April 2009
28 posts
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Booq Taipan Slimcase Review
I needed a new case/bag for my Macbook. With the shorter profile the only difference between the new Macbook and the old Macbook is about .13” of height (same length and width).
As all things Apple/Mac are concerned, there were plenty of overpriced choices, many of them appearing in the Apple Store. As an aside, it’s brilliant Steve Jobs has done. By making Macs so easy to use,...
March 2009
58 posts
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Giotto's MH-1301 Pro-Series II Ball Head
Can your ball head do this?
My old ball head couldn’t. It was only rated for about 11 pounds. This new ball head is rated for 20 pounds and handles the D3 with 24-70mm with ease. Now I no longer have to worry about my rig tipping over! Here are some close-ups I took earlier of the Giotto’s MH-1301:
But wait. If the D3 with the SU-800 is on the tripod there, then what’s...
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Can you handle this?
What goes through my head during a Charles Yeh shoot? Let me take you through the bullet points:
What’s the main focus of the shoot? Seriousness/humor for this one.
What’s effect am I going for? Edgy. Hard lighting on the face (snooted SB-800 flash). But we need to make the subject stand out from the background (rim lighting from the subject’s back)
What about the background?...
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I shot a 108 on a par 60. FML.
Played Scholl Canyon Golf course today. For the life, I could not figure out what was going on with my stroke.
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Cooking up new ideas...
I’ve been sitting on an idea for a shoot but I haven’t gotten all the parts I need for it.
I’ve also been doing some reading and studying on techniques and will be doing a tiny DIY project tomorrow. Looks like I need new snoots and a gridspot. Fortunately these things cost next to nothing to make, take up little to no space in the pack, and are easy!
Stay tuned… my mind...
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Lr2/Mogrify: Setup Borders and Signature
I’ve been requested to write a summary on my borders and signature/watermark for Lightroom’s Mogrify plugin.
Mogrify is an Lightroom plug-in that allows you to transform (i.e. transmogrify) your pictures on the way out (read: during export). If you’re uploading to flickr as I do then perhaps you’d like to add a border or a watermark before your pictures hit the website.
...
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Amy+Ed Hardy+Strobist=WOW!
This is the first picture that I’ve created in a long time where I’ve said to myself, “Wow!”
It usually comes as a direct result of capturing something precious. A moment in time that can not be replicated. Often it’s quite literal, like a hummingbird turned the right way to create saturated highlights. Other times, it’s an emotional gesture that is purely...
LMAO I just got a great idea!
This picture totally inspired me to do something later!
And the bangs on this one!
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Perfectionism... 4 hours of borders/watermarks
It’s not my fault they (read: Lightroom) didn’t make it easier to mass export pictures with borders and watermarks.
<enter Mogrify via camera left>
<applause>
No I’m not writing a script for a play. I’m just delirious after this:
I think I had 15 windows open at the same time. I couldn’t help it. I went through probably 25-30 iterations of my borders...
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The Vibrance of Roses
I’ll never get tired of the colors roses produce. They are simply gorgeous… weeds. Yup roses are actually advanced weeds. But regardless, they bloom incredible flowers! Here’s one from this spring’s bloom!
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...that was the sweetest 'I swear I'm not a "crazy...
crazyfor-you:
For reals.
LOL :)
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All 300 Reps
Yesterday Paul and I did all 300 repetitions of the 300 challenge. They include:
25 pullups 50 pushups 50 deadlifts (at 135lbs) 50 box jumps (with 24” box) 50 floor wipers (at 135lbs) 50 clean and press (with 25 lbs I forgot it was supposed to be 36lbs) 25 pullups
It took us about an hour. I actually don’t know how long it took because I wasn’t keeping track. But we finished...
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Spilling Light
Like a spoiled child, light does what it wants unless you control it.
It’s almost fluid in its ability to get places that you don’t want it to go. Yesterday I had a lot of trouble getting blown highlights in my neck and under my chin. It wasn’t until today that I experimented with an umbrella, a large softbox, and the Lumiquest Softbox III that I finally realized how much the...
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Can't get my mind off of... Anne
Hathaway that is…
I’ve been revisiting the Anne Hathaway photo and re-revisiting the Anne Hathaway photo.
I can’t seem to get it quite right. Admittedly, I’m getting closer but not quite there. There are highlights on her neck that I can’t seem to recreate no matter what angle I put my softbox. It really bugs me. The forehead, the shoulder blade, the arms…...
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Macbook stuff
I’m going to vent a little.
I knew I was going to spend a lot of time on the computer today. Mostly post-processing pictures and learning PS and LR stuff.
I was only able to do some of that today.
I wound up installing/reinstalling a lot of programs today. For example, I got this nifty little widget for my dock that tells me all sorts of information about the current state of my...
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Anne Hathaway Recreated
Larry posted this image of Anne Hathaway a couple days ago. I’ve been looking at it wanting to recreate the shot. This shot for me revealed the following:
Strong top-down lighting from camera upper front (to Anne’s right) creating the highlights in her forehead, nose, but bleeding onto her left cheekbones.
Strong lighting from camera front-left creating the highlights in her arms.
...
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Mustard Festival 2009
The 2009 Mustard Festival was hosted at the Robert Mondavi Vineyards in Napa Valley marking the beginning of the mustard season. The festival invited several vineyards to showcase their wines. Of course with good wine, there has to be good food! Hamburgers, steak sandwiches, pizza, pasta, ice cream were all available from the various vendors. Here are some of the pictures from the Festival!
Note:...
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Grease at The Pantages featuring Taylor Hicks
We watched Grease at The Pantages Theatre yesterday. It wasn’t nearly as good as Rent. The only really good thing about it was that it featured Taylor Hicks as Teen Angel (singing the song Beauty School Dropout). Unfortunately Hicks only had 1 song in the musical, but he did sing a song at the end of the show promoting his new CD release.
There was supposed to be a picture here but I...
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11 hours 35 minutes of exercise
I have logged 11 hours and 35 minutes of exercise this week.
Unreal.
They breakdown roughly below:
3 hours surfing
2 hours tennis
2 hours weight-lifting
2.5 hours golf
3 hours volleyball
I’m exhausted and sore all over. Literally. From head to toe.
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The Mystery of the Crying Wall & the Water Heater
3 weeks ago our housekeeper discovered that our water heater had been leaking water into the base pan (the collecting tray at the bottom of the unit). Fortunately, the pan did not appear to overflow thus I was not alarmed. In the picture above you can see the large 40 gallon water heater. The water heater is directly above my room in the attic. In the picture below I zoomed-in for a shot of the...
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Westcott Apollo 28" Recessed Softbox
The pictures of the Macbook were taken with this softbox:
At 28” the diagonal (hypotenuse if you remember Geometry) is almost 40” which is almost the size of the 42” Westcott umbrellas that we Strobists carry.
Which is why, when placed side-by-side, the 28” Apollo looks bigger than the 42” umbrella, particularly because the black border flares out past the...
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Dell's Adamo: A Close Look at the MacBook Air...
Looks like Dell’s a little late to the party though. Click here to read more about it.
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What's in bloom at 995 FLR?
Here are a few snapshots of what’s in bloom in the backyard:
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Macbook (Pro Mini)
They call it the Macbook Pro Mini. Updated with the same unibody aluminum shell with which they created the Macbook, the Macbook is now essentially the equivalent of the 15” Macbook Pro but in a smaller body. Sporting a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and an NVIDIA 9400m 256Mb it processes digital images with ease.
Here are the full specs: Enclosure: Aluminum unibody shell CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo...
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Busy
I can explain my lack of posts recently:
I am taking Adobe Lightroom 2 classes (after which I’ll take Adobe PS CS4 classes)
I purchased a new laptop (soon unveiled here)
Archive/databasing pictures - when you have over 80GB of pictures and growing fast, this becomes quite the dilemma
Over 7.5 HOURS of exercise this week - surfing, tennis (twice), lifting (twice), volleyball… and...
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Wife divorcing ex-CEO: $43 million not enough →
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Family photos (the beginning)!
I should probably explain the origins of these pictures. This trip up to San Jose, I brought my camera gear. Lately however as a result of the strobist movement I have been doing a lot of off-camera flash photography. Thus I brought 2 flashes, an umbrella, and a flash stand.
The rest is history.
Here is an excerpt from the original series of family photos. You can see the rest of them here....
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Rush Rush (SPELLBOUND 1991)
My brother sent me his version of Rush Rush on piano and I backsolved the chords and improved upon his original version. I think this version is pretty good. The basic chords/tabs I found online were crap (as usual) so I made most of these up myself. They were originally written for A major and I transposed them down to C major, so if there are any mistakes that’s probably why. I’ll...
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Family photos (part deux)!
Note to self: Don’t click the remote faster than the flash can refresh! Otherwise your pics will get darker and darker…
Click on the picture to see the rest of my photostream for this set!
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Too much good stuff...
Family portraits, Darda, Robert Mondavi vineyard/Mustard Festival, “Get in the chopper!” Car shooting, chilling at Emily/Dai’s house watching youtube vidoes, smoking Cohibas with 18 YO Macallan, foot massages at 99 Ranch, waking up late, no fondue for you! Waiting 2.75 hours at Boiling Crab?!?!
Too much good stuff.
Pictures to follow over the course of the next week. Hope I...
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Dust bunnies...
What are you looking at? No seriously, what’s supposed to be in the picture?
Actually, the right question you should be asking is what’s NOT in the picture?
The answer? Dust bunnies!
Well, actually there are still 2 little dust bunnies to the right of the frame but there are only 2 versus the 50 or so I had before! That’s right! I brushed them off with my new Visible Dust...
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Lightpainting dilemma...
Warning: Very lighting/photography technical!
Here’s my dilemma: How do you use an SB-800 on a lightstand for light painting over a 30 second exposure? I was reading Ken Brown’s how to on light painting cars The problem is I need the SB-800 high on a lightstand for a downward angled light source. Then I would just trigger the flash and move, trigger and move, etc. But I...
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How you know you're a Strobist
I found the following online… While I haven’t had a conversation like this, it is entirely possible. LOL!
Great write-up! I find myself in Gap & Gap Kids stores standing about 2 feet away from the wall staring at the gallery wrap images. The conversation usually goes like this: Store help: ‘Can I help you?’ Me: ‘Not really. I’m just trying to see how this person was lit.’
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Identity crisis
One of the really neat things that light painting affords as a technique is putting yourself multiple times in the same frame. Each picture you are about to see was shot with 1 shot. None of these pictures were stitched or combined in post-processing (e.g. Photoshop).
This is the first shot where I used the curtains behind me to provide the ambient lighting for the frame. Then I moved from spot...
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Lumiquest Softbox III
As an answer to my DIY beauty dish failure and also wanting a portable softbox, I bought the Lumiquest Softbox III for about $35 from Adorama (free shipping and no tax, yay!)
It consists of 5 panels, 4 of which fold onto the sides of your flash head (in my case a Nikon SB-800) and 1 of which is translucent and acts as the softbox. It spans 8x9” and looks like this unlit:
You can see...
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Memories of Bora Bora
I can’t remember if I posted this shot on here before but here it is again!
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tumblr won't let me follow non-tumblrs
Totally lame. I guess they’re just trying to “keep it within the family”…
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Backed up on processing...
Too many shoots, too little time to process. Fortunately I am spending less and less time processing because the shots don’t require it.
Unfortunately the D3 sensor is collecting a LOT of dust and most of the time I spend post-processing is just cloning out dust bunnies! Can’t wait til my brush and blower get here…
See those little black specks? No, I am not in a tornado....
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Nazi zombies, run!
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Light Painting with strobes?!?!?
In my ruminations on how to light a large object (read: car) with small lights (read: strobes), I’ve been racking my brain on how to do this without spending any dough (read: money).
I’ve been analyzing this guy’s pictures on flickr such as the following:
This is an AMAZING picture and yes that’s a REAL car! Josh (aka Heliotrope) has also left us notes on his flickr...
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If my images are worthless, then what do I have to...
A while back I posted a link to an article arguing why my pictures are worthless. The following is an excerpt:
Trying to make money from your photography is a very long shot. The market is so saturated with quality pictures with extremely high availability and extremely low prices that getting a foothold is close to impossible.
So while I have this romantic dream that I could potentially sell...
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Lessons in Car Lighting - Practice
I always wanted to know how to light a car in a studio. Yup, a real car. Especially a flat black car because flat black has the most reflective qualities out of all the various colors. The reason black is such a bitch to keep clean is because it reflects all the flaws in and on the paint. This also makes it a bitch to light because your light sources are going to wind up in the reflection of the...
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Octomom giving birth - hilarious!
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Seeing things in a different light...
I used to look at pictures and say, “That’s pretty” or “That’s ugly”.
Now I look at pictures and can’t help analyzing the light and composition and photographic aspects of the picture.
Take the following picture for example:
Now, this is a pretty cool picture but the exposure on the subject is a little dark and the balance between the background and...
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Bolsa Chica Conservancy
For the past 3 years I’ve been regularly surfing next to the Bolsa Chica Conservancy. In fact I’ve surfed the inlet that flows water into the wetlands. At times, I’ve even eaten/drunk bird shit from the water that flows out of the wetlands.
In any event, I have never actually stepped foot inside The Bolsa Chica Conservancy to see the birds themselves. Today I did and we (my...
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More LOLCAT
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Sunkissed
Who says you can’t overpower the sun with 1 speedlight?