Nicholas Haggin Photography
Selected views through my lens
SuperBloodExtraHype Moon
I’ve long been meaning to borrow some exotic lens I can’t justify buying from the good folks at LensRentals, and last night’s eclipse gave me the perfect excuse. The 80-400mm zoom I rented turned out not to be the exact lens I wanted for lunar photography, but it gave me an improvement over last year’s eclipse shot at least.
I’m Too Cool Anyway
Now that the students are back, we get to see scenes like this again at the bus stop.
Spotlight
This play of light and shadow was a welcome surprise one morning as I got ready to go to work.
Return of the King
A few years back I wrote about the then-new PocketWizard Plus III, a high-end radio flash trigger that was more affordable than its predecessor. At the time I speculated that I would soon be buying some, which turned out not to be the case; I couldn’t justify the purchase so I continued to use Nikon CLS or physical sync cords to deal with off-camera strobe.
Three years later, I barely succeeded in making my oldest son’s birthday portrait because I could not get reliable flash triggering for the setup I had envisioned. In the meantime, PocketWizard had released a simpler and even more affordable trigger, the PlusX, and 2-packs of them were on sale at my retailer of choice. I decided it was time to pony up for the good stuff.
The image above is a little test with one of my kids’ Lego figures. I hooked a LumiQuest SoftBox III onto the end of my flash and brought it in real close, which kept the background dark and indistinct, and sealed off the edges with a little vignette in post. Worked like a charm. Now I just have to see if I can realize that 1600′ range they promise on the box….😀
1917
My F100 almost ate this roll of film; it would not rewind and I had to pop open the back in a dark room under cover and pull the film out, and it suffered creasing and damage anyway. It’s a pity, because I don’t know when I’ll have time to go back and recreate this image of University Laboratory High School’s dedication stone.
Summer Shade
There are profuse beds of daylilies all over the Engineering campus, in just about every possible color. My Rolleiflex T doesn’t focus closer than 3.5 feet, so instead of a macro shot I had to content myself with a group of lilies of different colors on this June day.
Bikes and Bus
My dad gave me his old Rolleiflex T several years ago, and since then I’ve run a few rolls of film through it. I really like the visual quality of medium-format film, which is much smoother than 35mm, while the Rollei is far easier to handle than, say, a 4×5 large-format camera. This image is from May or June 2015; I’m not sure which because I don’t log shots when I take them as well as I ought. Bad photographer.🙂
