First round of photos back

This is the roll I sent to York Photo for developing. Photos first, technical details later:

A challenger appears! This was taken during a particularly cooperative time at the feeder. At one point there were up to 5 birds more or less getting along and sharing the feeder. Now there's just two birds battling over who owns it.

This one is using the perch. In between sips, he kept peering over the side of the feeder, probably wondering what the hell I'm doing. I think this guy is the one currently winning the turf war.

I can't really tell which bird this is. I liked the sense of depth of focus from this photo, though.

I wanted to capture how the curtains glow in the direct sunlight in the morning, but taking a picture of the curtains directly doesn't really convey that. I think including the window frame would give more contrast, but at the time I wanted to crop out the ugly stains on the lower part of the curtain (left by the last tenant).

One morning I got up particularly early and, due to the shortening days, I actually caught the trailing end of the sunrise. I liked the warm glow on these leaves just starting to change color. I swear, though, in the 30 seconds it took me to put on pants and get the camera, the light had changed. I took a picture anyways.

Our pumpkin! Which got turned into pie! And then mold!

Gah, this picture needs to be straightened. But look! Colors! Only some of the trees change color here, but there are a couple of them near our apartment. It's nice, but I miss the brilliant displays and the associated smells and sounds. The first time I went home for Thanksgiving was my junior year. Riding home at night, I was confused by all the debris blowing around the highway: it'd been 3 years since I'd experienced autumn and I'd forgotten about that whole thing with the trees and the leaves.

This and the next few photos are from a walk through the Dish. This a ... red berry tree. Juniper? Anyways, I was drawn to the red bits, but I think the leaves are the most interesting part of this photograph. What an odd shade of green! I wonder if they looked that way when I took the picture. It reminds me of the color of Fuji film boxes.

The green part is Stanford campus (faculty housing, I think) and the yellow part is the Dish. There's something about water management here...

 A tree! SC likes this photo best, and I agree.

Technical Notes

These were shot on Fujicolor 100 with a Nikon 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens and processed and scanned by York Photo. They did a real quick turnaround (3 business days from mailing out the film) and have the best prices, but I have some complaints about their work.

This is what the tree photo looked like when I downloaded it from their site. Way overexposed! Did I do that? But I've been using the automatic exposure modes, and I didn't have this problem with the roll I had processed at Keeble and Shuchat.

Did they scan it poorly? It's weird that I was able to extract so much detail from what appears to be pure white. It's like there's some kind of dynamic range compression going on, which is more typical of film overexposure rather than digital overexposure. Maybe Keeble & Shuchat did some exposure compensation for me?

The second complaint is more concrete: dust and scratches on the scans. First of all, they processed the film, so there's really no excuse for that. Second, isn't ICE pretty standard nowadays?

Finally, I had some shots that gave me some technical feedback I'll keep in mind for the future:

I wanted to take a picture of the lichen growing in this branch, but the auto exposure overexposed the branch in order to balance the dark background. In this case, I think I'd have to use the spot meter in M mode.

I wanted a silhouette of this weird looking trunk holding up a cloud. I stopped the aperture down pretty far to get both in focus. There's a lot of glare from the sun, though, which is not too surprising, but I wonder what I could do to mitigate that. Maybe a lens hood? Does the small aperture make it worse? More importantly, can I get the lens flare artifacts without that haze?