Don't blink

Or you might miss it. Here's some pretty kick ass high speed photography The flashes I have aren't fast enough for this type of work. The on camera flash I have (Nikon SB-800) is reported to be able to freeze a bullet mid flight, but triggering it is a bit trickier. Still, I'd love to build a sound trigger some day.

Quote of the day - Coworker's email edition

So Xavier pointed out this rather bizarre camera which I then emailed to several of my photography oriented coworkers. 4”x5” camera made from Aluminium, Titanium, Brass, Silver, Gem Stones and a 150 year old skull of a 13 year old girl. Light and time enters at the third eye, exposing the film in the middle of the skull. My coworker responds I'll wait for the 18 year old skull model to come out before I buy. The prices should come down by then.

Making the new old again

Just putzing around with aging photographs in Photoshop. I took a photograph from my nephews wedding (I was the photographer - remind me to never do that again) and aged it quite a few years. Let me know what you think (you can click on the images for bigger views) Original ...

Everything you ever wanted to know about photography

But I was too lazy to make tutorials about. Here. Best I've seen yet. Hat Tip Joe Healy who, as of the last time I heard, was still the man.

Creativity

Moonlighting

Here’s me, doing what I do on the weekends – Wedding photography.

A moment of silence

Shot a wedding this weekend. Some of my best work to date if I do say so myself. The only problem is that I shoot 1000+ pictures each, and I have to sort through them when I get home to cull out the blurry / bad / over-under exposed shots. Most people don't realize that for every picture I take, I have to inspect it for exposure ,focus, and color balance (making the whites look white. Trust me, it ain't easy). When I first started, I could throw out over half of my images. But now that I've gotten better, such...

Photography Lesson #2 - Step back, zoom in

Most digital cameras have the ability to zoom. Most use a physical lens to do the zooming with many cameras boasting a ‘digital zoom’. If I ever see any of you actually using that feature, I will hunt you down and force you to revert back to Polaroids. All digital zoom does is enlarge the pixels, giving a grainy, poorly defined image. Don’t use it. As for the zooming in and out with the lens, I wholeheartedly agree you should be using that button more than you probably are. Most people zoom in when they cannot get close to the subject....

A better ratio

I had a wedding to shoot on Saturday. It was a 7 hour event, so I got about 1200 shots which is normal. I honestly cannot fathom how it was ever done in the film days as I cannot see having to reload every 32 shots. Anyway, I was the primary camera. My ‘assistant’ (and I use quotes because she’s the owner of the company that hired me) took a few shots, but it was mainly up to me. I can handle weddings all by my lonesome, but I’m glad she was there for two reasons – It was a medium-large...

Free photography advice - Sell your film camera

From Engadget Not to be outdone by Nikon, who recently announced a nearly complete exit of the film-based camera business, Konica Minolta has just announced that they're pulling out of the camera biz altogether. Man, film seems to be doomed faster than I thought. There will always be a specialty for it, but I bet it goes the way of audio tapes before we know it.

Photography lesson #1 - Offsetting your subject

One thing I hear a lot from people is ‘Your camera takes such good pictures’. They think a $3200 camera + $2500 in lenses will automatically make all pictures come out great. They’re very wrong. While good equipment will help you consistently take better pictures, it’s the photographer that makes the picture look good, not the camera. So, in a new series of posts here at Sharp as a Marble, I plan on giving out free advice so you can take better pictures at home. Yes, you. And I plan on doing most of the shots using my tiny Nikon Coolpix...

Anyone know how to rotate a house?

I love shooting pictures of kids, especially mine. One of the best ways to light any portrait is to use a thermonuclear light source approximately 93,000,000 miles from the subject using a vaporized water diffusion system (the sun and an overcast day). Direct sunlight is really, really crappy for lighting as it causes harsh shadows, makes people squint, and plays havoc with your light meter – the difference between the brightest spot and the darkest is too much for a camera to handle. Therefore you’re going to either have blown out highlights or very underexposed shadows. Anyway, some of the best...

Photography Tip #1

If you ever decide to buy an SLR Camera, don’t scrimp on the lenses you buy. Remember, the camera is for all intents and purposes a light-tight box to hold the film / CCD. It is the lens that provides your photos with their clarity, contrast, and sharpness. What you really want to look for are lenses that are all glass (no plastic) and have a fixed aperture of which you want the largest one possible. For me as a Nikon user, I buy only Nikon lenses. However, for my wide angle I thought I’d try to save a few hundred dollars...

Riya - Godsend or Satan's work?

Not too long ago, I started looking at a business opportunity writing software that would use facial recognition and scan every digital photo on your computer, automatically updating each picture’s metadata with recognized faces (I had also consider a fecal recognition program, but had a hard time finding funding). My basic thought process was you’d start the application, it would scan wherever you told it for all image files, look at each file and see if it contained any number of faces, compare the faces to those already stored in a database and if a match was found, update the metadata...

All that work for nothing

Working on a 40 page wedding album. Just realized I’m already at 40 pages. I still have 2 dozen photographs to use. Damn.

That's one huge unit!

A simple comparison of a 2 month old and my new lens

The unrelenting callousness of reality

So I have this dilemma. As most of you know, I run my own photography business. I prefer children’s photography, but with the newborn, I haven’t had the amount of time I need to put into advertising the way I need to in order to garner some business. I have a shoot this weekend, but it’s a friend and her kids so it’s not like it really counts (although I am getting paid). Mostly, however, I shoot weddings. Here’s the rub. I hate my telephoto lens. Hate it. It’s a Sigma 70–300mm lens. The optics are fuzzy, the focus painfully slow,...

Adventures in flash photography (With Horsefaced Boobies!)

Remember this shot of John Kerry’s daughter at the Cannes film festival? The material she was wearing, while opaque to the naked eye (pun very much not intended), became suddenly semi-transparent under direct flash. Well, this weekend I shot a wedding and the groom’s mother’s dress fell prey to the same basic principle. I feel so bad because in all the formal pictures, her choice of undergarments are no longer a mystery (she was wearing much more than Ms. Kerry here). And the amount of work it takes to ‘hide them’ is quite monumental. So, I’m handing off the shots to my...

Designing blind

The company I shoot weddings for asked me to design a wedding album to ease their workload. The design part is easy enough. I know enough tricks in Photoshop to make light work of it and the new features of CS2 turn it into child’s play. But I didn’t shoot the wedding, so all these pictures are a random jumble of shots with no particular sequence (multi-camera shot, so I’ve got 1500 images to sift through and only 100 that the bride really wants anyway). Part of my task is not only to create an aesthetic layout, but to tell the...

Why I Always Have My Cameras Available

You get shots like this...

Accidental Catblogging

If you haven't taken a chance to enter your request in my Photo Meme, please do so. Reader Glen asks me to photograph my computer setup without cleaning my desk, so I did. However, I accidentally got a bit of catblogging thrown in, so I decided to post it here.Granted he's a little hard to see in all the mess, but if you look to the lower left, you might see Bueller hiding amongst the debris.click to enlarge

Photo Meme

AK, I'm a semi-professional photographer so I should at least play this meme up. I've seen it around but now that Redsugar Muse is doing it, I'll hop in the fray as well.Ask me to take a picture of whatever you want that would be in my house. What I'm looking for are requests for things that would reveal more about me that you'd like to know rather than simple objects. For example, don't ask me to take a picture of a pair of shoes, however it would be more interesting to ask me to take a picture of my...

Daughter-blogging

{click to enlarge}I love my daughter and I'm always more than happy to show her off. She turns 2 on the 11th (yes, she has a Sept. 11th birthday). I can't believe how fast the time is going by. I do, however, have around 2,700 images of her on my computer alone. This picture is currently my wallpaper at work.I hope her growing up having a photographer as a parent isn't as annoying as it was when I was growing up.

sRGB is not the same as Adobe RGB

One would think that someone who purchases a $3200 digital camera and uses it for a business would realize that sRBB and Adobe RGB aren't the same.I have to admit, until today, I've not been really thrilled with the color response of my Nikon D2H. Sure, it's a beast of a camera and yeah, it does 8 FPS for those photo shoots for Sports Illustrated, but the colors always seemed to be flat. I would have to literally correct hundreds of shots in Photoshop because of the color problems.Turns out, I was using the wrong color space in Photoshop. I had...