The SLR Difference

These pictures from a digital SLR are more about the difference in cameras than anything else. I selected them mostly for the shockingly richer feel compared with pix from a Coolpix or Powershot. The SLR is pretty old and a lot lower on the pixel count than the little guys, but the lens on the SLR is at least twice as wide. Glass counts, I guess. I know for sure the huge pixel counts on little cameras are just a marketing gimmick: pixels are cheap to add and few realize that more pixels cannot help a cheap lens.

All the shots in this post were taken by Mitch with a Nikon D70s SLR with (roughly) an 18-70mm Nikkor zoom lens which I dragged along one day just for fun. Mitch went nuts and shot over nine hundred pix about as fast as he could shoot.

Viewing tip: click to see the photo enlarged. Click again to see the next picture. Along the bottom you will see thumbnails that let you jump around at will.

The big one is good, but i lke the coolpix better cuz it fits in my pocket. It's not the camera for me, it's what speaks to me. What I see makes the difference not the camera. No matter the camera the picture is what counts when it speaks to someone. So I snap and delete until I'm satisfied with the end results. -- Mitch

Cameras differ but the way I see it is the end result. A picture speaks, not the camera. Big little makes no difference. What I see is my view of life in motion. It's not about the people it's what they wear or are doing at the moment I snap. I like the coolpix better because it fits in my pocket, no other reason. The big one's cool just doesn't fit anywhere, and weighs too much. Nice camera though. 

I said "mostly".

Ship Sunrise

 Mitch worked on this shot pretty hard; these three are from over a dozen he took. It was a great sunrise so they were all fun, but one of them...

Bingo. Generally I would say "Not enough story", but sometimes Mother Nature can carry the day all by herself. btw, all pix going back a half dozen posts are uncropped and unaltered in any way. My Mac died and that was where I could effortlessly crop and enhance shots. Better this way, I think.

South Florida style!

Love these. I call them  bi-chromal.

We gotta get Mitch a dog.

It is still the beach.

A harbinger of Spring Break to come.

With all the visual variety I am amazed Mitch can get these bi-chromals.

There is a lot of variety, yet only certain things stand out. No one should be amazed by my shots. It is after all called "mitcheseyes." It's just life as I see it  --flashes of color, movement, light, shadow, and reflection. What I see is the essence of life waking up.The world offers much to those who truly see, and nothing to those who charge blindly ahead without looking, or stopping for a moment to breath life's beauty. -- Mitch

 

Welcome to Fort Lauderdale!

Breakthrough?

Well, not exactly a breakthrough because I had noticed Mitch was leading up to this, but this time he sent me one shot and directly asked me to put it up. The artist speaks.

By "this" I mean careful and deliberate composition/arrangement of a photograph. It was clear from some recent shots that Mitch had waited for the right moment or moved to where he could get the right angle but this time is different. He did all that and just told me to put it up, not leaving it to my discretion. 

The close cropped hair and folds in the clothing suggest a robed monk in sunrise meditation. I love the red artifact and the spikes of sun and wondering who the guy is and what he is wondering. I even like wondering if Mitch posed him.

That is a cell phone shot, by the way. It goes to show that the story and visual clout transcend the quality of the camera. Last weekend I dragged along my Nikon D70s SLR and Mitch shot nine hundred pix before I could finish a second pint at the Elbo Room. I will put those up soon but my point is I was shocked at how much richer those photos were compared to those of the cheapo digicams. This pic reminds me that in the end a good composition does not depend on a special camera.

This whole story started when Mitch kept showing me cell phone shots and I had a Canon Powershot sitting in a drawer somewhere so I wondered what would happen if Mitch had a slightly better camera to work with. Then he gave me back a few hundred shots of bikini butts and I thought, OK, he gave you three hundred shots of bikini butts, you wanted to see what he would do right? Shut up and go with it.

But I did pick the best of the butts and he had shot other things and some of those were interesting, so I did in the end inject my own sensibilities by picking certain pics and not others and by cropping photos to enhance them. I checked with Mitch on that imposition of my own preferences and he stopped me cold and said it was no problem, he liked the implicit dialog. 

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies, I think. Heisenberg said the very act of observation alters the event, right down to a scientist in a white smock altering whether a photon behaves as a particle or a wave simply by looking at it. And they do not even have to look. If they set up a recording device which will let them look later, it changes the nature of the photon from wave to particle at the time of the recording.

So Mitch is the photographer and I am the audience. In a parallel universe I skated in front of a truck coming down off the drawbridge at twenty knots and Mitch had a different audience and took a different path, but I suspect in the end Mitch would be Mitch and he would end up at the same place me or no me, because in the end he would have found a different audience and in the end even as the artist heeds the audience the artist is no artist if they do not lead the audience to see things they could not have seen.

Uh, pardon the hyperbole. It is too soon to push aside Ansel Adams or Cartier-Bresson. With this shot I am just saying Mitch is stepping up his game nicely.

Coolpix Debut

The Canon Powershot went south, in a way I have seen before: the lens gets stuck trying to open (or then close). These cheap little digicams are great and fun but disposable. So I ran up to Office Depot and for fun got one of the cheapest they had, a Nikon Coolpix for eighty bucks. They wanted to sell me the extended warranty for $17 and then I would have to ship tehm the dead camera and get back a coupon for a new camera. No, thanks.

When you got, flaunt it.

Nice framing.

The fish have been hard to photograph, but this looks great.
Maybe the Coolpix handles night shots better.

A top contender in the bird-flight category.

When you see folks sitting right there it is because the wind is blowing from the northeast,
from the other side of that wall.

Brilliant.

The waves came out great in this shot.

Easy rider in pink.

Paula the Yankee fan. Her church offers the best meals in Fort Lauderdale according to the crew.

Look, up in the sky! (Closely.)

I would title this "Birds on Mechanized Sand" if I had been lucky enough to take it.

I love the matching shirt on her shoulder. It is one of those fill-in-your-wn-story deals.

OMG. Is that Gwyneth Paltrow? Nah, but still...

Looks like the Coolpix software was trying to turn nightime into day.