All posts by Dulany Sriner

FaceBook friend or foe?

Since my first website many years ago, the face of the web has changed many times.  Many of these changes have been good and make internet presentation much easier. You no longer have to learn code to produce a very nice web presence.  You can build a site just by filling the blanks on a website development tool. You tell the software what you want and almost instantly, the website appears.

Then there are the social media. They have the website set up for you. All you need to do is post notes. In the case of Twitter, the notes are short. For FaceBook, you determine how much you want to post and who can see it.  FaceBook is a free service; or is it?  Do you think it was designed to make you happy?  It was designed to provide a broad sampling of consumers for advertisers.  Not only can they provide an audience for advertisers, they can look at what you are posting and use that information to offer you specific goods and services based on your interests.  In other words, they read your postings and if you start talking about a baby, you will be flooded with baby items.  We complain that the government  snooping  and then turn around and open our innermost thoughts to the corporate world.  I don’t trust the government but I trust the big business even less.  The way I see it, as long as you understand the rules, and go in with your eyes open, FaceBook can be an enjoyable experience.

There is a saying, ” never point a gun at anyone” and most people are familiar with it.  That one thought has probably saved countless lives.  Another saying that everyone should be taught is, “Never post anything you don’t want the world to read”  You can not expect security measures to always protect you.  If you don’t post it, nobody can steal it.  Use some common sense.  That guy who is a friend of a friend of a friend of yours and wants to be your friend might really want to con you out of some money or perhaps he likes to look at cute little girl’s pictures.  Know who you friend.

I like FB and enjoy the friendships it has expanded,  If someone really wants your information, it is available. I won’t let that fear stop me from communicating with friends.  But  I also keep private information in e-mail. It isn’t perfectly secure but it is more secure than social media.

I plan to talk more about how to use FB in the future. Watch for it.

About Record breaking temperatures

At daybreak today, the thermometer hit a record low for the date. It was 13 degrees below zero.  That’s 83 degrees colder than enjoyable.  The way I see it, at about 25 degrees, it is cold! After that it is just degrees of misery.  When I was a kid, we didn’t have the wind chill factor or if we did, nobody talked about it. I think it is just an invention of the news media to sensationalize the weather. “Tomorrow morning’s wind chill will be -35 degrees below zero! At that temperature, your nose can freeze and fall off in less than a minute”  Yes, I know it is either -35 degrees or 35 degrees below zero but -35 degrees below zero sounds so much colder.   What ever happened to , “It will be cold and windy in the morning, bundle up.”

For those of you who live below the Mason-Dixon Line, I will try to describe what these temperatures feel like.  I know, I know, wind chill is the “feels like” temperature but that is like saying the sweetness factor tells you how sweet something is. If you have never had sugar, you have no comparison.

The first thing you will notice when you step out into the sub-zero cold is that your nose hairs freeze. Perhaps we need a nose freeze factor measured in seconds to replace the wind-chill.  We will be having a 3 second nose freeze factor in the morning. That means on the second breath, you will notice the inside of your nose is getting sticky as the moisture on your nose hairs starts to freeze and stick to the other freezing hairs.  The next observation will be the squeaking snow or ice under-foot.  Your footsteps are no longer silent. They squeak.  It is a sound unlike any other but once you have experienced it, you never forget the sound. It is higher pitched than a squeaking old floor and the colder it is, the higher the pitch.  After the squeak factor, you notice the hardness of the surface on which you walk. While it is true the density of the surface increases with the cold (you know, heat expands; cold contracts) the real difference is the freezing of the soles and inner-soles of your shoes. Even the padding between your joints loses  its compression factor. This is why the cold is described as bone jarring cold.  The last feeling you get in these arctic temperatures is the the lack of feeling in extremities. This is the numbness factor. It is determined by the insulation  in your clothing.  If you go out without a coat, you might have a 3 minute numbness factor.  This factor would be actually two numbers because there is also a time factor for warming up when you return inside.  So a 3-5 numbness factor would result in numbness after just 3 minutes outside without a coat and a 5 minute warm up time when you return inside.

Now that you know the standards, I can describe the weather I experienced this morning.

This morning, when taking out the recycling, the temperature was 13 degrees below zero; there was a .75 sec. nose freeze factor and a  +5 octave  squeak.  There was a zero compression factor along with a numbness rating of .2-27.  In short it was FRIGGIN FREEZING!

Have a great day. I’m not taking out the garbage any time soon!

On this cold winter’s day

Had we gone on our planned vacation, we would have been settled in down around Orlando for this week. We would have been just down the road from our long time friends the Dershimers, I don’t know what the weather is there now but it is certainly cold up here. I make that statement because I am assuming we would have made it through the winter mess that blossomed between here and there during our planned travel. We both felt uneasy about the trip and cancelled it a while back. Perhaps, had we gone, that winter mess might have caused us great discomfort. We will never know but we have learned to follow that inner guidance. Is it the soft whispers of God or some spiritual guides giving us advice? Is it relatives past, concerned about or well being? I don’t know but I pay attention. I think it stayed in the single digits here today and it sure would be nice to be in sunny Florida right now.

I have started the long process of converting some of the old VHS tapes into DVD’s. Some of those tapes contained old movie footage from before I was born. I have reels of tape taken by my grandmother. Many minutes can go by without one head in the shot. The only way to to besure your head was not cut off was to bend over! It was still fun to see the old degraded movies of my Mom and her family. There were lots of picture of my Grandfather in his garden or with his daughters. With grandparents back then, being no different than they are now, there were LOTS of grandkid pictures! I saw me as a toddler along with my siblings. Good medicine for a cold afternoon.  I was amused to see me at age 4-5 years drinking a bottle of Coke. So, I was a Coke drinker for over 60 years!

I watched Krystal in a production of the Christmas Bunny at school (she was the bunny). I could not understand the words any more now than I could then but it was still fun to watch.

There are many cassettes to copy and I am sure I will enjoy them all even though those early VCR cameras were certainly poor quality. Or was it me? In any case the auto focus was not very auto and even less focus. But I still can remember those good times with the kids. Do we really realize how lucky we are with the ability to capture the present so we can watch it when it is just a memory of the past. Not only can we watch it, we can also share it  instantly on a friends computers or big screens half way around the world. With this many changes in my lifetime, I can’t even imagine what it will be like in 20 years. Dick Tracy and Buck Rodgers technology will be old hat. I guess it is already but then , so am I.

That’s what I was thinking.

The Lightkeeper

Florida LighthouseOnce upon a time, far away in the land of Awesomebeauty, there was a beautiful lighthouse.  The keeper of this lighthouse was named Canon Wealder. He was a rather short  and obviously was well fed by his wife Nikon.  Canon was better known to his friends by his nickname Photog. He was the town photographer and his pictures were known far and wide.  He loved his town and he loved his lighthouse because both gave him the opportunity to take many beautiful pictures.

Every day, he would scour the countryside for beautiful sights to capture with his lens. If there were a storm brewing, he might spend the day up in the tower leaning on the outside railing with his trusty camera hanging at his side. As a new and unusual cloud or squall line formed, he would raise his camera, compose the perfect shot and slowly push down on the shutter button.  CLICK, went the shutter and another slice of time was imprisoned on his film.

At night, he would go down in the basement level to his darkroom and carefully develop his negatives. He was a true artist with his camera and also in his darkroom. He would hang out his negatives to dry and when dry, he would put them in a folder with a note about each shot.  As the years went by, his collection of photos grew larger and larger. He had multiple file cabinets full of pictures.  He had to devote an entire storage room next to the darkroom for the storage.

One day, when he was looking through the files for a particular negative of his niece’s wedding, he thought to himself, “There must be a better way!”  He thought about the County Library and the way they sorted their books and had index cards to tell where the books were on the shelf.  “That’s it,” he thought. You will remember that he made notes on every picture taken and attached those notes to the pictures in the file folders. “Why not make a card catalog with these  notes.” came a voice in his head. He went down to the storage files and put a descriptive name on each file cabinet and a more descriptive name on each drawer. Then he went through his thousands of file folders. He would take a file folder and remove the page with the picture notes. After determining the content of the folder, he would find the descriptive cabinet and drawer and place the folder in the drawer but not before he had named the folder. Next he made an additional notation on the the file page he had removed. As an example, he might find a folder with pictures from the city garden and place it in the “landscape” file cabinet and in the “city” drawer. He would then mark the folder “city garden”.  On the folder note page, he would note the location; Landscape > City > City Garden.  Success! It took several weeks to get the folders all organized but when he was finished, finding a picture was easy.

The next step was to make the index cards for his catalog.  For nearly a month, he sat at his desk transferring the information from the note pages onto the index cards.  Each picture had a card.  The heading for the card was a short description of the picture. An example might be ” Michelle’s wedding – kiss at alter” . Below that, was any notes he had made about this picture like date, location, and people in the shot. The most important part of this note card was the location of the negative.  Portraits > Family > Michelle’s wedding.

 It was a work of art, this newly devised cataloging system.  His picture negatives were safely stored in the basement storage room next to the Dark Room. There were even signs over the door; “Dark Room” and  “Light Room” .  On his card catalog, was a plaque, “Lightroom Catalog”

Now you might think that this would be the end of the story but it is not because at Photog’s death, his estate was distributed and some things sold. The Lightroom Catalog was separated from the negatives.  The negatives were kept by the Photog’s wife but somehow in her grief, she sold the catalog case.  She was never able to retrieve it. The only salvation was that Canon had sorted the negatives into descriptive files.  Nikon spent the rest of her life trying to rebuild the Lightroom Catalog with the limited information she had. The notes about each picture were lost forever But at least, she had the pictures.

The moral of this story is:  Drives crash and files are lost. Always store your picture files in descriptive folders to make recovery possible. Back up your Picture files regularly and back up your Lightroom Catalog as well. Make sure both are stored in a safe place.  As I think about it, while it is not practical for me to try to store my more than 125,000 pictures to the cloud, storing a copy of the Lightroom Catalog might be a good idea.

Lightroom is a miraculous software.  Don’t underestimate the value of the “Library module”. The “Develop Module is great to make your pictures look better but if you can’t find the picture you want, what good is it?  Also remember that all the revisions to your picture files are stored in the Lightroom Catalog.  If you lose the catalog, you lose everything you did in the “Develop Module”. You are back to the original files!  That’s how non-destructive editing works. Yes, you always have the original file to go back to which is very important but all the revisions are stored separately unless you export the revised version to be saved. One option might be to shoot in RAW, make your changes and then export the new  optimized file to  jpeg in the same location.  This might give you the best of both worlds if the Catalog is lost. Best solution; Back-up, Back-up, Back-up!

Feel free to leave a comment and/or share this article.

Retirement Age

Retirement age; that is the age you are finally able to stop punching a time clock and have the time to do more of what you want and It is a good thing you have all that extra time because everything you want to do takes longer.  I mean everything from tying your shoes to trying to figure out how to set your new watch or the car radio.

Since the early days of computers, I have been teaching myself how to make them work for me.  It was  fascinating.  Fast forward to today.  I am still learning! For almost a week, I have been using the Lynda.com website to learn about the web design software, WordPress.  I don’t know when I did my first website but it was a long time ago. To keep up you need to learn new software. That has never been a problem for me.  Until now! It takes me several hours to learn a chapter and about 30 seconds to forget it.  It isn’t the understanding; it is the simple memory.  Add in the fact that I might doze off in the middle of a tutorial and you can understand why it is taking so long.  I know what the program does and even how it does it but I forget where to find the right button to click to set up a menu or add properties to a file.  It is a little like my recent dieting – 3 steps forward and 3 and 1/2 steps back.

I have three monitors in front of me. My laptop is running the tutorial and the other two are displaying my current software; in this case, the WordPress program. By the time I look from what I am supposed to do on the first monitor to the last screen to do it, I have forgotten what I was trying to do.  I have found that I have to watch about 4 tutorials and then go back to the second one and go forward 4 or 5 and then back 3 or 4.  It is a little like a bug hitching a ride on a rolling hula-hoop.  While going in circles you travel a long way but don’t get too far ahead with each cycle.

As you can see though, I have made enough progress to get the site up and running. The posts below were just practice posts. I still have a lot of the basic design to do but at least it is functional.  I will be making most of my normal posts here.  I’ll post links on FaceBook.  I still have a lot to say and this should be the easiest way to say it.

Let me know what you think.  in the comments section.  Hopefully, I will figure out how to manage the comments.

He believes in you

I does not matter if you believe in God, the fact that he believes in you is why you are.

 D.F.S. 10/14/13
Hi Lord, it’s me. We are getting older and things are getting …bad here.  Gas prices are too high, no jobs, and food and heating costs too high. I know some have taken you out of our schools, government and even Christmas, but Lord I’m asking you to come back and re-bless America! We really need you! There are more of us who want you than those who don’t! Help us to let others know you love them and we pray for a re-kindling of the fire that made this country great. Give us a REVIVAL of people following you, for that is the only way to “change” this country in a positive direction. Thank You Lord, I Love You. (Author unknown)

I got this as an e-mail and decided to pass it on this way so it can be easily shared.  Some of you might be thinking, “All this God talk is just for the Bible beating Christian fanatics.” but God isn’t Christian! He/she can’t be claimed by any religion as their God only. God is the central anchor of ALL religions. Yes, he is the God of the Catholics and the Protestants but when you pray to God, you are praying to the God of All. He is the God of the Christians and the God of the Jews. He is the God of the Hindus and the God of the Buddhists. Yes, he is also the God of the Muslims.  The spirit has no denomination; it simply is. Life is a journey of the soul and at some time, when the soul has learned the lessons it must, it will return to its source. Only then can we find true peace.D.F.S

Eagles in winter

Winter around the Sriner household often revolves around the annual quest for the Bald Eagle. This year was no different.
 Click on the above and other pictures to see them full sized!

January of this year, brought with it a trip to the operating room for Pat. She had to have major shoulder surgery. The surgery was extensive but she has been recuperating very quickly. During her 6 weeks off work, we practiced retirement. The freedom was great! The end of the practice period and the subsequent drop back into reality SUCKED BIG TIME! Although I am already semi-retired, there was no guilt relaxing while we were both home but once Pat had to start punching a time clock, my responsibility gene  started showing its ugly head again. I could not just sit at my computer and work on pictures or study new ways to manipulate them in Photoshop. I started looking at my watch thinking, “I need to do something to justify my time”. The trouble is, when your heart just isn’t in it, there is a great deal of wondering getting ready to work. It is hard even now to type that nasty four letter word. WORK. I’m not good at goofing off so I certainly won’t ever completely retire but the difference is  the “have to” and the guilt. I can still hear my step-dad and his always demeaning manner. “Don’t just sit there, be productive.” haunts me still. Artistic pursuits that require periods of sitting resonate deep inside as non-productivity! I feel guilty reading or studying or tweaking pictures or writing my blogs.  Having recognized the problem is making it a little easier to pursue my God given artistic endeavors. But I still look around to see if anyone is watching me goof off at the keyboard. During our practice retirement, I felt much less of this distraction. If Pat is wasting time reading a book, I can waste time on my artistic outlets. June can’t come too soon for me!

“So”, you ask, “What about the eagles?” OK, I’m getting there. For me, my first eagle sighting many years ago was an awakening of my spirit. I don’t understand completely why but I am captivated by their majesty. The desire to capture that spirit in pictures really opened me to photography as a compulsive artistic drive. Once I had a soaring American Icon in my viewfinder, I was hooked. But my tools were far exceeded by my desire to get that perfect image. I wanted images that I could share with others so they too could experience the feeling I got capturing the marvelous raptor in my camera. Each year brought a little better camera or lens. My weapon of choice now is a Canon D7 with a 400mm “L” series lens combination. This is about as far as I can go without another mortgage on the house. At this point I would need to go from thousands of dollars to tens of thousands. With retirement just around the corner, that jump will probably never come. Fortunately, at this time in life, I have come to grips with this drive for the biggest toys because no matter what you get there is something just a little bigger, a little better. I am ready to accept that fact and simply do the best I can do to learn how to use the tools I have.

OK, OK, I’m getting there. Eagles are basically fish eaters. Sure they will, on occasion take a duck on the river or a rabbit in the field but they nest and usually hunt on the rivers. As winter starts to swallow up the open water in the north, the eagles will start migrating south for food. Around here, they are found as they migrate along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. They need open water to feed so as the river freezes, they are drawn further south. Along their journey, they will often stop at the Locks and Dams along the river because the water rushing through the gates or turbines won’t freeze. This provides them with the open water to fish. For than reason, they will congregate in large numbers at these locations. It is not unusual to see 25 – 30 in a single tree. Sometime even more when the river is nearly all frozen. But in the event of warmer weather, the river is not frozen over as much and they will spread out along the river due to the lower competition. There are probably as many eagles in totality but they are not bunched up. That has been the case the last couple years.

There is one favorite place along the Mississippi that attracts photographers from all over the country. That sweet spot is Lock and Dam #14 in northern Illinois near the Quad Cities. What makes this spot so special that it draws crowds all winter, is the configuration of the river. There is a small bay where stunned fish can often be seen floating on the surface. The eagles find this a perfect hunting grounds and the near-by observation walk has no visual barriers between it, the water and diving eagles. Every eagle photographer has pictures of  an eagle perched in a tree but to catch a shot of the dive and capture of the fish is the true feather in any nature photographer’s cap. Many can go for many years without the opportunity to make this capture. L & D #14 seems to give the best opportunity to make the capture. Photographers from across the country will line the walkway with $20,000 camera set-ups.

This is a small weekday crowd.

Most of these photographers are from out-of-state. You will notice the buckets by several of the shooters. No it is not to store fish they catch. They are full of fish used to bait the eagles. While some will question the integrity of this practice, it is common here. They will use compressed air in a can to bloat the fish and toss it in the river in hopes an eagle will swoop down for a catch. The eagles don’t seem to mind the easy pickin’ and the photographers are overjoyed with the results. Many of the baiters are professional photographers who offer “eagle safaris” to the participants. I won’t pass judgement but I will say it works if the eagles are there.

An adult eagles swoops in for the floating fish
one leg catch
Hold on tightly and we are off

One thing I have learned over the may years I have chased the elusive eagles from site to site, is that they are unpredictable. The population can not only change from day to day but hour by hour.  But it is worth the try and the wait when you are rewarded with the above shots.

As the days begin to lengthen, most of the eagle pairs know it is time to head back north to  get the nest ready for the spring hatch. New eagles will be born in the North Country and when winter spreads the blanket of snow and ice over the region again, the eagles will return to our backyard and I will again be able to spend the winter trying to outguess their location. But next winter, we won’t be limited to the all too often cloudy weekends. Next year these same dives will be in sunny locations and the beauty will be multiplied many times as I am able to be seen ever so much more clearly.

Perhaps  by next winter, the above juvenile will have graduated to the adult white head and I will see him in all his splendor.

You can see more of my magnificent eagles at: my Smugmug Gallery Click on the preceding link  to see more.

The New World of Photography

When I was growing up, my first camera was a Tower box camera. I think it was a Sears brand. Obviously, it was film and it had a simple fixed lens. I even had a small film developing set to print my own black and white pictures. It was fun for a while but I was way too young and impatient and yes, a bit lazy to print my own. It was too much trouble. Once I started working with color film, there was no desire to develop and print my own pictures. I would take my film down the the local drugstore and they would ship it off for processing by Kodak. A week later, I could look at the set of bad snapshots. There must be a better way! Then I found girls and had no time for photography!

Fast forward until after I was married. We loved to travel and nothing goes better with travel than photography. I got my first SLR film camera. It had many of the new features like a split screen focus and built in light meter. The split screen focus showed the picture in the lens-finder as a split picture from top to bottom. The two halves were offset from each other and as you brought the picture into the proper focus, the two halves would move in opposite directions until they lined up perfectly. Snap and you had the picture. Proper exposure was achieved by watching the light meter in the lens-finder. Adjusting the shutter and aperture would move the light meter needle to the center and proper exposure. Now think about all that and take a picture. It was not all that easy. Focus, adjust speed, adjust aperture, readjust focus and snap. Now add movement as you pan to follow the player running down the field. It took a lot of dexterity to get the shot in focus and properly exposed. Would you like to now add a zoom to the mixture. Not too many soccer Moms getting decent photos of Johnny making the touchdown. Landscapes were not too hard to get a decent shot but if movement were involved, chances lessened drastically. All this talk about the past is boring even to me and I am writing about it. Why even mention it? I mention it because it shows just how far we have come and I didn’t even go back to the true beginnings with big billowed box cameras and flash-powder. What were they really doing under that black tent?

Computer: enter stage left. Talk about change, remember all those adjustments I had to make with my first SLR. Now, the little computer inside the camera does all that for me if I want. To help me still feel important, they add the manual mode. For those purists out there, still hanging onto that thought pattern, and their loftier than thou, attitude, who propose that a good photographer shoots RAW in full manual mode, I say, go back to the old film camera like I had in the 60’s. If you are going to promote the values of the pure photography, do it without a net. Take your pictures and then go have them developed or develop them yourself and see if all your settings are correct. If they are not, you have to go back to the site and do it all over again! Oh wait, the game is over or the wedding was yesterday. OOPS! Sorry! There are a few photographers I know personally who could do that and do it right the first time but they are all old times who like me had to do it that way. If you were a professional photographer back in those days, I certainly respect your skill set.

So, what am I saying? Am I proposing you go get a new model high end camera and point the dial to the green box “automatic” ? No, that isn’t what I am saying. But I am saying, you spent a lot of money on that camera let it do the “busy work”. I seldom due “manual focus” but I do use the spot meter to pick my single focus point. That way the camera does not focus on the tree when I am shooting the deer behind it. I lock focus on my subject and then recompose and shoot. If I am shooting moving subjects like an eagle in flight, I set the shutter speed at around 1/1600 sec. I let the camera determine the ISO and sometimes the aperture also.  For most other shooting, I set the aperture and let the camera set the shutter speed. The aperture determines the depth of field. Only I know for sure what I want there but the newer cameras are getting fairly smart at guessing at it.  After I take the shot, I can look at the capture in my screen and see the histogram to be sure I got it right. I will go on record here to say that I worked so long without a net, I often forget to use it. This is not something I recommend nor am I proud of my failure to use it. You don’t have time to check each shot but give it a quick glance just to be safe. There is nothing worse than hiking back from a waterfall and finding the dial had inadvertently been bumped and was setting the exposure 2 stops wider. Everything was blown out! Real Bummer!

The title of this blog entry was “the new world” and all I have been talking about was the past and present. Where are we going? I see the field of photography changing dramatically. WE have made the physical characteristics of cameras and lenses about as good as they are going to get. Now it is the software and hardware’s time to shine. I see photographers spending a lot more time on the computer and less behind the camera. This is already true for the portrait photographers. The size 16 bride wants to be photographed as a size 6. The wedding in the backyard wants to be presented as being on the beach. Make the cloudy day bright and sunny. These things are all possible now. But I see the buyers less receptive to what was and demanding what they wanted it to be.

Recent advances in HDR photography make it possible to see even better than the human eye. There was a time you had to move subjects away from the bright windows because you could not expose for both the subjects and the window. With HDR, you can. Suddenly the view outside can be just as clear and the dark indoors. This is possible now but some cameras are doing this automatically now. They take multiple shots and merge them into an HDR picture file. I think there will be advances in the sensors so that this won’t even be necessary.

I also think we will see a difference in how pictures are displayed. Gone will be the family picture wall. To replace it, wall mounted HDTV will show continuous slide shows of the family. Using a simple search will bring up Little Sis pictures that will run throughout her birthday party. The large screen will display the travel photos when it is not being used for TV viewing. Dedicated viewers will contain Dynamic still shots. An example will be a movie of a waterfall. At first glance, it will look like a normal photograph but then you notice the waterfall is falling. The trees are swaying in the breeze, occasionally, a local bird or other animal will move into the frame. The background will contain all the sounds from the scene with a quiet background accompaniment. These dynamic stills will be purchased or rented like a DVD. The pictures will be designed to be non-distracting if you are trying to converse with someone but will be more like looking out a window. Some might be dedicated viewers simulating a window that looks out over the neighbor’s house 3 feet away. Got a condo wedged between two other units. The “Dynamic window” will still give you a view on the side complete with warming sunlight. Other seemingly static photos will be Zoomable. The touch screen will take your touch to indicate you want to zoom in to that now illuminated dark alley or cave. Super slow motion will bring in a thunderstorm almost imperceptibly. Remember watching the aquarium for hours and remember how calming and restful it was? This will be one step further.

My advice to young aspiring photographers, learn your equipment first but then learn the hardware and software that will be used to present your new dynamic art!

My Journey Through Photography

DSDgtls_4FB--27As I recall, my first camera was a tower box camera. It was a box about 4 – 5 inches square. You held it about stomach height and looked at the viewfinder on the top. It was like a Kodak brownie. This was the mid 50’s. My, how cameras have changed.

Below is a Kodak six-20 from about 1940. cameras-2707-1

I got my first 35 mm SLR shortly after I was married. It was a Yashica. Nothing was automatic then! The most automated feature was the built-in light meter. By setting the size of the opening, Aperture and by setting the time of the exposure, the little light meter in the viewfinder would show up indicating amount of light entering camera. The object was to get the needle into the center of the scale. Open the aperture, and the needle would go to the right. Speed up the exposure (less time open) and it would go back to the left. Any combination of correct settings would bring it to center. The first time you got film developed, you found that although there were many options for proper exposure, they were not all successful in giving a good picture. If there was any movement, and the shutter stayed open too long, the picture was just a blur. If you moved the camera any with a long exposure, there was just a blur. It didn’t take too long to see that an exposure time of 1/30 sec was about the longest you could use without a tripod. If there was any movement of people, you better have a speed of about 1/60 sec or less. You also noticed that if you were using a telephoto lens at a distance, you better shoot at a faster speed. Shooting a bird with a 200mm lens required a shooting speed of less than 1/200 sec. It became obvious at first that the speed was the most important variable to master. So, depending on the type of picture, I would usually set the shutter speed first and then dial in the f-stop or aperture until the meter registered in the center point for the perfect exposure.

The first time you went to the drugstore for film, (yes, that was where most people got film and had it developed) you learned about the film ASA. I knew a little about film and 35 mm was the size of the film I used. I could get 24 exposure rolls or 36. I would buy color print film because I wanted to get a print of the picture. My Dad bought slide film because he would show the pictures on a screen with a slide projector. I guess that was the first “Big Screen”. Niagara Falls on a 6 ft screen was impressive. OK, so I walked up the the counter and asked for 35 mm, 36 exposure Kodak print film. I wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about. The clerk replied, ” OK, what ASA do you want?”

” Huh?” was my reply. That is when I learned about film speed. I knew about shutter speed but now I found out there was also film speed. Film with a high ASA would work with less light. I could get 25 or 64 ASA. Later I found out about high speed film with an ASA of 400. That was 16 times more sensitive than 25. That was impressive. Unfortunately, the higher speed film came with a drawback; it was grainy. This was not an easy decision. If you had fast film and it was a bright sunny day, it might be difficult to get pictures that were not over-exposed. Going too low might limit pictures inside without flash. It seemed like the more I learned, the less I knew.

Every time I wanted to take a picture, I had to decide what film to use. What if I have taken just two shots on a good low speed film and then go into a candle-lit cabin and need high speed. Should I roll up the film in the camera and waste most of it or forget about the inside shots. I did learn that I could roll up the partially used film, note the number of pictures taken and then roll it up without loosing the leader. Then I would put it away and put in the faster film. Later when I wanted to go back to the slower film, I would have to put the partially used film in the camera, advance it past the already used portion and start shooting again. It was not an easy process. Once the film ASA was decided, I had to decide what shutter speed to use. Let’s see, we are at a colorful parade outside in the sun. I’ll put in ASA 64 Kodacolor, 36 print film. I load the film and make certain the end is properly caught in the take up reel. Advance the film several shots to be sure it is past the exposed leader. Screw on my 50mm lens and set the shutter speed to 1/250. OK, ready! Where did the parade go? I guess it was a short parade!

As you read this, you might say, “It doesn’t seem like it is worth the trouble.” Did I mention, you also have to focus the camera yourself on a split screen view finder if you have that luxury option. You look through the viewfinder and in the center, there is a circle. your image is split between top and bottom. To focus the camera, you had to line up the top and bottom to get focus. Now fire away but not too many shots because every roll will cost perhaps $20 to develop. Is it any wonder why we bought pictures of vacation spots rather than take them ourselves?

Now, even the cameras on our cell phones do all this decision making automatically. The better “point and shoots” will not only analyze the type of picture we are trying to take and decide the proper aperture, shutter speed and sensor ISO (like film ASA). Then they focus on a spot or group. They will even compare the faces of the subjects and focus on “known faces”. They do it almost instantly and “click” you have the picture you want and it is almost perfect!

So, to those who say, “shoot fully manual” I say, “no thanks, been there, done that. Let me do some tweaking but let that tiny computer inside my camera do the busy work! “

Quest for the Mighty Eagle

Havana Nature Center
Sunday was the first of our eagle watch tours for this year 2011. We headed up to Havana about 45 miles NW of here. While it had never been very good to us in the past for eagle sightings, I saw a note on Facebook from an Illinois Audubon Society member that told of a significant number of eagles around the harbor on Bellrose Island. As we pulled into the riverfront park, we saw what was a new building to us. It was the Nature Center, new last spring. It turned out to have just what these old folks needed. The riverfront room was surrounded by windows and a full view of the river,  Bellrose Island and the marina. The viewing station was warm and there was food service. Two chili cheese dogs later, we knew this could be a new favorite for us on our eagle quest circuit. The adjoining heated full restrooms so necessary at this age, put them high on our preferences list. There is even a campground there that we will try out in the spring. They are open Tuesday, Thursday and the weekend. Look for them on FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Havana-Nature-Center/164528800234746  They even show a count of the eagle sitings for the day.

Here is a tip for novice eagle spotters. We sat there for over an hour and some of the time, eagles were barley visible without binoculars. Then, a couple would fly out of the trees and jostle for a captured fish. We watched an adult sparring with a juvenile for several minutes overhead and then they were gone. So, the tip is: be patient! You can’t just drive up, look around and not seeing anything right there, just drive to the next spot up/down the river. Park and watch. Get out the binoculars and scour the tree tops. Once you spot some watch them for a while. There is no assurance they will leave their perch while you watch but if they do, they could easily fly just overhead and turn somersaults less than 100 ft. away! There are always some shore birds around the park so even if the eagles are hiding out on the far shore, there will still be birds to watch. If you are just learning to capture the winged wonders in flight, it is good to practice on the gulls. They will hang almost motionless in the wind 20 feet away.

 When we were there, we even had entertainment to keep us occupied while the eagles were elsewhere. The lady at upper left, sang and played the guitar. Below is a slide show featuring some of the flights from the day. To start the slideshow, click on the play arrow at the lower left corner of the player below.

Vimeo player: Click here

havana 1 2 11 from Dulany Sriner on Vimeo.