Category Archives: Night

Zermatt, Lake Como, Lucerne. Oh, my!

After two weeks of locomotion across frosty Switzerland and Italy, these pics are what we have to show for it.  A great trip, and well worth the cold I got along the way.  This is also the first time I’m posting images from the Panasonic GF-1 that I used on the mountain.  The pics of the Matterhorn, among others, were taken with the GF-1.  GREAT quality in a relatively compact body.  Love it.

Demet

Beautiful photos!!!

over the top GORGEOUS!!!

steph

holy amazing eye of talent, dana. finally got to these… love love love them. every one is beautiful. and everyone is beautiful. my faves are 4, 6, 16, 22, and of course 37.

B-Boys

It took me a while to post these.  I wasn’t really happy with them.  Last weekend, I attended a Hip Hop dance competition called City vs City.  It was like something out of a movie.  If you have seen the movie “You Got Served” this competition really was just like the last dance scene in the movie (minus Lil Kim and the bright lights).  It was an interesting day, because I pretty much hated everything I shot while I was there.  But the day turned out to be a good thing for me.  First of all, it allowed me to try to shoot something that I’m just not at all good at capturing.  And second, it really was a good ego check.  I had been a little less humble about my skills with a camera lately.  Most of the photogs I know will agree that any sense of satisfaction with their images is completely ephemeral.  I think I’d like to restate it: if you love all your pictures, you’re not shooting enough.  Which has definitely been the case lately.  So I went and stunk up the joint to the tune of 1500 images.  These are some of my faves.   I really want to thank KBev for inviting me to tag along and for showing me some of his tricks to capturing the best action, even though I wasn’t able to come close to emulating his great photos.

Nice shots! Funny how alot of us techies ended up exploring our creative sides with more passion than what we majored in.

Mama Said…(& other behind-the-lens ramblings)

Lighting geekery alert:  I don’t typically get much into how I took a certain shot, but the mood struck today.  Over the weekend, I received what I think will become one of my favorite accessories: a 24-foot long “off-camera” ETTL cord for Canon flashes. Basically, this means that I can place a flash that is hard wired to my camera over 20 feet away from me when I’m shooting. I didn’t even know they existed until Syl Arena mentioned it at a workshop I recently attended.  So, for this image…I shot with a Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod & a Canon 24-105 Lens at 35mm, f/4, 1/200s, ISO 640.  The key light, a Canon 580 EX II,  was connected to the 5D hotshoe via the new cable and attached to a light stand at camera left, approx 12 feet from the subject. The key light was also gridded, gelled with a 1/2 CTB gel, and half-snooted (to prevent the wall from being illuminated by the key light).. all with Honl flash accessories (also worth their weight in gold).  The key light was manually fired at 1/4 power.  A second 580 EX II, gelled with a 1/4 CTO gel, was placed low, camera right to create the shadow on the wall and fired manually at 1/132 power.   The whole thing took about 15 minutes of shooting and a little tweaking in Lightroom/CS5.

Johanne

I *love* it. I bought a 2-foot flash cord. Except it was built like a telephone wire, so the effective distance was maybe 1 foot. By the time I’d used it for one session of trying to stretch it longer than it could reach, the hot shoe housing broke (on the cord). I’ll have to look into this 24 foot thingy; gotta be cheaper than a pocket wizard.

Johanne, I have one of those, too. But at $60 from FlashZebra, the new 24′ cord (which is not coiled like a telephone cord) really is a steal. They tend to drift out of stock pretty regularly, I’m told.

Mar

Awesome! No words

(and I do not understand anything pass Mama said…)