October « 2009 « so many stars

Archive for October, 2009

Bright Angels

October 31, 2009

Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon, AZ

i recently made a short trip out to Arizona and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share the jawdropping beauty of the Grand Canyon with my friend Melissa. its one of those things that really just chokes me up inside when i see it and i could see from Melissa’s reaction that she was feeling the same way. its just so achingly beautiful and so vast that the feelings of humbleness and humility are overwhelming.

i created this image as a composite from 5 other images using Photoshop’s HDR (High-Dynamic Range) capabilities. the idea is that you over expose and under expose a few shots and photoshop blends the shadow and highlight areas into one well-balanced photograph that you camera would normally not be able to capture. this photo (or series) was taken late afternoon as we decided to take a short hike down into the canyon where the perspectives are a bit more dramatic. there’s a little bit of distortion in the clouds because they were moving. and i shot this at 16mm, so the movement of the clouds is really exaggerated a little bit. i’ll include the 5 original photographs used to make this shot just as a reference so you can see what we’re really working with here.

Bright Angel HDR image 1 (+2 Stops)

Bright Angel HDR Image 2 (+1 Stop)

Bright Angel HDR Image 3 (+/- 0 Stops)

Bright Angel HDR Image 4 (-1 Stop)

Bright Angel HDR Image 5 (-2 Stops)

Tags: arizona, grand canyon, photography, travel
Posted in photography, travel | No Comments »

Copyright Infringements…

October 19, 2009

Keira - Tutu, Frame 6

Every once in a while I google search on myself and my so-called studio name, silverystars just to see what pops up. Its interesting how bold people can be and often times I’ll see my photos posted to others’ blogs or filckr accounts. If they’re done with attribution, I generally won’t have a problem. But last night I found an account on flickr that had one of my photos posted to it and it was the only photo in this person’s gallery there.

So, appropriately, I contacted the Yahoo Copyright and Intellectual Property folks and said this:

Copyright for the the image in the link below is owned by me Scott Nichol and has been posted to your site by a user unknown to me and without my permission. The copyright data for this image is still embedded in the metadata of the JPG image file and viewable on your site. it still indicates the copyright holder to be me, Scott Nichol.

Please remove this image at your earliest convenience:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9097705@N05/574099858/

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at:

Scott Nichol
[address, phone number, etc...]

You would think that this info along with the fact that the person had only one image in their flickr gallery and that my copyright info was still embedded in the photo’s metadata would be enough to satisfy a DMCA takedown.

Interestingly, though, Yahoo!’s response to me was as follows:

Yahoo! would like to help you with your request. However, in order for us to process your complaint, we require that you comply with Yahoo!’s Copyright/IP Policy at http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/details.html and the statutory requirements for a valid DMCA notice (set forth at 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)).

Specifically, in addition to the information you have provided below, please include in your notice:

A statement that you have a *good faith belief* that the use of the content in question is unauthorized; and

A statement by you, *made under penalty of perjury,* that the information provided in your notice is accurate.

Until we receive a complete and effective notice of infringement, Yahoo! will not be able to address your complaint.

Regards,

Copyright/IP Agent, Yahoo! Inc.

What’s really interesting to me is that a statement of good faith belief is more important than empirical evidence when it comes to intellectual property on-line. In the end, once I included these statements in another email, Yahoo! pulled the image.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me with my artwork. And the bottom line is if you’re an artist posting your work on-line, its really important to send out these notices no matter how ridiculous some of the steps can turn out to be. If you don’t follow through, it sends the message that its OK to copy your work without your permission. And if there’s a really serious case of infringement its harder to defend in court if you haven’t already taken reasonable steps to protect your intellectual property in the past.

best,
scott

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Dust Settles

October 18, 2009

a dust settles on my skin
and i imobilize

the rest won’t seem to come right now, but the photos remain…

Dominique - Talc No.2

Dominique - Talc No.3

Dominique - Talc No.4

Posted in fine art nudes, photography | No Comments »

Raymondskill Falls

October 12, 2009

Candace - Raymondskill Falls

i’m often reminded how lucky i am to have my friends in my life. Candace is a magical person and we always seem to work very well together, producing artwork that moves me deeply. this was a wonderful day exploring the primal spaces within the Delaware Water Gap. our conversations that day cemented our friendship deeper and later that night we talked by a bonfire and stared up at the moon.

the kind folks over at deviantArt.com liked this piece so much that they decided to award me with a Daily Deviation for this piece.

Posted in fine art nudes, photography | No Comments »

Equinox

October 10, 2009

Melissa - Hybernia Park, Late August, 2009

hot and moist, the humid
days peel away
and the lush summer crush
slips into the crisp snap
of a fading memory and a place
that i’d rather be

Tags: photography, poetry
Posted in fine art nudes, photography, poetry | No Comments »

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 »

Expectant

October 6, 2009

i’ve spent the past 3-or-so years photographing the female form. tall women, some skinny, some curvy. i’ve seen some of them change, get more tattoos, cut their hair, and threaten to retire. i’ve shot in waterfalls, deserts, the high sierras, and abandoned buildings of all sorts. about the only thing i haven’t done is worked with an expectant mother-to-be. and though it is something that has always intrigued me, i’ve never had the chance to explore the female form in this way.

Amber - Expecting, No.1

i was amazed to watch amber’s interpretation of her body while carrying her unborn son. her movements seemed to be a poetic dance with new found partner. my original plan was to shoot somethings with amber that could be showcased as a maternity product to offer potential clients. however, i found myself quickly falling into the back into a typical figure study with amber. these new curves were unique and beautiful and unlike anything i’d ever seen before.