*Little Pink Weeble*'s photostream  

This photo is from one of the last weekends I spent with my old Pentax, but that's not what the rant is about.

This weekend while my very sick dog was sleeping I was very, very wired and stressed. And while cleaning out my camera bag, looking for something, I was inspired to write.

So, who else has a love/hate relationship with their circular polarizer?

As you may know, one of the most important tools in your camera bag as a landscape photographer is a circular polarizer, aka the CPL. Blue skies bluer, clouds whiter, better contrast, enhance or eliminate reflections, and add a stop or so to your exposure. The easiest way to think about a CPL is to consider it a pair of expensive sunglasses for your lens.

There was a time in my photography when I lived in the 10-14mm range, at F16 or so, at exposures starting at a second and extending to a couple of minutes. I still visit that land – that magical landscape land of the rule of thirds and magic-hour lighting and clouds whipping by and still waters and silky waterfalls – and there’s nothing wrong with this branch of photography, in fact, when done right it can be stunningly beautiful. (Especially to someone who is not a photographer – you know – the post-card purchasers of the world. They ooh and ahh over very simple camera techniques, and if you post process the hell out of your image, they go further ga-ga. I digress.)

Working so much in portraiture in the last year or so has led me back into the 50mm 1.2 range, 85 1.8, and gasp, sometimes at ISO 1000, not 100. But there in my bag resides my landscape tools – my plastic cases containing expensive, brass wrapped, magical glass – my 77mm B+W CPL (+/- $100) and my 77mm B+W 6 stop ND filter (another $100). The CPL is a slim design, the ND, for those not in the know, resembles black glass – though the 6 stop is not as dark and intimidating as a 9 or 10 stop filter, which can only be compared to welding goggles.

When I found my angles growing wider and my exposures lengthening (sounds like a personal problem, no?) I needed a better CPL – something slim, something reliable, something without a terrible color-cast, something reputable – real, "expensive," glass. I went with the B+W, which all things considered (what with batteries for cameras being $80 what’s $100 for a quality filter?) is a bargain for what it does. At 10mm you don’t have to worry about vignetting from a beefier, cheaper CPL. I’ll argue right now that just about any long exposure is going to have some sort of cast to it, which is why we shoot RAW and post process our images, and why we do custom white balance settings. But to not lose the corners of the image, what a delight! (Because then we can rush into Photoshop and add a vignette, subtle or not, to our liking…) Somehow I was utterly convinced I needed this contraption, this slim, sexy, expensive CPL. What’s funny, though, is how much I have come to loath this slim, round item. Why?

Well, let me start by saying, I still need and want a CPL in my bag. This is not an anti-CPL commentary. This is merely a rant against this particular design. This CPL has been all over the country with me: to beaches, to canyons, to mountains, in snow, in rain, at sunsets, high noon, you name it. I’m fairly rough with my equipment – if you know me you know I’m not just disaster-prone, but a clutter hound, like Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoon, instead of a cloud of filth I am surrounded by constant chaos and clutter. Put me in a room with nothing – nothing at all – and come back an hour later and you’ll find me surrounded by piles of needless paperwork, tubes of chap-stick, empty seltzer cans, some craft supplies, several pens that don’t work, junk mail, several random cords that don’t plug into anything I own anymore, a few broken CD jewel cases, maybe a snack wrapper, ketchup on my shirt, and a twisted ankle. It’s just my life. So the fact that this CPL has held on relatively unscathed in the two years I’ve had it is pretty remarkable, and a sign of either dumb luck or excellent construction. I mean, this is the woman who ran over a Fuji S2 Pro with a Honda Civic. So, the fact that this little CPL merely makes a distinctive grinding noise from sand stuck in the rotation…well, that’s just a hiccup. But why is there sand caught in my CPL?

Because it’s an obnoxious piece of crap design. It’s next to impossible to get this damned thing on your camera lens. You cross thread it half the time, the other half you think you’ve got it on your camera, and the minute you start rotating it to compose your shot with the desired polarization, you realize you’ve rotated it the wrong damned direction (yes, there’s a “wrong damned direction” with this filter) because it promptly pops off the front of your lens and lands in the surf, where you have to chase it down before it’s sucked out with the tide, and hope that while you’re quickly fishing your $100 filter out of the ocean your tripod doesn’t get sucked in by the shifting sands. This little CPL is SO slim that half the time you think you’re screwing it onto your lens, you in fact are merely rotating the front element. In this respect, the grinding, sand-induced sound in my filter has been a blessing in disguise – if I don’t hear the sand grinding away in there, I know I have actually secured it to my lens correctly. So, if you have this filter, I suggest an ocean bath with lots of fine gritty sand. It will help.

This slim design has another fatal flaw – and the good news is that I have yet to die from blood poisoning from battling this flaw. As I mentioned earlier, I also have the B+W 6 stop ND. And, as you may know, occasionally we stack filters for desired effects or the correct exposure. So, sometimes you have to screw your CPL onto the front of your ND, which is screwed onto your lens. (At this point in photography, chances are you don’t have a UV on there, too, egad – but you can see why the slim design helps – when you have two filters stacked at 10mm, you run the risk of vignetting.) And as anyone who has ever screwed a CPL to another filter knows, sometimes the damned things want to mate for life. You finally have your CPL mounted to your ND, without the threads tangled, and you’re hiding under a hoodie or a jacket so you can see through your viewfinder or use your live-view to compose your shot, because the ND is so dark it’s impossible to compose through without making an effort, which is further complicated by the addition of the CPL, and now, hiding under your jacket like an old-timey large-format photographer from days of yore, you’re carefully rotating your CPL so as not to have it plop onto the ground in front of you (or off the cliff in front of you, or into the ocean surf in front of you, or into the rushing river in front of you, or into the tick-infested Devil’s Club in front of you, or into the poison oak in front of you…you know, the landscape hazards), and finally after being satisfied you have a shot you’re happy with, you trudge back to the safety of your car to chimp at your LCD. And when you’re finally packing your camera bag up like a good little do-bee, you realize between the temperature shifts and all your frantic rotating as the light changed before your eyes, somehow this slim little CPL has decided it loves your ND so, so much that it’s never gonna give it up, never gonna let it down. And now you have to separate them. I cannot COUNT the times I have gripped the CPL in one palm, and the ND in the other, and twisted, only to find a perfectly round, 77mm sized, gash in my flesh. I mean, it’s stigmata territory as your palms are bleeding, and in fact, it’s going to take a miracle to separate these two filters. I am pretty sure the landscape of my hands has been permanently altered by my slim CPL and its aggressive mating with other filters. Luckily, as an occasional off-trail hiker and photographer I have a pair of rubberized, insulated gloves, and usually if I sit my CPL on my defroster in my car at full blast heat, and then grip the CPL and the ND using my rubberized gloves, usually that will get them apart. But it’s no small feat – and in fact I know photographers who have had to have their filters cut apart at the camera shop. The hair on the back of my neck is rising just remembering the chilling sensation of that expensive B+W slicing into my flesh. This is a very expensive torture device, and mine has sand caught in it - good times!

Even more annoying than the bleeding hands and sand issues is the hilarious little joke of a lens cap that B+W so kindly includes with the filter. This lens cap is the mere suggestion of protection for your expensive filter. In fact, it may well be the single worst-designed piece of plastic on the planet, even in comparison to Jocelyn Wildenstein’s face or the interior of the new Ford Fiesta. This lens cap is the most useless, nasty little joke that B+W could play on you. It doesn’t lock into the CPL – it can’t because of the slim design – it merely hugs the front element, with a gentle, clammy-handshake quality. And if your lens has a hood? Forget it. The lens hood and the lens cap will not ever, ever play together. Ever. So, you cannot simply be a lazy photographer on the rush who throws their cap on their CPL and throws their camera in their bag and dashes off for the next destination, no. You have to sit down, remove your CPL (watch the flesh of your palms, mind you), and pack it away in the case, and then put your regular lens cap back on your lens. If, like me, your overpriced lens hood was wrecked in a yachting accident in southern California (you can’t make this stuff up), you can try, vainly, to use the lens cap jokingly provided with the slim CPL as you pack away your camera. What happens in reality is that you slip the cap on, and before you can even take your camera strap off from around your neck, the cap has popped off, mocking you. If you are careful and aware of its desire to live ANYWHERE but on the filter for which it was intended, you hold the cap onto the filter as you try to pack away your camera. And no sooner have you zipped your camera bag and put it on your back than the cap has popped off, and is now going to hide behind the Velcro compartments of your camera bag, you know, down at the bottom, wedged behind your batteries, your CF card wallet, your lens cleaning kit, that lens you hate and never use but keep in your bag anyway – it’s down there. Somewhere. While your $100 filter is vulnerable to whatever you have carelessly left in your bag on your hike – keys? A fancy rock you found? Flashlight? A film canister? The point is, this damned lens cap is so utterly useless, that when faced with a lens with a hood and this CPL I can’t unscrew without maiming myself, I remove my lens hood, I cover my CPL with a large microfiber cloth, and then I hold the cloth onto the front of the CPL with the lens hood, then I pack it all away. The lens cap pretty much lives in the plastic case for the filter, as it’s completely flawed in my opinion.

The sad part is that being thrifty, I won’t replace the CPL until it’s destroyed or has floated down stream in an incident (I once lost a $35 lens cap for a Nikon Fisheye in a river incident. Lesson learned.), so I am stuck with the thing for now. My next CPL will absolutely NOT be a B+W slim. I suggest you think long and hard about whether you purchase one yourself.

Anyone else hate their B+W? Anyone love it?

This is my baby lowland gorilla, Gromit.

Okay, he's actually a pug/Boston terrier cross, but he looks like a gorilla, and here he looks like a demented sock puppet.

Last night he started exhibiting what can only be called "signs of neurological distress." By the time I got him to Dove Lewis, his front end was stiff, he was drooling and panicky, he couldn't hold his own weight, his head and neck were craned back as far as they could go, and he had vomited all over me and the backseat of my car where I was holding him, sort of like in the Exorcist. It was very, very grim when we got to DL.

Thanks to some steroid injections and anti-nausea the panic started to subside, and by 11pm last night in the ICU he recognized me and gave me giant kisses and smiles and tail wags and snuggled his stuffed armadillo toy I brought him. This morning his back end is still unstable, but he's in good spirits. He's currently in for observation and tests at a doggie neurologist. My amazing boytoy, Patrick, not only sat with me all night, he ran and got me Little Big Burger while we were waiting at DL for news. And, being friends with my vet, last night she came to Dove Lewis to get the full scoop and visit me and check in on my gorilla. It's times like these, when I am surrounded by amazing professionals and specialists all within a few miles of my home, and when friends of mine are calling me, offering to sit with me at the office, or run out and get me lunch - it's times like these I realize how incredibly lucky we were to land here in Portland. Even my day-job boss has been amazing - helping me with the bills and letting me stay at his townhouse near Dove Lewis so I could be nearby if Groms took a turn last night. And I got to wash my vomit-covered LL Bean jacket.

I won't know until later what on earth happened to my baby. Perhaps a form of encephalitis or meningitis; perhaps a stroke or embolism; perhaps a bizarre seizure (though it lasted a very, very long time). All I know is that I plan on having this ridiculous face greet me for a good many more years - I mean, how could you not love a comical guy like this?

(Clearly.)

I had grand hopes for a more complex Christmas photo this year, but time and energy got away from me... Luckily I found these cow costumes for just $5 at Target, and knew my dogs would let me torture them for a simpler version.

What I couldn't have predicted was the hilarity of my dogs running around our studio wearing bells - turns out the bells scared the crap out of the dogs. The good news is that they know how to sit for a treat, so once they were posed the bells weren't quite as scary anymore.

This is Otto. He's a tater tot, if you can't tell from the photo. He's a funny little man, with a solitary white whisker. I met his mom here on flickr years ago - and when I moved to Portland I realized she lived here - and we took our pug-brigade to the dog park together. Pugs being pugs, they ignored each other and wanted attention from people. Oh well.

(for the leaves, anyway)

You should have seen me. I squeaked into the Japanese Gardens this afternoon just before closing, I am running around like a madwoman today as I leave for Ohio at 5 am tomorrow for a family wedding and packing is planned but not complete, everything has been going wrong today, and it was raining. But rain has yet to stop me when it comes to photography in the Pacific Northwest and it was the least of my concerns today.

My big concern was whether or not I'd miss the peak at the Japanese Garden while I was traipsing around Bible Belt North this weekend. I am confident peak will be starting about Sunday, and going through probably Tuesday or Wednesday. That's my prediction having been at the Gardens multiple years now shooting in the fall. Some of the trees, however, little guys, are at or just passing their prime, their little red leaves starting to look sort of well-done and ready to drop. The trees near the south side of the Pavilion are ready - as in if you haven't seen them yet you might miss them entirely. The mangled tree with the broken looking limb near the north side of the Pavilion (over the black river rocks) that is always last to turn red hasn't started yet, the famous maple needs a few days still. So, I imagine as long as I use the shit out of my photo membership and go in early on Tuesday and Wednesday, and head up Monday afternoon, I should be able to shoot a few new frames to add to my ever-growing Garden collection.

This little tree is in an odd position, and its best angle isn't this one at all, but I was digging these leaves on the moss. I had to lay on the pathway of the Garden (which I was only able to do because it had just closed and I was one of five photographers there today in the rain, and the others were at a different tree) (really, don't lay in the way of other people as a general rule of thumb, not cool) and put my face on the sidewalk to really get this right. My camera, rest assured, was in fact on the sidewalk, NOT in the moss, as I'm a big preacher about leaving the moss unscathed up there. I got wet as hell, and had some dirt on my face, but after weeks and weeks of shooting weddings and in the studio it felt good to get a little dirty and wet outside. :)

I love how the 20mm at 2.8 made this look like a mammoth tree very, very far away from the foreground, when in fact it was just a few feet away. Photography is pretty magical sometimes.