The Argus Collectors' Group is pleased to present...
The 2004 Holiday Lights Contest
Tim Verthein
Photo is of a 1958 Edsel tree ornament (see the little tree and presents in the back seat?). In reality it is about 4-5 inches long. Sat on that cotton felt like stuff that has built in multicolored sprinkles of glitter in it. Suppose to look like snow, but at this scale the snow sparkles look like chunks of debris from a fireplace explosion. On to the technical: Taken with an Argus A-Four (still my Argus of choice..use it all the time), with a Kodak +3 closeup lens attached (yes, actually found a series slide on holder that would work)! Tripod mounted camera with cable release. Lighting from 2 photobulbs in reflectors about 5 feet away. Film Kodak Plus-X. Exposure f:11 at roughly one second. Shot an entire roll of film at various exposures and angles, and a lot of experimenting with focus and parallax correction. This frame was the only one I really thought was good. No print was made, scanned the negative in my ancient Olympus ES-10 film scanner. No digital manipulation. Although I was REALLY tempted to remove the light glare from the windshield, but decided that was cheating.
Kodachrome 200. (Expired roll from my freezer). Argus A-Four. f:5.6 in an attempt to get some depth of field anyway. Time exposure unrecorded... somewhere between 1 and 6 seconds depending how fast I was actually counting. The display was in a neighbors yard, and it was -22 degrees below zero when I was taking photos of his display, So I wasn't real pickey about taking notes, and I may have been counting fast! But it did make me wonder if I really needed to defrost the film from the freezer before going out to shoot! Bogen tripod, cable release.
Tim Verthein, Bovey, Minnesota