the city in the van, about a dozen or so were even worth uploading onto my computer! Of the one's I am going to post up, there isn't much more to say about how I took them other than at varying zoom lenses. The entire thing was shot in manual (except for the focus which had to be set on continuous servo (?) because the car was in constant motion, and all of them through either the front windshield or the side. I really wanted to bracket the series of stills I'm uploading with text --because it does look better, but I don't have much else to say about my experience that day. One point that I would like to note is that I was consciously attempting to adhere to the Rule of Thirds, The Golden Rule, and Rule of Drawing Lines (?) to compose some of the shots where possible.
For my friends who see this, please don't withhold on the negative comments, in fact, I encourage it. I thrive on criticism --but keep in mind that it has to be reasoned, ie. bash the composition or the aesthetics of the image if you want; just give a reason. For any compliments...thanks? I guess, but I really can't do much with them.



All pictures are property of Habib Ahmadzai and of Prime Photography and cannot be redistributed or used without authorization by owners of the images contained on this webpage Copyright © 2007.

B&W's

This post is to showcase my attempts at experimenting with the B&W setting on my D80. The stills were taken the day before I had taken experimental lighting shots at my friends house, it just took me a while to get to upload them on my laptop, process which ones I wanted and which ones I could do without. The only editing I did was to crop the images --I would have liked to do more, but the editing software I have has only a limited number of editing options available. The setting for these pictures was a dyke(?)/waterway across from my house that extends a considerable distance and was dried out at the time (this was the day right before the thunderstorm we had last week in Toronto).
Like most of my pictures, the impetus for these was simply an impulse.
There are really no themes for the pictures I take, not because I detest direction in my photographs, but because I am not nearly as skilled and perceptive enough as more experienced photographers to be able to capture a naturally occurring narrative for a particular scene.
Many of the photos I posted are watered down selections of objects or scenes I took multiple pictures of in various exposure settings and shutter speeds. What I came to realize only after this experience was that B&W photography is quite complicated in it's simplicity and best to capture moments of profound meaning, suffering, or tranquility with somber colors of grays and blacks that do nothing to detract from the raw emotion in an image. I found this to be the preferred method of shooting by one of Europe's most famous photojournalists; Erik Refner. The video of his shoot in Marrakesh showed him to favor the use of primes for portraits (you're probably thinking, "no shit?!") but he only used B&W and sometimes even macros to get up really close to his subjects. Mind you, he had a habit of picking very weathered and worn faces --thereby increasing the conveyance of perceived character. Nonetheless, his images of simple weathered faces had more depth than any color portrait ever has (that I've seen at least). To see his work just google him and you'll find his website.


All pictures are property of Habib Ahmadzai and of Prime Photography and cannot be redistributed or used without authorization by owners of the images contained on this webpage Copyright © 2007.

Experimenting with Lighting

The passing week has been an exciting and nouvelle one in terms of experiences. I spent two nights shooting stills at night (experimenting with longer exposures) and a day shooting B&W by the water way across where I live. The pictures will be posted later on in the week when I have time to convert them to JPEG, and as the title of this entry aptly stats, this one's about experimenting with lighting --which coincidentally enough, was a matter of happenstance!
I was at my friends house watching some old movies [on movieforumz.com] when I noticed this LED he had on his dresser and since I am able to bring my camera and laptop with me pretty much anywhere thanks to my amazing Crumpler backpack, I bring it everywhere I go. We started playing around with the effects it had on various everyday household items, when I stumbled across a bottle of water. The results speak for themselves :)
This image (to the right) was shot with an LED ice cube on a shag carpet. The exposure was at 2 sec. whereas the other images were shot with longer SSs . The image below and to the left was the product of stacking two of the LED cubes on top of one another. And the one underneath was a combination of the LED stick and cubes. The SSs for these two (stacked cubed) photos were fractions of a second as can be observed by the lighter backgrounds.
The photos turned out much better (I equate uniqueness and abstract as desirable) than I had ever thought possible, and much clearer than I imagined at such long shutter speeds. I would love it if Nestle happened to stumble across these photos and picked them off me (perhaps I can step up from prosumer to simply pro :P...k maybe I should learn to walk before running). On another point, Everything I write is random thoughts and with the explicit intention of filling the white spaced around and between my pictures --I mean common, it looks better no?

Ciao,

-h


All pictures are property of Habib Ahmadzai and of Prime Photography and cannot be redistributed or used without authorization by owners of the images contained on this webpage Copyright © 2007.

My D80

This site is dedicated to my first passion: photography. The first camera I had ever held was a Minolta SLR when I was just over 4 years old (1990?)...I believe I broke that camera not too many years afterwards, but the passion and thirst for the control that one has in capturing a scene from one's own perspective and thus forcing others to see it from said perspective grew from there. During the hiatus from SLR cameras, I kept myself mildly entertained and sated with consumer Nikon film cameras (I think we owned one for a number of years --at least well into the 90's).
While photography took a backburner, my love for music and instruments grew. And thus, the decade of musical experimentation began for me starting first with the recorder. I hated that blasted instrument. The violin was next (and continued for a number of years), followed abruptly by the alto-saxophone through the duration of my middle school years. In high school I began playing the trumpets, only after losing interest playing drums (and only because there was one drum set and we had to take turns), and quickly fell in love with the trumpet.
At about the age of 16 I lost interest in playing instruments and began to develop a fond admiration for the skills required to snorkel and scuba dive, and the surreal tranquility afforded by immersion in an underwater seascape. Living in Toronto made the investment in scuba gear a poor decision in hindsight...but then again, hindsight is 20/20.
Now, having just finished my second year at university I have come full circle and am reunited with my first love: photography. It's been just about over a week since I purchased my first DSLR camera with help from very kind advisors (TP and Bill Pardy have been pivotal in all of this). I purchased my Nikon D80 after much rumination in an effort to insure it was not simply another impulse buy --I'm a materialist whore sometimes. But given that this obsession to purchase a DSLR began during the first few months of my freshman year and lasted over a year, I believe it was not another whimsical desire on my part.
With the D80 I purchased an 18-135mm Nikkor lens to better cover a wide range of functions (given it's telephoto capabilities). This lens is rather versatile and provides well as a starter lens for any new photographer (..."new photographer" is too much of a misnomer in this regard, so from here on in I will use "prosumer" to better encapsulate the capacity of photographers such as myself who are not making a living on photography, but are still producing/striving to produce professional-grade photographs).
Along with the D80 and the Nikkor, I purchased a much yearned for Crumpler bag!!! This is by far the keystone to my photography arch. It allows me the functionality of a bag that easily stores a DSLR, 15" notebook, textbooks for school, and even a tripod! More importantly, it does this ergonomically and with a blazé style that (if you know me) is all to too critical in everything from my attire to my attitude. It is truly my backpack-Volkswagen --unique, tasteful, and sophisticated...not to mention quirky/fun!
To balance the good with the bad this month, Maroon 5's new album and the LP album were so utterly disappointing I shed tears of sorrow...Anyway, enough of this life story (it's much to late to continue writing). The following are pictures I took during my first week of photography and are all my vain attempts to experiment and "hone my skills" with the 18-135mm.

Breezy,

-h

All pictures are property of Habib Ahmadzai and of Prime Photography and cannot be redistributed or used without authorization by owners of the images contained on this webpage Copyright © 2007.