Art is Everywhere, just look with Artisitic Eyes

A normal Sunday afternoon, with the family  on a busy beach….what occasion for to do some interesting picture do you have in a situation like this ??

More than what I expected to have!!

I start shooting some family album of my daughter and her friend playing in the breaking waves with a body surf board, and after a couple of dozen of them, I turn my sight to the left and to the right looking for some interesting scenario, but the sun of the early afternoon, the too many people on the beach, maybe two dozens on two kilometres of sandy beach!!, were not helping at all, so I start looking on the sand exposed by the low tide and I walk in an area where the water table of the interior of the land, is filtering amongst the dense sand of the slope, eroding it in some point and around the stones abandoned there by the waves of the last tide.

Metallic surface of the water, around a stone

So , playing with the reflex of the sun on the sand and the filtering water I took some interesting photography…here I show you some of them…..comments are welcome.

A solitary Stone designed the sand around it on an Osa Peninsula Beach

Tree Landscape designed by the water filtering throught the sand on a beach on the Osa Peninsula

Pandora Plants found in the Osa Peninsula

Fungi group on the Bark of a Tree

Few days ago, Sunday, I was just killing time, eating some bread, fresh of the oven, salame and some red wine, in the back garden of the Il Giardino Restaurant, my Restaurant in Puerto Jimenez, when I saw a line of smoke coming out from a fungi that was growing on the bark of a dead tree, in the middle of the garden….I went  close enough o see that it was not smoke but a continuous cloud of microscopic spores of the almost dry fungi, that, reached the right maturation and were starting their trip to a place where to start a new specimen of that kind of fungi.

I immediately went home, just across the road, to pick -up my camera, the tripod and the flash system for macro photography, I start assembling all the equipment, but for the time  was ready to shoot, the weather changed and a strong, but short raifall, drenched all the garden leaves, trunks and fungi.

So, the fungi stopped to “smoke” and the spores stopped to fly away, but watching carefully underneath the epifitic grass that grow on the dead trunk , I found the early form of the same fungi, younger than the smoking ones, with tender flesh and a kind os snow cloud in formation amongst the bends of the flesh and in top of the crown border of the specimen.

I place the Nikon D300 with the 105mm Macro lens and the R1C1 close up flash system installed on it, with an extra SB-R200 light in my hand for to place some light on the top of the subjects and create some back light for to add deepness to the sceene.

Deep of field is always critical when you do macro photography but here the immobility of the subject and the use of the tripod allowed me to go down with the shutter time, until 1/6s,  and go up with the power of the flash units  so  I could close the diaphragm up to  F/22, extending the deep of field to that couple of centimetres that allowed me to have, almost, everything in focus.

When I saw the first readable shoots in the LCD screen of the camera, I thought that these creatures were looking like the  conscious plants of Cameron’s Pandora Planet, so here I give you some example to study and discuss to which category they are , seriously, if there is some mycologist that can help to identify them, [please advise, and, as always, any comment is welcome.

Fungi on a Guyaba dead tree

Funghi with white, snowy spores foam

Neuronal like web of the spore foam

Broken Shells

Sunday Afternoon I went to one of my favourite Beaches and Photo location for to take some shoots while I was enjoying some relax with the family.

Walking on the beach with my heavy Mamiya RZ67 , and, for sure, my Nikon D300, I found a place where some poacher went to crash the shells of several big Cambute for to extract the flesh of the body and sell them on the black market.

The scene was sad but I got some dramatic images of the broken shells on the sand with some dried coconuts, here i show you one  of these pictures…

Broken Shells and dried Coconuts on the beach

This is a Picture I took with the Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, and the 65mm f/4 on tripod. the film is an Ilford Delta 1oo Pro, that I developed in DD-x 1:4 for 12 minutes. Scanning with Epson V500 Photo, and processed with Lightroom , just for to add more definition and some graduated filter for the sky in the back

comments are welcome….

Night Photography in the Osa Peninsula

Night Photography in the collective unconscious, is strictly connected to images of urban streets with car lights that design long red and white strips,  skyscraper window randomly lit with their shape  defining the sky shape,  people involved in the rituals of the dark hours, etc. etc.

If you live in the Osa Peninsula,  you must redefine the whole idea of Night Photography, here cars that run during the night hour on the streets of town are few, no building are higher of two stories, and the night people is repeatedly doing the same thing; get drunk in the local cantinas and bar, not really a great subject to shoot, and not really friendly with somebody that can show to the rest of the world how bad they were last night…..

Osa Peninsula Niht Corral Gate

So, here around, you need to shift your search for interesting subjects toward the best and wide source available in the Osa : Nature and agricultural world.

Due to the little  time I have for to take Photos, my jobs maintain me a quite busy, I have to concentrate the free moments and use them fully.

Night, is often the only time I have for to take y cameras, often more than one system and go, wandering, looking for an interesting subject.

One full moon night , the period of the month I prefer, I was on the way to Matapalo beach, just one kilometre out of Jimenez and I saw what looked to me as a great subject : the Don Gegio Corral.

Few metres before of it, a street light was spreading its yellowish light over the gravel road and the surroundings object, including part of the Corral fences and gate, while the full moon was almost vertical, and was appearing and disappearing amongst the big white clouds…I liked the scene and I start placing my tools in site.

I took several shoots with the Nikon D300 with the white balance sat to CLOUDY, INCANDESCENT,  and with determined K gradient, for to have an idea of the different possibilities and the way that the mix of lights coming form the moon, the street light, and some flash I add to some shoot,  interacted amongst them.

I have a set of several pictures I like, some with the cold colours of the Incandescent set, some with the warmer tones of the Cloudy set and some with a mix of them obtained playing with the K gradient.

The picture I choose for to show here is one that had been taken with the Cloudy setting, with my versatile 18-70mm at 18mm, a shutter speed (?) of 30 seconds and an aperture of 5.6

I like this picture for the game of lights and shadows and the Grey sky in the back of the door, that add some drama to  the scene, already dramatic because the fences on the sides of the gate that obligate to walk toward the door, without any possibility to go in any other direction

The next nights, until the moon was almost full, I returned to the crime scene, and I took some other sets with the Mamiya RZ 67 and B&W film, and one night I brought there my system of Metz flashes for  a couple of pictures that i like too, but this is another story….

I want publicly thanks Don Gegio that allowed me to enter in his property for to take these pictures, pictures that I show to him and he likes too…..

Any comments is welcome.

Digital DX Vs.Medium Format Film

Last Sunday I had a moment for to take some pictures that I had in my mental folder where I store the next sets I want to shoot, waiting for the right season, the weather, the tide, the moon, the colour of leaves, etc, as every Photographer does.

so I brought in the middle of a Mangrove swamp two cameras of mine, the D300 Nikon with my everyday lens, the 18-70 mm a 3.5 lens, that cover the 90% of my needs, and the Mamiya RZ67 PRO II with the 65mm f/4 lens, that is, approximately, as a35 mm lens in the 35mm world.

I set  the D300 the on monochrome with green filter, and I placed a green filter on the Mamiya, for to have a similar condition of gradation of grays.

the D300 was set to a 1EV less than 200ISO, the lowest ISO possible on this camera, while in the Mamiya back I load an Ilford Pan F 50 ISO, a great film for to record details, with a great range of grays.

Once I placed the tripod in a location where I could take pictures of a nice composition of trees, mangrove roots, leaves in the sun , that, thanks to the green filter looks almost white, dark mud and very dark spots of shadows, I shoot several times with both cameras and, the two ” versions” of the same view are the ones that you can see here

This is the Mamiya Picture, took with the 65m F/4 lens and the green Filter 1x, more or less a 35 mm in the 35mm film camera world

This is the Nikos D300 picture, took with he 18-70mm F/3.5 at  18mm, more or less a 24 mm in 35mm film camera

What we have here is a very similar situation, in term of general ” feeling, and some difference of levels and curves are, possibly due to some different setting during the “digitalization” of the film, Scanned with an Epson V500 Photo, and processed with Lightroom.

But we can appreciate a slight difference of prospective, everything in the  Nikon capture is ” compressed ” for to make possible to fit the image in the small sensor of the DX format, while the Mamiya, with a 60mm x 70mm film surface, doesn’t need to compress anything, and the image is much more similar to the real one.

But the big difference amongst these two Photographic formats is appreciable when we go to see the images at the 100%

This is a detail of the Nikon Picture enlarged at the 100 %, great details of everything,  even the small elements in the deep shadow

This the Mamiya Picture, great definition of the front leaves, but some blur on the leaves in the back, and lost of details in the shadow, but, again, here we are observing a reproduction of a film, scanned in  ” dry ” method, that doesn’t really offers the best possibilities of transfer all the details to the digital media.

But, you know, here, we are observing a crop at only 35 % !!

the size of this pictures, scanned at 3200 DPI, is, at 100 % of more than 3 metres of height, against the  ” small ” one metre and something of the Digital one.

So, what do we have to do?  Shoot with Digital or Film?

At these levels, the answer, for me, is : it doesn’t matter.

I like to shoot with the Digital Cameras, for the easy is to check the work i am doing and for the amount of picture I can store in one of my pockets, but wen I want feel the emotion of to take a  “Photo  ” ,  I can’t avoid to take my heavy, anti ergonomic, complicated Medium Format Mamiya , insert one of that rolls of just 10 captures and wait for to hear that ” ploft ” of the mirror.

Comments are welcome.

Drift Wood on the Osa Peninsula beaches

In this tropical environment, where microorganism work so hard for to digest and disappear any dead organic element, is not easy to find some interesting aged piece of wood, with, maybe, the exposed flesh, and the places where you can expect to find some are the beaches  of the Golfo Dulce, where the little waves don’t clean too fast the shore, giving time to the drift wood for to be  ” worked ” by the sun, salt and rain.

With some picture of the masters of the past in my eyes, I was waiting to have the sun in a position that would create some shadow in the background of this picture, and have the chance to isolate the subject and create the right contrast between the almost white surface of the drift wood and the obscurity of a little cave, completely ” absorbed ” by the shadow,  and almost invisible in the picture.

I used the lowest ISO was possible, and, thanks to the bright sun, I could close the diaphragm enough for to have almost everything in focus, here the shutter is on 1/125 and the aperture is F/9, the Camera is the Nikon D300,at 1EV under ISO 200, the lens is the Nikkor 18-17 F/3.5-4 at 18mm, in autofocus and manual control of exposition.

In post production, with Lightroom, I just cropped a little and reduced a little the exposition of the left upper corner, for to accentuate the darkness in that spot.

Comments are welcome.

A place where Osa Peninsula Photographer can meet

Ok….. Here we are !

Beginning a new Blog is a great emotion .

For me, that have this medium as, almost, the only one available for to get in touch with other persons that share this passion, it is an important step.

And I choose this picture for to open the first page of the first number of this  blog  for to emphasize the spirit I would  be present here.

this one is an HDRI, an High Dynamic Range Image, obtained by the interpolation of six images with different shutter time,  for to obtain the right exposition on the sensor of the camera of the different areas of the picture, that, as you can see, for to be taken against the direct light of the sun, range from deep shadows to the bright light of the sky.

The choice of to shoot it in Black & White, is for to remark the wish to go toward Fine Art Photography, instead that a mere documentation of animal and vegetation species.

I would try to maintain the discussion around themes related to the general problems and techniques of Photography, with some emphasis on the aspects that this activity involve in  an environment like the one where we live and shoot.

Everybody that would participate to this blog is very welcome and I would be glad to open this space to interesting and instructive debates.

I will try to organize one special page where contributors could place some of their most interesting works, for to offer to everybody some source of inspiration and example for to discuss some technique or Photography Style .

So, welcome, and, please, leave your thought and ideas in the comment space.

Giulio Ranalli