Zoom and Shoot Through It
Today I finally got around to testing my strobes and the power they put out through various light modifiers. Yes, a slow day indeed! I was able to get a better sense of f-stops, distances and such, and learned some interesting (I’m using that word loosely) and surprising things. And to my non-photographically-minded readers (clients, etc), my apologies for such a dry post. 
So put on your nerd hat, and let’s dive in.
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Soap Box Derby (with a homemade tilt-lens)
Today my family and I attended a soap box derby race, held semi-annually in Ventura by the California Family Soap Box Derby Association. We had also planned on going on a short hike afterward, but that got postponed as we were having too much fun watching the cars go down the track! I’ve been itching to shake up my family-snapshot photography lately, and decided I’d leave the house armed only with my homemade ’tilt’ lens (attached to a Fuji S5 Pro). This lens is a little like a ‘lensbaby‘, except it’s harder to use and cost me about $5 to make! You can see a picture of it at the bottom of this post. Basically, the lens is tilted relative to the film/sensor/camera plane, rather than being parallel to it as in most cameras. The effect is that the in-focus areas of an image are not all the same distance from the camera. This leads to out-of-focus areas in surprising places.
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Tutorial: Improvised Strip Light
This was a very quick experiment with an improvised ’strip light’. For those who don’t know, a strip light is a…
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Green is the Colour
Tonight I’m “digging through the crates”, to use a DJ term. Coming across old images that struck me then, strike me now, and I’d all but forgotten about. There’s a green theme to these, and an unusual amount of trees (although given the color, perhaps not that unusual). These were taken back in the day, before flash and before digital. Other people had flash and digital, but I didn’t! More than half of these were taken on 110 format film (or the hand-wound 16mm equivalent).
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Best of Class
A very quick blog post. Just a little thing, but it’s something worth bragging blogging about. Last night the Channel Islands Professional Photographers Association held their quarterly print competition. I won “Best of Class” in the Fashion/Editorial category with this image of Kristin below. Big prizes? Fame and fortune to be mine? No, but I got a pretty red ribbon.
Hot White and Super Fast
One of the ways I market my photography is by using ‘photobooks’. I make arrangements with local coffee houses, doctor’s offices etc to host my book. It’s a very ‘ambient’ style of marketing (and not the only thing I use), but people stumble across it and it’s been a very effective way to show people my work. It’s time to do a new one, and I decided I would shoot something specifically for the cover this time, rather than use existing material. The contents of the book will be updated to reflect the last six months or so of new clients (which I still have to put that together!).
Read on for lighting diagrams and info on the shoot.
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