As difficult as it feels sometimes, I’m learning that there is a lot of value in being seen, known, and understood…its the whole being open part that I find so challenging.  This image of the wife of a close friend (taken at a recent wedding) is a friendly reminder of that.  When Beatrice pays attention, she seems to look into you…and always with love.  True friends always care about how you’re doing…and somehow manage to never judge.

Last weekend, during a trip to Boston, we got a chance to drive out to Reading, MA to spend an afternoon with Caren and her family.  Caren is a good friend from business school, and I had never met her husband, Evan, or her children.   They were as fantastic as Caren, and I documented the good times with a few images.  Naturally.

Shauna takes fitness seriously.  Both hers and that of the hundreds of rabid fans of Hip-Hop Cycle, her insanely popular spinning class.  While she finishes up her PhD at Johns Hopkins, she tortures (ahem, teaches) her east coast devotees at Baltimore’s best gym, Merritt Athletic club.  But when she visits home, the West Coast faithful get a chance to take her class at the Equinox Palo Alto location….if they can get there early enough.  This week, Shauna was good enough to commandeer a classroom so that I could experiment with some techniques I’d been wanting to try.  And hopefully get some nice shots.

Another weekend, another flight.  This time to Rocky Mountain National Park.  While I was there, I decided to practice as much landscape photography as I could….and a little HDR technique.  Here are some of my favorites.  You can mouse over the pictures to get some details on how each image was created.  I’ve uploaded them as a lightbox gallery so that I could make them larger than usual.

In honor of the fact that I saw the movie, didn’t completely follow it, and am actually not yet sure whether I liked it or not…but am STILL thinking about it…I thought I’d throw up a tiny slice of virtual inspired by the Maritime Hotel in Manhattan.

Sarah and I met at SFO on the way to Europe.  In 2006.  And we haven’t seen one another since.  Small world coincidences worked their magic, and she asked me to take some photos of her this weekend, which I was more than happy to do!   The shoot basically amounted to our first (and only, I suppose) in-person catch-up session.  The weather was typically summery for San Francisco….blustery, 60′s, and foggy.  But we still had lots fun.  And who knows, we might hang out again before another 4 years passes.

Last night, I just needed to create an image.  I guess it was a really rough week…

It’s HOT in New York!  But so much fun.  From High Lines to Jersey BBQ’s to Broadway shows to Brooklyn butterflies, I feel like I got more than my money’s worth over the holiday weekend in the Big Apple.

Hooray!  I got my first image published this spring.  A UK-based digital photography magazine called Digital Camera Essentials ran it in a recent feature of reader images.   Pretty exciting.   For all the looking I did in bookstores on both coasts, I never found a paper copy.  Of course, I receive two of DCE’s sister magazines in the mail each month, but have never subscribed to DCE.   iPad to the rescue!  Now DCE has an app…that lets you download back issues…so I downloaded it at 2:30am PDT today.   The actual image can be found in the opening slideshow of my main site,  Dana’s Eye.  Now all I have to do is prove that it wasn’t a mountain of luck by making it happen again!

Malaya came out dressed to support from head to toe for San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade.  After a morning of marching, she made time in her busy schedule to meet up for lunch.  With mommy Heather.   She looks more like mommy every day (see final pic).

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.

Last weekend, a couple of friends and I made the trip to Boulder Colorado to participate in a workshop led by the incredible Tyler Stableford.  To say that I love his work would be a huge understatement.  I can’t remember in which magazine I first saw his work, but it was a few years ago, when I was just stumbling into photography.   If you haven’t already clicked on the link above, you owe it to yourself to spend some time perusing his site.  It is amazing.

What I wanted to get out of this workshop were some tips on working with clients and models, some of his processing secrets, and maybe some great shots.   But Tyler was so great about taking time to understand where each of us were as photographers and encouraging us to push that boundary.  For me, that meant thinking much more about the story that my image composition tells, how each element in an image either enhances or detracts from that story, and developing a process for arbitrating the two.  If you cannot already tell, I loved it.   I got so much more out of the weekend than I anticipated.  And I’m planning to attend Tyler’s next workshop in Arches National Park!

This weekend I met and photographed New Jersey-based recording artist Ant Grant and his producer, Tomas Ramos. Thanks to Akintayo Adewole, one of my closest friends and Creative Director of Akande Music, for making the introduction. Ant is a phenomenal subject and an even better guy.  After the first couple shots, it was obvious he had done it before. In addition to being a recording artist, Ant is an actor, and was immediately comfortable in front of the camera.   I could write a lot…a whole lot…about what I learned on this shoot. I experimented with shooting into the sun with high speed sync, was saved a couple of times by my new Lastolite diffusers/reflectors, pushed my flashes to the limit on a rooftop in 90-degree weather, stood on the ledge of a 5-story building to gey an intersection into the background, wished I had brought water (several times), pined for a Hoodman Loupe so that I could see my LCD in the blazing sun, fell even more in love with my 24-foot ETTL cable, and was VERY thankful that I bought the third set of 4 rechargeable AA’s.  Actually, there’s a lot more that I learned on the photography side, but the best part of the day was meeting Ant, Thomas, and their manager, Darren.  Yesterday was a timely reminder of how good it feels to be surrounded by like-minded Black males who are as passionate about their art as I feel I am about photography.  A fantastic day.  I’m looking forward to doing it again.  And Ant does smile…I have pictures to prove it.

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.

This image of a woman lit by votives was taken in Stephansdom, a cathedral in Vienna, Austria. Although I was a bit conflicted about disrupting her moment of reflection and invading her privacy, it clearly wasn’t much of a deterrent. I took this image about 18 months ago but didn’t really think much of it until I was doing some image library housekeeping (which is never-ending) this weekend. Yet another example of something that really appeals to me now but not so much back then. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing the fact that I’m horrible at deleting images that clearly won’t ever see the light of day.

Using London to toy with some HDR + artificial tilt-shift techniques…

People who have seen my work before know that I love to experiment with stitching.  And HDR.  And split-toning.  So why not all three at once?  For this image, I used a Canon 16-35mm lens.  The final image is actually a stitch of 6 images taken while swinging the camera in a rainbow arc to create the severe distortion (pausing for each exposure, of course).  Trinity Church stands in stark contrast to its  much taller lower Manhattan neighbors.  Its also surprisingly peaceful, despite its proximity to Wall Street; just entering the courtyard felt insulating.  I worked a few blocks away in the late ’90s, but never set foot inside until this year.

I don’t think I’d seem Lem since college.  And I have only seen Sam once in the last 15 years.  But this weekend the three of us got together in frigid Minneapolis.  A gathering of the fellas to talk about…anything and everything.  Both Lem and Sam were grad students whom I met as a freshman at Northwestern.  They were great role models then and are even better ones now.  Seeing Lem’s family (his wife was actually my freshman Chemistry TA) was especially fun, and you can see from the pics that none of his 3 kids is especially camera shy.

We had the chance to see Raul Midòn perform at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts Theater recently.  He is incredible.  Take a look at this video to see how fantastic a performer he is.  I also had never attended the SF Jazz concert series.  Joshua Redman at Grace Cathedral (!!!), Bobby McFerrin (who amazed me in concert when I was 11 and I would have loved to see again), Maceo Parker, Booker T…you get it…the lineup is ridiculous.  Damn!  Just saw that the Bela Fleck show is sold out!  Anybody got extras??

This weekend I attended a lighting workshop with Canon speedliter Syl Arena.  Actually it was much more a seminar than a workshop in that I took exactly zero pictures.  But it was great for reinforcing some of the stuff that I’d picked up about lighting over the past couple of years.  My kit doesnt come close to scratching the surface of what Syl carries in his gearbag.  Probably never will.   But that didn’t stop me from coming home and trying to rig up some relatively elaborate (with my normal lighting scheme as the baseline) setup to get a shot that I had been thinking about since seeing reading Joe McNally’s book The Hot Shoe Diaries.  Both Syl and McNally are lighting savants, and if I ever thought either would come within 100 mouseclicks of my blog, I wouldn’t dare attach his name to this attempt in any way.  The image didn’t live up to the lofty goals I had for it when it was just in my head.  But this is what you get when you have two speedlites with no wireless trigger and have to bounce a pre-flash signal around a corner and down a hallway with the help of reflectors, mirrors, and foamcore.   I definitely had it coming.