Kathleen McGivney

A Tree Grows in Los Angeles

Roots, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I've been going through a lot of film negatives lately, some new, some old. I used to shoot tons and tons of black & white film, and I miss it. Looking at some of these negatives has inspired me to pick up one of my old Leica SLRs and run a few rolls of b&w through it. Since I have a better scanner now (his name is Atom and he procrastinates much less than I do) I should be able to post more film shots soon.

This image is one of my favorites from my film archives. (Calling them "archives" rather than "piles of old negatives" makes it sound fancy and organized.) I took it while walking around the grounds of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church near downtown Los Angeles. A friend of mine and I were out shooting just to see what caught our eye. As we were walking around the grounds, I saw this knotty old tree behind the church near the rectory, with its bulging roots displacing parts of the nearby sidewalk. I thought it was an interesting subject and I liked the way the light was hitting in only in certain places because it was streaming through the branches of another nearby tree, so I captured the image.

If I recall correctly, I was using fairly high-speed black & white film, not because I was working with low light but because I like the large grain in higher-speed films. Sometimes a grainy look can impart a certain aesthetic to a photograph that I find appealing. For example, another image that I shot during this outing is of a side of a building and some trees and landscaping next to it; the grain in the image makes it look as though it was taken 80 years ago rather than with a modern camera. It gives it an artistic, somewhat painterly quality that I really like in a photograph.

More scanned negatives coming soon, as soon as my scanner gets home from work!

Zeitgeist Films

Zeitgeist Mugs, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

Recently, I went to the offices of Zeitgeist Films with Jenni Miller of Premiere while she interviewed them for a piece about their 20 years as a filmmaking team and their retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I was there to shoot photos of the two for the article. I only posted a couple - this one of the mugs that a friend of theirs made for them, and another of the two filmmakers, which are both featured in the article on premiere.com.

I am looking forward to doing some more work with Premiere, which I'll be doing next week as I cover one day of the San Diego Comic Con for them. Yes, it's a comic book convention (and one I've been to many, many times before), but there is quite a large film company presence there and there will be many filmmakers and actors there promoting their films. And I'll be there to take pictures of 'em doing it.

Raging water

Raging water, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

I have blogged a few photos that were taken using a Lensbaby before. As I mentioned in this post, the Lensbaby is a hybrid of a tilt-shift and a bellows lens that allows a photographer to create a selective focus effect. With a traditional tilt shift lens, you can create focus on your desired subject and have the other areas of the image out of focus, which makes the subject really pop out from the background. This is achieved by creating a very shallow depth of field.

What the Lensbaby does that's a little different is adds a blurry effect around the center area of focus. As you can see in this image, the flowers and foliage surrounding the water that I was focusing on look streaky, as if you took a watercolor brush and dragged it away from the subject. This effect happens when you focus the Lensbaby, which is done by pushing down on the bellows until your subject is in focus. The flexibility of the bellows also allows the photographer to concentrate their area of focus at any point in the image. So I could focus on the upper right corner, for example, and the rest of the image would have that streaky, soft-focus, watercolor look. I especially like to use this lens for high-contrast or difficult lighting situations, because the Lensbaby allows for some incredible ways to play with light and color.

On our last trip to Ireland, I used the Lensbaby much more than I did our traditional lenses, so I'll be posting some more on the artistic possibilities that can be achieved with this lens, which has a very attractive price point, just $150 USD for the Lensbaby 2.0 (my preferred version). It's a good way to take a step towards expanding your creative vision with your photography.

To really see the full effect in this image, it's best to view it larger. Bigger version posted after the jump.

A tower that leans, you say?

Leaning Tower, Pisa, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

While we were on our honeymoon, we took a day trip to Pisa to check out the Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles), which contains the world-famous Leaning Tower. We didn't have time to climb up the tower as there was a 6 hour (!) wait for a climbing time. They only allow a set number of people up in the tower at a time due to its, er, structural issues, so we decided to pass and instead took photos inside the Baptistery (one here) and the Duomo (cathedral).

Many efforts have been made over the years to stabilize the tower and keep it from completely falling over, but it still leans and offers a great opportunity to play with perspective. I shot this with the Canon 5D and a Canon 17-40mm f4 lens at its shortest focal length. The wide angle at 17mm causes some perspective distortion. This, along with the direction that I was pointing the camera, makes the bottom of the campanile look larger while making it look like the tower leans much more than it actually does.

Camera collection

Leica R, originally uploaded by Atom Moore.

Recently, we had a loaner of a Hasselblad H3DII, which is a high-end medium format digital SLR. My husband took the opportunity to use it to document our entire camera collection. He set up a little mini-studio on our dining room table and got to shooting. Now that I have recovered from the seizures I had from the dozens of times the flash fired, I thought I'd share them.

This photo is of two of my film SLRs. (Yes, I still shoot film sometimes. I'm super retro.) The one on the left is a limited-edition Leica R3 Safari with a matching 50mm f2 Summicron lens, made in the late '70s. The one on the right, taking an unauthorized nap break, is a Leica R4, the R3's successor, with a 100mm f4 macro lens. Both are manual focus cameras but have exposure meters and both manual and automatic exposure modes.

The rest of our collection can be seen here.

The family that shoots together, stays together

My husband and I are very much into photography (in case you couldn't tell already). He is a professional photographer who has just returned to freelancing after working for a pro rental house. I'm a hobbyist, but a pretty serious one. We share cameras and lenses, made easier by the fact that we both use the same SLR system (Canon). So, when we go on vacation, we don't just hit up the typical tourist spots and take posed photos - we walk around, soak in the beauty of wherever we happen to be, and take photos of whatever catches our eye.

And of course, sometimes we take photos of each other. Taking photos. Observe:

We took these of each other in the elevator inside the Duomo Museum in Florence. Atom is using a Sigma DP-1, a fixed-lens, wide-angle compact camera that uses the Foveon X3 sensor. (It doesn't normally have a viewfinder on the top; he attached a 28mm Voigtlander viewfinder to the hotshoe.) I am using a Canon EOS 5D SLR with a Lensbaby, which is a hybrid of a tilt-shift and a bellows lens that allows the photographer to create a selective focus effect. I use Lensbabies to create images like the creepy statue, and of course, the one of Atom above.