Peekfoto

The Big Fudd...

2012-02-10T21:05:00.000-05:00

I have been a long time fan of the Fudrucker's hamburger chain. I have dined at the original Fuddruckers in San Antonio not to far from the airport. I was disappointed a number of years ago when the Fuddruckers in Grand Rapids closed (it we eventually replaced with a Carraba's with is another fav of mine) so when ever I am flying through the Detroit Airport, I try to stop by the Fuddruckers in Concourse C. The problem is that there is usually a line out into the concourse and I don't have enough time between flights. So the other day on my way to White Plains NY after getting off the airplane, I looked down the concourse and saw no line at Fud's, this was a good sign... So I thought.

Walking into the eatery, I noticed there were no cashiers but three kiosks. Ok, at first I thought this looked efficient.

Now I have always liked the 1/3 pounder with the pumped melted cheese on it. This option was not available as there was not a cheese pump in sight. For 0.75 more I could get cheese on my hamburger. After a number of options on the Kiosk, I was finally able to get a drink for $2.75.

The kiosk accepted a credit card and if you wanted to pay cash, you had to pay the non-existent cashier. So I became the invisible man waiting at the cashier station. It was not until my burger was ready and the gal behind the counter was keeling out FIFTY... NUMBER FIFTY! After I got her attention that I was at the cash register holding up a ticket and cash and not the food delivery counter did she realize I wanted to pay cash. In all actuality, I probably could have just picked up the burger and she would not have been the wiser. At least that way I would have gotten my money's worth.

So she took my money and turned away. I had to get her attention again so she could give me a cup to with she grabbed a cup and sat it upside down onto of the kiosk. Am glad we have antibodies to fight off germs as I am sure that was not the most sterile of surfaces.

Obviously there were plenty of seats available so I found one in the corner to consume on of the biggest culinary disappointments in my life.

I could go into great detail here describing the pathetic looking burger but suffice it to say, I will not be returning to this Fuddruckers EVER! If given the opportunity I may attempt a run at a regular retail store but never in a terminal.

Fuddruckers... You may only have one more opportunity to impress.

Take care all... Doug

Expo - Saturday Summary

2012-02-05T23:33:00.000-05:00

The morning started off at 7:30 with Rick Ferro. Rick is a renowned portrait photographer who has worked with the Miami Dalphins made the Walt Disney World people. Rick covered a range of topics including posing, lighting, and business practices.

After Rick spoke, David Ziser introduced one of the most prolific wedding photographers in the world today. Australian born and now living in Southern California Jerry Ghionis took the platform and spoke of relational photography.

How we interact with our brides and what our mindset is makes all the difference in how we approach our profession. Seeing the person you are photographing through the eyes of a loved one changes how we see and photograph that person.

The afternoon was left to the trade show. There one aspect of the trade show that stuck out to me were the number of processing labs with booths.

Above is the ribbon cutting by David Ziser and his group. Below Sigma made its presents known with some really big Glass. I can't say much for Canon and Nikon which both had booths but really didn't bring anything to the game. No bodies, no lenses, nada!

FJ Westcott lighting brought to the show a really unique opportunity. Using their TD-6 content lights and some really really big softboxes, they set up four shooting stations with models and all. The did this at Photoshop World and brought it into town.

Above is a group of photographs that says it all... Shooting & Chimping! Below is one go the models that were being shot. I took these with my iPhone 4s.

Here is David Ziser who originally was not going to be speaking at the Expo found himself with a Lightroom 4 Beta demo.Being the organizer it is amazing he was abel to carve out the time to present anything. He told us that he was able to get Adobe to come is as a sponsor as long as he did the demo on LR4 Beta.

The day finished up with another seminar on creativity presented by Joel Grimes. Joel is color blind in that he can not see greens and to be able to produce the beautiful images is not only a credit to him, but the human experience. Joel shared with the group his creative process, seeing the end before you start shooting.

Well, there is a quick update on Saturdays activities. I'll update again tomorrow night.

Take care... Doug

Expo - Friday Summary

2012-02-04T23:50:00.000-05:00

Before I get going with todays summary of the PhotoPro Expo I wanted to put up an image I took last night before I went to bed. This was an iPhone 4s shot from my bedroom window. Post was done in an App called Perfectly Clear. The camera in that phone continues to amaze me.

Friday morning started off with Jason & Rebecca Weaver, their topic was about creating sticky customers. How and what we can do to create a relationship with our customers so the stay our customers. That seminar was held in the Marriott. Most all of the other seminars were held in the convection center. You can see what it looks like below.

Following was the marketing master planner Sarah Petty which presented her BUMP process. The session attendees learned about Branding, Understanding your numbers, Marketing, and Promotional process in managing and promoting your business.

After a break for lunch we were all wowed by the imagery of Vincent LaForet. An amazing and Pulitzer prize winning photographer we learned that the breakthrough video Reverie was his first shooting with a camera that took video. Here is the Canon link if you have not watched it.

I had not gotten very much sleep the night before and I knew if I did not want to fall asleep during one of the seminars I needed a nap. After about an hour of Vincent's look at this wonderful image I have created, I snuck back to my room and took a good nap. When I returned, he was still going at it. They were dazzling images and very inspiring but my sleep deprivation needed attention.

After Vincent LaForet was done, Lindsay Adler came on stage for her presentation.

Lindsay is a New York Fashion photographer and was presenting her work and motivating the attendees to consider a fashion flair in their portrait and wedding photography as an option to provide to their clients.

The day was really getting long and yo could see it in the crowd. The final speaker of the night was Kirk Vuclain. All I will say is the following image explains the rest of the evening,

Kirk was a hoot with plenty of takeaway information. Probably the most entertaining of the entire expo. His message was to make your studio the coolest one in town.

That is going to do it for tonight. Cya... Doug

Expo - Thursday Summary

2012-02-02T23:30:00.000-05:00

I found where the photo competition was being held in our hotel and I enter this dimly lit room. A number of people are sitting in the from of the room looking at an image somewhere has entered in the competition. The room is as quiet as a mortuary at a viewing. Suddenly one of the judges calls out a number there starts justifying why that chose that particular number. These end up ranking the image in the competition. They would spend ten minutes on one picture with the photographer describing the emotional connection (or not) they they were trying to express when the captured the photo. Enough for me, I was outta there. I was going back to the room and catch up on some stuff when I ran into the man himself, David Ziser. As he saw me come out of the competition room, I asked home where all he excitement was. David directed me to the second floor.

This is where stuff was happening. This image was taken a little later as you can see Ziser across the image getting a shot of the group. So take a group of photographers in a hotel they do not have to drive away from, add some beer and wine with a scoring competition and what do you have. A secondary competition only for cash. People would pay $10 to get a dry-erase card to put their name on and when the image was brought up on screen (from the actual competition) people would write down the number they though the judges would score the image. After ten images the one who got the most correct guesses won half the pot. The other half went to the association. It kind of reminded me of the movie Rat Race when all the old gamblers were in the hotel suite betting on wich of the five or so hotel employees hanging from the curtain rods would last the longest. It was fun to watch.

Here is a zoomed shot of David Ziser on the other side of the room. These were taken with my iPhone 4s and run through an app called Perfectly Clear but are still a little noisy as the light was low in the room.

Tomorrow we start out bright and early at 7:00 so it is off to bed.

Cya... Doug

Expo - Arrival

2012-02-02T16:00:00.000-05:00

Today was real a day to get here and get settled. There is a seminar this evening but the real learning starts tomarrow.

I arrived in Cincinnati this morning to attend the PhotoPro Expo 2012. I am super excited as this is my first foray into photoaphic conventionering. I have been to a number of aviation conventions and there is always so much to see in such a compressed timeframe.

Exiting the airplanes presented a striking image of the economy in this area as seen below.

When the economy tanked, ComAir had been one of the largest regional airlines in the country meriting their own terminal in Cincinnati. The had been bought out by Delta Airlines while Delta was using CVG as an international hub. Post economic crash, the ComAir terminal was closed and was incorporated into the main terminal.

Enter the Northwest/Delta merger. There goes the international hub. Detroit was already serving that capacity. If the lack of people in the terminal at 10:30 on a Thursday morning does not make it clear, the image below brings even more clarity.

I was able to get a room at the Marriott which was the convention hotel and the one that was directly connected to the Greater Northern Kentucky Convention Center. This was the view I was given from my 12th floor room of the downtown Cincinnati waterfront.

Once I get going with the various seminars it will be non-stop action here is the line-up for my next few days.

Thursday

7:30-10:00 PM for Youth Sports with John Pittman and Jim Seers

Friday

7:30-9:00 Client Relations with Rebecca and Jason Weaver

9:30-12:30 Marketing withnSara Petty

1:30-2:00 Lightroom 4 Preview with David Ziser

2:00-5:00 Future of Photography with Vincent Laforet

5:00-7:00 Fashion with Lindsay Adler

8:30-11:00 Cool Studio with Kirk Voclaim

Saturday

7:30-9:00 Lighting with Rick Ferro

9:30-12:30 Style with Jerry Ghionis

12:30-4:00 Trade Show

4:00-6:30 Artistic with Joel Grimes

Sunday

7:00-8:30 Speedlight with Syl Arena

9:00-12:00 Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It with Scott Kelby

12:00-4:00 Trade Show

4:00-6:30 Surviving with Skip Cohen

I'll have more later... Doug

A Timely Christmas Gift

2012-02-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

This all started this past Christmas. Admittedly I am a very hard person to get Christmas presents for. Generally if I have a need and the money is available I will purchase the item. So this past Christmas I was the only one in our family that got absolutely nothing and I was fine with that as I had so much fun seeing the joy on others faces as they opened their gifts.

So in early January, my dear wife suggested I go to this photography she in Cincinnati. This was a shock to me as I have never considered asking her if I can go to these events as I am already away from home so much. I must have been surprised as my reaction did not impress upon her how much I would enjoy this as she asked if I really liked it. The significance of this gift of time has sunk in even further as the Expo approaches.

The next few days I will have some posts regarding the Show and Expo.

Take care all... Doug

Ding Dong The Droid is Dead

2011-11-16T22:20:00.001-05:00

I have been waiting at least four years for this time that day in October when I was able to get an iPhone. Surviving the Blackberry Pearl and then a first generation Android, I was finally rewarded with a smart phone that lacks the clunkiness of Microsoft... Err, well, it might just as well be. Google will eventually get it but the software exceeded the sorry Gen 1 of the Droid. The folks in Cupertino CA have something going when they can release a new product in an old form factor hand have it so sucessful. I am talking of the iPhone 4S. It is the same shape and feel as the iPhone 4 but all new insides.

This is not going to be a post on how much I like my iPhone 4S but rather a review of one of the iPhone Apps.

TrueHDR is an App that worked ok with the iPhone 4 but when Apple changed the sensor to handle light a little better in the 4S and added the fifth optic element something happened. In a good way. When you start the app you get to choose how you are going to control the app.

Auto Capture will take three exposures and work its magic.
SemiAuto Capture waits for you to select to locations in the screen. One for highlights and one for shadows. The you press the shutter button and the app takes two exposures based on your selection and then works its magic.
Manual Capture is for the real control freak and really does little to enhance the usability of the app. You select a highlight area and click the shutter, then a shadow area and again you must click the shutter. Seams like a waste of time, but like I say, it can appease the control freak.

I like to use the SemiAuto Capture option and is what the following images are an example of. Excuse the fact that I am simply using my hotel room for the example but it serves the purpose for this post.

Here you can see the two locations in the image that I have selected to be used for the highlights and shadows of the HDR. When the camera shutter is pressed it will make two different exposures based on the selection I made.

Here it has taken both exposures and is waiting for the second one to display. When you press the Merge button, the app goes to work keeping you abreast of its progress with the following screen.

Once both images have been merged you are presented with four sliders to tweak the image. Here again there is not much to do here except for the previously mentioned control freak.

The sliders are self explanitory. At the bottom are some options which include some Fx presets. The presets available are Sepia, Retro, Retro-II, Mono, XPro RedShift, and Vingnette. You can select any of the presets and if yo decide you don't like any of the just click on the last selected and it goes back to the original merged file. Once a preset is selected you can also go back and make adjustments with the sliders by selecting the little slider icon at the bottom.

When you his the save button you really don't get to see the finished image but rather you have to exit the app and go to your camera roll to see the finished product. Here is a comparison between the iPhone 4S and the 4S camera after the TrueHDR processing.

I don't know about you, but I'm sold. If you want to enhance the already fantastic camera iPhone 4S, I can not more highly recommend TrueHDR for your iPhone Apps collection

That will do it for me today. Take care... Doug

Wedding Composite

2011-10-27T15:52:00.000-04:00

Every composite image has at it's core a destination where the artist must in-vision the end in order to know how to navigate from the beginning. Sometimes though a composite may arise from the ashes so to speak. Todays post is about the latter and not the former.

In todays example I am using a bride who signed the second verse of a song to he imminent husband. Obviously this can not all be captured in one image so a composite image lends itself to this situation. Here are the steps I took.

First was an image that can be used as a background. Of course the elements obstructing the background must be cloned out in order to provide a clean slate for the subjects in the foreground. One point here is that you may want to wait until you have the subjects positioned in the foreground befor you completely clone out the background. This way you don't have to do as much cloning as the foreground images bloc much of what gets cloned anyway.

In the case above I chose to completely clone out the background subjects so I could use this image another time rather than just for this composited image. From one of the images with the bride and groom I extracted the groom for this image.

All images are on separate layers to allow a logical stacking of the subjects. Below I have the bride in the position she was standing in relation to the groom.

The bride had to be extracted in order to make the stacking of the brides work for the composite. Below is the next image (sign) of the bride.

There are a total of five images of the bride that needed to be extracted from other images. This was a simple but tedious process. Selecting the bride from each of the images and copying them into the composite image was the easy part. Each bride layer had to have a layer mask to isolate the bride from the selection of the original image. This was the tedious part but well worth it to make it half way believable.

These two layers were critical in aligning the brides for the composite. Below you can see how they gave me a reference to each head and shoulder of the bride.

Now comes the tricky part. While the brides are placed in a stack, the overlap of parts must be worked to again make it believable. This first image shows the stack uncorrected. You can see where the vail is blocking the dress and arm of the bride stacked behind.

Through a series of selections, opacity adjustments, the image became more believable. Below is the layer of parts that needed to be added to show some transparency in the vail. (It is shown on a black background so you can better see the example).

Part of the problem I had with the vail is being transparent, it brought over the background from the original image. Some cloning... Ok, a lot of cloning was employed to eradicate the remnant background. The image above is not all on the same layer as that would not have worked at all. Each part has its own layer because it required a different level of opacity to make it realistic.

So now with all the layers on to show the entire sequence we have an almost finished composited image.

This would be fine for a final image except for anyone who was at the wedding, There was a trellis made from branches that set the outdoor scene for the couple. In another image I had extracted the trellis which in and of itself was a monumental task but now I have one. So I dropped it in just in front of the background, did a little free transformation and viol á, a composited image of a beautiful moment in a scenic outdoor wedding.

Double click on the last image as it will actually get bigger than the other images in the post.

Enjoy... Doug

Morning the Loss

2011-10-07T01:17:00.002-04:00

Yesterday morning I thought it only appropriate to display on my iPad, this Apple logo that I worked up in recognition of the death of Steve Jobs. I am not a person who morns the loss of celebrities and the rich and famous. I do not spend a lot of time morning the loss of close acquaintances but rather enjoy the memories of the times I have been privileged to know and be in their presence.

I do however reflect, and recognize the greatness of individuals that have passed. Steve Jobs was one such individual. Listening to the news on Thursday the descriptive words were visionary, genius, inspired as well as inspiring. All these are true about Steve Jobs and so the best way I know how to celebrate this creative visionary' legacy is to make it to my meeting on the 14th at the Verizon office to purchase my iPhone 4s or as it has been said since his passing the iPhone Four Steve.

It will be good, I am sure. Take care all... Doug

Jobs Dies

2011-10-05T21:08:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has been following Steve Jobs in the past couple of years can not be too surprised about this news today. Death is a reality in all our lives and impacts us in ways that we can not know when we do not look at deaths door.

Without going into a litany of discoveries and accolades I will simply make this statement.

Good Job Steve!

Chroma Key

2011-10-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

Chroma Key is a process that is used in still and video productions that allow a subject to look like they are in a different location. One would look at the following image and assume the man is in front of a window.

In reality the man was shot in a studio and later dropped into a background. This is often called a green screen (blue is used also) and it has been around for some time. Did you ever wonder how the weatherman appears to be standing in front of the weather map not knowing where to point or missing the thunderstorm when they do point at something. That is chroma key. This process starts out with a photo of a subject in front of a green screen. This requires specific lighting because you want a good separation between the screen and the subject. If this is no accomplished, the green will bleed to the subject. Especially in women's hair.

With a good consistent background you can just use the color range command in the Select menu. If there is some variance in the background holding the shift key while clicking the differing gradations of the background will select the whole color range. I do this on a copy of the original image so I can just delete the selection after I have expanded the selection by one pixel (Select-Modify-Expand).

Once the subject is isolated, drop the background in and its onto blending. The image in this example was done somewhat quickly from stock so the lighting is off just a bid but you get the idea. Below is the layer stack from this project.

Two adjustment layers were added to the subject to better blend him with he background. Both are clipping masks as designated by the down arrows to the left of the layer. The first was a levels adjustment to set the light quality as close as I could given the lighting pattern. The second was a cooling filter to match the background.

That's Chroma key.

Take care all... Doug

2011-10-02T17:40:00.000-04:00

Wow, Where did September go. Ok I was on vacation for three weeks but still, wouldn't you think I would have time to do a blog post here and there. Oh well, guess that is water under the bridge now.

It's been a little over a month since I shot my son's wedding and the images have been coming slow. I am not sure it I am being to picky or if I am too emotionally attached to the images. Usually I can fly thought image selection but this time it came slow. It has been spaced out a little also. Just last week we shot the rings. It is nice to have the couple local to be able to do that with. So with those all shot it was into Photoshop to get the finished. Here are some of the examples.

These are all straight forward shots of stacked rings. The on one below with the bible is slightly different ion that both rings make the heart shadow in the gutter of the bible. Interesting though is how the lighting creates relatively the same heart shape while the grooms ring is laying down and the brides is standing up. The shot was taken with tungsten light (the ceiling light in the room overhead) with an EF50 f/1.4 USM at 1/6 seconds at f/11 and 100 ISO. I needed f/11 to get both rings in focus with that 50mm lens and ended up stacking sharpness (-100) adjustment brushes in Lightroom.

I would have used onOnes Focal point but was getting error messages when I went to the plugin from CS5 so I had to improvise. I fixed the memory error by rebooting but didn't want to in the heat of battle so I improvised and liked what I had.

The next image I have receive the most comments from as it seems the brides ring is floating in air.

This one surprisingly was one of the easiest to edit. It was only three layers in CS5. The image below is where I started. The grooms ring is about eight inches behind the brides. It was shot with the same lens only at 1/100 second at f/4 however the light was constant fluorescent. I positioned the camera to have the stones in the circle of the grooms ring. My first action was to do a rough selection of the rings and put them on their own layer. Next was to fill the Wii controller and rings. Looking back now it would have been easier to just create my own background but the blending of the isolated rings would have been much harder. Finally on the third layer I copied the brides ring, selected and filled to black, compressed it with free transform, and finally ran a gaussian blur on it. When it made the trip back to Lightroom I sharpened, lightened, and boosted the clarity with the localized adjustment brush (I just love that thing).

The last ring shot was somewhat of a progression project. Below is the stating image right out of the camera. It was shot with an EF 24-105 f/4 IS USM at 1/160 second, f/18 and 100 ISO. Shot on a piece of foam-core board and lit with an Alien Bee's Ring flash and way low power.

Isolated and fixed up, the image above was the final until my son said it looked like an advertisement. It was off tho the web to find a Helzberg logo which none were going to work without some serious help. At least not to the size I wanted to use.

I brought a file into CS5 and used the background eraser tool which left the enlarges small jpg file all jagged. Spent some time with the pen tool creating a vector mask which I could much easier scale to my hearts content resulting in the image you see above.

That's going to do it for now, hopefully it will not be November before my nest post.

Take care... Doug

Secrets in the Closet

2011-09-01T23:25:00.016-04:00

Back in July I posted about Leaving Paradise from Palm Beach Florida. Had some really nice images from that layover but I forgot to put one up that I had to process a little more.

This is a pano shot from the shore of Palm Beach to the west which ironically show downtown West Palm Beach in the image. I was walking around shooting in the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden and was unaware of the impending deluge. I knew I wanted to get a pano across the iner-coastal waterway but had no idea of what loomed beyond.

As it turned out, I was able to get back to the car without getting wet except for the beads of sweat form the incessantly hot and humid South Florida weather.

I was able to make it across the bridge and grabbed this image imminent squall. You can make out the double towers of the historic Breakers Hotel in the background.

Need to pack it in for the night. Take care... Doug

What a month!

2011-08-27T00:53:00.000-04:00

Have you ever had one of those times where you were so busy doing other things that you hardly got anything done that you might have done had you not been so busy. Yep, if you got that, you know what my August has been like.

Earlier this year my youngest son Tom trekked down to Chattanooga TN to propose to his girlfriend of three and a half years. That was in May. Samantha was working as a signer in a school system and could not move until the end of the school year. It was announced that the 20th of August would be the day. This took all those wedding planning guides and threw them out the window. No more 18 months before, 12 months before, or even 6 months before. Not only was there going to be an aggressive planning schedule, two other dynamics of this joyous moment were present. First the day is my wife's birthday and second, they asked if I would want to do the photography.

Engagement photos.

Of course I was honored to do the photography but also hesitant at the same time. I had to find out if it would be alright with my wife as I would miss sitting next to her experiencing the joy together. Did I want to work that hard on a day that I should be relaxed and enjoy the moment. After all, it would be my first solo wedding. All things considered, the answer was yes. Even though I knew I was jumping right into the middle of the fire.

One of the benefits of this decision was being able to work closely with Samantha though the summer and almost everyday of my vacation in August (so much for the Harley ride). She has really become my daughter, not just daughter-in-law. I did not realize that I would become one of the goto people on the day of the wedding but I had a lot of fun shooting all the preparation shots from nails to hair.

The plan was to shoot the bride with the wedding party and then the groom with the wedding party while they would not see each other until the alter. This is where the schedule started going south. We had to shuttle between two different towns which took more time than expected. The timeline started to go long to the point that the chairs were not at the park thirty minutes before the service. The first thing that went was the pre-cerimony shoot and some of the decorations at the cerimony. The chairs showed up, people got seated and the party started relatively close to the appointed time.

It had rained really hard in the morning and we did not know if we were going to have to shift to plan B. This was partly why the chairs were late. The clouds cleared and the grass was dry so the park turned out to be a wonderful location for the ceremony. We were able to shuffle though all the official shots and get the group off to the reception. I will talk about the ceremony next week when I get more images up. I will leave you with this one as i did not notice it until I was in post. The emotion Samantha expresses reflects the entire ceremony.

You may need to zoom in, but you will see it.

Take care... Doug

Don't Loose Hope

2011-07-27T23:30:00.000-04:00

When you are shooting people, there are always going to be angles that might turn out to be less flattering than others. I am not going to show the original image because that would not be nice. On this engagement shoot we were at a lighted bridge that covered a creek and had Samantha climb up on the beam that represents the hand rail. I was shooting just slightly off her back and the six in with rail was not kind to her bottom side. With the camera angle and the rail doing unkindly things, her rump was not only not right, it did not represent her true figure. None of this was her fault and during the initial selection she rejected it.
Not content with here rejection, I later brought it back and worked on it to see if I could make lemonade from what she thought was a lemon.

I really like the look over the shoulder look because of what it does to the head-neck-shoulder line. Given another chance and I don't know why I did not see it during the shoot, I would move her hair off of or straighten it over her shoulder.

After strategic cropping and some retouching, Samantha was really happy with the image. Moral of the story, don't give up on an image until you have taken a closer look.

Take care all... Doug

Engagement Round Two

2011-07-25T20:00:00.015-04:00

Between being gone and running over to Wisconsin for an exploratory venture for the wedding shoot, I have been one busy boy. I was able to finish editing the engagement photos and upload them to the lab for a first round of prints including a spiral bound print book. Samantha really loved the images but with anyone has her own taste. I had provided a series of images with different treatments for her to select from. The one of her backlit by the sun she liked but thought her eyes needed to pop a little more. Definition was definitely in order.

The only known way to do this right was a trip to photoshop. Most of what I wanted to do in PS I can do in Lightroom but removing improving the area below her eyes and make an adjustment to her arm would require a trip to Photoshop. You can see in the image below Samantha's eyes show much more contrast between the highlights and shadows. This is the definition that draws the viewers eyes.

When an image has as much light in the background as the one above, you would normally think you eyes would be draws to the brighter light. The secret here is to to create a funnel of contrast that draws the view into the eyes of your subject. Ad to that some nice sharpening to the eyes and you mind is compelled to look into the eyes.

Samantha is a very slender lady, but even with that, the camera does bad things to body parts. She asked if I could work on her arm in the foreground so it does not look as large. Thus my other reason for jumping into Photoshop. A couple of clicks in the liquify filter and her arm looks like it really does rather than how the camera compressed it.

Here again, the big, big key is moderation. A little bit of Liquify goes a long, long way. Tomorrow I will have another image that was an example of not loosing hope in your imagery.

Take care for now... Doug

Should you shoot your children?

2011-07-16T12:31:00.000-04:00

Shocking, just shocking I tell you! What kind of post title is that? Shooting your children!

Ok it might be a little title shock but the topic is real. Many of today's photographers got their start by taking images of their children and that is a fine way to hone your craft. This usually works great until the kids hit pre-teen and then it is revolution and uncooperative time. Give it a few more years and they are ok with it. When photography starts to hit the pocketbook then they are really ok with it. When it comes to wedding photography I would imagine it could get a little dicey.

This is where I am. My youngest son and his fiancé asked if I wanted to shoot their wedding. I had to think about it and then asked them one question. Did they want me to shoot it because they liked my images or did they ask because they did not want to hurt my feeling as a photographer.

From the images I have taken of them they really like what they see. This was a good answer. Now I had to ask myself a question. Did I want to do that much work at their wedding or just sit back and enjoy the time. Was it going to be to weird photographing my son's wedding? Finally would it interfere with my participation in the wedding. The answers were yes, no, and no. What does the father of the groom do anyhow other than walk down the isle behind his wife being ushered to her seat. As far as weirdness, it will be different but a great honor to do.

So the next thing to do was get some engagement photos as their wedding is this August. This seems like an aggressive timetable but they are both of the mindset that wedding planning is dragged out too long and they don't want to delay the inevitable. They have been in a close relationship for over three years so there is no issue there.

So last Saturday we went driving around to a couple of different location and got some nice images.

These two were actually take last and the sun was already gone so the use of a tripod was in order. I was using the 5D Mk II with an EF 24-70 f/2.8 L mounted. Exposure was 1/13 second at f/5.6 and an ISPO of 1600 while the focal length was dialed in at 35 mm. I did use a flash to expose the coupe and the 1/13th second was definitely dragging the shutter.

This image was shot on a little lighted bridge earlier but the sun was not a factor except for illumination. This was more of a plain Jane image but I played with it in an iPad App and came up with this cepia-grunge look using a little selective focus.

Time will tell about shooting the wedding but we are all looking forward to the event.

I'll keep you posted, take care... Doug

Leaving Paradise

2011-07-14T20:39:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday I had to extend my hotel room in West Palm Beach FL and when I did the gentleman at the counter made the statement that I got to spend another day in paradise. This is what my dad used to call it from their porch in Fort Myers FL. It is amazing how many people migrate back and forth to the South Florida environment. Way too many people for me. While I enjoy visiting Florida now and again, I'm sorry, I would not want to live here. So to me leaving paradise is a good thing, especially after three days of hanging around then same hotel.
Ok it wasn't that bad. We did have a car for most of Tuesday so we drove around some and I was able to get a little photo walk in. One of the other pilots is a huge "dido head" so we had to hunt down Rush Limbaugh' Southern Command. It was a gate of course on the northern end of the the island that is Palm Beach.

The photo walk was a pleasure and here are som images from that experience.

These two images above are of Palm Beach City Hall. Knew the relatively clear sky's with a circular polarizer would provide some really nice blues.

As we were walking down the sidewalk I saw this mirror and stopped surprising the two others guys that were with me. One of the guys was into photography many years ago and asked what I saw. I told him the mirror but he had no idea what was really going on in my head. The mirror had no appearance of support and I just found it so interesting.

It started to become an educational photo walk which I enjoy. Explaining what my thought process was enabled the other two to get into it a little bit rather than just accompanying me.

There was a door on the side of city hall that I just found beautiful.

Hopefully I will be able to find a use for this image other than just here on the blog. Here is a shot looking down Worth Avenue which is appropriately named as this is the Rodeo Drive of Palm Beach.

When we were driving back from the norther part of the island we pawed this church with amazing architecture. This time I left the guys in the cool car and went up and grabbed some shots.

This is an open hallway that completes the street side of the church. You can see the rail on the left side which faces the street. The arches are mirrored on the right and opens to a really nice courtyard shown ithe panoramic below. Click on the image for a larger view.

It is July and out of season in South Florida so the snow birds are gone but the heat and humidity is way too much for this Michigan boy. Nice place to visit but still nicer to leave.

Take care for now... Doug

Vacation's Over... Back to work!

2011-07-11T23:47:00.016-04:00

I have had a nice break from the regular routine and it is now time to set to plan things for the fall. While summer is not even near over, senior pictures are right around the corner. Not that I have been slacking while on vacation or anything it has been quite the opposite. My time off back in March was spent slacking.

This past couple of weeks have been very enjoyable because we have had an opportunity to get to know our future daughter in law a bunch more. We made a trip to Chattanooga TN to pick up the rest of her stuff and then turned around and spent a week out in Maryland with our daughter, her family and our oldest son. Two days after we got back from MD Evelyn took off on a bike trip (as a cook) with the youth group from our church.

Photographically I have not been totally asleep either. In MD I had an opportunity to do a baby shoot, then in TN I did some pictures of my son and his fiancé. To cap that off this past Saturday evening I did the engagement session for the happy couple.

We visited a number of different locations and while on the way to one I remembered an abandoned barn that I had scoped out previously. As we were pulling up the lane, I noticed the rapidly disappearing sun and asked Samantha to come down the lane. Getting the sun to backlight subject with the proper amount of fill flash is one of the most beautiful lighting condition in photography.

The real key is to use the right amount of fill flash. Enough to fill while maintaining the shadows. Camera specs on this shot; Gear- Canon 5D MkII w/EF24-70 f/2.8 USM lens. Exposure- 1/640 sec at f/2.8, focal length of 42mm with an ISO of 320.

I'll put up some other images of what I have been up to in the next few days.

Take care for now... Doug

Babies are great!

2011-06-19T22:59:00.000-04:00

I may have posted this image earlier but I think it may have been about a vase. It could look like one but it is much more than that. It was a beautiful little girl growing and not too many weeks away from being in the world.

There she is. The couple had me over to there place to get some newborn images. I have gotten away from shooting babies with flash as it often startle the little tikes. So it is just as easy for me to go to where the baby (and new mom) is most comfortable. I bring my little Westcott constant light kit (below) and use it to either exclusively or to supplement the existing light work great.

I use an X-Rite ColorChecker on the first shot of any new lighting setup and it is literally two clicks away from setting the white balance far any number of images.

The lime green blanket that was used caused a little trouble for me in post and I will be adding a neutral blanket to my baby kit bag in the future. Here are a couple more images of this little darling.

I like the finger as the focal point that threw her slightly out of balance.
Take care all... Doug

New Twist on Body Art

2011-06-10T23:24:00.001-04:00

Traditionally when one thinks of body art, the thought of a tattooed body comes to mind. Another possibility might be piercings or body painting. Here is another take on using the human body for art, in this case a more abstract art. Take a look.

I had take some picture of a soon to be mom for a baby bump session and was thinking of how could be used as a piece of art rather than just a picture of her bump. This particular shot started out with a tight T-shirt that gave a smooth line for a nice back lit image.

It started out with a single black and white yin-yang type of image. I was going down the line shadowing road when I changed direction and came up with this gradation of grays.

Nothing like art that has special meaning.

Take care... Doug

It's a Wacky Business

2011-06-03T16:39:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was just on of those days where you just have to chalk it up to... What ever! I must frost say that this is not a very photo centric blog post but I home you will find some humor in it eve though it's at my expense.

It started out at 5:30 in the morning when the alarm went off and I had to swap cars at the airport at 7:00. Then there was the two hour drive to meet a crew to do a check ride on the captain. The plan was to go to Pelston MI and get a car and drive to Grand Rapids. I would be home a day early, sweet!

I snapped a couple of shots from the airplane, here is Detroit Metro Airport and one of lake St. Clare.

Here is another from the airplane of one of the many proving grounds in the Detroit area.

Crew did a good job and we are in Pelston when I get a briefing update with the car information. Cool, the plan is coming together. So I go to the Avis counter to get the car and I get a message from our training scheduler asking me if I am on the road yet because she might have something for me tomorrow (read today). Now i could have just replied that I was on the road and that probably would have been the end of it. Thats just not right though. Besides, the Avis lady did not have the reservation. I giver her the number that I had from the brief and she finds it and a goes on to say that it was rejected. They are a franchise and not corporate Avis so they will not rent one ways to Grand Rapids. Nice! I checked with Hertz and they had a car so I called the company to advise and they said to give it ten minutes and I should get a brief update. So I walked around the vast Pelston terminal with my camera over my shoulder. I had already changed cloths for the drive home and was planning on making it a photo experience stopping along the way. So that's where I came up with the picture here of the Canadair RJ getting ready to leave the ramp.

Forty minutes later I finally get the update and it is still for Avis. Whiteout belaboring the point, it took a total of an hour and a half to Finally get a Hertz car that I could have set up in ten minutes. Isn't big business wonderful. The bad thing though was that I was no longer going home but driving to Pontiac MI. So the day ended up being one our in the airplane and six and a half hours of driving. I could have stopped k(and probably should have) on the way to Pontiac for some photos but it was now starting to get later in the day and I was no longer in any mood to enjoy much of anything.

My tomorrow (meaning today) was now going to be a check ride to Teterboro NJ and the airline home to GRR. So rather than getting home a day early, it is going to be a 9:45 pm arrival.

So when am I writing this post? Actually during a Checkride of some distance, I do have a chance to sit down so here you see my iPad out on the table and the headset that I use to monitor what the crew is saying between themselves and air traffic control.

We are currently at 35,000 feet and the WiFi is not on this aircraft so I am using BlogPress which is a very nice tool to work on posts while not online with Blogger. We are starting our descent into Teterboro so I have to go observe the crew I their descent and approach phase.

Just like any other passenger I have to be strapped in for takeoff and landing so here are a couple of shots of the New York area on our approach.

Closer shot of the NYC Skyline

Here is a shot of the Meadowlands

We are on short final for Teterboro here.

Take care... Doug

The Non Pilot

2011-05-31T22:34:00.003-04:00

This is totally not a photography post but if you can make it through the post you will either be LOLWROTF or think pilots are a bunch of nut-jobs.

Anyhow, we are working on a project that has to do with resetting how we as a pilot group accomplish the many tasks required to accomplish a flight. We hit a slight roadblock in a meeting today that created more questions than answers (not having an agenda for the meeting may have contributed to the outcome). So later on this afternoon I received the following statement from one of the meeting attendees. With the "BA" in the intro, I will assume it is an excerpt from a British Airways manual. Enjoy if you can keep up.

The titles P1, P2, and Co-Pilot will now cease to have any meaning, within the BA operations manuals. They are to be replaced by:

Handling Pilot,

Non-handling Pilot,

Handling Landing Pilot,

Non-Handling Landing Pilot,

Handling Non-Landing Pilot, and

Non Handling Non-Landing Pilot.

The Landing Pilot, is initially the Handling Pilot and will handle the take-off and landing except in role reversal when he is the Non-Handling Pilot for taxi until the Handling Non-Landing Pilot, hands the handling to the Landing Pilot at eighty knots. The Non-Landing (Non-Handling, since the Landing Pilot is handling) Pilot reads the checklist to the Handling Pilot until after Before Descent Checklist completion, when the Handling Landing Pilot hands the handling to the Non-Handling Non-Landing Pilot who then becomes the Handling Non-Landing Pilot.

The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot until the "decision altitude" call, when the Handling Non-Landing Pilot hands the handling to the Non-Handling Landing Pilot, unless the latter calls "go-around", in which case the Handling Non-Landing Pilot, continues Handling and the Non-Handling Landing Pilot continues non-handling until the next call of "land" or "go-around", as appropriate.

In view of the recent confusion over these rules, it was deemed necessary to restate them clearly.

Take care all... Doug

Kung Fu Panda

2011-05-30T14:49:00.001-04:00

So here we have another sequel to a very popular animated movie. too often sequels do not add up the original movie and other times they can exceed the original. In this case I would say it is on par with the original.
Jack Black again does a really good job as the panda. What I did not expect in the credits were line up of big name actors; Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, and even Jean-Claude Van Damme.
The movie provide a storyline of identity and personal achievement in Po ( the panda) as he learns his true identity and distinction as a young panda. Yes he finally realizes that he is not a goose.
All in all a fun and entertaining movie. If you are patient you could save a few greenbacks and wait for the blue-ray release.

Take care... Doug

PDX Go Home Day

2011-05-14T07:48:00.000-04:00

I missed yesterday even though we were just driving back to Portland from Cannon Beach. We did stop at Camp 18 on Rt 62 on the way back for lunch. A must stop for a great loggers meal if you are in the area.

Anyhow I spent some time last night processing images and cam up with what I think is a nice collection of our trip. Fifty tow in all and they will not all be here either. Here are a few of them. Some waterfall shots through some spectacularly green foliage. This one being Latourell Falls.

These next images are of Multinomah Falls further up the Columbia River gourge. The water falls a total of 620 feet and in the first image is of the first drop of the falls and if you look close, you can see my adventurous son just to the left of the falls.

I did say adventurous. He climbed down to the edge of the water and took a picture with his iPhone over the edge. You can see in the following image the famous bridge and then the lodge at the very bottom. The iPhone really takes some spectacular images to which i am jealous as the Droid that I have just does not come up to the task.

Here you can see the bottom of the bridge and the lower falls.

The second day at Cannon Beach was a really nice day and it became a really nice photography day. A couple more here of Hay Stack Rock. One in color and another Ansel Adams image.

There were some clouds moving in and it provided a very dynamic difference in the colors of the sky and beach so I grabbed this one.

These next three images are taken from Ecola State Park. The surf, clouds, and rock formations were really something.

This next image is what I have come to call "Where is Tim?" Did I say he was adventurous. Actually he is quite an accomplished rock climber and these rocks were not a big deal for him at all. When he came back he said he felt like he was in the movie "The Goonies". This was really funny as yesterday morning before leaving Cannon Beach we went dopwn to a coffee shop and had breakfast. There was a book on the history of Cannon Beach on the table and while I was paging through it I found that where Tim was climbing is one of the locations the Goonies was shot. No wonder he got that feeling.

I have some bird images I will share next week but this ought to do it for today.

Take care... Doug

PDX Day 2

2011-05-12T15:14:00.000-04:00

Today was much rain and driving. After breakfast we headed up I-5 also known in these parts as "The 5". I suppose the Southern California mental migration has been complete when inanimate objects are given an identity. Anyhow, up the 5 we went to Longview which is were the Columbia River makes its turn back to the west which creates that little nub on the Northwest corner of Oregon. As we were crossing the river there was a ginormous Weyerhaeuser logging processing facility. I stopped at an overlook and could not get a really good shot of the plant but was able to get a 19 shot pano of the river valley.

Click on the image to see a larger view of it. I have the resolution down so as not to fatten the blog but the actual image is 96 inches long. We then made our way along U.S. 30 to Astoria. Now the Oregonians call this road Oregon Highway 30 claiming ownership which I take some offense too. This particular highway is one of the few coast to coast highways prior to the interstate system that still exists today. It runs from Atlantic City NJ to Astoria OR. For the most part Highway 30 and the famous Lincoln Highway are one in the same from Philadelphia PA to Granger WY. Ok,back on topic here!

Astoria was very, I mean Very wet and we did not have an opportunity to really get out of the car.

Astoria is shipping town and is famous for not only being the town where Kindergarten Cop was filmed, but also one of the many west coast ports were the Shanghaiing was allowed in the 1800's. Re drove around Astoria just a bit even though it was raining and came across this little community at the waterfront and I just thought it made a nice picture.

On to Cannon Beach were we are spending a couple of nights. The weather cleared enough to get out and do some shooting so here is the infamous Hay Stack Rock of Cannon Beach.

This was the result of six stops of bracketing and brought into CS5's HDR Pro routine. I then tweaked it in Lightroom for some of the tonalities. Yes it was cloudy but even that gave way to some sunshine. This next shot was just a few minutes after the above one.

Really, the time on Hay Stack was 4:05 and this shot was at 4:21 in the afternoon. The weather changes out here as fast as it does in West Michigan.

I again went back out in the late evening for a sunset and got the next two images.

I alway like it when I can get the sun to starburst itself behind objects. Clouds do a great job of this.
That finishes u today. I'll see what I get up tomorrow.

Cya... Doug

PDX - Day One

2011-05-10T23:08:00.049-04:00

Today was a busy day once we got going and left the Denny's from breakfast. We headed east out of Portland on I-84 or US 30 towards Hood River. We had been over this route before but it was the first for our oldest son. We decided to do two falls, Trillium Lake and Timberline Lodge up on Mt. Hood. It was a pretty aggressive goal but we were determined once we got going.

The first stop ended up not being any of the fall but a very popular site that is a must for photographers f you come through the Columbia River Gorge. It is Vista House just East of Portland OR.

I do not have the falls completed yet but will get to that probably tomorrow. The big deal though was being able to get up to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. We were not sure this was going to be possible as they had ten feet of snow just one week prior to our arrival.

This following shot was take off the side of the road about twenty miles northeast of Mt. Hood.

One of the shots I was really looking forward to was a reflecting shot off of Trillium Lake of Mt. Hood. As I turned the car off the road onto the forest access road we cam upon a Road Closed gate with about five feet of snow on the other side. O well... Guess we can't fight mother nature. The road up the mountain was just fine though. Here is a picture from within the Lodge that shows how much snow they get up there.

Most of the windows on the lower level are boarded up but this was one that was an the "lighter" side of the lodge. The next image is from the third floor lounge looking up the mountain.

The sun had broken up the early morning overcast and the contrast between the white snow and the deep blue sky was simply spectacular. On the way don the mountain I pulled over and took this next picture. You might want to note the orange sticks on the side of the road are ten feet tall and are used to identify the side of the road for the plows after a fresh snow.

Tomorrow it is off to Astoria and Cannon Beach where we will be for the next couple of nights. I'll get something up tomorrow night.

Take care for now... Doug

Back West Again

2011-05-09T21:46:00.001-04:00

A couple of year ago we took a trip out to the Portland OR area, Mt Hood and such. We did not get a chance to make it up to Canon Beach and the famous Hay Stack Rock.
Back in February our oldest son called and asked if we wanted to go out west with him. This is not something that any parent should pass up. It has been seven years since we have been able to spent time with just him so we have been looking forward to it. In fact I am composing this post on a Southwest flight right now.
It may not be the best time of year to visit the Great Northwest but we are planning on having a great time anyhow, cool temps, rain or what have you. Personally I am visioning an early morning shot of Hay Stack with morning rain or mist not he water. Last week Mt Hood had a good bit of snow so that might be a little precarious depending on how the roads are and what kind of vehicle we end up with.
I have come prepared with my gear bag to capture those awesome shots we all look forward to. I was tempted to bring the 5D Mk II but backed out to my 40D at the last minute as I do not need the low light capabilities nor the ginormous files that beast creates. As far as lenses are concerned I brought the 16-35 f/2.8, 24-105 f/4 the 50 f/1.4 and the 70-200 f/2.8. I could not bring the 70-200 without packing to 1.4 teleconverter for it. That will give me an equivalent 448 mm on the 40D just in case I have an opportunity to get some wildlife (ok, so it's not a 600 mm lens but it will do). As far a legs, I had to unscrew the Really Right Stuff ball head to fit the Induro sticks. Of course there it all the other little stuff to go along with it. My backup plan is to download the cards to my MackBook Pro and then onto a 500 GB USB drive.
We will have to see how many shots I can feet up here this week.

Take care... Doug

Go Big or Don't Go at All

2011-05-02T20:28:00.007-04:00

That is a popular statement for a number of topics. When it comes to men and their televisions it is most appropriate. This past March we were kicking around the idea of going somewhere warm for our vacation but we knew we would be dong more traveling in the next couple of months. With that thought, we decided to put some money into the house. More specifically our family room needed some updated furniture and a move to flat screen TV. So the search began. Would it be a 42 inch, 47, 50, 55, or 60 inch? How about technology, did we want Plasma, LCD, or the new LED units. Then there is the refresh rate... 60 Hz, 120, 240, or the newest 480 Hz models. So much to think about. Then other factor was going to be price. How could I find the very best TV and have someone pay me for it. Yes!

Ok, so that might be a little unrealistic. Being somewhat computer savvy, I know the faster a processor is, the better the computer. You would think this applies to television technology. Well it does and doesn't. Before I get ahead of myself I will admit that we had decided on the Visio 55 inch 480 Hz LED unit. It was on the cart and in checkout at Costco when my debit card crashed. It was a Saturday late afternoon and I had made some purchases on it earlier in the day. Those and the TV hit the card limiter. I headed home to get a check as Costco does not take credit cards (I really didn't want to go that route anyhow). Driving back to Costco we decided to take one last look at Best Buy. I have had very little luck with Best Buy sales people regarding the level of knowledge they have on hat they sell. But alas I ran into the exception. The whole 480 Hz thing is at this point a marketing thing and not true 480 Hz refresh technology. I found out that most bargain 240 Hz units are really 120's that have been double sampled. Without going into the nuts and bolts, it is misleading the public and marginally legal marketing. I though it was odd that Visio was the only manufacturer that had a 480 Hz set. That should have been a light bulb at he get go.

The crazy thing about this diversion into Best Buy was that there was an LG (one of my leading contenders all along) 55 inch true 240 Hz LED set that was an open box item. Not only that, it had been returned within the 30 day return that Best Buy offers. I asked the salesman two questions, why the return and how long had it been on the shelf. He said the gentleman wanted the newest Samsung which was unavailable when he purchased the LG. When the Samsung became available he brought the LG back. The unit had been on the shelf for three days.

So here I have it, last years top of the line 55 inch LG for less than half the original cost, or pay more for the Visio. That my friends is called a no-brainer.

Yes LG, Life's Good... Doug

Happy Easter

2011-04-24T01:08:00.000-04:00

Yes I know a bunny is not what Easter is all about. But then Earth Day has nothing to to with Good Friday either.
This is the time of year that is the most important to followers of Jesus Christ. It is the time when Christ, a man without sin, took upon himself our sin so we would not have to suffer the eternal consequences of sin which is eternal separation from God. Not only did he do that in death upon a cross but three days later Oreo Ed to the world that he had power over death. Something no other man could have.
This time of year is especially important to me as if was thirty seven years ago on a Good Friday that I accepted Christ as my Saviour.
So have a very happy Easter and remember what the real reason for the celebration is.

Take care... Doug

New Kid on The Block

2011-04-11T15:30:00.002-04:00

It has been a week since my last post but it is one that has not been without serious busyness in my life. Last week I was at work hurried in a project until I headed home on Wednesday. Got home around 9:00pm and in bed by 12:15 am. So why is that remotely important to this post? I was up three hours later getting ready to catch a flight out to Maryland on Thursday. The 7th being our grandsons birthday and Friday was my daughter was going to deliver her second child which by the way came off without a hitch.

Raegan Michelle was born at 12:05 on April 8th. One of the images was on of my daughter the morning of the delivery to which I added a few touches in Photoshop but she liked the picture treatment.

Yes I did take a number of images in the hospital room with the 5D Mk II and an EF 50 f/1.4 prime to get as much light as possible. Of course most every image looks good on the back of the camera, when you get them in Lightroom things change just a bit. Here is what I think is the best to pics from the opportunity I had. I definitely made the right decision to bring the 5D Mk II rather than the 40D as I was running at ISO 3200 most of the time.

Well, it's home tomorrow and back to some form of normalcy.

Take care... Doug

Many Parts Make The Whole

2011-04-05T08:00:00.048-04:00

I was watching a Photovision video and there was a photographer in Salt Lake City by the name of Busath that was selling multi shot panoramic prints of large family photos. There is a very structured technique to do this properly but the best I had to play with was from the directory shoot I did for our church last year. I still had the images on my MacBook Pro (let's not go there) so I pulled in the pastoral staff to see what I could come up with.

The screen grab below shows the layer stack for the image.

I am not going to go into the technique but the background I used was for the individual shots were good for that purpose but it required me to completely pull the families off the background. onOne's Mask Pro struggled because there was just not enough contrast between some of the hair and the background. Photoshop's quick selection tool and Refine tool was the best ticket but still required a good dose of tough-up selection.

Anyhow the image weighed in at 1.06 Gigabytes. The jpeg file for print at 240 dpi still came in at 24 Meg. This tuned out to be a 15 inch by 64 inch image. I can just see it in canvas in the churches office.

If you have ever heard about sharpening needs to be the last thing you do before exporting or printing. When I am in Photoshop I like to use the High pass filter for sharpening. Here is what you end up with when you sharpen and then resize.

This was not an issue at all in this case because it was just one click to turn off the sharpening layer.

This week will get crazy really quick. I get home and leave the next day be there for our granddaughters birth. on Friday.

Take care for now... Doug

Two Starts Posting

2011-04-04T08:00:00.002-04:00

I thought I would try something that I haven't before. Start a post on my iPad while not in a WiFi area and push it up to the web when I get to my hotel room. Ok, nothing earth shattering here. I did need something to do while sitting at one of my favorite restaurants. That would be Carrabas Italian Grill.

Ok so onto the real post. I said the other day that I would put up a post on the lighting setup for my pregger session. Well, I didn't get to it. Don't you just hate that when someone drops the ball. So it's just a blog and for the ten people who may be tracking ok, I'm sorry.

The shoot was with constant light which used to be called hot lights but with the daylight balanced flouresents available today they are far from hot. They may not have the warm temperature of a 500 watt incandescence that's what the temperature slider is for in Lightroom. Yes I could get some a gell and work it so it would be right in the camera, but technology wins this one hands down.

Here is the setup:

At the top of the diagram is a six foot opening from the studio to a sunroom that is a giant soft box after about 10:00 AM. Normally the opening is closed with a pair of pocket doors so I can work with the studio lights.

A while back I had picked up a sectioned folding divider from Hobby Lobby and have been waiting for the opportunity to use it. The two soft boxes were covering a pair of Westcott TD5 Spider Lights (below) to provide the constant light.

I had replaced one set of five thirty watt bulbs with the fifty watt kit. That left me with five spare bulbs. I also had picked up a Photobasics green screen kit which came with an umbrella softbox with on incandescent bulb. Westcott also sells a unit that is really slick.

It handles the 30 Watt bulbs just fine. It does not put out enough light to light a backdrop but it really shines in product work as a kicker.

Well I got the post in. I have been working on a project that I should have something up here in a day or two.

Take care... Doug

In The Moment

2011-03-31T23:16:00.000-04:00

This could go up on a wall as black and white art and no one would be the wiser. What it is though is a well along young lady looking forward to her delivery date. The silhouette of her curves gives the image a yin-yang feel to it.

There is something special about a pregnant women. Special may not be the correct term but it more or less covers the range of emotional, psychological, and physical attributes that comes with pregnancy. I cannot even imagine the flood of female stuff that goes on in their minds but after three children I do appreciate what they go through and how the attachment with the child is so strong in the ladies. Must be why it is call maternal rather than manternal instinct cause we just don't get it. So in my little way I can use my skills to help a young mother or mother to be appreciate the life that is growing inside of her.

Here we have a nicely lit vase this is waiting flowers... NOT! It is the same pregger belly in the previous shot with a different twist. Creatively cropped in front of a folding divider lit from behind by natural light gives it a vase like look. Here is another image that could be used as a birth announcement.

All the images were shot with a Canon 5D Mk II with an EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM lens. Lighting was by Westcott lights. You can see in tomorrows post how the lighting was done.

Take care all... Doug

Click-Click-Give-Give... Oh what a relief (fund) it is!

2011-03-23T18:45:00.001-04:00

Ok, so what's wrong with this picture and the title to the post. How does the Apple website mesh with the thought of giving, donating, or anything humanitarian. Wasn't Apple under some kind of environmentalist hit list. So what gives?

Seems the people in Apple orchard like to reach out and effect people on a larger scale than is realized. Oh! Isn't it American Idol that directs millions of dollars towards different humanitarian programs. Yes Bertie, I think it is. But what is the vehicle that is being used to gather those millions. Ding-Ding-Ding, you guest it... iTunes. The uber megga successful music machine of Apple creation.

So back to the story at hand. You see that little cross at the bottom right of the Apple home page above.

Yep, you guessed right again, it is for the Red Cross. Go to Apple.com and click on the red cross and you will be directed to the following page.

With a simple click, you can direct funds directly to the Red Cross in support of the Earth Quake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster in Japan.

I am not here to pull on your heart string and plead for a donation (unless you are interested to donating to the Doug Peek Early Retirement Fund) on behalf of the Red Cross but if you want to continue to see really cool and advanced camera gear from Japan, they could use a hand up in rebuilding there country. Take some time and watch some YouTube videos from the "Japan Tsunami" and you will see more devastation than you will care to.

Anyhow after you click the amount you want to donate, all you need to do is confirm the donation.

It is billed directly to your iTunes account and viola money gets to people who can really use it. WHAT! You don't have an iTunes account! Ok so write out a check and send it to the Red Cross, I'm sure they will not return it.

Take care all... Doug

Madness Finished

2011-03-20T00:25:00.000-04:00

So it is not the same day as it was yesterday when I talked about shooting the basketball event at our church but it is close. I stopped shooting at 2:40 and went through 446 images. I knew I would some more images after the closing ceremonies and awards but there would not be that many. So after some quick work in Lightroom I whittled it down to 88 images to be tweaked if necessary. About 20% need to be edited with some form of adjustment other than basic white balance and sharpening. SOme needed a good bit of fill light but for the most part it was pretty well what the camera captured.

Once that was done it was an export and upload to Animoto to see how things went.

It is only at 360 as I it is going to be projected on large screens and it has a high frame rate so any quality problems from the low resolution will not really be noticed.

Take care... Doug

March Madness - Heritage Style

2011-03-19T10:19:00.000-04:00

This morning I am at our church getting shots of an activity that started last year with great success. It is a neighborhood basketball tournament that culminates in an awards ceremony at the end of the day. It has been a great source of enjoyment for all who enjoy the competitive nature of basketball. The thing is, there is no game. It is all individual competitions. The funds brought in will be going towards a missions trip our college and career age people will be taking this summer.

Stay tuned... Doug

Spo-rad-ic, Yeah... That works

2011-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

I went for so long keeping up a daily blog that now that I have been posting a little more sporadic, I find that I am more emotionally connected to the post rather than a task. Maybe it's just my ADD kicking in after the two and a half years of daily posting. (Ziser, I don't know how you do it be please keep on doing.)

Anyhow, the other morning I had to take my son to the airport to catch a flight. We had to leave the house at 5:45 so yes it was still dark. I opened the front door to see the following glowing in the sky.

Well it was close to that. I went down to the studio to bring up the camera and fortunately it was still on the tripod but had the EF 24-105 f/4L IS USM mounted. Ok so it was not the best choice for low light or solar photography but it was there and it was now.

So outside I go and turn the camera on only to be displayed with NO CF CARD. Ugh! I tromp downstairs and gram a card. So in the few minutes it took me to do all that, the moon was not the same but it is what is in the image above.

Dialing the ISO up to 1600 and racking the lens out to the full 105 mm I knew it was not going to be a great zoom as I was shooting on the 5D Mk II which is full frame so no factoring. Two good things though were with the Mk II 1600 was not going to be an issue and with the size of the image I could crop the daylights (maybe moonlights would be more appropriate here) out of the thing and still have a usable image. Actually the image above is cropped down to just under 10% of the original size.

Sliding the noise reduction slider in Lightroom just slightly eliminated the small amount of digital noise in the image. But that just made a nice looking spooky moon. I could do more.

I had not used the grain slider much in Lightroom because I generally am looking for a tack sharp image that is as clean as a whistle. Besides adding grain after you have reduced noise just seams counterintuitive to me. That is until you want to emulate some real filme grain and not digital noise. The moonlit night gets a little spookier. But I could do more.

Using the Hue/Saturation/Luminance sliders were not going to work her to make a global change to the images overall colorcast as it was mostly black and white naturally. So the next option was to add a color via the localized adjustment brush.

You can see the little tick mark where the color picker is set. That is all it took to give this already eery moonlit sky a sense of mystery and age.

Hope you enjoy the new sporadic me. Cya... Doug

LIVE! On the Web... It's The GRID

2011-03-07T17:09:00.000-05:00

At 12:30 P.M. today there was a new kid on the block... Or should I say kids. Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski, two of the three original Photoshop Guys (yes Dave Cross is still around) have once again put together what I think will be a very successful program that will air every week. Yes I did say air as in a live broadcast... Only not a TV broadcast, a Web broadcast. Ok so you say this is nothing new! Well yes and no. The basis for the broadcast is a talk-show format (only without the couch). Todays guest was West Coast Photographer Jeremy Cowart which is to say he photographs much of Hollywood.

The program is topical in that they have a specific topic they are looking at for the day but all three had their iPads on looking at Tweets from viewers.

A couple of todays topics were the use of the iPad as a portfolio and the use of video on the current round of DSLR cameras.

Jeremy uses bot asa a comercial photographer and had a really good point about print work. The ability to spread many prints on a table is much easier for a client to scan over than flipping through pages on the iPad. On the other hand, portrait and wedding photographers find it a great tool to show a client their initial images. I can vouch for that myself. Last saturday I shot an all day event of teenagers performing various activities from solos, dramas, to musical instruments. The next day I was able to show some of the images to people and it generated a good bit of interest including the question, "How can I buy prints of these?" YES, thats what I want to hear.

As far as the DSLR/video topic went, an online poll was taken during the broadcast that reveals the following:

Clearly if this is a representation of photographers around the country, Nikon and Canon have missed the mark. Personally I have played with it but have not incorporated it into any sales work. At this point it will not be a marketing tool or sales option but may be incorporated as a value added piece.

So back to the show. The Grid is a light, entertaining, and makes an hour just fly buy. I would encourage any photographic enthusiast to tune in at 12:30 P.M. EST on mondays to have a listen. You can catch The Grid at www.kelbytv.com/thegrid or you can eventually catch it as podcast at http://kelbytv.com/kelby-tv-shows/ or on iTunes.

Good, Info and entertaining.

Cya... Doug

Crazy Week

2011-03-05T21:28:00.001-05:00

Did you ever have one of this weeks that starts out wear and just gets weirder. That was my life this week. I was to airline out of Gand Rapids on Continental but waking up at 5:30 and checking the flight status revealed that basically all flight had been cancelled. The other option was to drive which I generally prefer over air lining. So I called the company to see if they could set up a car for me. That was not too bad but certainly an omen for what was to come.
After that things settled down for a couple of days. Meetings, work, meetings, work. It's a nice change from flying and traveling for an entire week but I know I would not want to do that for the rest of my life.
This weeks project was the jumping off point for a project that has been pushed back for a number of years. Maybe this time we might see it come to fruition.
When I am away from home and doing project work I tend to let the task and my creativity dictate my schedule. My schedule every day was 8:30 to 5:00 when in actuality it was often 8:00 to 8:00. I was at a downtown hotel away from the airport which I would personally would rather be closer to but I understand the company's reason for using the one we do. Anyhow... I was only booked into the hotel through Thursday. When I asked to extend my room through Sunday I was told they were sold out. Great! So Thursday at work I tell the company I would need a room for the next two nights and if it were possible one close to the airport would work well for me.
Some time late my Blackberry detonates with the high value information that I would be staying at the very same same hotel I just checked out of. Hmmm... So, I call the company again and tell them the hotel is sold out to which I was informed that we keep a block of rooms (I knew this) so they aren't really sold out. Fine!
I continue my creation into to evening and 8:30 hits about the same time my brain shuts off the creative spigot. That was going to work out well as I could make it to the room and watch Fringe (one of my favorite) and Blue Bloods. Let my brain slow down.
So I show up at the hotel at 8:50 ant the gal at the desk says to me "Are you sure you have the right hotel?" I hold the Blackberry up to her with the high value and secure information that says the name of her hotel. I then pass on the "block of room" tidbit and she says, "Well, they are all gone." Nice, I am beat, speaking to a wench worthy young lady, and have been sabotaged by people I work with because they didn't care to think about what they were doing. Simply processing data at a computer. Next!
Well, I could go on but after I got to my hotel, things settled down to a normal pace... An hour or two of chilling then off to bed. With the wacky schedule I had myself doing this week I decided to sleep in on Saturday. I did this knowing I was going to have one long day on Sat if I wanted to just drive home on Sunday.
It did at that, sixteen hours at work, got back to the hotel at 2:00 am on Sunday morning. I did managed to get done what I had planned.
For now though, it is three weeks off. Ahhhhhh
Take car all... Doug

iPad... Finally

2011-02-18T18:17:00.009-05:00

The apple iPad has been the rave since its revelation behind the Apple curtain of secrecy in April of 2010. In November I officially put it on my Christmas list to no avail. So as the new year came, so did my decision to purchase an iPad. So far there have been no surprises. It is a super-sized iPod Touch from the standpoint of integration. Where it excels from the Touch is in the steroid boosted applications. So occasionally I will be reviewing iPad Apps here on the PeekFotoBlog. One such application is the Photo Transfer App.

This is a great application if you have a laptop that is not designed to sync with the iPad you want to send or receive files form.

Here is the splash screen of the app on the iPad.

The default screen is in the receive mode as indicated by the circled button in the upper left of the image above. You must have both the iPad and the computer on the same wireless network for the app to work but it is fast. It instructs you to go to a specific URL and the following screen appears.

Pressing the upload button takes you to a typical file selection dialog window and when you accept the selections (yes multiple selections are possible) the transfer is really fast.

You can go the other way also in sending images from your iPad to the computer. There are a couple of items that the app is a little quirky with.

Many networks do not allow this type of transfer. Hotels are a big one for this. The good news is you can set up an ad-hoc network and do the transfer just the same.
One note on the ad-hoc setup is the network must be setup first (duh!), the iPad must connect to it in the Wi-Fit options in Settings. Give it a bout a minute to settle down and do all the hand shaking that is necessary and then start the app.
The app does not allow you to designate which of your iPad Photo Albums to place the images. It goes to the Saved Photos Album.
After the transfer when you sync via iTunes, the uploaded images are not viewable on the desktop. In other words, iTunes does not sync the images uploaded in your Saved Photo Album.
If you are using portfolio viewer other than the one that is on the iPad, the images in your Saved Photo Album can be deleted without effecting the ones in the portfolio app.

All in all this is a really good iPad app and makes it easy to got photos to and from you iPad and other devices.

Take care all... Doug

A New Blogger Day

2011-02-17T20:21:00.001-05:00

So it has been a little while since I posted last. I really had not planned on taking such long break from blogging but I must say it has been an enjoyable break. Call it writers block or possibly bloggers block but it Swanee like I was running out of material to talk about. What was actually happening was I just burned out on posting every day. It started out as a short break which grew into longer and more frequent breaks. Kind of like a addiction only backwards.
So what have we been up to at PeekFoto? We have been shooting but with the church directory project sucking up much of my time in town and December being... Well, December, all the activities created a big time vacuum. Not that what we did was not a lot of fun brut it was not shall I say photographically productive.
Here is one image I will share of a young lady.

This was shot on a white seamless with two Alien Bees 800's getting the background to go white and used a pair of Elenchroms To provide main and fill light. Post was in Lightroom with a trip to Photoshop to jazz it up.
Here the same setup only with this father daughter pose.

That is going to do it for today.

Cya later... Doug

Voice to Text

2011-01-11T01:10:00.001-05:00

Trying some new technology can sometimes be cumbersome, if not over slightly daunting. I am working with a voice recorder to input MacSpeach Scribe on the Mac that will translate it to the written word. I can basically dictate the blog posting and the software will translate it into words so I will have to see how that will work. One of the items that you must get used to when using the recorder is to enunciate your words much better and much more consistent. You must also include the punctuation, and any or other format that you need to have the translator set in the final product. Another item that will take some getting used to is the concentration it takes to not only dictate and formulate your words, but also insert the punctuation while advancing the thought that you have in your mind regarding the dictation. It might seem easier to write it down first, but that would be somewhat defeating the purpose of having the audio recording allowing the software to translate the voice. It would just be easier to type it into the computer, and let the post go as to is.

I am using a Zoom handy recorder H4n that seems to be very functional. The recording can be stopped at any time and once the thought process is continued you may continue the recording without having to start over. Being the first posting with this workflow I'm going to keep rather short you can see the picture below of the H4n. It looks very cumbersome but yet it is not. It seems very simple to operate but yet has very deep controls for multiple track recordings and so forth, clearly something that I probably will not use but the quality of the microphone was the driving force behind forcing this unit.

That do it for me today. So I'll cya later... Doug

Happy New Year 2011

2011-01-02T01:20:00.000-05:00

I hope all of you had a wonderful weekend enjoying the new years celebrations and all. Persoanlly I have been out of town and worked the 31st and 1st but new years celebrations have never been as important and Christmas with the family. I was able to enjoy a Mid-night kiss over the phone (don't go there!) with my wife.

Work-Work-Work

2011-01-01T23:30:00.018-05:00

My normal life as a pilot is usually much airline riding chasing pilots to observe their performance on a ferry flight (one with no passengers). I occasionally act as a crewmember on regular revenue flying. This pas week was one such week.

Normally I have quite a bit of down time to edit images that I may have shot the week previous to my flight schedule. I left for this past weeks tour with two goals in mind. Those being to edit and post a senior shoot and finalize the church directory images and get them ready to be burned to a DVD. Well... That didn't happen, but I did fly over 11,000 miles in the five days of flying shown above.

It was good to get out there and hone my skills in the rapid fire environment of line flying but disappointed I was unable to meet my commitments on the photo end of things. I will have to fix that on Monday back at the office. Needless to say, my blogging fell off the edge of the earth with that schedule.

Cya later... Doug

Hey There Big Guy!

2010-12-17T23:45:00.001-05:00

It was not that loong ago when this view off your left wing would have been really bad. Today the Mikoyan MiG-29 has felt the effects of time and cycles of high G loading. Back in the 70's when the cold war was running strong Russia saw the release of the U.S. McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle make its way to the heavens giving the United States a new level of air superiority.

The U.S. had taken technology to levels unheard of in the area of target acquisition and engagement using the advanced radar/targeting equipment onboard. The Russians were not as technologically advanced, they build some really well designed aircraft. The MiG-29 was the lightweight design when compared to the MiG-27 but yet the MiG-27 had the most amazing capability. It was so strong (due to extensive use of titanium) it could handle aerodynamic forces other aircraft just could not. The primary maneuver it could perform than no other aircraft was able to was call the Cobra Maneuver (pictured below).

This is not unlike the famed maneuver Maverick (Tom Cruise) from Top Gun performed pitching the aircraft up and then jamming the power in allowing the aggressor to "fly right past" him and the could get in position for a kill shot.

Ok, I guess that is enough of the aviation talk but the intro photo was fun to build. I was on a trip to Quincy Illinois and while taxiing up to the Fixed Base Operator we say these two MiG-29 sitting next to each other a ways down the ramp. After dropping our passenger, I grabbed my camera out of my back and walked down to the MiG's. It was truly a sad sight to see two aircraft that had served their country so faithfully is a dilapidated state of repair.

This last one says it all. My First Officer asked when I got back to the plane asked if they were in good condition. I just showed him this image with the bird crap on it.

Anyhow, the image below is the basis of the opening image. I spent a little time tonight cloning a the image into shape. Dropped a cloudy background that I took in Phoenix AZ last year. A little bit of non-distructive burning to balance the image and I was ready to go. Here is the original image.

The thing about doodling in Photoshop is that it sharpens your skills while you are working on a totally unimportant image.

I am going to take next week off from blogging (like I was really consistent this week) for Christmas so I will say it early.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Migration is Complete

2010-12-10T23:37:00.001-05:00

Ag least the major portion of the migration from the iMac 24 to the 27 inch model. Ill have an update on that whole fiasco probably on Monday or Tuesday. Suffice it to say, I am now running on the new machine.

Did a shoot on Thursday evening and am in the middle of a personal project which I'll get into later so other than that I am just finishing up a little Christmas shopping. I did find this on a friends Facebook post and chased it down on YouTube so I could imbed it here in the blog. If you are a fan of the movie Despicable Me you will really like it and if you have not you need to rent is and have a laugh.

Hope you enjoyed it. Have a great weekend and I'll cya Monday... DOug

New Mac Attack

2010-12-08T22:50:00.003-05:00

I have been ferry patient over the last four weeks as I have had a new iMac sitting in the box in the library and have passed it by several times a day knowing that I could do nothing about it. I did fire it up to see if it ran but then it was back in the box until I had the time to devote to migrating the 24 to the 27 inch. So yesterday I was going through the mail and an OWC (Other World Computing) catalog showed up.My son has an older MackBook and is going to run out of his 80BG hard drive sooner or later. I found there was a 320GB 7200 RPM drive for $69. I flipped over to the memory area and found 2x4 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 cards for the iMac at $127. Wow... That is a little different than the $600 Apple wants for the same thing when upgrading from 8-16 GB. Sent the order in and by using Yahoo shipping, it basically paid for the overnight cost.

I watched the videos on OWC about memory and hard drive upgrading and they were very thorough. It didn't take me more than five minutes and when I powered up and checked, the 16 GB showed up as advertised. Lightroom is going to looooove this machine.

Before the migration can start I had to run a software update on the new machine and it is taking its sweet time. Much longer than usual to download and then I realized... My son is streaming a Netflix movie on the Wii and that has choked the bandwidth this evening.
Ahhh... She says the download is complete. Guess I'll be going, complete the update and hook the to computers up for the migrations. I'll have to wait until the morning to see how it all goes.

For now I'll just be moving a long. Cya... Doug

New Viewing Process

2010-12-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I alluded to a new process of viewing that I have come up with (no doubt someone is doing the very similar thing but in my world I though of it so 'm claiming it as mine) for viewing images online without having to retouch every single image. There is something to say about only showing you best work, on the other hand, I have a life and would like to spend some quality time with my family. So here it is.

After a session I color correct crop and sharpen in light room and export the images to a SmugMug folder. That in turn is uploaded from within SmugMug and they look like the image below.

This is a 72 dpi image for fast display and uploading. Lightroom has a wonderful Publish Service panel that sends files directly to SmugMug and I do use that but not at this point as LR will not send the files with the watermark. There is a slight chance that I just have not figured out how to also. Anyhow these images can be viewed by clients for selection only. Once they have notified me of which ones they want, I will go ahead and retouch those. At that point I take down the proofs and publish the full size images for purchase and downloading depending on how they are ordering as my SmugMug pricing is higher than my direct to the client pricing.

Following the show your best work logic I provide a few images that I feel are the really nice ones and post them (also downsized) with a gold PF in the lower right corner of the image. This way I let the client know that those are images that the finals will look like. Kind of a teaser. Here is an example.

This seems like a much more practical use of time as retouching fifty plus images is time consuming especially when only ten or fifteen images will be used on average.

Hey that was a little insight into how I am morphing the business into an organized process.

Take care all... Doug

Week In Review

2010-12-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

Last week from a flying standpoint was a breeze. Two days home, one travel, one work, another travel, one standby at the airport then yesterday was a checkride and airline flight home. This will get posted in the morning but right now I am in LaGuardia waiting for my flight to Grand Rapids. Every time I tether by phone to my laptop at an airport my mind goes wee, it's free free free.

I was able to get a bunch of editing done on a number of shoots I have done over the past couple of weeks which was nice to get caught up a little. Here are some of the images from those sessions.

The first one is a family from the Church Directory shoot and I got to playing around with changing the color of the background in Lightroom. This is not the color we are using in the directory, it is more of a grey lit with two strobe with full CTO gels giving the background a rusty look.

This was a Allan and Ava which are part of my marketing department because the spread the word really good. I had a roll of white seamless under the background and had them show up before the evening onslaught of shooting began. I wanted to do some high key shooting and it turned out well.

This is the other family in my marketing department. Mom just wanted the kids pictures and did not want to be a part of it. This was actually shot on the same white seamless. A trip to photoshop is all it takes to pull them out of the image and place a background in behind them. The gold PF in the lower right corner is a watermark from Lightroom that I am using as part of a selection/workflow process that I am working on.

My daughter Sandy, husband Chris and little guy Levi were in over Thanksgiving so I set up my moonlight background and hit it with a single strobe with a blue gel.

All in all last week was a productive week in one respect or another. This week is at home and I have a number of items on my plate but the one paramount project is the migration to the new iMac which sadly to say is still in it's box :(

Take care all... Doug

2010-12-03T08:00:00.061-05:00

When you have an opportunity to go shooting, you should take it. I have many of those but too often do not go. Sometimes it might be due to fatigue of a day flying, or airlining for that matter. Yesterday was not a tough day for me as it was a conference call and a checkride to conduct. It ended in San Jose about 3:30 PM Pacific.

Ending up at the San Jose Hilton Downtown I had a nice view from the 14th floor. One that overlooked the downtown area revealing a carnival that had taken roost on a closed street. I felt that move to go and I went, camera slung over my shoulder. Here are some of the images I grabbed on my little walk.

As I continued my walk along carny row this one had some really good light so I leaned up against a pole to stabilize me and took the shot. The carny had a funny reaction to me taking a picture but was obviously friendly about it. You can see his reaction in the image below.

I don't necessarily find carrousels appealing but I do find them interesting. Interesting mechanically and esthetically. The horses are still a little freaky though. This one did give me an opportunity to practice a little blur in camera. Slowing down the shutter speed required an equal amount of closing down the aperture. I ended up with the following image.

The closed road started and ended with a ferris wheel. This was the one at the other end of the street. Unfortunately there were very few people at this carnival. I am not sure if it was the start or end of the deal but they will not stay in business long if their turnout is like this.

On the way back to the Hilton I had to cross the Light Rail tracks and had another though. Obviously inspired by the blurred carrousel I had previously taken. The train was not moving very fast but I was able to sufficiently reduce the shutter speed to get it to look like it was really moving. The camera stats were 1.3 Seconds at f/18 so as not to blow out the ambient light from the platform.

Like I said in the opening, it is important to grasp those opportunities to shoot. Especially if it is not something you normally shoot as that will expand and challenge your photographic talents.

Take care all... Doug

When It Rains....

2010-12-02T08:00:00.003-05:00

The other day I went into the office to cut some mat board for some framing I was going to do and I heard the tell tail sound of wet carpeting. That is not right, especially with a bunch of frames and photo boxes sitting on the floor. The next hour was spent extricating those boxes and frames form the office.

I also had about thirty pieces of mat board on the carpeting. I spent another twenty minutes severing an eight by fourteen inch corner off of each board that was wicking up the water quite nicely.

With that bad news It is not as bad as what I heard from a dude last night on a flight from Chicago to Denver. He had a large camera bag on his back but the real tell was the Gitzo tri-pod he had over his shoulder. He had spent the last month and a half touring and photographing Europe and on his last stop was in Berlin. He had all his gear locked in a locker and you guessed it. Gone! Fortunately he had insurance for the gear but the sad fact was the he had two 200 GB drives full of images that were gone also. All he had left was twenty gigs of CF cards to show for his trip. Now that is sad. He was using a Canon 5D Mk II and had it set up to burn his copywrite information into the image at capture. It's a stretch but hopefully he will see an image of his some day and be able to rack the perpetrators down.

Tomorrow I'll try to get some shots up from a family session I did a couple of weeks ago.

Take care... Doug

Being Thankful

2010-11-25T13:24:00.001-05:00

I would be remiss if I did not send out a quick Thanksgiving post. Yes this rock we call earth has its problems but we have so much to be thankful for as the God of all creation chose us to make his best yet give us the choice to accept his grace or not.

Thank you Lord... Doug

Glare-Be-Gone

2010-11-22T08:00:00.005-05:00

In my church directory shooting it did not take long to appreciate non-glare glasses. I also had to figure a way to deal with glasses that had a good bit of reflectivity. A catch light looks nice in the iris but a full reflection of an umbrella or softbox in a pair of glasses that obscure the subjects eyes really looks bad.

See what I mean. So how do we work with these types of glasses. If we use the geometry tat the angel of incident light equals the angle of reflective light we can simply position the light so it does not reflect off the glasses. Easier said than done, especially in a limited work space. Glasses can be tilted but can look goofy, the subject can tilt their head done slightly but that can look unnatural. The solution I found works best and only takes a couple of minutes in post is to have the subject remove their glasses and assume the same pose. Shoot off another round and you have the head shot with and without glasses. If the exposure is close (which it should be real close) the work is even easier.

Take both images into Photoshop and make a selection around the non-glassed eyes that encompasses part of the forehead, all of the glasses and some of the cheeks and nose. Command-J to put the selection on another layer then drag that layer over to the image with the glasses headshot. See below.

Alignment can be critical and if the subject has changed the pose, sometimes you will have to split the eyes and do the next sep on separate layers. Now on the eye cut-out change the blending mode to Difference and start to drag the cut-out over the headshot with the glasses. If the pose is very close, most of the cut-out will go dark as it aligns with the other image. See below.

It does not have to be perfect but as close as you can get it. Sometimes you must free transform to rotate the eyes to match up or even split them as I just described. Once you have the images in alignment change the blending mode back to normal.

Now you want to add a layer mask to the eye cut-out and fill the mask with black.

The black mask covers the cut-out and when you paint the mask with a white brush the image beneath the mask will be revealed on the layer.

In the image above you can see that one eye has been exposed on the layer above the glassed eye and white painted in the glass area only. This has the effect of erasing the glare and is really slick. You end up with the image looking like the one below.

One of the problems with this procedure is the shot without glasses is usually a little over exposed in relation to the eyes behind the glasses. To fix this it just takes a slight levels adjustment applied to the masked layer. It is important to make this levels adjustment a clipping mask so the adjustment is only applied to the layer emediately below the clipping mask and not all the layers below.

So why did we make the extra step? Giving the eyes a different exposure will make it look like there is glass in the frames. Compare the image above and the one below.

It does not take much of a levels adjustment to make the difference but you don't want to look too obvious do we. So the above image is the finished product and rather than have you scroll all the way to the top, below is the original image.

When zoomed back out to get the whole head shot, or family portrait, the image will look as natural as can be.

Hope you got something out of this little tip today.

On a posting note, this week we will be having family in and will also be off to other family members for Thanksgiving so I will not be posting this week unless I get extraordinarily bored which I don't think is going to happen.

Cya next week from the road... Doug

It's like Magic

2010-11-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have seen this piece of software for some time now and have been temped to buy it for a while. The issue I thought I had with the program was in their advertisements. The software is Portrait Professional Studio 9.

I don't have a complete workflow down from Lightroom or Photoshop as it will work as plug-in/external editor for wither of those. It is also a stand alone piece of software which makes it nice for files that are not in the LR database.

Regardless of where the file comes from, when the interface pulls up you are expected to provide some input to the software. Specifically gender and defining points as you can see form the five pints on the face below.

After that the software takes your to each eye/eyebrow, nose & mouth, and finally overall facial geometry. The next three images show this process.

Above is the initial estimated positions based on the relationship of the previously defined five facial anchor points. Below show the points locked down after repositioning them.

Below are the final adjustments on the periphery of the face befor the software starts to work its magic.

And now without further ado, here is what Portrait Professional Studio 9 produces right out of the gate.

Now the fun begins! along the right side isa number of controls that allow total adjustment to what the software just produce. You are able to back off or strengthen any of the adjustments that were automatically made. Here is the control panel condensed.

Here is one of the control modules expanded.

Further you can define or limit some of the objects you want to work with in the image by extending or cutting back the area to be effected by the sliders. Below is an example of the hair having been defined.

Once enhancements have been made and all is said and done, saving the image returns you to Lightroom or Photoshop.

Below is a a before and after example of an already processed image in Lightroom that made a round trip to Portrait Professional Studio 9 and back.

Overall a really nice application fro a specific function but will it ever save some time brushing here and brushing there. Ultimately I think I will use it for specific function and turn off some of the others like the eyes and mouth. I still find the adjustment brush presets I have made in Lightroom do a really good job. From a time standpoint, this application can not be beat.

Take care all... Doug

Back to Work

2010-11-18T00:23:00.001-05:00

This tittle has two meaning, first I am back on the road and second I am done with the directory shoot and can focus my energies back into the seniors before it is too late in the season. One of the features I like to do with seniors is to have a customized design using their schools logo and colors. This can be time consuming at times depending on the detail of the school logo or masthead. Here is an example of a web page with the masthead.

Using the pen tool in Photoshop makes a detailed selection real easy. I must say it takes a little practice to master this tool as you learn how much stretch it will take to create the bezier curves that allows a vector mask to be created. See below for the points that re-created the logo for my use.

With the points and segments established you can either establish a selection (marching ants) or a vector mask. I like the vector mask myself as it is only a Command Click away from generating a selection from the vector mask.

The next stage in this image was to get a "letter" style image. The font they use for the letter jackets are popular and identify the senior with their school. So it was back to the web to see if I could find that one.

This is all I had when I started. Resizing the image to 240 dpi smoothed things out a bit but it was still back to the pen tool to get things under control. The Eagle had came from another image on their website as this one was not going to work at all. Here is the result of the work.

So how was I going to use these elements to get a pleasing result to the client. There is a little back story to this in that the seniors dad had a picture of him holding his Gibson guitar and was interested in having Tyler in the same pose with the same guitar. Here is the layer pallet for the image to follow.

Both the logos were brought in from their own files, the image of Tyler was extracted from a white background and the rest is some tweaks here and there in CS5.

The final image is a mix of these multiple images and some drop shadows and bevel and embossing to enhance the text and I ended up with a 16x20 sized image weighing in at a slender 320 MB.

Hope you enjoyed the journey... Doug

It's Kind of a Kick

2010-11-17T01:52:00.000-05:00

The Digital Story is a blog, launch site for Derrick Story who is a renowned photographer, author and instructor of most things photographic. Derrick's podcast, oddly called The Digital Story, is one I listen to on my iPod while airlining around the country.

Anyhow, the term snap shot has been renamed in the Story world to Grab Shots which I actually think explains the action more succinctly. Now I am not one to necessarily toot my own horn but when someone else pulls your image out of a bunch and finds it worthy to display, that's cool. If you follow the link Reflections and Patterns, you will see it is not something all that spectacular. It was however, in the moment as they say.

So will this make Doug enter photo competitions? Unknown at this point. I have never been opposed to them but it has never been my thing. Who knows, that could change.

Take care all... Doug

Kodak Moment - For Real

2010-11-16T22:15:00.101-05:00

This post is funny, sad, unbelievable, and audacious all at the same time. Of those adjectives I like audacious the best as it is defined as one showing an impudent lack of respect for another. Of this story that was the bottom line be it intentional or not. I look at it as a funny experience as I had no ulterior motive in my actions. Ok... With all the lead up to this Kodak Moment what in the world am I talking about.

Sunday I wrapped up my shooting for our churches pictorial directory. One family came in with a disposable Kodak much like the one above. The dad asked if I wouldn't mind taking a picture of them when I was done. My first reaction was "no problem, I'll be glad to." Then I got to thinking, I was not selling the images I was taking for the directory as I considered them high end snap shots. I was not spending a proper amount of time with the "client"/subject for me to consider it professional portraiture. So this guy was looking to use the occasion to snag a family portrait on the cheap.

Here is a sample of the shots I was taking and no this was not the guy with the Kodak.

The setup went like this. The background was side-lit by a pair of Alien Bees B800's at 1/8th power through a 2x CTO gel. The main light was an Elenchrom RX600 set at f/5.6 flashing through a parabolic umbrella on the left side. From the right was another RX600 set at f/2.7 through a Rotalux 39" Mini-Octa softbox as a fill light. Light control was by my little stack of a PocketWizard MiniTT1 on the hot shoe to fire the B800 on the left side with a Plus II transceiver. Stacked on top of the TT1 was the Skyport controller for the Elenchrom's. Here is a picture of the transmitters but you can read the post right here.

The second B800 was triggered by its own built-in slave trigger. I had the RX600 set-up to slave flash also in case I had a problem with the wireless. So back to the story...

I took my two or three shots (I told you it was a high end snap shot) and then grabbed the little Kodak disposable. With the click of the shutter, a pop of the little flash on the camera and all four of my mono-lights popped in all their blinding glory. Hope the dude is not expecting miracles because if he is lucky it will look at best like the one below.

A little over exposed I would presume if not completely white. Guess he will not be looking to benefit from someone else's hard work and investment of time and equipment.

Like I said, I found it to be funny and I thoroughly enjoyed doing the shooting for the church. People are funny though. But thats what makes people different.

Take care... Doug

Very Cute If You Like Dogs

2010-11-12T16:53:00.003-05:00

This is just too qute not to share wth the rest of my blogosphere. I know I have been a little sporatic for the last couple of weeks but it has been somewhat hectiv as I am sur it willl be through the end of the year. So enjoy the little vidio and I will see you later.

Bye... Doug

Did We Dodge A Bullett

2010-11-05T23:16:00.004-04:00

So with a tittle like that, there must be some juicy content in this blog post. Well, yes and no. I will say this post will be very political in nature as it deals with a threat to our way of life. So why a political posting on a photo blog? First it is my blog and I actually can control the content, but secondly and most importantly the subject matter is so important, so impacting that I am compelled to share this information with you.

This last Tuesday, there was a serious message sent to our governing body of this great nation. It is pretty clear the average American did not like the direction (and speed) the Administration was taking the country. The only way to stop it was to take control of half of the legislative branch of our government. The result will be gridlock in any expansion of government. Unfortunately this will stagnate the country for the next two years which might just be what it needs. The worst place a capitalist society can find itself in is an environment of unpredictable regulatory control.

This is a video written and produced by Curtis Bowers in 2008, he had been a Congressional House member from the state of Idaho. It deals directly with a systematic process since the late 1800's to defeat capitalism from within rather than an overt frontal attack in war. Not to dissimilar than the story about how to boil a frog. If you put a from in hot water he will jump out but if you put him in warm water her will remain in the water while it heats up until the from realizes he is too weak to jump. Oops!

In watching this video, I realized I had lived through the most striking and aggressive advances in socialism since Marx started the ball rolling. Now with that 20-20 hindsight i can look forward with trepidation as this movement goes forward.

The following is the trailer form the movie Agenda, take a couple of minutes and watch it.

AGENDA: Grinding America Down (Trailer) from Copybook Heading Productions LLC on Vimeo.
What can I say! You can order a copy right here.

There are some illustrations in the movie that really connect the dots and can look like an old Amway circle and lines presentation if you look at it too hard.

Click on the image for a larger view and take some time and do some Google searches on some of the name and organizations and you will be amazed at the level of social radicalism there is in our society.

As you can see in the diagram above it all points to the democrat party. This is not a personal indictment of anyone who claims to be a democrat but it is simply where all these socialistic movements align their efforts towards. I think we can all agree the entire political posture has moved left over the last 40 years.

So how has socialism infiltrated our social structure. Marx determined there were six areas that need to be taken in order to take the United States down socially. Take a look at the following diagram.

The bottom portion of both diagrams are the same. The first diagram shows the ties of socialism in our political structure while the second diagram illustrates the areas of our society that have been infiltrated to bring us to a point of unwitting submission. We will literally do what ever the government tells us to. After all 708,400,522 that's right almost three quarters of a billion of us took off our shoes and put little bottle in one quart plastic bags in 2006 (that's the latest TSA data). So don't tell me we will not buy anything else they sell.

Does this concern me. Nope! My hope and trust is not in some nincompoop sitting in a lofty position in Washington. I have a higher hope in Jesus Christ that I know will not fail. I am sure all this that is going on has not caught God off guard so I am not going to let it get to me. It is just very interesting to see what is happening to our society and how it is apparent how it will finally fit into Biblical end times prophesy. Now that's something to get excited about!

Take care and I'll be back next week Lord willing... Doug

It's Going to Get Busy - Update 2

2010-11-04T08:00:00.002-04:00

Here is one page of the contact sheet in Lightroom from last weeks work on the churches pictorial directory. It started off a little slow last Tuesday night but starting Thursday it took off full swing. I shot for six hours on Saturday and then for a short time before and after the morning services on Sunday. It was first come, first served on Sunday for many of the families that just could not make the evening schedule. The count was up to 19 by the time I left the building at 12:50. Not too bad. So far for last week the count is up to 84 families or individuals. Next week is starting to fill up nicely.

The more I got into the project, one of the biggest question was "Why can't we buy these pictures?" I stood strong on my position that I was giving my time to the church for the directory and the images were not going to be of a photographic quality that I would feel good about selling. Not saying the care taken in posing and composition was at a sub-standard level. It was very much a production line at times. I really did not like not being able to allow myself the time necessary for the level of portraiture I feel is necessary, but the timeframe allotted just did not allow.

That is the position for now, I may take a closer look at the results and if the images are nice enough to reproduce in something more than a directory thumbnail, I may do that. It just is not planned at this time.

When I found out the directories will be printed on the churches color laser printer I just sank inside. I suspected this was going to be the case so I was not surprised but as critical as the print end of the photographic workflow is... I am just nervous about the end quality and how it will reflect on my part. This may be a smidgen narcissistic on my part as I really do not have any control of the out put. Oh well, it will be what it will be.

Take care and cya tomorrow... Doug

It's Going to Get Busy - Update 1

2010-10-29T23:08:00.000-04:00

I had an original thought of naming this post "Biting Off More Than You Can Chew" but it really has not been. What it has been is a serious commitment of time and energy to pull this project off. The project being of shooting families at church for a pictorial directory.

Again Ii certainly do not mind donating my time to this project for the church. As a side benefit, it has been a lot of fun getting to see people in the church that I may not normally see as there are two services on Sunday morning.

I have been shooting between 6:00 PM and 9:00 PM at ten minute intervals and that has worked out very well. Only a couple of times have I had people waiting but when I checked the time, they were early and the shoot schedule was right on time. I was even able to squeeze in a call-up at the last minute.

Today was the only day I got a little rushed as I had to do a family shoot before the directory shooting started. We had agreed to meet at the church as this was where all the lighting and background was et up. Arriving at 4:30 the mom was already there with her children and I had to put up a white seamless for this shoot. Rather than taking down the grey midnight muslin I simply took more gaffers tape and secured the muslin to the uprights and removed the hanging rod to slide into the seamless tube. Back up on the stands it worked like a charm and when I was done I simply took the A-clamps and clipped them to the muslin and let their weight take out the sag while over the topside of the seamless.

Of course the 6:00 family showed up at 5:45 which put me into rush mode. BUT! I relied on my flying background that says when you rush, that is when you make mistakes, so I consciously made an effort to slow down and get everything set the way I knew it needed to be.

Being Friday night, there was not a big load on the schedule so I was able to wrap it up a little early, get home, download the files to the Drobo and kick back and watch some TV.

Tomorrow is Saturday and the schedule will be quite busy so it's off to be for now.

Cya... Doug

It's Going to Get Busy

2010-10-26T08:00:00.052-04:00

This was the announcement slide that was projected in the lign-up at our church since last Wednesday. The e-mail our pastor put out was titled Pictorial Directory - Not a joke. This was funny as a number of years ago the church accepted an offer by a studio to have a pictorial directory. This became a sales tool for the studio and a bust for the church. When a family had their sitting they were presented with a number of packages order right their. This did not sit well with much of the membership and certainly id not go over with the pastor when he found out there would be no directory form the studio as promised.

Jump forward to present day, the church management software the church uses now has the capability to produce a directory with images. With the ability to produce this document in house, we just needed a photographer. Hmmm... I can do that.

After looking at it more closely, it will be a couple week commitment to get the images captured with my flying schedule and all. It will be a fun time to see as many members come through for photos. In talking with our pastor I proposed what I wanted to do.

It is not about selling prints form this shoot but; I wanted to have a table set up with some simple marketing material displayed so people could ask questions and schedule a session outside of the directory shoot. He had no problem with that so one of the marketing displays I have for this project is shown below.

The idea of this project is to provide jpegs to the church for the directory. They will not be for sale and are not to be distributed for personal use. There are a couple of reasons why we determined this to be the condition.

To do so would be detrimental to any future income stream.
The images will not be retouched as they are not intended to be enlarged but for a photo directory.

The time it would take to retouch to a professional level each of these images would not be a good business decision. When working with families that subsequently employ our services of course we will produce a high level product. Yes we are having special pricing as a promotional during the directory project.

Anyhow it is off and running today. Got to get over to church and set up lighting and such so take care and I'll give an update later in the week.

Cya... Doug

Cool Mac Tool

2010-10-25T08:00:00.041-04:00

With all the wonders and intuitiveness of everything Apple, when you first get into the Mac world and start looking for your files and are used to the Windows File Manager it is a little daunting. I'm not saying it is a hard transition, its just different. Different in a good way in that the options you have are more readily available to you. Having said that, Finder is not the end all app for file management.

A company called Binaryage has a really nice app called TotalFinder that essentially replaces Finder on the Mac that is running Snow Leopard (OS 10.6). Rather than having open windows spread all over your desktops you can have one with all the listings tabbed. See the screenshot below.

Three of the biggest tool in TotalFinder are tabbed browsing (above) dual mode (see below) folders on top and visor which is a hot key (double key the option) that brings up a finder window regardless of where you are working.

When there are multiple tabs open the slickest way to move/copy files is to enter dual mode. I use the default command-U but you can determine your own hot key. This action connect two finder lists in what appears like a mirrored screen. This is way cool.

The folders on top option is really nice and something Windows had right in File Manager. This lists the folders grouped above the files. The only downside that I would like to see TotalFinder improve upon is to reach into the open file dialogue and get the folders on top option at that level. Oh well it still is an imperfect world.

That would be my pick of the week if I had one.

Take care all... Doug

Indescribable

2010-10-24T08:00:00.025-04:00

Good morning to this special Sunday morning post. After you review the post you will know why I put it up this morning.

I was on Facebook the other night and was reminded by a friends post about haveing seen Louie Giglio presenting his Indescribable talk. I first was made aware of Giglio at a Chris Tomlin concert in Columbus OH during his "How Great is Our God" tour. Take the few minutes to watch these five short videos. You will be blessed and humbled at the same time. It's... Well... Indescribable!

Have a great Day! Doug

Spectacular Fall

2010-10-22T08:00:00.045-04:00

Last week my son Tom had gone for a run down the Kent Trails. I say "the" when really there are many trails in the Kent Trails system. Many years ago the trains pretty much stopped running in Michigan at there was no real place to go. The could not cross the straights up north and the only real access to Canada is over in the Detroit and Port Huron areas of the state. So that left a large number of abandoned rails in the state. Many of these have been relegated to walking, running, bicycling and in some part snowmobiling. In the fall they are just spectacular to take in. This year was a very good year as there have not been heavy rains and strong winds which have left the leaves on the trees for most of the fall season.
Anyhow, Tom came back from his run and proclaimed that I must get down and take some pictures of the colors on the trails. By the time I got around that day the sky had clouded over and I thought I had lost to opportunity. The next day I found it had rained overnight but it was a light shower. I packed my ThinkTANK Shapeshifer bag with my 40D, the EF 24-105 f/4 IS and EF 16-35 f/2.8 lenses and my Induro Carbon tripod with the Really Right Stuff BH-40 ball head.
As I entered the trails I knew it was going to be a good day, the colors were absolutely stellar.I came across this cart bridge for a golf course about a mile from our house and the sunlights was filtering through the trees providing such beautiful shadows and colors. The image above is actually an HDR of three images at Ev-1, Ev 0, and Ev +1. The image below is a screen capture of the original images in Lightroom.

Tom has been in Chattanooga TN attending college for the past four years and said they just don't get to see colors like this. I gotta tell you, Michigan might have its problems but God has blessed it with a natural beauty that can't be beat.
That's going to wrap it up for this week so have a great weekend and go out and enjoy the beuty of creation.

Cya... Doug

Pixel Perfection

2010-10-21T01:15:00.000-04:00

Photoshop at the core of its coding is a pixel or bitmap editor. That is not to say there is not some powerful algorithmic Mojo going on under the hood. So what am I talking about there? There are two processes that generate graphic images, these are bitmap and vector graphics. The image above is what the big deal is all about. Both sides of the image have been enlarged the same amount. So why has the left side pixelated and the right has not. (As a side note the left side shows a good example of artifacting.) Earlier I had traced the logo with the pen tool in Photoshop to generate a vector mask that can be scaled without any distortion, pixilation or artifacting. So how does it do this. First here is an example of what the two mean:

To the right you can see an example of vector vs bitmap graphic. The lines are the same size yet the vector line is so much smother. When a pixel is enlarged it maintains its squareness is the best way to describe it without going all tech-geek.

Now having mentioned the g word, we are going to get into it in short order. A vector graphic uses mathematical equations to generate a path to which a line may be drawn. Take a point in space as a reference, give it an direction and magnitude and the resulting point is called the sense. The element between the starting point and the sense is a vector path. When the vector path is stroked it becomes a bitmapped line in Photoshop. This is a simple line, curves are another animal.

To make a sin wave as shown below the equation below the wave is applied.

What this equation does is generate coordinates based in input values at specific points on the graph where only one shape of line may connect the projected points. Take the projected numbers on the simple chart below. Of the five sets of numbers they define a specific path for the line to be generated.

So how does all the relate to Photoshop? Have you ever noticed that when you are scaling text it maintains shape and definition? Then if you rastorize the text layer then enlarge the text, it does not scale as well and will eventually pixelate. shapes are the same thing. That is the best explanation for the difference between bitmap and vector graphics. The next time you go dragging a pen handle to stretch a curved arc, just think about all the number crunching that is going on behind the scenes.

Ok so I got s little techie on this post but it was a fun little look into the mind of Mr. Adobe.

Take car all... Doug

An Apple A Day

2010-10-19T17:00:00.007-04:00

Well that might get a little expensive if you are talking a certain Macintosh Apple. You know, the silicon type. Following through with the promise I made myself last Tuesday, I placed the order today.

So why did I go for the 2.93GHz Quad-Core i7 vs the 3.2GHz i3 and 3.6GHz i5. I am not going to sit here and tell you is is the hyper-threading technology but I will tell you it is the latest Mac Intel technology available on the iMac.

Ok whats with the hyper-threading mumbo-jumbo? Well, it is a technology developed by Intel so that a single processor virtually acts like two 2 to 4 and 4 to 8 and so on. Right now the i7 Quad-core with HT acts as though it is eight processors. Well, not really. The software has to be specifically written to use the expanded functionality of the chip. Sl why did I go for it. This will be the first time in the 25+ years I have been buying hardware where I am ahead of the power curve. Newer versions of software I would expect to be written to harness the extra horsepower in the i7 chip. The i7 chip is designed with such higher efficiency than the i5 that the slower clock speed of 2.93 GHz of the i7 performs at a higher speed than the 3.6GHz i5. That's why!

As far as memory, I selected 2 4GB 1333MHz chips rather than 4 sets of 2GB to allow me to expand to 16GB with more cost effective (read cheaper than Apple) 4GB chips. So why did I go with a 1TB internal drive? My philosophy is to use the internal drive for working files and once completed move them off to the Drobo or one of the other external drives.

Anyhow by October 28th, I will be spending some quality time setting up this bad boy.

Take care... Doug

Happy Birthday Ma

2010-10-13T00:30:00.001-04:00

It is my mother-in-law's birthday today and with that I will not be posting on the blog today.

Take care all... Doug

Burn by Faith

2010-10-12T23:12:00.088-04:00

Tonight wrapped up our annual missions conference at church I was to have an Animoto video of shots I had taken on Sunday which was the start of the conference. I had take 199 shots on sunday of the event and pared it down to 101 of which I used 97 in the video. As I was hand holding with the 5D Mk2 most of the time I was on burst so as to increase my sharpness average. Obviously there were a lot of duplicates that were either blurred or just dupes that I did not need.

Yesterday I was busy on other items and had delegated today to get this done in an hour or two. Well that did not go according to plan at all. Figuring I was not going to be working with the local adjustment brush very much, I thought I would dump the images onto the Drobo and import them into Lightroom. Nice plan!

iMac

My desktop is an iMac first gen... Here just take a look. Ok? Seen enough. The killer in this computer is the 2 BG of memory that tries to keep up with the number crunching in Lightroom's database system. It is not pretty at all.

Click... Beach Ball... Wait... Drag... Wait... Release - Beach Ball.

Sorry, for the WinPeople, the spinning beach ball of death as it is known in Mac speak is the same as the twirling hourglass in Windows. It means the system is being jacked by your memory and the hard drive is trying to pretend it is RAM. When I bought the iMac it could not address more than three GB and Apple sold either 2 or 4 GB. I didn't want to pop the extra cash for four gig when I would only get one more. Besides it would not have helped.

MacBook Pro

Compare that to my MacBook Pro and there is a significant different. Yes the processor is faster but the logjam on the iMac was the virtual ram the hard drive was trying to play. The MBP has 8 GB and fly's with Lightroom.

All that to say that it took waaaay longer than I expected and the service was to start at 6:30. Animoto took it's sweet time tendering the hi-res version but finally did. Got the DVD files downloaded, burned the DVD and stuck it in the DVD player to see if it would run. Now our normal DVD player is in a box as we are refinishing the family room/studio and the VCR/DVD player-burner is real finicky when it comes to DVD's. So not knowing if the video was going to work or not, I hopped on the Harley and off was off to church at 6:45.

I got it up to the techTeam and they dropped it into the DVD player, pressed play and the opening screen came up. YES!!! It was going to work for the end of the program.

So two things came out of today. The first being to trust your work when your workflow is sound. The second is that I will be ordering a 27" iMac next week with 8 BG. Why not 16, two expensive right now. Two 4 GB chips leave two slots open for another set of 4 GB later if need be.

Anyhow, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Cya... Doug

Binary Day

2010-10-10T10:00:00.058-04:00

This is a day that only happens once every one thousand years but you could say that about any specific date in a millennium. Many people like to make much of numbers and dates but really was June 6, 2006 (666) the day of the devil? Nope, don't think so. I guess the only number that will remain for some time is 911 being the day the United States was attacked by some really sick and hateful people, as well as the emergency number for help.

So today might just as well be related to the binary or base-2 numbering system. A series of ones and zeros is how you are reading this post. A zero symbolizes an off signal and a one indicates on. So why is this fundamental to Binary Day? Here goes.

Back in the day, I'm talking 1873, Frederick

Guthrie discovered that some elements will transmit energy when they are heated. This is known as the thermionic emission effect. It wasn't really put to use until the early 1900's when the vacuum tube was invented. The materials used in vacuum tubes required relatively (to todays microprocessor standards) high power to heat the elements in order for them to work. That's why they glowed in the back of your parents, or grand parents TV or radio receiver.

So how do we get from tubes to bits? After all, one is analog and the other is digital. Energy flows through a tube and there for it is an analog device. However the properties of the tube make it a switch of sorts that can provide either an on or off signal. Taking this line of thinking further a simple relay does the same thing. Look at the diagram below to see how a relay works electrically.

As power is applied via the control power. the coil generates a magnetic field that pulls the core of the contactor down. With unswitched power (hot) at one side of the points, when the contactor completes the circuit the power is allowed to flow to the switched side of the circuit. There are many application for relays as they allow a light power load to control a heavy power load. Again in a logical manor, a relay is either on or off, when a decision has been made to activate the relay, the circuit is on.

Moving into solid state December 23, 1947 was a significant date. It was when Bell Labs created the first working transistor. No moving parts hence the term solid state.

Looking at the diagram above, it is very similar in logic to the relay in function. The Base receives a charge which allows the flow of electrons from the Emitter to the Collector. The point here is it functions like a switch. It is either on or off. The next movement in technology was the advent of the logic circuit. As best I can describe, these function as though a number of transistors were housed in the same unit and allowed more than just a single on/true or off/false answer but also an and / or option to the logic (get it? Logic Circuit) Admittedly this technology came to being as my electronic education was tapering off. Honestly I had not kept up with this level of geekdom until mid 1980. This was the year of my computerize birth so to speak. I bought a Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80 with 16Kb of memory and no drives. Programs loaded from a cassette tape. Of course this was all new and exciting and to this day my wife can not understand my excitement about making the word "Hello" flash on and off in black and white. With the limited electronic knowledge I had attained, transitioning to ones and zeros was pretty easy.

Still where does all this background tie into Binary Day? 101010 is October 10, 2010, a simple series of ones and zeros (starting to get the idea?) In the digital argument world, a one is considered on or a true answer to an argument and a 0 is off or false. As only two numbers (zero is a number) are used naming it a binary order is appropriate. So lets look at the following diagram as an argument.

Given a singular argument there is only one answer, either true or false equating to on or off, or in the binary world 0 or 1. This logic is not new, in fact in the year of our Lord 1732, discrete bits were used in punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon. So much for new ideas! The solid state circuit and microprocessor allowed this vast amount of information to be stored and processed in higher numbers than humanly possible. I actually took a computer course in college that I dropped because I found typing up punch cards to be extremely boring.

Anyhow in the diagram above there are two sets of arguments which result in four possible answers.

The possibilities are 11, 10, 01, and 00 which define this as two bit logic. You may be familiar with 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, and 64 bit processors. Nintendo didn't call it N64 for no reason at all. When we expand the two bit logic consider the following:

00 = 2 bit

0000 = 4 bit

00000000 = 8 bit and so on.

if you continue the logical arguments from the diagram as being four possibilities, eight bit would produce 256 different possibilities; 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 is how the math works out as bits are added. Sooo... As this was posted on 10-10-10 at 10 in the morning it is a full eight bit day. Now it would be just too ironic to see if it had 256 words.

This is a little peek (pardon the pun) into my brain so don't be afraid, no live brain sells were actually injured in this blog post.

See Ya Later... Doug

Refelction

2010-10-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

There really is nothing like a good reflection. This particular reflection is on the Barnes & Thornburg building across from Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids MI. We were walking back to our car after spending a couple hours looking at the various ArtPrize entries. As we walked along Monroe Center Street which runs diagonally in GR I saw this reflection and had to get the shot. My son Tom was with us and as I started to hesitate for the shot he said "I knew you would see that." Do our kids know us or not? I am hoping it is the development of his photographic eye which is already quite good.

I could not leave it with the single shot so I went across that small grassy knoll and took the following image.

Sometimes foreground elements enhance an image and sometimes they don't. In this case both images work.

I have to get going but wanted to get a post out this morning before I headed out.

Cya... Doug

Composition and Framing

2010-10-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

Yes Edith, they do come together. If composition is how an artist places object in a scene and framing is how a photographer positions a scene in the viewfinder of the camera, what is it when both are used. Is it framposition or compoframing? Or does it matter at all. A good photo is just that... Good.

Here is an example of framposition. This first image is of a bronze figure called "gatherer". It was located on the ramp/walk around the Grand Rapids Public Museum during ArtPrize. In the background is the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, the old Israel's Building and the J.W. Marriott Hotel.

Below is the J.W. Marriott Hotel as viewed from across the river standing next to the gatherer sculpture. At the base of the hotel is a the work of TAnya Vanden Bosch called Loop de Loop.

Here is a closer view of the painting. Actually it is painted vinyl applied to the first three floor windows of the J.W. Marriott.

So here is where the fromposition comes into play.

When I saw the name of the gatherer and saw Loop de Loop across the river I knew what I wanted in a final image. Thirty odd feet of painting in the hands of the gatherer.

It is most important to see the end, or at least have a concept in mind for these types of shots. If not they are all snap-shots and not necessarily great shots.

Take care all... Doug

Simply Amazing

2010-10-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

The above photo was take at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. It is a pencil drawing titled Calvary, American Officers 1921. The artistic tool of choice by the author Chris LaPorte was a 2h drawing pencil. This is just a section of the entire piece as you get a better look at the breadth of the work in the image below.

These are the same photo except the top one was corrected for distortion in Lightroom. The actual drawing goes out of frame in the lower photo. Having the people in the picture gives some for of scale of the work. Below is a closer image of some of the men in the drawing. One of the real amazing aspects of this drawing is how the shadow of the sun presented nearly split lighting and eventually came to broad lighting on the left side of the drawing.

Finally the image below is a close up of one of the officers just to show the detail that was given to each stroke of the pencil. The vision and touch LaPorte had with the 2h pencil is... Simply amazing.

I can think of no better way to close out this post than to present here the Work Statement by the author:

E Pluribus Unim - Of many one.

Many marks make ip the drawing. Many men make up the regiment. Many lines make up the face. Many wrinkles make up the shirt. Many characters make up the story. Many experiences male up the event. Many minutes make up the hour, day, year.

This drawing is both a representation of the people, their legacy and the countless organization of pencils marks that make up a composition. It is about the process of drawing, and also a portrait if these men who must have survived horrific events to preserve what we experience today. The drawing is an exploration of character and an exploration of mark-making to revel that character.

It is also a tribute to lasting legacy. I wanted these men to be life size, so that their impact may be immediate and tangible. They are her and now but also way back when.

Chris LaPorte - Artist

Take Care... Doug

Let's Talk

2010-10-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

When you hear those words, the first thing that crosses your mind is what did I do? It's not like let's do lunch, or let's have coffee. No... those are much more cordial and social mediums of a gathering of thoughts.

On the other hand when some says lets go fishing, relaxation comes to mind. Enjoying the out of doors, male bonding and all that goes with it. That is what I captured as we walked across the Lion Street bridge back to the Gerald R Ford Museum where we had parked are car.

What we are looking at here is the Michigan Street, and I-196 bridges crossing the Grand River.

Looking a little closer you can see some fishermen north of the small dam enjoying the opportunity and enjoyment of the catch. I could say they are executives that have to fish for their food as a result of the many Michigan corporate downsizings but then that owuld take this post in a completely different direction.

But then again if you look closer as I did once I noticed it in Lightroom, there are a couple of men just standing in the water talking. Hmmm... Maybe it is a new form of therapeutic downsizing.

Let's talk!

Doug