Larkvi.com Weblog

I am in Frankfurt am Main for almost three days, laying over on my way to Addis Ababa, where I will spend most of the next two months on a university grant. Today I walked around the small but attractive inner-city of Frankfurt and was inspired to work on abstracts using the architectural features of the city, as seen in this close-up of one of the larger skyscrapers in the city. Frankfurt is, I am told, the only German city really possessed of a skyline, as the civic centre, like so many of the ‘historic’ buildings around the town, is entirely constructed post-war.

The Lathrops were the family of Leland Stanford’s wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford. This monument, here heavily edited, can be found in the Stanford University Arboretum, near the mausoleum.

I am not sure where to go with regard to editing this image, but I love the ravens and their expression and the way they are looking at the camera. Even if I never make anything great out of it, I think it is worth sharing.

I just received a flash/umbrella setup and my new camera (my old one broke, though I hope I can salvage it as a second body). I decided to play around with it a bit, and, lacking a model, settled on self-portraiture. For a first try at a flash portrait, and given the difficulties involved in shooting oneself, I am fairly pleased–I am looking forward to getting more practice with manual flash, and eventually catching up on all the great material at Strobist, which inspired my purchase (that, and the prospect of dark church interiors in Ethiopia–more on that soon).

Trying a bit more drama in this flower portrait.

I was photographing this bison at 300mm (480mme), getting its whole body, when a nearby professional photographer, annoyed that the beast would not raise its head and open its eye to look at the camera decided more or less to give up. We had been exchanging a bit of chit-chat, and before he packed up, he offered to let me try his Canon 500mm f/4 L (800mme). Almost as soon as I got my camera onto the lens and figured out how to loosen the Wimberly mount, the bison looked up and I got my favorite bison shot of the trip.

You’d think that, given how kind the photographer was, in allowing me to use his extremely expensive equipment, I would have thought to ask his name, but I didn’t.

This was one of the fattest beaver I had ever seen, and certainly the friendliest. On a tip that the beaver frequented the same spot on the shore at the same time every day, I watched for it three times. The first time I was on a tripod with a telephoto lens, but it was so unafraid of me that it came much to close to photograph–so close, in fact, that it was at one point standing on my foot, at which point I stopped trying to be still and startled the animal so much that it left. The second time, it showed early, and I missed it. The third time, I put on my 100mm macro lens and lay down on the ground, to avoid the problem of the first time, but still I had trouble with the animal coming too close, even after I retreated several times.

To compound the problems associated with depth-of-field at close distances, the animal was late this time, and the light was fading, necessitating a lower shutter speed and larger aperture than I would have preferred, making for a lot of missed frames.