Little Show Saturday
June 16th, 2014
Just a quick post to let you know that I have some prints in a show in Dayton that opens Saturday. I got the prints hung today and made the above crappy quick and dirty pano of them on the wall. They are actually hanging straight, it’s just the bad pano that makes them look crooked.
The opening is Saturday night starting at 6. I plan to be there at the beginning, but will be heading out to get dinner with my wife after an hour or so. So, if you’d like to meet me at the opening, come early and say hey.
There is more info about the show, STRAY LIGHT: A Summer Art Experience, here.
More Camera Geek Stuff
June 15th, 2014
Before I get back to posting more photos from my shoot last June in the Poconos, I’m going to detour again with some more stuff about shooting with my Panasonic G5.
Went to a concert in the park tonight. The Springfield Summer Arts Festival lasts a month, from mid-June to mid-July and has a free performance pretty much every night for more than a month. It’s a nice thing to have within walking distance of our house. The band last night was a Springsteen tribute band. They turned in a pretty lackluster performance, but it was a beautiful night and the price is right.
But, this show did give me a chance to play with my Panasonic G5 and the 45-200 (90-400 in full-frame terms) lens that my wonderful wife got me for Christmas. The lens performed pretty well. It’s f/5.6 at the long end, so the auto ISO was picking 1600 most of the time. The auto focus worked only OK at keeping up with the singers. It hit often enough, but not as often as I’d like. I left everything at the program, auto settings…dialing in some exposure compensation later in the evening when the stage lights took over from the setting sun. I shot jpegs and have posted them here unedited, other than a reduction in size. You can see that the color balance shifts around due to the changing colored stage lights. My Nikon D7000 does a better job of finding a good color balance under conditions like this.
I wasn’t real impressed with the performance of the camera and lens in this application, but it wasn’t awful. And the jpegs are nice and clean, even at 1600 ISO. Not the equipment I’d chose if I were getting paid to shoot a concert…but then again, if that were the case I wouldn’t have just stayed in my seat the whole time either.
Bottom line on the camera/lens: I could have done better with my D7000 and my 80-200 Nikkor. But the Panasonic was adequate. I think I got a few OK shots.
I also shot video of one song they performed, “Youngstown.” If you are interested in what the camera does with video you can check it out on my facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=468177136618322&set=vb.100002781188493&type=2&theater It’s not great video…hand held and there are some problems with the camera keeping focus when the lens is zoomed. You’ll see what I mean if you check it out.
Back to the Poconos
June 12th, 2014
Getting back to catching up on my old shoots, we return you to days of yesteryear…about a year ago, in fact.
I love working with models who are also photographers. They always have a much better idea of what I’m trying to do as a photographer if they struggle with the same questions and issues when doing their own photography.
Both Brooke Lynne and Blueriverdream are excellent photographers as well as wonderful models. When I’m working with models who also do photography I always encourage them to shoot as well as model if they want to.
As you can see, both Brooke and Blue took me up on that offer during this shoot and I think they each enjoyed working with the other and made some fine photos of their own. And, it also makes for some interesting behind-the-scenes shots for me.
Morning in the Smokey Mountains
June 7th, 2014
I’m going to interrupt the Poconos posts because I have some new photos that I just took and really want to share. I just returned from a week in the Smokey Mountains, one of my very favorite places on the planet. The Smokies are my favorite mountains in the world. I love wandering around in them and enjoying the amazing beauty that is there.
This was a family trip, but I did sneak away one morning to do a shoot with a new (to me) model from Asheville, Lilith Noir. It’s always a crap shoot when I look for new models on Model Mayhem. This time I found two who said they wanted to shoot with me on the trip, but, as often happens, one of them went missing a few days before we were supposed to shoot. But, like at a crap shoot, sometimes you win big. That’s the case with Lilith. She’s a wonderful model and a great person. We had fun and made some photos that I’m very happy with.
As you can see, we went to a waterfall. This particular waterfall is a little-known one near the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’m not going to publish the name because I’d kind of like it to stay little known. So many of the good places in the Smokeys are so overrun with people these days that it’s starting to interfere with enjoying the place, let alone doing figure photography.
There’s another reason that shooting in the Smokeys is so special for me. Some of my favorite photos, including my most popular photo, were taken down there, many with a wonderful model, Lani, who also lived in Asheville at the time we were working together. Lani moved on from modeling to other things long ago. It very nice to have found another great model in Asheville. I hope to be doing more with with Lilith in years to come.
Two In The Poconos
June 5th, 2014
On down the trail in the Poconos Brooke Lynne, Blueriverdream and I found some more natural spots to do a few photos. It was fantastic to work with both of these beautiful talented models at the same time.
In The Poconos
June 1st, 2014
After my trip to Philadelphia to testify in the 2257 trial I had the great fortune to make a short trip to the Poconos with two wonderful women, Brooke Lynne and Blueriverdream. It really doesn’t get any better than this. These two ladies are two of the best figure models in the world. They are also both really fine people. Talented, creative, nice, fun to be around. Needless to say, it was a great shoot.
We headed out into the woods and the first thing we came to was this old stone structure. When I was a kid we called these storm cellars. I suspect they have a lot of different names depending on where they are located. Whatever you call them they make an interesting setting for some photos.
Of course, this was just the first stop on two great days of shooting in a fantastic setting. So, I’m going to be posting photos from this shoot for a while. I think you’ll enjoy what’s coming.
More from Philly
May 28th, 2014
While I was in Philadelphia for the 2257 trial my friend and wonderful model, _G_, came by for a shoot. The light was completely different on this day from when I shot Nina here, so we did different things. Still enjoyed using that Art Deco mirror, though.
No striped light here. Just some lovely soft light.
And there was another nice mirror in the room. I couldn’t resist playing with it a bit.
Memorial Day
May 26th, 2014
I took some photos of the Rhododendron in front of our house this weekend. So here is one of those shots to mark this holiday. I don’t usually have anything to say about this holiday, except sometimes to rant a bit about the apparent inability of most people to distinguish between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. But today a great writer up in Cleveland, Erin O’Brien, posted an excellent essay on her blog that does a very good job of expressing some of my feelings about this day. I suggest you go read it.
http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/2014/05/memorial-day.html
Getting back to photography, I took that photo while playing around with my Panasonic G5 and the 45-200mm lens that my lovely wife got me for Christmas. I was just seeing what it would do, and challenged its limits a bit with how I shot this photo. I hand held it and cranked it all the way out to 200mm (that’s 400mm in “full frame” terms). The exposure was f/10 at 1/160 using the in-lens image stabilization. And the ISO was set automatically at 1600. I shot it as a jpeg to let the camera do its thing with the file.
I uploaded a full-size file if you are curious. To get to it you need to right click and select open in a new tab. At least that’s what works with Chrome. I’m pretty amazed with the quality under those parameters.
And, just for fun, I processed the file in ACDSee Pro 7, which I just upgraded to. I’ve used one variation or another of ACDSee since I started doing digital photography. It was around providing an excellent tool long before Light Room came along. I was a beta tester for the original Light Room, but I’ve never seen a reason to buy it instead of ACDSee. This time I got a deal on a new package they call their Family Pack. It includes a bunch of programs and allows each of them to be installed and used by three users. And you don’t have to “rent” the software and pay for it over and over again. One hell of a lot better deal than what Adobe is doing to us these days. Check it out. And, no, they aren’t paying me to say this. I just think it’s a great program and a great bargain. I pay the same for it as you. The Family Pack was just too good a deal to pass up. It even includes a Mac version for those of you in that camp.
The new Pro 7 version has added a lot of RAW control and kept all the good stuff from earlier versions. I’d been using version 5, not being one to upgrade every time a new version comes out. (Are you listening Adobe?) It looks like I might be doing a lot more image processing with ACDSee and moving more and more away from PhotoShop. I used the sharpening and noise reduction tools of ACDSee on this file, just keeping them at the default settings to see how it worked. I’m very impressed. The G5 doesn’t really have much noise at 1600 ISO (that in itself is a pretty amazing fact for someone who used to develop Tri-X in Acufine in a never-really-successful attempt to get 1600 ISO) but after the noise reduction in ACDSee, there’s really no noise left at all, and it didn’t seem to hurt the sharpness.
The tools we have today are pretty amazing. It’s a good time to be a photographer, if what you care about is making photos, not making a living.
Nina in the Sun
May 24th, 2014
I hope you are all enjoying your Memorial Day weekend. Please take a moment to remember what the holiday is about.
I’m still working my way slowly through my backlog of shoots. I’m in June of last year now. That was when I went to Philadelphia to testify in the trial for the lawsuit to have the laws commonly known as 2257 and 2257A declared to be unconstitutional. I’m one of the named plaintiffs in that lawsuit. We did not get the result we were seeking at the trial, though it actually went better than we had expected. We are now in the process of appealing that decision. Eventually we expect this suit to make its way to the Supreme Court. But that’s probably years away.
Meanwhile, some very nice things have come of my involvement in that lawsuit. One of them was meeting a wonderful woman whose professional name is Nina Hartley. She is also a named plaintiff in the 2257 lawsuit. She testified on the same day that I did. We had lunch and dinner together along with the other plaintiffs and some reporters who were covering the trial. Nina and I kind of hit it off and ended up doing a little quick photo shoot in my hotel room in the afternoon. I posted one of those photos back at the time after a real quick look at the files. Today you get to see a few more shots.
I know that “striped light” has been done a lot, including by me. But this was a quick, spur-of-the-moment shoot and the hotel room we were working in was less than ideal. So we made do with what we had.
The room was decorated in an art deco style, so I did take advantage of that and played around with something just a bit warped using this big mirror.
OK, now you can all get back to your barbecue.
Blooming Kelsey
May 19th, 2014
It was a beautiful sunny day when Kelsey and I were shooting at this lovely location. And it really is a great place with beautiful rock formations and all sorts of plants. Of course, I worked with the “real” lenses for my Nikon in addition to playing with the soft-focus lens that I used for the photos in the last post.
And everything was in bloom. So, despite fighting the blazing sun, it was still possible to get some fun photos. After playing around with the colorful rocks and moss it seemed to be mandatory to pay some attention to all the flowers that were everywhere.
Thanks to Kelsey for showing me this great place and for doing your usual fantastic job of modeling in it.
