The September desktop background image is here! Running water is a necessity and the streams of Colorado have plenty of running water! This months image is from El Dorado Canyon State Park – also located near Boulder, CO. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
The August desktop background image is here! The dog days of summer bring us the Flatirons – located near Boulder, CO. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
We were met with overcast weather when we awoke this Independence Day, and with it our plans to go in to the mountains exploring were scuttled. So to make the best of the cold and dreary morn, I baked some blueberry muffins!
My wonderful wife knows how much I like blueberries and she had just happened to pick up a pint at the local super-mart. Armed with fresh blueberries, I baked up a batch of six jumbo-sized muffins. During the baking process, I realized that I didn’t have any decent pictures of one of my favorite food items so I broke out the camera and the 105mm Macro lens.
Surprisingly, taking photos of food is actually pretty easy. I placed the muffins on a wood cutting board and placed them near a window with beautiful natural light. I set my white balance to ‘cloudy’ and fired off about 75 shots. One thing to look out for is shadows. If the light coming into the scene from the window is harsh or overly bright, you will want to use a inexpensive reflector set up opposite the window to help even out the shadows. If you don’t want to spend the money on a reflector, you can use everyday items such as a piece of white paper or some aluminum foil. As the name implies, you are trying to reflect some of the light back in to the photo. Trust me – it really does make a difference. In this case however, using a reflector wasn’t necessary because of it being such an overcast day.
Once I got these images on the computer, I noticed that the cloudy white balance (5600 Kelvin on my D300) was a little bit too warm for my liking so I dialed the temp down to about 4700 Kelvin. Being able to change the temperture of the image is one of the biggest benefits of shooting in RAW vs JPG/TIFF Fine. I’m so happy with the end result that a batch of these are going to make their way to the Fotolia stock photography agency.
Finally, the best part about food photography is once you’ve snapped off all of the shots that you want, you can eat some seriously delicious food and after all, isn’t that what holidays are all about?!? =)
The July desktop background image is here! This is a long exposure night time shot of downtown Denver on a stormy, summer night. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
[UPDATE: The full set of images from the shoot are available here (requires Flash)]
My friends at Boulder Motorsports have been busy building a new bike for the 2010 racing season and they asked if I would like to come take some shots of it for them. Umm. Yeah! The F042 is a custom made kit bike that is truly a work of art. If you are a gear head, you can read more about it here.
I got to the shop at 6AM this morning and Brian Sharp was already hard at work re-building an engine for one of his Californian customers. I set up my gear and tried to stay out of the way as much as possible. Once Will Neville arrived to provide some creative direction and assistance, we got to work. My idea for the first two shots were that this truly is an unveiling of the great work that BMS does. I thought it would be interesting to have a silhouette and some darker, almost flirtatious images of the shape of the F042. As is normally the case, the first 15 or 20 shots were a lot of trial and error but I started dialing in the look I was going for and thanks to my trusty RadioPoppers, I was able to nail it.
Once the darker shots were done, we cranked up the lights and started getting some good product shots of the bike and some of the custom parts that BMS used to create the F042. I haven’t processed all of the images yet, but I can tell from a quick glance that I think that I was able to capture the craftsmanship of Brian and his team.
After we got done documenting the F042, I had an opportunity to ask Brian how this bike does on the track. He response: “it’s been on the podium every race we’ve entered!”. So not only does it look great it’s also a rocket on the track! It was an early start to the day and definitely more work than I would have thought, but hopefully I will be able to give Brian some ‘podium’ shots of his latest creation!
The June desktop background image is here! Another image from Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Colorado. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
The May desktop background image is here! This image was taken at Sprague Lake in the Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Colorado. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
So, my iPad showed up today – my initial thoughts are this is an amazing consumption device. The jury is still out if this will be a great production device. The keyboard is relatively easy to use (I’m creating this post with it), but many of the characters that I use are extended characters on some obscure keypad that isn’t visible by default. Other than that, I haven’t found anything that I haven’t been able to work through. True Apple – stuff just works. More to come after I’ve played with it for awhile…
[UPDATE: after having spent another five or six hours on the device...]
First things first, the iPad is blazing fast. Compared to my iPhone 3G it seems at least twice as fast, probably three times as fast. The apps spring to action when you touch them, scrolling through a web page with a flick of a finger might be TOO fast!
The built-in apps have all been updated to take advantage of the larger screen. Email, calendar and contacts are all much easier to use – but why no iDisk upgrade? I was really interested in the iPad for the new iBookstore. I’ve seen differing reviews about that – my take? It’s pretty darn good. As someone who reads several books a month, I won’t have any problem keeping up that pace on the iPad (and it certainly feels more like reading that trying to trudge through ebooks on my iPhone).
Kudos to Apple for getting the developers on board early – the selection of apps for the iPad in the App Store wasn’t huge, but I have downloaded twenty or so and the developers have come up with some great ideas. I really like the Weather Channel app.
That being said, the media companies need to get a grip. Aside from the free ABC app (which allows you to watch television shows streamed to your iPad for free), everyone else seems to be charging way too much. $4.99/month for Popular Science – when I already receive the print edition at home? $17.99/mo for Thea Wall Street Journal? Thanks but no thanks. One can hope the media companies will realize the err of their ways and start charging a reasonable amount for their content – if not, I probably won’t be purchasing (as I’m sure many others will follow the same path). The lack of Adobe Flash has not been a hinderance – at all.
In this geek’s opinion, Apple hit another home run with the iPad. Time will tell if it will be as big of a hit as the iPod or iPhone, but after using the iPad for a mere day, I can’t envision not having one.
The April desktop background image is here! Sadly, life got in the way this month. I had intended to include an original image this month, but between inclement weather, work and life in general, that didn’t happen. So, I went into my archives and grabbed one of my favorite shots – Latourelle Falls in the Columbia Gorge located just outside of Portland, Oregon. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
This past Saturday was the big day – my friends Jessica and Joseph got married. That in itself is big enough news, but I also had the privilege and honor of documenting the ceremony and reception. This would be my first wedding as the official ‘photographer’ and it very well could be my last! More on that to follow.
Anyone who knows me understands that I’m a prepare for the worst and hope for the best kind of guy. I spent a lot of time leading up to the wedding trying different techniques, ordering special diffusers, and generally making myself a nervous wreck leading up to Saturday. Photographing someone’s wedding is a serious responsibility and I would like to think that I treated it as such. There’s no chance for a do-over so you’ve got to get it right the first time.
My wife and I arrived at the location about three hours before the ceremony to set up and take some test shots of different locations and rooms so I would have a baseline from which to work. Going in to the event I was optimistically hoping to be able to shoot at f/5.6 at a shutter speed in the neighborhood of 1/125s at an ISO of no more than 800 (but I was secretly hoping to be able to shoot at an ISO of 400). After I set up a couple of softboxes and remotes, I fired off a couple of shots just to get an ambient reading on the available light. Houston, we have a problem. I realized I would be lucky to get 1/30s shutter speed at f/2.8 at an ISO of 800. This presents several problems. First, at 1/30s shutter speed, camera shake. Second, at f/2.8 I had minimal depth of field. Throw in the noise on my D300 at ISO 800 and I was quickly understanding that this was not going to be easy to pull off.
The show must go on however and I blindly (stupidly?) trudged forward. After getting a comfortable baseline for the groups shots after the ceremony, I sent my wife down to gamble (the wedding was held at a local casino). I started taking some filler shots. What’s a filler shot? I wanted to document some of the finer details that most people might not have the time to pay attention to so I grabbed my macro lens and proceeded to gather as much detail as I could. I then swapped to my fisheye and grabbed a few frames of the environment as a whole. Finally, I stepped outside and fired off a few shots of the exterior – it couldn’t hurt right? It was starting to get close to the ceremony so I headed back to the event center and started to get mentally prepared.
About 15 minutes before the ceremony, I made my second troubling realization of the night – there wasn’t enough light for auto-focus to work reliably. This one concerned me – quite a bit – because you can fix a lot of things in Photoshop but you can’t make a blurry picture look like it’s not blurry. And since I rely on my camera’s auto-focus about 99.999% of the time, well, lets just say I noticed that my palms started sweating just a bit. As I mentioned previously, going in I was hoping to be able to shoot at f/5.6 from a distance of 20 feet. With those settings I guessed I would have had about 2 feet of depth of field – plenty for close enough to be good enough. At f/2.8 though? I would be lucky to have a foot depth of field – maybe less. Needless to say, I was starting to second guess whether or not I would be able to pull this off but there were no other options available so I just had to suck it up and make the best of the situation.
The next thirty minutes were a blur. I rattled off over 400 shots and this is where all the hard work and practice of the previous five years paid off. I would check my LCD and histogram every 30 seconds and make sure I was at least “close” to a good exposure. Frequently I had to make changes on the fly and knowing exactly what change needed to be made, which buttons to push and to what degree to push them really paid off. I expected that a lot of the images I was getting were going to be junk, but I also knew I was going to have a handful – maybe more if I was lucky – that I would be able to work with. As for the ceremony itself? I’m sure it was lovely. I’ll have to confirm that with my wife. I was too busy trying to document the proceedings to be able to pay attention to what was happening around me.
After the ceremony finished, we ran through some traditional wedding shots. Finally, I was presented with something that wasn’t a Tim Wakefield knuckleball! The standard group shots went more or less as expected and they turned out OK – but really a little uninspired and boring if you ask my opinion. Needless to say, this is a wedding and people expect to see the group shots. I took a moment to catch my breath because I knew I had a few more difficult spots ahead of me.
I planned on making a wedding book for my friends and I had in my mind the cover and back cover shots that I wanted to capture, so I asked Jessica and Joseph to step out into the hall to grab those shots. Much to my chagrin the bride and groom were feeling it and we ended up spending close to an hour getting different shots and poses all over the casino! That last statement could be misconstrued. Don’t get me wrong, I was unhappy to be doing it, I was mentally going through all of the things that could go wrong and how was I going to overcome that. Thankfully, my wife came along and she took care of some of the minutia while I was able to concentrate on making the image. What is the minutia? The little things like making sure the brides hair is acceptable, getting lint off the grooms coat, pointing out the crappy background we were shooting against. Without her help, the images would have been a lot worse.
Finally, the reception. This was actually the most uneventful part of the evening. Sure there were some shots I had hoped to get during the reception, but logistics weren’t going to allow me to get them so I had to let it go. I for one was a little bit happy to have a break in the action.
Fast forward about two hours. As I moved the files off my memory cards and on to my computer, one of the memory cards threw an error during the process. Oh No! I’m not sure if I had a heart attack but I certainly know I panicked. It’s times like these I’m glad I’m an IT geek. I tried a couple of things and was able to get all of the images copied (and backed up). It was at this point that I realized that I had shot over 950 images in a 3 hour period. It was already 1AM in the morning so I wasn’t going to process them but I just had to browse through them and see how much work I had ahead of me post-processing. There were some real winners and some real losers. I ended up with over 100 solid images to work with. Only a 10% success rate but any photographer will tell you, a 10% success rate – especially at a one of a kind event like a wedding – is actually really acceptable.
What do I take away from this? For one, a whole new appreciation for wedding photographers! I expected a lot of hard work and a good deal of stress but this exceeded my expectations going in by quite a lot. Second, I didn’t understand why/how wedding photographers charge so much – but now I do! It was hard work. If you’re thinking about getting married and want to hire a professional photographer – pay the man (or woman) – they deserve every cent they charge. Third, I’m not always one for bigger, faster, better gear but I would have really appreciated a nifty fifty for this. An f/1.4 50mm lens would have been a godsend. Those two extra stops of light would have saved me hours in post-processing time – more than paying for the $439 price tag. My final realization from this? I have zero interest in becoming a professional wedding photographer. I’m thoroughly grateful for being given this opportunity. It’s just not for me. Please don’t interpret that to assume it was a miserable experience – it truly was an honor and a privilege, I got to help my friends out and I had a great time doing it. (just don’t expect me to say “yes” if you ask me to do it again) =)
John is a freelance photographer in the Denver, CO. In his spare time, John instructs others in the art of capturing great images.
Understanding Exposure
Bryan Peterson
Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
David duChemin
VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography
David duChemin
The Digital Photography Book
Scott Kelby
The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters
Joe McNally
