Last night, I just needed to create an image. I guess it was a really rough week…
Category Archives: Night
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.
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Nice shots! Funny how alot of us techies ended up exploring our creative sides with more passion than what we majored in.
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.
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Awesome! No words
(and I do not understand anything pass Mama said…)
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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.
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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.
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??
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I have Raul’s “State of Mind” album pretty much memorized. I used to rock Sade asleep to it every night… it calmed her right down and it became our thing. Hands down an amazing guitarist and vocalist. Wish I was there!
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Skills. Nice work.