Attitude!

The Flock

An instant favorite!

First off sorry there is no photo from me today. I can claim my photo a day project has not yet begun since I am starting if officially on the 1st. So with that I thought I would post a link to a photo that really hit me when I saw it. Unfortunately it is copyrighted so I can't actually post the image here. The photo itself is amazing, as you will see. But if you read through the comments he talks about how it was done and that is what is truly neat. Give it a look. You won't regret it!

I'm Crushed!

Way Cool Light Painting Video

Going to have to try this at some point... it looks too fun!

Self Portrait

This will be a bit of a geeky post today.    I was playing around with my flashes late last night and thought, "I wonder if I can do a high key background without white seamless."  So I grabbed my torture devices triggers, flashes, light stands, tripod and camera.   After salvaging two of my four AA rechargeable flash batteries for one of the flashes, which my oldest had abducted for a remote control digger, I was moving.   I was going for proof of concept here, didn't really care much about the quality of the shot.  I had to shoot this all on manual focus, without a test subject to focus on, and with a wide aperture so the photos are somewhat out of focus.  In any case here was a before shot of what I was trying to blow away (this is with one flash 580 EXII 1/16 power camera right, high).

And here is what the final result looked like:

I will have to admit to a bit of photoshop on both of these.   The black fireplace opening, behind me, gave me some trouble.  It wasn't bright but you could see it.   That is the only part the flash didn't completely nuke.  I fixed it in aperture with the clone tool.  There are also some touch ups to my face -- I am not going to post an image of myself, which I can control, without at least some minor improvements :P

The high key effect was produced was with a 580exII under a shoot through umbrella camera right and high gelled with CTO at 1/32 power (now that i look at it the CTO was a bit aggressive, if I were doing it again I would probably drop it down to 1/2 cto to lower the orange tint).   There was a Vivitar 285hv bare behind, aiming at the background at full power.   I had to drop the aperture to 2.8 in order to get the Vivitar to blow out the background.  Aside from what I mentioned above, it did a great job.

I know this photo is not a masterpiece, by any shape of the imagination, it was never intended to be.  I used it to teach myself a bit more about using off camera flash for effect.   In another post I will complain about the chineese torture devices known as Cactus V2S triggers, which were responsible for me staying up until 4am to get this thing finished, and show off my new alienbees when they arrive.

Diets Start January 1

Jeffrey has a Hayday

My oldest, Jeffrey, is autistic so smiles captured on camera are a rare and precious thing with him.  In early November we went on a hayride with my in-laws, they do that every year.  I snapped this as we got on the tractor for the ride.  He really seemed to enjoy that day.

Trevor Learning to Fly

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

My new Toy :)

Jordan and Trevor get DVD Players

My Dad

Though I won't always post descriptions or explanations for my photos, this one deserves it.   During our families Christmas get together my sister and her family, my brother and his family and me and my family gave my dad a lens for his camera.   He had been wanting a 50mm lens for a while -- he had one some time ago but it got broken.   My dad and I, at some point, are going to go through all of the functions of his new camera.  My hope is that I can help him so understand the manual features a little better.  Woefully inadequete it is, but I hope that I can give a him a tiny fraction of something back for all he has taught, shown and given me.

Trevor playing XBOX

Cheap Light box Does the job

I have been wanting to play with doing some white seamless photography for a while.   I don't have a ton of room and money is kind of an issue at the moment.   We are working on our Dave Ramsey plan, though not as strict as we could be, so shelling out money for a roll of seamless and a mount to put it on right now isn't really in the cards.   Still I have wanted to at least play with the effect of a completely white background and a 'macro light box' seems to have pushed me down that path for a bit.   I follow David Hobby's blog, strobist, and he posted some time ago about how to make a light box out of a cardboard box, tissue paper and tape.   That was certainly in my budget :).    Here is the result:

As you can see it is a precision piece of equipment :).    The results, however, were fairly good.   Here is my favorite of the photographs I made with it.