Less talk, more pictures - that's my mantra beginning right now. To start things off, I have a few pics from the Wash DC sculpture garden. A quick disclaimer though: the pics shown here are not indicative of the quality that the Hasselblad is capable of. My local camera place, where I usually have processing and scanning done, actually went out of business for a few weeks (though thankfully, they were bought by Calumet photo, and from what I can tell so far, Calumet is running a tighter ship than the previous owners). As a result, I had to scan these images at home, using my Canoscan 9000F and vuescan software. Perhaps it's my inexperience with scanning, or perhaps it's the scanner or software, but the results are not quite up to my usual standards. That being said, the images are still very usable, and in some cases, the grainy scans actually give the pictures a charming vintage quality.
The Sculpture Garden, or more correctly, The National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, is located on the National Mall, at the intersection of Constitution Ave and 7th. It's a nice place to spend a few hours - the merits of the sculptures themselves, as with most modern art, are debatable, but there's an ice rink in the winter, and free live jazz every Friday evening in the summer.
As usual, all of these photos were taken on Kodak Portra 160, and metered using my Nikon D90 set at ISO 100 with -0.3 EV's exposure compensation (in bright sunshine, the D90 generally overexposes by just a bit), but these settings are just ballpark numbers. Because color negative film has so much exposure latitude, my metering need only be accurate to within ~2 stops. I really enjoy this since it means that I don't need to agonize over technical details and can instead focus on making photos.
Most of these photos were post-processed in iphoto or snapseed, but only very minimally - white balance and some sharpening to correct the inherent softness of the scans. Unfortunately, digital sharpening does roughen the naturally creamy bokeh of the Hasselblad, but for this round of pics, that's just something I'll have to live with.
Uh, I'm not sure what makes this art, or what the message is, but that could be said for most modern art, so I'll leave my opinions out of it!
I'm also not sure what happened with the negative here. This was the first picture of the roll, so I suspect that my film magazine may need to be calibrated. After all, the camera is at least as old as I am, if not older (i.e. born in 1980).
I hate spiders, and that must be why this picture is so boring :) Actually, all these pics from the Sculpture Garden turned out to be kinda boring because I wasn't allowed to get any closer to the statues. Tighter compositions almost always lead to more interesting photos... oh well.
This last pic is my favorite. Two very different versions of Rodin's Thinker :) Although the Hasselblad isn't a snapshot camera (have to manually meter the scene, manually focus, then compose), I occasionally get lucky and catch a candid moment. IMO, the human element can transform a ho-hum picture into something a lot more interesting.
That's it for the Sculpture Garden. I've already got the scans back from my next roll of Portra, and the good news is that they look much better than these scans I did at home. That'll be an interesting article, all about shooting macro using a Hasselblad with close-up diopters. Stay tuned...
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