The future of Advertising

This short video tells it like it is.  Thank you to the visionaries who posted it on YouTube...unafraid to tell it like it is.

Check it out:  Catvertising

Let me know what you think.

Photography this weekend

Photographed a Fender American Telecaster Deluxe in the studio this weekend.  Used Alien Bee with shoot through umbrella, Lumopro LP 160 flash and reflector card.  Like the drama of the B&W.  Wish I had gotten a little more light on the head stock.  Practice makes perfect.

Also photographed my bike...no flash, late day sun. Like the shadow of the bike eon the wall.

Maybe in Reading...??

Came across this post on Desert Air Blog.  Well worth a look.

Made

Love the idea of Made in America.  Maybe it's time to revisit this idea.  Buy local. It applies to food and it can apply to many other things.  It is a great way to support our local economy, help our skilled craftsmen and revitalize our US economy.

I'm already supporting local food producers.  What else could we do?

Lots of skills here in Reading.  I'm sitting here wondering what could we do here to tap into the vast underutilized pool of talent here...

Visiting Montana

My wife and I recently went out to Montana to visit my son at MSU in Bozeman.  We spent a week; first vacation in a long time.  Bozeman is a spectacular place and a really fun town.  While there we took a short drive to Yellowstone (just an hour and a half away). It was the last week to visit the park before they closed it for about a month prior to the winter season.  Perfect timing... we practically had to place to ourselves!  I took a few shots while I was there:

Single Frame approaching Fountain Paint Pot, Lower Geyser Basin.

Panorama Lower Geyser Basin near Fountain Paint Pots.

Something new; a vertical panorama of Fountain Paint Pots.

More shots on my web site:
Montana Images.

A Very Funny French Condom Commercial

Came across this really funny French commercial.  Oh those French!

View the Commercial

Good review by Stephen Yolland too.

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Came across this review.  Fits what I know about Steve.  Gotta get the book soon.

http://skaarendesign.tumblr.com/

DeLong Christmas Tree Farm

Foggy fall morning.

Color

Holga look.

High contrast.

Matt Hagan, Die Hard Funny Car driver getting mentally prepared to go from 0 to over 315 mph in 1/4 mile. 

Lil Hot Rod Photography

Photography of Lil Hot Rod bike with model at Rt 13 Dragway.
More images later.

Delmarva Bike Week

Three LightRoom treatments of photo from Delmarva Bike Week.

Cool Pet Photography by Andrew Pinkham

Found this photographer who is doing cool pet photography. Love to try something like this...
Check out his site.
http://www.andrewpinkham.com/

Using Adobe LightRoom

Well I spent a few days on the Eastern Shore photographing during the 2011 Delmarva Bike Week.  I had an assignment for Hot Bike magazine and also photographed two additional bikes.  I did some general coverage of the event including some of the music; found a great group Lower Case Blues, (more on that later).  I also went to see Tyler and Thrill Kill Jill perform their Lucky DareDevil Thrillshow.

Anyway I came home with a bunch of images. I took this opportunity to process my photos in LightRoom which I am still exploring.  There are presets for effects that ship with the application and there are more available online.  This is a great resource to get started:  ProPhoto Top 10 List   I downloaded some from the Adobe ADOBE Exchange.  Some are free and some you have to purchase.  I've only tried the free stuff so far.

Here are some examples; 

Touch of Blue preset

Original

Touch of Blue preset

Killer Vintage Look preset

You may need to do a little tweaking to your photos after the preset is applied but it's  a great place to start and they have been lots of fun to play around with.  You could get the same effects without the presets but using them as a starting point is much quicker and may give you some ideas to try that you might not otherwise think of.

Portraits with new lens

Had a great time at recent portrait session with Jr. drag racer Brittany.  Shooting with my new 70-200mm f2.8 Nikon lens.  Love it!  So clear, great color and quick focus.  Only objection... it is HEAVY!  Short shoots like this no problem but it's a lot to lug around all day.  Worth it for the quality though.  Everything was shot with one bare flash on an overcast day. 

I have tweaked these in Lightroom but haven't done any work in Photoshop yet.  The finals will need some clean up but I really like working in Lightroom; much better work flow especially for large projects. 

David Perry Hot Rod Photographer

I will be shooting a motorcycle for Hot Bike magazine during Delmarva Bike week.

Looking for posing ideas and inspiration I came across this photographer David Perry.
Drool.  Love his stuff.  Check him out here: David Perry

Rumblers Car Show

Went to Brooklyn for the first time on Aug 20th for the Rumblers 11th Annual Custom Kills & Hotrod Thrills show.  It was under the Queens Expressway and it was huge.  Very cool; lots of great cars, vendors and strange people.  Loved it!  The lighting was a challenge with dark under the bridge and full sun outside creating a backlighting situation.  Here is how I handled that:  I shot tight framed shots and tried to shoot along the expressway to minimize the amount of background in the shot.  I also tried using the back lighting, sometimes with a flash fill to get an effect.  Here are a couple of shots:

The back lighting problem.

Using back lighting

Tight Crop

Tight crop

Shooting along the length of the expressway.

Shooting along the length of the expressway.

Using back lighting

Tight crop

See more at: Studio 413

I also shot a model meet-up at this with pin-up girls!  Fun! 
I'll post something about that a little later.

Portrait shoot

Photographing a Junior Dragster Driver today at the track.  Will be taking senior pictures with her dragster and without.  Have some ideas about what I want to do.  Will be using my new 70-20mm f2.8 lens!  Should be fun. 

Brittany

NHRDA Photo Shoot

Had a blast at the National Hot Rod Diesel Association event on Saturday.  Delivered everything using Lightroom.  It's been an interesting 30 days (almost) learning the new program.  Guess I'll have to purchase a copy since my trial runs out in a few days. 

Here is a shot I manipulated completly in Lightroom.

The original Shot.  (80mm, f5.3, 1/250, ISO500)

Rotated, scaled, used preset bleach bypass filter, then
reduced the vibrance and added Post-Crop Vignetting.

NHRDA National Hot Rod Diesel Association

Covering the NHRDA Northeastern Diesel Nationals this weekend for the NHRDA.  Missed it last year but was there in 2009.  Supposed to be bigger and better this year.  Here is a shot from 2009.

Diesel Rat Rod 140 mph 1/4 mile!

Love this idea

Wonderful concept.  Check it out:
http://dearphotograph.com/

I met Big Daddy Don Garlits

On June 25th and 26th Big Daddy was at the Maple Grove Raceway for the MOPAR Action @ The Grove event.  What a cool and easy going guy!  A true racing legend; I was honored to meet him.

Me and Big Daddy in the staging lanes.

That's Big Daddy, still racing at 78 years old!

Here is an overview from Wikipedia:
Donald Glenn "Don" Garlits (born January 14, 1932, Tampa, Florida) is considered the father of drag racing. He is known as "Big Daddy" to drag racing fans around the world. Always a pioneer in the field of drag-racing, he, with the help of T.C. Lemons, relating at least in part to the loss of a portion of his foot in a drag racing accident, perfected the rear-engine "top fuel dragster design". This design is notably safer as it puts most of the fuel processing and rotating or reciprocating parts of the dragster behind the driver. The driver is placed in "clear air" in front of nearly all mechanical components, thus remaining capable of activating a variety of safety equipment in the event of catastrophic mechanical failures or fire. Garlits was an early promoter of a full-body, fire-resistant suit - complete with socks and gloves, often branded as Nomex.
Garlits was the first drag racer to officially surpass the 170, 180, 200, 240, 250, 260, and 270 miles per hour marks in the quarter mile; he was also the first to top 200 in the 1/8 mile. Note that all official NHRA records require a "back-up" (speed and elapsed time within 1% of the record) run to verify the newer, higher level of performance. He has been inducted in numerous halls of fame and has won numerous awards during his career.

Girls and custom motorcycles

I'm excited about setting up and doing some photography at the 929 Customs open house on June 4th in Strasburg, PA.  I will be shooting four or five custom motorcycles for 929. We will have models there to pose with the bikes. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do. Key light with my Alien Bee and a shoot through umbrella. Maybe a key light for the model's hair and a ring flash.  Will experiment prior to the day.

Available light at Maple Grove Raceway

OK at Maple Grove on a sunny day is a great place to shoot.  The track faces south so in the morning the sun is coming from the east and in the afternoon I shoot from the other side of the track with my back to the sun which is coming from the west.  First tip, wear a shirt with a collar. If you are out there all day the back of you neck will most certainly get sunburned and if you're wearing shorts the back of you legs need protection too.

Here is a shot taken at 10:30 in the morning.  Camera settings were f5.6 at 1/1250, ISO 400 with a plus 1/3 of a stop setting and the picture characteristics set for vivid.  Light was mixed with clouds so conditions were changing I shot in shutter priority and with a daylight white balance.  This is the jpeg exactly as it came out of the camera, just sampled down for this post.  The key for this shot was the fast shutter speed. My camera was a Nikon D200 with an AFS 18 to 200mm  3.5 to 5.6  G ED zoom lens.  I positioned myself about 50 feet, (really guessing on this) down the track so the car drove into position about one car length from the starting line.

This image is nice with a straight on look. You can see the car twisting under power with the left front tire off the ground.  If I were to tweak this image I might open up the shadows just a bit to create some separation between the tire and the track surface.

I often take a step to the right and try to get a little more of a side view while still seeing the entire front of the car.  This is a good angle because you can usually see the rear tire wrinkle as power is applied.

This image is taken at mid day; light was almost directly overhead, you can see the sun reflecting off of the visor of her helmet. I usually keep it on shutter priority and slow my shutter speed down to about 250 to increase my depth of field. If I had to guess that is what I would have thought this exposure was made at but surprise it was shot with exactly the same settings as the previous one f5.6 at 1/1250. I probably walked right off of the line and back to the burn out box to take this shot.  I did do a little Photoshop work on this one sharpening a bit and lightening the riders face and the front of her leathers to open up the details.

This image was shot at the end of the day.

Backlighting

Well the 2011 drag racing season has started at Maple Grove Raceway. I was out there this past Friday night and Saturday to cover the American Drag Racing League, (ADRL) first ever event at the Grove.  Series includes five all-professional, eighth-mile drag racing classes: Pro Extreme Motorcycle, Extreme Pro Stock, Extreme 10.5, Pro Nitrous and Pro Extreme, the quickest and fastest full-bodied, door slammer class in the world.  These guys are F A S T!  Door cars were topping 200 mph in 1/8th of  mile and motorcycle were topping 160 mph!

So how to photograph these land rockets.   Friday I arrived at the end of the day so the sun was low in the sky. I decided to try some backlit shots at the starting line.  Light was low so I used two LumoPro 160 flashes with radio popper remotes to light the shadow side of the cars.

Shot:   f3.5 at 1/1250

I balanced the flashes with a little trial and error to light the cars but not overpower the drama of the image.  I used one flash at  1/4 power and widest angle zoom directly facing the side of the car.   The second flash was forward of the car to light the front; set at 1/2 power and zoomed to 85.  No stands I just set the flashes on the concrete barrier walls along the sides of the track.

Shot:  f5 at 1/1250

Burn outs put a lot a white into the pictures which could be a problem.  Using flash I usually shoot in manual mode and I just let it get blown out but shooting at 1/1000 or 1/1250 I usually hold some detail.

Shot: f4.5 at 1/800

Shooting the motorcycles posed a little different challenge. I lit them directly from the side with two flashes on the barrier wall pointed straight at the side of the motorcycle. They were about 8 feet apart on either side of me and set to 1/2 power.  I positioned myself about 20 feet past the starting line and panned with the motorcycle.  I got down low to capture the second motorcycle in the far lane.  I slowed the shutter speed down a bit for the panning but just to 1/800 to make sure I captured the detail as well as a sense of motion.

One added note: Many sports photographers pack big glass but that's not always necessary.  I shot these with a fixed length 60mm lens.  I like the smaller lenses, they're much lighter and you can zoom with your feet.  Just sayin'

Please check back, I will be posting some additional images from this shoot and discussing available light shooting as well as using gradient mapping for post processing.  You can see more images from this shoot at: Studio 413 

Alien Bee

Just got an alien Bee Strobe.  How cool. I can make it fire with another flash, it has a sensor, tethered with a wire or using my Radio Poppers.  Here's a picture just using the raw light and a fill card.

OK a little harsh but a start. Hmmm, modifiers next.

Flash Bus Tour with David Hobby and Joe McNally

I just attended the Philadelphia workshop with these guys and well... WOW is the first thing that comes to mind. The show, and I do mean show, went from 10 am until 5:30 pm and and it seemed like ten minutes.  They were both really fun and interesting to listen to and boy do they know light. All of their explanations were step-by-step and really clear. If you have a chance to see them I highly recommend it.  Watch this space for some new flash photos.

Fun Film

I'm interested in type and follow some typ blogs. Came across this interesting use of type..

Bicycle Film Festival

Sunrise January 11, 2011

What a spectacular sunrise this morning. Photographed  1/125 at f/3.2 with a 50 mm lens. White balanced for Fluorescent light. And it doesn't come close to capturing the beauty of the actual scene. I also shot it with a Tungsten, Auto, Sunlight and Shade White balance but the Fluorescent captured the best detail in the red clouds.

Sunrise in Mohnton January 11, 2011 6:12 am

White Balance Test

Nice sunrise this morning so I went out on my deck and did a little test. I created four versions of the the view (looking East) from my deck. For each view I changed the white balance. Here are the results.

Auto

Fluorescent

Incandescent

Sunlight