Freezing the Light

Golden Gate Bridge

Originally uploaded by Moose408

I have uploaded new photos from the Keeble and Schuchat Alcatraz Workshop to my Flickr account.

I have been trying to pare down the number of photos I post to Flickr from a given event and was hoping to get it down to just 3 or 4 photos but there were so many photos I liked and realized if I didn’t post them they would just be hidden on my hard drive forever. So I think I ended up with 16 new photos. But each bit has been lovingly handcrafted for your viewing pleasure.

Calvin and Mani

Originally uploaded by Moose408

The Bay Area Strobists (a Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/608107@N24/) had a meet up on Saturday at a studio in Fremont. Had a big turn out with over 20 photographers and 4 models. We mainly shot in the studio with large studio strobes but one guy setup his speedlights out in the parking lot and I grabbed the shot above.

It was a meetup and I learned quite a bit. Would have liked a little more focus and talk about strobist techniques. Because of the models and nice studio most folks were concentrating on shooting the models and not much in the way of changing the lighting. Still a lot of fun though.

More photos in my Flickr stream or at the Bay Area Strobists group page.

Alcatraz Lighthouse

Originally uploaded by Moose408

This past Tuesday I spent the afternoon/evening doing a private photo tour of Alcatraz. This event was sponsered by a local camera store.

There were approximately 30 of us and we had access to pretty much the entire island. This event was held after the island was closed to the public so we got to go in a lot of areas that are normally closed to the public, Some really great locations. I had a great time and plan to do it again next year.

This is my latest DIY project. These stands hold a sheet of foam core board vertically. I use foam core a lot in my photography, to act as a reflector, a background, or a gobi. In the past I have used a variety of methods for holding the foam core boards in place such as taping them to light stands or leaning them up against bricks or boxes. But this did not often work well as the boards tended to move and fall over.

So to the solve the problem I devised these stands. I made two sizes. The large is made of wood and is designed to hold large 4′x8′ sheets of foam core. The smaller ones are cut out of acrylic and can easily hold a 3′x4′ sheet of foam core. The slot is cut so it is exactly the size of the foam core thickness. This provides a tight fit, and I can actually pickup the foam core from the top and the stands stay in place.

So this is a simple, yet effective solution to my problem. If you would like to make your own stands I have plans available for the acrylic version here. Plans for the larger wood version will be coming soon (or you can probably figure out yourself).

For those of you who would like the stands but don’t have the tools to make your own, I am also selling them on my web site FoamCoreStands.com

Here is a photo of the small acrylic version

Gel Holder

Originally uploaded by Moose408

I have been getting a lot of requests for my Flash Gel Holders so I finally got around to creating a web site to promote and sell them. Check it out GelHolder.com

Cairn

Originally uploaded by Moose408

I picked up the Canon 50D Monday night and finally had some time today to go take some photos with it. My camera prior to this was a Canon Rebel XT, and I took some great photos with it, but it was time to upgrade and as soon as I heard about the 50D, I immediately called the local camera shop to get on the waiting list.

I was expecting it to arrive mid-Oct, so was pleasantly surprised when it showed up on Sept 29th.

I had three main reasons for wanting to upgrade.
1) Better High ISO
2) Larger LCD (the Rebel is just way too small)
3) More pixels. Although I think that 15.1mp is a little too much

I haven’t yet had an opportunity to test the ISO performance. In my photo walk today I really enjoyed the larger LCD and during post it was nice to have more mexapixels for a couple of photos where I cropped heavily (didn’t have a long enough lens to get to what I wanted). So far the camera has been great!

More photos are available on my Flickr account.

Canon Battery

Originally uploaded by Moose408

This may be common knowledge but I just figured it out today. The battery cover that comes with Canon batteries had a small hole in it that shows the underside of the battery. By rotating it, it can show blue for a charged battery and gray for a discharged battery. Who knew?

I’ve been using this cover for over 3 years and just now figured it out. It might have been in the instructions, but who reads the instructions for a battery?

Anyway I thought I would share in case there was someone else out there who hadn’t figured this out.

I participate in a weekly photo challenge on the site DPChallenge. Besides taking the photo, one of the challenges I often face is getting photo to be the right file size for submission (either 150K or 200K depending upon the compeition). Photoshop has a quality slider when using Save for Web, and a readout of the file size on the status bar that updates as I move the slider, but I’ve found it to not be entirely accurate. It can be a few K off, so even though it says my file will be 149K it might come out at 152K instead. I often have to save the file several times to get the file size correct.

Today I came across this great tip on Planet Photoshop blog.  It turns out that the option called Optimize to File Size which solves this problem for me.

I’m a happy man

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Alvin-1434

Originally uploaded by Moose408

Finally catching up on a backlog of photos that need processing. Got several up from the August Model Mixer. There were 3 models there and I improved somewhat on the lighting from the previous shoot. Still need to practice.

More Model Mixer photos at
http://www.craigcolvin.com/photos/model_mixer