Hammer Time

I love watching the work in the blacksmith shed at the State Fair!

You can tell there's a lot of camaraderie among the folks swinging the hammers and shaping steel.

Plus the forges make for some dramatic pics...

Thresher

Tractors!

It's that time again!

Milking shorthorn ox.

Percheron.

Blacksmithing.

Woodworking.

Automotif CDLXXI...

When it's 29 degrees outside in Indianapolis on the morning of the first of March, it's nice to warm up with memories of a warm August morning at the State Fair, where I snapped pictures of this 1937 International Harvester D-series pickup truck.

Chains of Love

I'd never really watched chain being made before.

That's... that's a lot of work. In the days before its manufacture could be even partially automated, a lot of skilled labor went into every single foot of chain. A heavy chain like that could not have been inexpensive.

I don't know how much chain a good smith could turn out in a day, but there's gotta be nearly as much work in six or eight feet of chain as there is in a half-decent sword (if not more), and I know those weren't cheap.

(Shot these photos on Wednesday morning with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS.)

.

Y'know what's cool?

I can pull my bicycle out of the garage at 9:30 in the morning, and by quarter 'til ten, I've locked the bike to the fence at the Fairgrounds, bought my ticket, gone through the magnetometer, and I'm strolling to Pioneer Village with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, ready to take some pictures.

It can take more than fifteen minutes just to park when you drive your car to the Fair.

.

Final Week

Only three days of picture taking at the State Fair left for me this year...

Fossils at the Fair, Part 1

Surely a fourteen year old camera is a useless fossil, right?

Not so fast...

The Canon EOS 5D Mark II hit the market in November of 2008. It sported a 21MP full-frame sensor and was the first Canon DSLR (and the first full-frame DSLR from anyone) capable of recording 1080p HD video. The 5D Mark II was used to shoot things as diverse as the opening credits of Saturday Night Live, whole episodes of House, and scenes in Hollywood movies like Act of Valor and The Avengers.

At launch, the MSRP for the camera was $2,699 without a lens. Nowadays you can pick up a nice used body for $350 or less, which is about as inexpensive as a good full-frame DSLR gets. A lot of these cameras were picked up by enthusiastic amateurs based on the hype and then sat largely unused until their owners decided to trade them in on some new mirrorless hotness or other. Batteries are still available new and of course you can use the entire library of Canon EF lenses without having to worry about an adaptor.

One of the attractions of using the Canon EF lens mount are its "L"-series lenses, identified by their red rings, high quality construction, premium optics, and (typically) enormous price tags.

The latest version of the L-series midrange zoom, the 24-70mm f/2.8L II, goes for something like eighteen hundred bucks at BezosMart, but you can get the older version from the 1990s, the 28-70mm f/2.8L, for around six bills at KEH Camera Brokers if you're willing to settle for "Bargain" grade. (And you should be, because KEH grades very conservatively. Their 'BGN' would be 'VG+' most places.)

Introduced in 1993, the 28-70mm f/2.8L was noted for its optical qualities and indeed still holds its own at DxOMark. I use mine on my 50MP EOS 5DS without worrying about it not being sharp enough on the super high res sensor.

So there you go. If you're willing to shop used, you can get a very competent professional DSLR body and lens setup for eighty percent off.

(Cross-posted at the other other blog.)

Acreage

There's something about two and a quarter tons of beef on the hoof headed right at you...

12MP photo from Nikon D3 & 80-200mm f/2.8 AF

That's a lot of muscle, and was a favorite source of motive power among the early U.S. settlers staking out farmland in the old Northwest Territory, what was to become Indiana. They didn't need to be shod, fed themselves on grass, were less likely than horses to be stolen by native tribes, and if one of your tractors broke a leg you could console yourself with a good steak dinner.

Did you know that an acre was basically originally defined as the area that a yoke of oxen could plow in a day?

A yoke of oxen are trained together from the time they're weaned and always are yoked on the same side. Only a lummox would try and switch out his nigh ox and his off ox.

24MP photo from Nikon D7100 & 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR

Draft Post

It was at the Indiana State Fair that I learned that oxen pull a load with their necks while draft horses push a load with their shoulders.

Rolling Coal

Literally.

Yesterday I was shooting with the D7100 and what I believe to be the best walking-around, all-in-one lens for DX Nikons, the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR. It's got a usefully fast aperture, a useful zoom range (the equivalent of a 24-120mm on full frame), image stabilization, some weather sealing, and it's razor sharp. If I could only have one lens to use on my APS-C Nikon bodies, this'd be the one.

.

Five Days Left

I stay away from the State Fair on the weekends. It's way, way too people-y.

It's closed on Mondays and Tuesdays so that the fair folk can have some time to relax and/or tend to their real jobs of keeping us all fed.

I also avoid the heat of the day, because ick. Also, I still need to get writing and stuff done in the afternoons.

I don't go at night because the Fair is a different place at night, as is the Monon Trail between here and the State Fairgrounds. In the morning? I have no problem pedaling my bicycle down to the North Gate and locking it to the fence at 0930, but I generally avoid the Monon south of 52nd (or north of Kessler) at night.

That means my fair-going is limited to a couple hours in the morning, Wednesday through Friday, weather permitting. So far we haven't had any rainy mornings, knock on wood.

According to my calendar, that means I have five mornings of State Fair left this year, and I aim to make the most of them.

Adorable

The oxen-in-training are just too cute.

Canon EOS 5DS & EF 70-200mm f/4L IS

Canon EOS 1D Mark IV & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS

Warhorse

This is Powerhouse.

He's a percheron, and he stands 18 hands tall and weighs a ton. Literally. He's seven. It's his first State Fair.

He's normally pastured with cows and gets a little excitable when there aren't any around, so they keep Percy & Carter, the oxen, out when they bring Powerhouse out, so he stays calm and brave for his bovine pals.

Tom, the percheron who'd been there every Fair since I can remember, wasn't there this year. He'd be 24 now, so probably about retirement age for a draft horse.

.

Renewable Fuels

This 1925-vintage Keck & Gonnerman steam tractor generates 19 horsepower. It was built at the Keck-Gonnerman factory in Mount Vernon, Indiana, way down in the southwestern tip of the state.

Keck-Gonnerman got into the steam engine business in the 1870s and was a major employer in the area before finally being sold off in the 1950s.

Overlensed...

So I'm standing there at the State Fair yesterday, trying to get some long shots of the steam engine and the thresher, getting everything compressed with a long lens.

I couldn't get the composition I was looking for, when I became aware of the two little kids next to me, who were also watching the goings-on. They were both in their Pioneer Village garb, looking straight out of Little House on the Prairie, when all of a sudden the younger one hops on her friend's back for a piggyback ride.

And there I was, inside of ten feet, but with a bazooka of a 70-200mm telephoto zoom on the camera. Hardly the lens for a head-to-toe portrait shot at that range, but when a photo op like that comes along and drops in your lap, you snap first and worry later. (I had a second body with a 28-70mm hanging off my other shoulder, but by the time I could switch cameras the moment might have passed. In fact, I did switch cameras after snapping this one, but the pic was over...)

This is some peak State Fair stuff right here.

.

It's that time of year again!

State Fair time!

Fair Folk

I've mentioned before that candid portraiture is my absolute favorite photographic endeavor. If I could find a way to make a living walking the earth and snapping photos of folks in their natural habitat, I would love nothing more.

Here are my favorites from this year's State Fair...

The first two were shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the third with an EOS 1D Mark III. All three were using an EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens stopped slightly down to f/4 to get good subject separation from (occasionally very busy) backgrounds while getting a bit more sharpness than if I'd been shooting wide open.

That latter was a thing I had to learn the hard way. Like a lot of people, I had the whole "I paid for a ginormous aperture and I'm gonna use every bit of it!" thought process going on for a long time.

The 70-200/2.8L is the original, non-stabilized version; a well-loved example that a blog reader made me a stellar deal on. That lens is the reason I do most of my paying work with Canons again (I'd been shooting Sony) and has taken a lot of my favorite portraits since I got it back in 2018...

.

Top Crop

"Zoom with your feet!" is a saying you'll hear from photographers who scorn zoom lenses in favor of primes.

Thing is, last Friday I was using a lens with a maximum focal length of 80mm (on an APS-C sensor, so the equivalent of 120mm on a full frame) and you can only get so close to the threshing magine before bumping into the ropes that they have up as a safety barrier.

Fortunately a 24MP sensor lets you crop without losing much detail. Here's a screen shot of the RAW file in Photoshop before cropping...