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Archive for the ‘gear’ Category

Photo Mobility

August 14, 2010

So, I am writing this posting from a bus traveling from New York City back home to Allentown. It’s becoming quite apparent to me that we’re living in a world that is becoming simultaneously more interconnected and more mobile at the same time. The bus I’m riding on has WiFi and I’m connected to my blog through the Wordpress app on my iPad. I’m listening to Pat Metheny in the background and watching the high clouds intensify as we travel west.

Before I left yesterday, I finished up a morning shoot with a model named Firefly Sky and I quickly transferred some of the shots to the iPad so i could review them on the trip up. And I actually brought one of the shots into an app called Filterstorm and produced a really nice, clean edit of the shot. Sure, it’s just a black and white conversion, but I was able to use a curves adjustment tool to recover the highlights a bit and use the channel mixer on the black and white tool to get the skin tones looking really nice.

Is this a bit of gadget geekery? Of course it is, but it’s also kind of liberating. The experience is light and effortless where a laptop would just be cumbersome. The freedom to create while you’ve got the downtime of a bus ride is exciting in ways that are, dare I say, magical and revolutionary.

See you all when I get home…

Firefly - iPad Portrait

Lili Adonia - iPad Portrait

Tags: iPad, mobile photography
Posted in experimental, fine art nudes, gear, photography, travel | No Comments »

midday, june 2010

June 20, 2010

after having some of my work featured on the Lensbaby galleries, it kinda reminded me that there was an experiment i wanted to do. Lensbaby makes a soft focus lens that has an interesting aperture ring. its got a larger hole in the center, then smaller holes around the rest of the ring. i assume that with the soft-focus optic this enhances the soft focus effect. but i’ve been wondering what would happen if you put this aperture in one of their other optics, say the double-glass optic.

low and behold, magical things started to happen. notice the out of focus highlights and the really cool rippling effects going on? that’s all optical kids. no photoshop skillz required.

models: Katlyn and Sweet Romance

enjoy.

my days with you

flow lazy hot and languid

Tags: fine art nude, katlyn lacoste, lensbaby, Sweet Romance
Posted in experimental, fine art nudes, gear, intimate portrait, natural light, photography | No Comments »

Instant Gratification

February 1, 2010

my mind has been in a bit of a whirling state lately. as much as i love a good shoot, i’ve really just been wanting to make prints and such with the photos i’ve already got in my library. capturing digital shots or even shooting film is really just the first movement in a photograph’s performance. ultimately, they all should be printed and presented. that’s why i’ve been working on building up my darkroom again and making a UV printing box (more on that in a later post).

but i’ve also been intrigued by the idea of trying to get my hands on a Polaroid camera and experiment with instant film. there are lots of creative possibilities for transfers and emulsion lifts as well as just the look and feel of a Polaroid print. i had a couple of disappointing losses on ebay where i was out-bid on auctions for used Polaroid cameras, but recently i managed to win a Polaroid Automatic 250.

the only real problem with the camera was that the battery was corroded onto the contacts inside the battery compartment. and the battery that it originally used was a 4.5 volt that isn’t even made anymore. a post to one of my regular photography forums provided a quick answer and i was off to radio shack to look for a 4xAAA battery holder. i had to use a dremel tool to remove one of the 4 battery compartments from the 4-battery holder, then re-wire the holder slightly to get 4.5 volts out of it instead of the normal 6 volts you’d get from 4xAAA batteries. i kinda suck at soldering, so a few hours later i had power to the camera and it seemed to be making reasonable estimations of shutter speed to control exposure.

the film was actually quite a bit more expensive than the camera and i was really reluctant to load any into the camera until i had something really compelling to shoot with it. but ultimately, i decided to shoot a pack of 10 frames just so i could get a feel for how the exposure system worked with the camera (it’s all-automatic, no manual override). and as you’ll see in the next post, this was a good idea. some of the more experimental techniques i wanted to use with the exposed prints would require some practice before trying them on real pieces of artwork!

Original Polaroid Automatic 250 Battery

Newly fabricated 3xAAA Battery Holder for Polaroid Automatic 250

New battery holder in place!

The Polaroid Automatic 250 and some packs of film

Posted in gear, photography, polaroid | 1 Comment »

Making Things Work

October 7, 2009

Radiopoppers with custom cables

i’m really not much of a tinkerer. i don’t have my own soldering iron and i had to borrow one from my dad for this project. but i do like understanding how things work and the simple fact is this is so very simple, it was foolish not to do it myself.

i recently bought a set of Radiopopper JrXs which are radio controlled flash triggers that work really well. they can work in a mode that just fires a flash or studio strobe in a very unintelligent manner. whatever power setting the strobe or speedlight happens to be set to, that’s how much light you’ll get. however, if you connect the receivers to an Alien Bee studio strobe (of which we have 3 down at our studio) using the data cable (which is just a short phone cord), you can control the amount of light on the strobe with knobs on the transmitter that’s right on your camera. this is a huge convenience, especially when you’ve got a light on a boom stand that’s 8 feet in the air. and its a huge time saver because i don’t have to put the camera down, walk over to the light, adjust the power, then take another test shot. and even more so, i can connect the transmitter right to my light meter and adjust the light before i even start shooting.

The accidental tinkerer's workbench

the Radiopopper folks also announced that there would also be another accessory called the RP Cube for the receivers that would allow you to manually control the output of Nikon and Canon speedlights using these same knobs on the transmitter. the RP Cube was a small cube with a hot shoe to snap your flash into, and a stereo headphone jack to connect to the radiopopper receiver. for location shooting, this would offer the same benefits as using the data cable on the studio strobes. i thought, “great! send me two!!” but, of course, its not going to be shipping for another 6-8 weeks.

i am an impatient man and so is the rest of the internet, apparently. someone figured out that the manual control was done in the same way that most TTL metering is done. full flash power is accomplished with a longer duration flash and lower power is accomplished with a shorter duration flash. so, there are two wires, the trigger wire and the squelch wire. the flash is told to start by closing the circuit on the trigger wire and its told to stop or turn itself off by closing the circuit on the squelch wire. the radiopopper transmitter accomplishes this with some tricky timing and then radios the receiver to close the squelch circuit just in time to achieve the power level set by the knobs on the transmitter.

Homemade RP Cable and RP Cube!

so, by taking a Nikon TTL E900 cable that has the same trigger and squelch wires, its really easy to wire them to a stereo mini-jack to connect to the radiopopper receiver. a trip to radio shack got me the stereo mini-jacks and a stereo mini-cable. a trip to dad’s place got the soldering iron and some solder. so after a couple bungled soldering attempts and another trip to radio shack, i’d finally had the cables wired up and they actually worked! by clipping and saving the cable portion of the E900, i made an RP-Cable to manually control my flash by plugging it into the TTL control connector on the flash. then using the E900’s hot-shoe cube , i wired up half of the stereo mini-cable to connect it to the radiopopper receiver. the benefit of putting the flash on the hot-shoe cube is that it has a standard 1/4 x 20 mount so i can easily put the flash on a stand and it also has two other Nikon TTL connectors which means i could gang two more flashes together, having two or three flashes working in concert from one receiver. that’s nice!

so now that i have all this cool control, i can do things like this…

Genna Bee - Freak Show Terror!

this was done by balancing the little bit of night time ambient light and adding some flash to highlight Genna. the flash was triggered with a set of radiopopper JrX transmitter and receiver.

Daniel, Sports for Kin

again, balancing ambient while adding a remotely triggered flash that was to daniel’s right side. notice the highlights in his hair and the right side of his chest. since the sun was starting to set behind the houses here, this highlight is all from the SB-800 mounted on a hand rail to daniel’s right.

Posted in Strobist, gear, photography | No Comments »

and then things got complicated

January 5, 2009

rebecca lawrence

so, i’ve finally made the switch to the Canon 5D Mark II. this is a sea change for me since i’ve been shooting with Nikon gear for years now. buttons are in the wrong place and for my first shoot, it was very slow going. but i know that with continued use, everything will seem as familiar as an old glove. i made the change because this camera lets me shoot high definition video and i’ve always had a love for video as an expressive media. photography is still my #1 outlet, but in many ways the two can coexist in the creative hemispheres of my brain.

the complications arise when trying to work with video. really, with a still image, as long as it can be read with photoshop, you’re good to go. sometimes this requires software updates for things like RAW file decoding software, but in the end, the tools just work on pixels. but with video, there are frame rates, codecs, editing presets, real-time effects rendering, field dominance, delivery format, and a variety of devices and media hosting platforms.

right now i’m some transcoding 1080p high def footage to 60 frames per second using advanced frame rate conversions so that i can get high quality slow motion clips. its a lengthy process that can’t be done in real-time. but if i want to edit the footage the way i envisioned it, this is the way it should be done to look the best, visually. i guess i forgot how time consuming working with video is!

generally, i use Final Cut Pro and Motion to edit my video. for a while, i’d considered doing video as a semi-pro. i’ve shot event, know how to author a DVD and can edit a pretty powerful, emotional segment. but i have the original version of FCP Studio and its support for HD video is somewhat limited. and i’m considering a move to FCP Studio v.2 to facilitate the advanced types of edits i’d like to do. its a $400+ upgrade from what i’ve got, but it could be worth it, especially since the version i have is showing signs of age. it doesn’t seem to take full advantage of the 8-friggin-processor cores i have in my beastly tower, and some the the creative possibilities offered in the new version are just mind blowing.

so, is there an outlet for fine art video work? (i think i could produce some) is video too transcendent and ephemeral a media to be appreciated as fine art? (its hard to hang a video on a wall and video installations in galleries have never appealed to me that much) but since these questions veer way too far off the my original topic, i think i think we’ll leave this is a discussion for another posting.

Tags: photography, video
Posted in gear, photography | No Comments »

that sentimental feeling…

December 15, 2008

Zinn - Spur Falls

in a little more than an hour one of my beloved nikon cameras will sell to the highest bidder on eBay. and suddenly, i’m getting sentimental about having to give it up. its a wonderful piece of machinery and it is the instrument i’ve used to take some of my favorite photographs. we learned the ins and outs of photographing the nude and made some beautiful artwork together.

so, is it ridiculous to get sentimental about a camera? it doesn’t know what great pictures it took. its not even aware that it takes pictures. its just a specialized collection of metals and semiconductors wrapped in a magnesium and plastic shell. but yet, it seems like such a part of me, even if it has been sitting mostly unused in a corner of my camera bag for the past year or so. when i hold it in my hands, it seems to fit so well and when i turn it on, the controls are right where i expect them to be.

and the new camera that will replace it will be something different. a new girlfriend with longer hair and curvier hips! but the first time we try to make love with the light, it’ll seem all wrong. i’ll fumble for her buttons and she won’t respond the way i like. but eventually we’ll get to know better how each other works. i’ll learn what makes her squeal and she’ll come to know what makes me groan. in the long run, the perturbations caused by this shift will cause new neurons to connect, new possibilities will open up, and the creative flood will rush forth. so stay tuned! its sure to be an interesting ride!!

now… what’s high bid up to again?!?

Tags: gear, photography
Posted in gear, photography | 3 Comments »