Thursday
Mar112010

C-it Pre Patty's Day Party

I got to join in on some Irish fun at Sully’s Saloon and help Creative image technology celebrate the 2010 KYSTE Conference Kickoff, and welcomed a partner shooter Chuck Conder. Other than my snipe shooting, the bulk of the (not shown) photos were lit by a pair of speedlite shooting into reflective silver umbrellas. The guests had a blast bumping these very top-heave contraptions, but the night ended for me completely loss-less. I'm pretty sure the party continued after i left, I'm anxious to hearing some stories.

Thursday
Mar112010

Using the BlackBerry on our Macs

This is the Sprint BlackBerry:
Thursday
Mar112010

What's up with custom white balance

You may have seen my picture Floating rose but what you may not know is that it was shot under horrible lighting conditions. I was in a room with a single light source (an old halogen lamp) pointed toward a standard drop ceiling. It was bad. Really bad. But I thought it was an interesting shot so I decided to make some changes to my camera (should be standard practice, by the way). Here is my original shot:

 

 

As you can see it's horrible. But was I worried? Nope, not one bit. It's easy to fix, and there are two ways to do it. 1. Change your white balance in your camera 2. Fix it in post I opted for #1 but my best shot happened to be my first one, before a custom WB was set on my camera. No worries. First, I had to take a picture of a neutral density. I carry a set of cards with me so it's usually no problem. Here is my original shot of my neutral card:

 


 

Now the best thing to do is to use this shot and set your camera to a custom WB by pointing to it, and I did that. But remember that my best shot happened before this. In Aperture (or Lightroom, PhotoShop, whatever) I set my white point to the gray card, and that gave me this pleasing, corrected colorful shot:

 

I simply lifted the adjustment on that shot and applied it to my horrific rose shot and look at the magic that happened:

 


 

Yay for the custom white balance! This is my most dramatic example to date of what setting a correct white balance can do for you. As I said it's standard practice for me now at all shoots.

Tuesday
Nov242009

Mom and Dad's 40th anniversary video

A little video for Mom and Dad on their 40th anniversary.
Wednesday
Sep092009

My Two Wives

My "alter ego" experiment. I had a lot of fun with this shoot because I could finally include my wife and kids into my photo world.

Alter Ego

I'll be doing more and more of these shots soon.