I Want to Go Home.

Shooting on a Free Weekend

I finally don't have school work to have to do on the weekend. I've just been chillin and taking a few pics here and there. I convinced Ben I needed to practice on my portraiture before the start of the semester in order to stay sharp. It was nearing sunset, so we went across the way to an empty parking garage to shoot. Here's what we came up with in the newfound free time:

Ben doing the Barack Obama. Nikon D300, 44mm, 1/250 at f/7.1. ISO 200, D2X Color Mode I +3 sharpening, WB incandescent, remote flash with warming gel 1/16th power on light stand. PS CS3 Level edit and color correction.

Trying to get serious with the hard lighting across one side of the face. Nikon D300, 29mm, 1/125 at f/7.1. ISO 200, D2X Color Mode I +3 sharpening, remote flash on 1/8th power on light stand. PS CS3 Level edit and black and white conversion.

Soon after this shot, we were approached by security and asked to leave. At least they gave me ten minutes.

Earlier in the day I finished making a strip light out of a leftover Cinnamon Toast Crunch box for my SB-600. Time for some macro work on a RZ RIDE I had at the apartment.

Sinister Dodge Viper. Nikon D300, 200mm, 1/60 at f/11. ISO 200, D2X Color Mode I +3 sharpening, WB auto, remote flash with light strip with 1/16th power on light stand. PS CS3 Level edit and color correction.

From above. Nikon D300, 200mm, 1/60 at f/11. ISO 200, D2X Color Mode I +3 sharpening, WB auto, remote flash with light strip with 1/16th power on light stand. PS CS3 Level edit and color correction.

Behind the Shots:

I knew I wanted some softer light to descend onto the car, so I set my light stand up and pointed the flash down with light strip attached. The black backdrop is the back of a black shirt from my closet. I used the table to elevate the car so I had more room to work with the light setup.

Another angle of the strip light. The light opening is covered with a piece of plain office paper to help diffuse the harsh light source. I covered the inside of the light strip with white gaff tape to help spread the beam evenly while it travels from the flash head through the strip and eventually down along the length of the strip toward the subject. This will become useful for different applications later. What is all that hanging from it? Well, in my initial shots, there was some light spill on the black backdrop that was distracting, so the black paper towards the back of the strip light is to absorb that light so it doesn't show up in the photo. The other problem initially was the light was still a bit harsh on the car's surface, so I put a white piece of paper on the front side of the light strip to bounce softer, diffused light back onto the front of the car.

A view from above. The strip is held onto the flash head by a piece of Velcro and a small piece of gaff tape for extra support.

That's all for now. Let me know what you think.

Good night.

Going Once, Going Twice, Sold!

I officially finished my Marketing class earlier today. So, literally two minutes after I finished my last online test, I put the book up for sale on Amazon. Having conveniently just learned about pricing strategies in the last chapter of the book, I priced the book three dollars lower than what others have listed their used books for. The result? It sold within two hours of being posted. Hooray! Looks like I'll be making a visit to FedEx Kinkos to ship this thing out tomorrow morning.

Goodbye, horrid book.

Hopefully I can get rid of that awful Economics book just as quickly.

Behind the Shot:

I wanted to do something I haven't done in a while, so I set up the book using my old D200 to prop it up and set my SB-600 behind it facing the door, the only all-white surface in my bedroom with enough room for the shoot. Unfortunately that meant that I would have this ugly door gap line in the shot. Oh well, can't win all the time.

A look at the scene.

I used my light stand and hung one of my new 9-inch flood lamps on it (lamp cost about $7 at Home Depot. Keepin it ghetto, baby).

Another look at the lighting setup. The SB-600 was set with a color gel (Lee Filters "Flame Red") on 24mm to give a wide, even spread across the white door.

Here's a closer look at the color gel. I also tried this shot with no gel but it was boring.

Another look at my light stand with flood lamp. The lamp is so warm, I have to set Incandescent White Balance to keep the white book looking white and not yellow (another reason I gelled the flash).

I'll take this opportunity to say a few things. A lot of times people have to resort to weird methods to get the lighting they want. I only have one flash unit and that became a big problem for me for this shoot. I had to resort to using a cheap and unorthodox flood light for my primary "key" light. Not ideal. Also, I had to use the back of my bedroom door as a background. The walls are textured and would have given me weird shadows if I popped the flash on it. So, to all those that have limited resources: be creative. Don't be afraid to get ghetto. No one is judging how you made the shot, just whether you got the shot or not.

That's all for now. Good night.

Almost Done...

These two classes have been a total pain in my ass for the past eight weeks, but at last, I am almost to the end of the road.

Two books soon to be on sale on Amazon. Shot with SB-600 on remote with homemade snoot. No post-processing except B/W conversion and cropping. Details below.

Similar shot of books in color. No color correction on PS, just cropping. Details below.

Behind the shots:

So, I wanted to make a plain picture of two books a little more interesting. Emphasis on a little. This isn't exactly very stimulating, I apologize. Anyway, First, I set up my SB-600 on my light stand and set the flash head to 85mm to narrow the beam of light. Next, I set the controls on my commander pop-up flash on the D300 and set the flash to go off at 1/64 power. Test shot. Horrible! Yikes!

I realized that the beam was still flooding out and covering the entire frame, so I needed a snoot to narrow it. Luckily, I finished a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch earlier today, so I cut up the box and made a crude snoot and taped it to the end of the flash. I wanted the edges to fade to blue for more color effect, so I put a warming gel on the flash to balance what I needed to do with the White Balance of the shot.

After a few minutes of adjustments in shutter and aperture, I settled with 1/320 at f/6.3, ISO 200. Since I used the snoot, I was able to get a nice gradiated edge on the light source without using Photoshop's vignetting darken feature. No cheating here.

Here is a wide shot of my quick set-up. Took about 30 seconds.

Note the cut up box taped as a snoot on the flash head. Also note the closet doors in the background. Exceptional closet space, I must say.

Since my classes are over this week, I hope to get back to shooting. Hopefully there will be some cooler posts than me being bored and shooting these books.

Good night

Summer Classes End This Week

Gotta stay on that grind...

The Dark Knight

The best movie I've seen in a very long time. Go see it.

*UPDATE* My brother recently said "it's probably the best movie I've seen in a decade." He's seen A LOT of movies. I only hesitate to agree with him because there might be that one movie that I'm forgetting that struck me more than The Dark Knight... seeing as how it doesn't stick in my memory, it's probably safe to say that I agree with him.

The Dark Knight IS probably the best movie I've seen in the past decade.

D300 - 8fps without vertical grip

Since the D200, it has been a basic thought that burst rate was dictated by the amount of power the batteries were able to put out for the shutter. That's why, at the time when the D200 was the newest Nikon camera, it was only able to shoot at 5 frames per second (fps). With the dawn of the 6fps D300, we learned that wasn't the case. The battery could put out enough power for at least 6fps. Anything more than that requires more power - hence the need for the vertical grip to achieve the D300's maximum 8fps burst rate.

What I'm about to show is that the battery is actually capable of more than that.

I'm going to show you have to get 8fps WITHOUT the vertical grip.

There are, of course, limitations to the method I'm about to show you. Nevertheless, it's a pretty cool trick.



Limitations:

1) You can only get 9 frames at a time. Since I set the camera on a bracketing burst, the camera will only shoot 9 frames continuously. After that, you'll have to depress the shutter again to get another 9 maximum frames. This means you only get a little over a second of continuous shooting. BUT, that's not so bad considering you're doing it without the vertical grip. If you know for sure you need a little fast frame rate for a specific thing (like say the middle of a ice skating routine or a golfers celebration) then you can quickly get 8fps speed just by holding the FUNC button while you shoot.

2) You can't use flash. It's questionable to be using flash on a 8fps burst anyway. You're flash won't be able to recharge to a high enough level to be very reliable. So, this trick is no good for that.

3) You have to shoot in (S)ingle shot shooting mode. It's too bad you can't go from Continuous High at 6fps straight to 8fps with FUNC button held down. I've tried and it doesn't work. So, if you want 8fps, you're going to have to sacrifice the 6fps convenience.

4) Not a reliable way to shoot a whole event. Who wants to hold a button down while you press the shutter? That can and will get annoying very quickly, especially considering you have to shoot in Single shot mode. So, if you forget to hold down the FUNC button, you'll be pleasantly surprised with a camera that is not shooting continuously when you've taken it for granted the whole time.

To go back to the battery power discussion - I guess we'll never know if power is the limitation to higher burst rate. We know now that it has at least enough power to take the D300 to 8fps for 9 frames without assistance by a second battery. If power really isn't an issue, then I would really like to know what is. If it isn't, then there is really no reason for the D300 to be limited to 6fps. That is unless they are limiting the camera just to market the vertical grip, which is currently selling for a little less than $200. You can't have everything you want, I guess.

Anyway, that's all I have the energy for right now. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Good night.

Crop Job

Cropping often makes or breaks a photo. Which is your favorite?

I know which one I do not like, that's for sure. 

New Tool/Toy Coming Soon

Say hello to the best wide angle lens for DX format, and my new lens!

It's on back order, so hopefully it will arrive in time for editor's training.

Why is it the best? Well its fast at f/2.8, the fastest of any wide angle lens for DX format. It is impressively wide at 11mm. Not as wide as the sigma 10-20, but the f/2.8 is more attractive. Also, this lens is sharper, has less distortion, and performs better optically than the sigma 10-20, tokina 12-24 and even the nikon 12-24. On top of all those things it is the only one of any of the lenses mentioned that is less than $600. That all equates to overall badassness.

I cannot wait.

Lighting Differently

**

UPDATE:

Ben forced me to take his beloved YouTube money-making face off this post. What a bitch. Subsequently, all that stuff about remote lighting with a warming gel was deleted with it. Sorry, just going to have to wait until I have legitimate examples haha

**

Photography has nearly taken a total back seat since being here. Just nearly though. When the mood strikes, I break out the camera and the good old SB-600 flash unit.

Lately I've been messing around with my lighting techniques in the brief time that I spend shooting. Those who know me well know that I like to shoot faces, especially while using my SB-600 set on remote with the D300's pop-up flash on commander. Some of the time, I like to put a warming gel on the flash and dial my WB to bluer kelvin settings to make some color in an otherwise drab environment. Take for instance the photo below:

Ok, let's get into some crazier stuff:

Me shooting a self portrait.

Except for cropping, this photo was not processed in Photoshop at all. To those who liked that pic I took of myself while in the car (John haha), this pic was taken the same night.

Same flash dance. I used the pop-up flash on rear curtain sync. Rear curtain sync pops the flash at the very end of the exposure, meaning if you had the shutter open for 3 seconds, the flash would pop right at the very end, when the shutter is closing. What does this mean? Well, everyone knows that if your shutter is held too long you're going to get motion blur. To alleviate this, the rear curtain sync setting freezes all action in place right at the end of the exposure. This means you can move around all you want and the flash will ensure that you are still sharp in the photo. This also gives the lighting a really cool effect because it is mixing ambient light on a long exposure with flash lighting.

For this particular photo, I set my shutter to a 20 second exposure with rear curtain sync flash mode. Then, I pressed the shutter and spun around slowly, making sure that the dining room light was being captured. Since I was spinning around, the dining room light appears in the photo as yellow streaks. Lastly, as the shutter starts to close, the flash goes off, freezing my face in place.

As you can see, this makes for some interesting exposures since the light from the dining room not only dances around but also appears to be behind and in front of my face. Think of the possibilities. I am! I can't wait to take these principles and use them in more productive photos than my own face.

Hopefully I'll have some time (and motivation) this weekend or next to show you some real examples of these lighting techniques. As for now, I'll sit on my ideas.

Borders = Interesting Place to Study

As some of you may know, there is a Borders bookstore right outside of my apartment complex. I have been a frequent visitor of this Borders since becoming a resident here in good old Creve Coeur. Last night I went with Ben who had his own studying to do. I'm not the only idiot to think summer classes were a good idea, ya know. Anyway, Ben convinced me to turn up the heat on my econ studying and I successfully studied two chapters last night. I sucked down a nice cup of iced coffee from the Borders coffee shop. That coffee helped me stay up until about 2ish last night, working on econ with the occasional visit to the DPReview message board (which is a whole other blog discussion).

So, thinking I was on a roll with the whole studying thing, I left work today and immediately went to Borders. I was amazed at my own academic discipline. On any other occasion I would procrastinate to the bitter end, but really I've already done enough of that and it was time to do work. And do work I did. I started at about 5:30pm and studied all the way through closing at 11:00pm. Not bad at all for me.

The weird thing was that I didn't do my usual crying and bitching about having to study a god-awful subject. I was actually really invested in the material. Yes, invested in economics. Wtf am I thinking? Gag. Usually I stare at the digital clock in the upper right corner of my screen thinking to myself how much time of my life is going by when I could be living a legitimate life of enjoyment and bliss. This time was different. I hunkered down and got shit done is the long and short of it.

Funny thing happened while in my study corner (I strategically rearranged the tables on the back wall for optimal study position). An older woman, scraggly and a bit odd looking, sat at the table next to mine. A trash can separated our comfort zones and I was deeply invested with headphones in place. Still, this woman somehow successfully caught my attention. She pretended to read a book while she attempted to get me to look toward her with frequent fake yawns. These were blatantly fake yawns, like how you would yawn when trying to act out a cheesy scene to five-year olds. Anyway, needless to say I was pretty annoyed that this women didn't notice by my headphones and intense consentrative face that I might have been busy with something. She finally mustered up the courage to speak up.

"Hey, excuse me, can that send emails," she asked as she gestured at my computer.

I took one headphone off and responded, "...yes."

"Do you mind sending this email for me? Ya know, when you have time." She handed me a small piece of paper with what appeared to be random scribbles. A split second later I realized it was a really a badly-written message with a website and some other crap I didn't bother to care about. A bit cross with the woman, I responded, "I'm in the middle of studying."

"oh, ok" she said with surprise.

I immediately thought "you know I'm in the middle of something because you've been staring in my direction waiting for an opening to talk to me for like ten minutes." I'm sure that's what my facial expression said.

The weirdest thing was that she didn't even stick around to see it through. Five minutes later she put down the book she wasn't reading and just left. I waited until then to really look at the piece of paper she handed me. Just as I thought - gibberish. Ok lady, how am I supposed to send this crap ass message to a website with MY email account. A few screws loose she has. Definitely not legit.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to continue my recent streak of productivity. I must say, I really enjoyed feeling so dedicated to one task. So far this summer I've managed to distract myself out of necessity. It's nice to know I can still sit and do work (yes I know, that's like the third time I've used that expression).

Three more chapters to study. Test Friday. We'll see how tomorrow's Borders session goes.

Good night.

Happy 4th

I just got back from Springfield and already tucked in for bed. The weekend was awesome of course. I don't feel like getting into anything since sleep is calling my name pretty loudly now, but I just wanted to post a few pics.

I know these fireworks pics aren't all that great, but whatever.






This last one is not a good fireworks picture at all, but I wanted to give you a sense of where we were - a golf course.

Good night.

Lull

Sorry for not posting lately. Update will be coming soon.