Cataracts Music Festival ... 2 days after

I doubt I'll ever be someone who'll comfortably say that a phone camera will ever replace a DSLR or mirroless digital camera when it comes to quality and sophistication. But I can say I'm getting more and more impressed with the capabilities of the camera feature of my iPhone5.

Today is the first of three consecutive posts in which I present images taken exclusively with my iPhone. Today's post should be the least impressive of the trio; the two others were taken in very low-light conditions, and delivered remarkably well. I'm saving those for last, though.

Today's post is about images I took today, during daylight hours, as I strolled through Garfield Park en route home from dropping off with family some cucumbers I'd grown in one of my gardens. I came upon four background pieces that were used Saturday in the park during the third annual Cararacts Music Festival.

This was the event's first year at Garfield Park, where it was moved because of opposition to staging it again in Fountain Square, where it played out the first two years. At last year's second staging, I was elsewhere in Fountain Square, photographing the inaugural (and, apparently, only running of the Fountain Square Grand Prix cycling competition).

I walked through the park Saturday during the late hours of the festival, and heard at least two of the 40 acts of psych rock, garage rock, hip-hop and punk styles that the event boasts it attracts. Organizers did a great job of cleaning debris from the ground; curiously, they left behind these four pieces, so I decided to photograph them while I had a chance. All I had with me was the iPhone, so that's what I used.

I don't know what a couple of these are supposed to represent; just appreciate the artwork. Leading off the post is a silver triangular tent-like structure whose top 2 feet (see photo below) was separated from the bulk of the tent, as if to allow ventilation. A "Stay Off" sign was still on the backside.

Above: Yes, I was trying to include myself in the reflection ... and was disappointed it wasn't more conspicuous.

When mortality is the photo subject

A member of a photography group at the online business networking site LinkedIn recently asked other group members for suggestions on how to best shoot pictures of -- and I'm not making this up -- caskets.

Yes, there is a demand for this -- in advertisements, primarily. Maybe even in funeral home promotional literature. The "why" of posing the question is irrelevant. The reason I'm posting this is because a fellow member of the group, in his response to the question, contributed a remarkable anecdote that he insists is true. He gave me permission to post the story here, saying it happened some 20 years ago. I'll fudge on the names and places so as not to embarrass any party to this anecdote who might still be around -- and happen to stumble upon this.

Here's the story, copied from an email from the fellow who provided it at LinkedIn:

Empty caskets are reasonably easy to deal with. I have a friend (we’ll call him Bubba) who took an assignment to shoot a series of portraits of a young father IN a casket. Apparently the family had never had any images made of him while he was alive.

The family asked for photos of the two children and the wife with the deceased. ‘Bubba’ took his brand-new Hasselblad and a three-head portable studio strobe setup to the funeral home. He photographed Papa & Mama; Papa, Mama & kids; Papa & kids; Papa & each child; then the family left him to try to get a 'life-like portrait' of Papa.

The funeral home thoughtfully loaned Bubba a stepladder so he could get the right angle for the portrait. To make a long story short, while leaning to get the exact angle, Bubba lost his balance and fell into the box with Papa. As he fell, Bubba held the new Hasselblad over his head to protect it, but as his forehead connected with Papa’s nose, gravity smacked the camera into the back of Bubba's head, knocking him semi-conscious (and dented the new camera).

Talk about stuck! Poor Bubba’s hands were behind his head, holding the camera that had bonked him in the back of the head, his elbows on either side of Papa’s head. In addition, his forehead made poor Papa’s nose parallel to his cheekbone, his nose touching Papa’s Adam’s Apple, and he had to somehow get out of that box. Preferably without calling attention to his predicament.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, when he finally worked his way out (without tipping the whole casket and contents onto the floor), Bubba went to a men's room to wipe off the makeup that had smeared off Papa's face onto his forehead. Then he went to quietly find an employee of the funeral home to unload his story.

He apologized for breaking Papa's nose and offered to pay to unflatten the nose, if necessary, but begged the employee not to tell Mama. The mortician said, 'No problem,' and went to Papa, grabbed his nose between his thumb and forefinger and snapped it back into shape. My friend asked if that hurt anything. 'Nope, he's dead,' was the answer. They re-applied Papa's facial makeup, and nobody was the wiser.

Bubba never took another photo job involving a dead person, although he sold more than $2,000 in prints and enlargements. Apparently the family bought prints from virtually every image. The story has never been told in print before this, as far as I know.

More on the eye-opening F200EXR

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might remember a post from a month ago or so when I trumpeted a new point-and-shoot from FujiFilm, the 12-megapixel FinePix F200EXR.

This high-end camera is pocket-size for those looking for something convenient, which includes me for those times I just don't want to lug around a heavy camera bag or backpack. The big lure for me -- which is why I mentioned it previously -- is that it offers a couple desirable features that you'd otherwise wouldn't expect to be able to execute unless you were using a DSLR. This includes, in one mode, the ability to shoot in wide-dynamic range (the camera actually captures two shots at different exposures by dividing the 12MP, reserving 6MP for one exposure, and 6MP for the other), and in another mode, it regroups the 12MP into 6 million large pixels to enable high-sensitivity in low light conditions (and, consequently, low noise).

Photography Bay, an online resource which touted the F200EXR this year right before the annual Photo Marketing Association convention in Las Vegas early this month, recently posted an analysis (click on link) of the camera after checking it out at the convention, where FujiFilm gave the F200EXR its formal introduction.

Yesterday, I noticed that Amazon.com had trimmed $25 from the camera's original sale price of $399. Camera equipment prices don't remain static; in fact, many manufacturers have jacked up prices on camera bodies and lenses since the new year. Odds are this price will not stick at $374 for long.

Woe-be-gone the bad days

For every success story a photographer has, he or she probably has just as many failures or embarrassments.

Like the time I took pictures at a property assessment protest rally in downtown Indianapolis and brought along two cameras -- one equipped with a standard walk-around lens and the other, a telephoto lens to handle close-ups. I viewed this as an ideal chance to satisfy two class assignments -- a news coverage photo assignment in my correspondence course through the New York Institute of Photography, and a need for a multiframe photo essay for my Advanced Photography class in the Continuing Education Program at IUPUI.

I woke up late that morning, so I had to rush to pull together my gear, head out the door and drive downtown. The fact that I rushed should have sent out Hitchcockian warning signals of what was to come, but it didn't.

It wasn't until I got there that I realized I'd brought only one battery (I have four, one for each camera and two backups). Three of the batteries must have gotten separated from my camera bags (probably from needing a recharge) and not returned, and I hadn't noticed or thought to take inventory before heading out the door. Luckily, I did have the one battery, and it appeared to be fully charged, so I spent the whole shoot swapping out the battery from camera body to camera body to take my pictures, but still feeling a bit uneasy about my sloppiness while pulling together my gear.

I was relatively satisfied with my images, and I dutifully turned in my assignments. The NYIP needed prints, and I submitted them; the IUPUI class teacher wanted the images in jpeg files that he could compile for a slide show in front of the class, so I emailed those to him. So on the day my Advanced Photography class met to look at everyone's essays, the teacher pulled up my photos on the projector and asked me why I had shot some of my frames -- on a day of bright sunshine -- using an ISO of 1600 (a setting used rarely, and then only in extremely low-light conditions).

I cringed and felt that familiar tinge of red-faced embarrassment. In a very quick flash, four things became readily apparent.

1) The teacher was one of those who pulled up the "Properties" data of each jpeg image to check out such things as the image's date, the identity of the camera and lens used, the f/stop and shutter speed settings, whether flash was used, and, of course, the ISO.

2) I hadn't checked that ISO setting on the camera before taking my rally pictures. I really did know better, and if had checked, I would never have used 1600 because that setting would compromise the image quality by introducing a lot of grain, or noise as it's called in the digital realm.

3) The 1600, I then recalled, was what I'd last used with that camera. It was for an indoor low-light family outing.

4) Finally, it also explained a nagging question I encountered, but hadn't bothered to explore, on the day of the shoot: Why was the Program mode on my camera allowing me to shoot at such fast shutter speeds? I'd recalled seeing the numbers "1/2000" and "1/5000" flash on the LCD, which was astounding for my telephoto lens, and I just didn't take the time to investigate it then because I was already freaking about the missing battery and wanted everything else to go smoothly.

My brain had crunched all of that information in the nanoseconds after the teacher had posed his question. I decided to respond as succinctly and face-savingly as possible. "That was an error," I mumbled ... or maybe it was, "That was an oversight." I was prepared to spill the gory details if he chose to lob me some follow-up questions, but I was sincerely hoping he wouldn't. To me, in my humiliated state, I was already viewing this as unwanted drama, akin to the Arlo Guthrie Alice's Restaurant/Thanksgiving Day Mass-a-cree.

Mercifully, the teacher moved on, making no further issue of it; I think he was satisfied that he had made his point -- and had let us all know he checked that kind of stuff.