Quick Shot With the New White Lightning

Still busy with school projects and whatnot, but I just got a White Lightning X1600 monolight. I absolutely love it. Here's a quick shot I snapped with my dad outside.

It was overcast at about 5:30 p.m., and this bad boy killed 99% of the ambient. I burned a teeny tiny bit out in post, but this is basically how it looked. Shot through a 32" x 40" softbox above and camera right with Pocket Wizards.

Putting Down the Camera...

Not for good, but just for a bit. I'm going to take the rest of this year off from any kind of serious shooting, and focus on completing my degree so I don't end up like the guy above. I'm gonna need to focus and hit the books hard, and photography has been a wonderful distraction over the past couple of years. But the time has come to get it done.

Hopefully come this holiday season, I will have completed my degree in Sociology with a minor in Political Science. What am I going to do with that you ask? Shutup.

Seriously though, I'm going to miss shooting and participating in the online community a whole lot. Thanks to everyone who's read the little that I've posted, and to David Hobby for sending you here!

Later.

I Finished The Internet Today.

Yeah, that's right. All of it. I've been home sick for 5 days now, and I knocked it out.

99 Sienfeld References in One Painting, The End of a Rainbow, People peeing on Google Street View.

And one of my personal favorites, "How To Build Your Own Large Hadron Collider in 1.62 x 10 ^ 28 Steps!".

I've seen it all.

I Voted For Chuck Norris... :(

We're about to have a new president, and here's how it all panned out. Gadget courtesy of the all mighty Google. Scroll over it for info - you can zoom and pan across the staes.

Mimicking Natural Light

I posted this in the flickr Strobist discussion group months ago, and it got swallowed by "what can I doo on 2 flashh" posts, so I guess I'll post it here:

I can remember first trying to learn about gels, reading David's posts about balancing Tungstens, greens and fluorescents, and I found it a little difficult to wrap my head around initially. Mostly because I couldn't really visualize it. I had a hard time thinking of indoor lighting as "green".

Anyway, this is a real meat n' potatoes version of David's teachings, and perhaps a little more of an A to B to C simpleton's lesson - but something I think I might have enjoyed reading when I was first starting out. I'll leave the hard stuff to The Man


I've been meaning to post this for a week or so now, and David's recent entry on Gelling For Fluorescent inspired me to finally write it up. This is extremely simple take on using gels for light modification. I was trying also for the photo to appear as if it wasn't actually being lit by anything but ambient.

I was with my buddy Scott driving around rural Alabama - we came upon an old abandoned barn and thought we should go in and check it out. I immediately noticed an old window that had been painted over and was soaking up some really nice orange-ish yellow light. I thought it would be great for a photo.

I set up a couple of SB-26's around the room, to light Scott from various angles, and ultimately decided I wanted to make the picture look as is light was beaming in from the window onto him.

As you can see in this ambient-only lit photo, the window wasn't actually providing much light:



So, Scott's girlfriend was commissioned to serve as a voice activated lightstand, and hold an SB-26 above him "from an angle that would look like the light was coming from the window".

With bare flash, you can see the light is way too cool, and completely inconsistent with the light that would be coming from the window. It looks like he's just being lit with a flashlight - basically, you can just feel that it's not coming from the window - even if you know nothing about photography/lighting:



So, easy solution: stick an Amber warming gel on the front of my SB-26, and voila! Nice, warm, light that looks as if it's coming from a window:

City Stages 2008

So, I got on a few stages this past weekend, and it was friggin awesome. I finagled my way onto the stage with the likes of Al Green, Diana Ross, and one of my favorite bands, The Flaming Lips. I told a couple of my friends who aren't as into the Lips as I am that even if they can't appreciate the music, they would be amazed by the show. I still haven't heard the end of how great it was.

A week or so before the show, I was awaiting backstage passes from a guy I knew from high school who plays guitar in the band Beyond Me. I headed down to the local camera shop, Cameras Brookwood just to look around and lust over equipment I would love to have for the show but could never afford. Long story short, I got to talking to a wonderful gentlemen named Paul, who upon listening to my whining/ expression of my desire to have some better, faster glass for the show - agreed to let me borrow his personal 80-200 f/2.8 lens. Yeah, score, I know.

The show itself was magical, and being on stage was inspiring. Needless to say, I was more than pleased with the results, which after talking to another photog at the event I felt the need to watermark.

Oh, and I met Wayne Coyne (lead singer) after the show, and he was one of the most genuinely kind human beings I've had the pleasure of meeting. I could tell he sincerely enjoyed what he was doing during the show - he was just having a blast, and putting on a great show. And during the set, there were a couple of times when he looked right at me when I had my camera up. I could go on and on...

Edit: I'm sorry, I can't for the life of me figure out how to properly arrange/format the text with the pictures in posts.

Vroom...

Blogger (at least on my computer) hasn't been working for me lately, hence the lack of posting. I know all 5 of you have been on the edge of your seats, but I haven't had time to mess with it. Nevertheless, I'm back in business, and I'm out on spring break for the next week. Whew, party! Not really, I'll be doing a lot of boring stuff, but hopefully I can take some cool pictures.

Anyway, I had to go out to Barber's Vintage Motorsports Mueseum a few weeks ago to shoot some motorcycles for a guy who's creating some kind of website for a particular brand of bike. I don't know anything about motorcycles, and they scare the crap out of me, but I do love a good Porsche! They were doing the driving school out there that day, and running the track really really fast. I snapped off some shots from the 2nd floor of the museum through the window.