It’s been a weird couple of months. In between two different eras, Year Five is progressing nicely, with gear acquisition going smoothly and knowledge only ever building on the creative empires I’m trying to build. So much foundation but no walls, no windows, no doors, nothing on top of it yet.
More important things seem to happen every day.
Kolari Vision did an amazing job on my A6300, now technically an A6300i, but I’ve started to call it Sturm after the post-Renaissance artistic movement and Destiny 2 weapon set of Sturm and Drang. When I get an A7iii and a smallrig to match, I’ll have Storm and Stress in my hands.
Currently, most of my photography has been spent figuring out the quirks of infrared light and how it interacts with everything else. It has been a joy to find out what reflects infrared light and why.
Infrared light is an intense little thing to wrap your head around. There are really simple, subtle things that I can point my camera at and find that all along there was another wavelength of light to be found there. It’s actually become quite a Lovecraftian exercise. There’s an idea now that whenever I see something I know there’s more to it. It’s as simple as the black cotton in one of Nadine’s hijabs being bright red or magenta infrared, I just can’t see it without Sturm.
Here’s two shots from her recent senior portrait shoot comparing the effects of infrared. She’s getting two Bachelor’s Degrees in a little over a week!
So, aside from the Helios being intensely obvious with itself, the color variety in infrared light is insane. There are some lenses that transmit better or worse, which is an interesting idea to go over.
Essentially, different lenses treat wavelengths of light differently depending on the elements used in the lens! The Helios 40-2 was a lens tested by Kolari Vision to see that infrared light didn’t outpace the visible light spectrum in it’s dispersion within lens elements. tl;dr: the Helios 40-2 treats all light the same, and bends it the same. Probably mostly thanks to the KMZ having made military optics, so I’ll chalk it up to Russian engineering on this one.
The SL1 shot beautifully for me not having much time with it between it and the 80D I had before the A6300. I hadn’t messed with it much before but aside from auto white balance, the SL1 came loaded with automatic color profiling. I haven’t had a lot of time to read about it, but that would be why any shots on the SL1 are noticeably more colorful and contrasty. For a computer it does a really good job with color variety. I’ll have it on hand while I don’t have another Sony camera to compliment the modded A6300.
Kolari Vision appears to have been backordered on the IR Chrome filters, due to high demand it looks like. I’ll be getting part of the third batch of filters anytime between a week ago and a week from now. So I’m excited to get it and slap it onto all of my lenses one at a time and see what it looks like. I also have a hot mirror filter I should be getting in the same box so I can make my 55mm diameter and lower lenses look normal. This, sadly, means that the Helios will never see only visible light on the A6300 ever again. Kind of a weird thought. Gouging out one eye to put a new one in its place that can only see in full spectrum.
Most of my day to day work, thankfully, is spent talking about cameras and drones and learning more and more about them every hour. It’s not exactly thrilling, nor applying what I know yet, but I’m learning to much and being able to teach others. I would call myself a consultant on the matter of drones and camera stuff. Hell, I’ve been and am being paid for it I should just throw it on my resume. As such, I haven’t found much time to spare for poetry OR photography. Lot of real life stuff happening right now.
One of which is that I got into University of Washington in Tacoma! Second try’s the charm, but I am now a husky. Which I would have never thought even in high school would have happened, and not for bad reasons, but because I was so flippant about college in high school. I mean, I still am, but now I know what to be flippant at, and that makes all the difference.
I got in. Now we wait for September and jump into it.
I might take a photography class here, go to club there, but mostly the campus is gonna be about Tacoma and my broader exposure to the city now that I’ll have a real reason for being out there every day. I’ve been to Ruston, done North End, a little of Downtown, some Stadium, but I haven’t BEEN there. Not yet. But I will be, and that’s the exciting part.
More to make art of. More ways to make art. That’s really all I can ever ask for.
Also Xilent is releasing the follow up album to We Are Virtual, titled We Are Dust, set to drop on the 20th. Hopefully I can get my hands on that damn aerochrome filter by then!
Consume reality!
Radio Reality City!
Consume Reality! 