Had a great shoot last weekend, messing around in old city with Stephanie. We had such a good time, we wound up shooting for > 4 hours without even noticing! We also got a ton of rubberneckers as we invaded the streets of old city – a group of touristst ran up to try and snap shots of Stephanie too while we posed in front of the first Bank of the US.
Anyway, came back with some nice shots and we’ll be heading out again for tomorrow’s Strobist meetup!
This is part of the “authors@google” series – Joe McNally, speaking at google.
Not only humorous and inspirational for aspiring photographers, but there are some real pearls of wisdom there. Definitely worth watching – over an hour, and I honestly wish it were longer.
Buncha links this week…
First on the “photographer’s rights” front we have some good news.
on a related note this is an oldie, but a goodie:
Moving on to the business world, David Ziser of digitalprotalk has a nice article:
And PDNonline has an some interesting numbers on the business of wedding photography:
Finally for some technical stuff:
A new project I’ve started. I wanted to play with the idea of what a “flower picture” is – we think of florals as so much about vibrant, saturated color I wanted to see what would happen if we removed color from the equation entirely. Not just as a black and white conversion, but totally removed. I began by getting some wildflowers, and spraypainting them white, they were then photographed against a white seamless background. I also began including the same flower *in color* to juxtapose with the white version. I am calling the project “Shades of Life” as it deals not only with issues of color and form but on a more abstract level, with the juxtaposition between life and death.
My master plan was to use a laptop to set up a ad-hoc network (meaning the laptop acts as wireless router, creating it’s own network) and set the eye-fi to auto-upload shots to it, in essence creating almost like a wireless tethering solution.
Unfortunately, speaking with eye-fi support, they informed me that this would not work, as the card needed an actual “internet connected” router to send the photos through. Bummer.
However, their new offerings are enough to make me look at them again. Notably they have 2 new models in addition to the basic eye-fi card the Eye-Fi Home, which strips out the internet functionality and just has “upload to computer wirelessly” and the Eye-Fi explore which adds *geotagging* to the photos.
The “Home” looks promising as it may finally do what I need (connect via ad-hoc network), and the “Explore” is simply cool. I love the idea of geotagging. Maybe it’s not a big deal for studio work, but it would be awesome to throw one of those in my G9 and tag my street/travel shots. From what I can tell it needs a wireless AP to do this, so it’s not as good as a dedicated GPS module, but still. very cool concept and definitely something new and cool in the world of photography.
And how often do you say that about a memory card!
Recently I’ve been playing with a new way of combining my mediums of photography and painting. Basically I am taking photos, printing them on rice paper, and collaging them into encaustic paintings – the rice papers is thin, so when it is covered with wax, it disappears, leaving only the lines of the image showing through.
Here are the first two pieces, just as “proof of concept” I will now be starting a series I am tenatively titling “Stories in Wax and Pictures” as a collection of portraits incorporated into encaustic works. Should be an interesting project!
(click the images for larger versions)
Now, normally when scouting, you go around and when you find a potentially good spot for a shot you fire off some frames
However, I like to use my G9 for scouting – not only because it is light and compact (I toss the g9, a sync cord and strobe in a little shoulderbag, and it weighs a few oz.) but for the *movie mode*
In addition to my reference shots when I find a good spot, I will flip it into video mode, and pan around the area – recording all the angles/light in the area – as well as speaking some “notes” about my ideas for the shoot. That way when I get home, I not only have my still images of the locations, but a bunch of little video clips showing all the angles, with narration along the lines of “corner of x street… light coming from the west… will place model in front of the tree/car/whatever… with a reflector to the left and single strobe to the right”
or something like that 
This way I remember *excatly* what I was thinking at the time for the shot/setup.
Anyway, hope it’s a useful tip – it doesn’t have to be with the G9 either, any pocket cam with a video mode will make a nice companion to your SLR when scouting locations! (though with the G9, I find I hardly need the SLR backup)
The current design of F1point0.com represents my first real attempt at making a wordpress theme of “my own”. To be fair, it is based off some existing code (the nice “limau orange” theme by Bob at blogohblog.com) but that was only because I saw it had a similar structure to what I had in my head, and I knew I could modify it easily. I’d say I reused about 50% of the structure.
I’m most proud of the little “red dot navigation bar” which I structured and styled entirely from scratch (it was modeled off a navbar I liked from an old rapidweaver theme I used once!)
there are still a few very minor glitches (the nav dot disappears on blog archive pages) but they should be fixable.
I know it’s not a big deal for a lot of you with web design experience, but for a n00b like me it’s quite exciting!
I’m honestly not sure what to make of this – seems like kind of a weird combination for a “cross-licensing” agreement. On the one hand, it will surely be good for Pentax to have a company with the weight of Microsoft backing it, but on the other hand I am leery of the direction MS might influence Pentax in. I fear that MS would push Pentax toward more flashy, mass-market, consumer-level electronics (aka toy cameras) and away from what I feel to be their greatest strength: Fantastic optics and well designed cameras.
I mean really – not to bash Microsoft, but how often do you hear the words “Microsoft” and “well-designed” in the same sentence. I cringe to think of the feature bloat
Although to be fair, it is really to early for more than idle speculation. We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.
A few nice links on the more technical side of things
that’s it for now! more to come soon.
I love prints, especially large prints.
one of the downsides
to me of digital imaging is that it lends itself to *not* printing your
work. Back in the “olden days” of film negatives, you *had* to print -
there was no image other than the print (I’m not counting slides) This
of course had downsides of it’s own – prints take up space, and are
harder to catalogue
but with the advent of digital, I feel like
more and more people are simply chosing not to print their images,
sharing them electronically via the internet and photosharing sites
etc…
And in some ways this is great. it is convenient, it
is quick, it is easy and it doesn’t cost anything. Prints are somewhat
more time consuming (if you do them yourself), require physical storage
space, and cost money.
but there is something wonderful about
the experience of looking at a rich 16″x20″ print, nicely matted and
framed that simply cannot be replicated by staring at a computer
monitor.
Another advantage to printing is that digital noise and grain is not
*nearly* as offensive in prints as it is viewed 100% on a computer
screen. I hate it when someone will rant on and on about minute
differences in noise performance between x camera and y camera and iso
settings etc… and when I ask them how it looks in prints they admit
that they never actually *print* these images. Arrrrgh.
So do it! make some prints! there is no reason not too, it’s as easy
as uploading a file to mpix or such and ordering. Photobooks are good
too. it is simply amazing to me that I can get a nicely printed and
bound book of my photograhs for < $20. (I’ve been pretty impressed
with blurb) I feel like it’s pretty much made the old-school 4×6 print
album obsolete.
With so many options available, making printing easier than ever it is really a shame not to print your work!
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