Brent's Planet

Using the BlackBerry on our Macs

2010-03-08T21:59:28Z

This is the Sprint BlackBerry:

Mom and Dad's 40th anniversary video

2009-11-24T19:59:59Z

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

My Two Wives

2009-09-09T14:54:27Z

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.

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

I saw the light

2009-08-31T20:10:11Z

Here is a quick shot done in my basement. I used Pocket Wizards to trigger 2 flashes, the one in my hand as key light and another one behind me for back light.

Some cropping was done in post.

Papa John's waterfall

2009-08-12T20:15:22Z

While out exploring with my son, looking for waterfalls we happened upon this gem located at Papa John's International HQ. They have a nice walking path there that seems to be open to everyone (that knows about it).

My settings were: Camera: Canon EOS 40D Exposure: 0.1 sec (1/10) Aperture: f/20.0 Focal Length: 51 mm ISO Speed: 100

HDR time!

2009-07-29T18:31:38Z

Time for some HDR shots. It's my humble opinion that, like special effects in movies, HDR is best (in general) when use subtly. The dreamy, ghosty pics that are posted quite often cheapen the intent of HDR, and that is to capture more details than a single shot can and come closer to the human eye's capacity. So these pics would probably not even be recognizable as HDR by current standards but I believe that I'm using HDR as it was intended.

These were all made using 3 exposures bracketed at +/- 2 stops. Then combined using the Photomatix Pro plugin for Aperture .

July 4th Fireworks

2009-07-22T14:18:18Z

My shots from July 4th fireworks show. Mostly had a 30 second exposure for each shot, and varied my aperture from f/11-f/22.

Now I can't wait for a good lightning storm...

Quick Tips: Photographing Fireworks

2009-07-01T23:31:31Z

While browsing around prepping for July 4th shooting I found this article at Canon's Learning Center. From the article:

Get out of AUTO! Shooting fireworks is one specialized situation where you simply cannot expect good results with the camera’s mode dial in the full-auto green zone. Nor will autofocus work reliably. For the best and most consistent results, make sure that your exposure and lens focus are both set to Manual (and try pre-setting the lens focus to infinity.Turn your camera’s mode dial to “M” for Manual, and be sure to set the AF/MF switch on your lens to “MF”. Now, turn the focus ring until you’re set at infinity focus. Some Canon lenses have a distance scale printed on them for this purpose; the infinity symbol is a figure that looks like the number eight turned sideways. Others (like the popular EF-S 18-55mm kit lens) do not — if you don’t have a distance scale, with the lens set to “MF” and the front of the lens facing you (as if you’re staring into the lens), turn the focus ring with your fingers clockwise until it stops. Now leave it there; do not set it back to “AF” until you’re done shooting fireworks.

What's up with custom white balance

2009-05-27T20:08:33Z

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.

Floating rose

2009-03-04T12:24:59Z

A rose floating over an industrial background.

Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Exposure: 4 Aperture: f/3.2 Focal Length: 50 mm ISO Speed: 100 Exposure Bias: 0 EV Flash: Off Encoding Process: Baseline DCT, Huffman coding Exposure Program: Aperture-priority AE Color Space: sRGB Custom Rendered: Normal Exposure Mode: Auto White Balance: Manual Scene Capture Type: Standard