What I don't have is interest.  There's a lot going on in my life, and I'd rather get on with it than write about it.  Besides I doubt anybody really wants to read about it.  So I've been neither writing in my blog, nor really reading the blogs of others.  I check in on Aces Full and Pandora's Tea Room every now and again, but that is pretty much it.  I post on MOTL every now and again, but not too frequently now that the werewolf games were cancelled due to people taking them too seriously.

What's been occupying my time is my photography business.  It seems to be picking up, which is great, because I simply love this work.  I did a school dance in February, and a photoshoot for an aspiring actor.  In May I did a costume shoot for a dance school which is the first shoot I've done where I can unequivocably say that I made pretty good money.

June's been hopping.  I did a graduation shoot for a relative (no money, but I did some networking at the school while I was there that might turn into business), and a graduation party for the same relative.  This past Thursday night I shot the dress rehearsal for a stage production of a dance interpretation of Peter Pan.  Friday night I shot the eighth grade dance of a middle school in southeastern Massachusetts.  Then Saturday I shot the 1PM and 7PM performances of Peter Pan (42 Gb of pix in one day... yowza!)

I wrote about this a little bit on a message forum, so I figured I'd share that here.

June 12, 2009 11:01 AM

Last night's shoot went well but I am exhausted. I took a chance and produced a 36" x 24" (poster size) print of the main cast (with some added text) and it came out GREAT. I was amazed. I expected at that size the image would be very fuzzy--you know "stand a few feet away and it will look fine". Nope, it was nice and sharp. About 90 minutes of post production and cost about $50 to print, and I gave it to the dance school director as a gift.

She went positively gaga over it and hung it immediately as a poster for her show. The kids loved it too.

Of course I had a couple totally unrealistic parents come up to me after the show asking if I "had any extras" or would "give them one". "These are quite expensive to print. Of course I can have one made and shipped to you but it would cost $100." "Oh forget it then." LOL. It's so hard to make money in this business unless you are doing weddings or products. For the costume shoot I spent 8 hours shooting, and 50 hours in post production. My total profit after printing and shipping was $800--that's $13.75 per hour and no matter what price you charge people think it's too much.

Anyway the dress rehearsal shoot went great, apart from the 580 EX burning though batteries like there's no tomorrow. 4.5 hours of shooting, 1,105 pictures, 30 batteries eaten. I picked up a digital frame and loaded it with a bunch of work I've done over the last couple years and set that up next to the fliers--that got some attention. I had a number of people come up to me after the show and tell me how much they loved my work, which is always nice. We'll see if they still love me when I raise my prices next year. 

So tonight I have a middle school dance to shoot, and then tomorrow I have to shoot the performances that I went to the dress rehearsal for. Busy few days!

June 13, 2009 1:55 AM

Tonight's Middle School Dance shoot was exhausting but fun. These kids were different that the kids at my daughter's middle school--they were a lot stiffer... nobody danced for like the first 90 minutes. I was like WTF? Heck I wanted to put the camera down and dance myself. The DJ was great, all the tunes were current.

This was an 8th grade dance and soon the kids will all be going off to different highschools so there was a lot of emotionality... a lot of kids were crying toward the end... that doesn't exactly make for a nice photo.

Kids at my daughter's art school are also more hammy for the camera, these kids pretty much constantly ducked and hid whenever the camera showed up. This behavior drives me nuts, I'm being paid to shoot the dance, these kids are bawling that they're not going to see their friends again, and they're not going to have pictures of their friends to remember because they're too busy responding to the camera in the way they've been trained to respond "ooh don't take my picture I look ugly". You just want to say "Jesus, grow up already." Sometimes I say to them "this may come as a surprise, but we can all see you... we already know what you look like." No matter, I just switched to the 200mm and shot long... you get nice closeups that way and the kids don't know who is being photographed.

All in all I think it went well. Two big shoots tomorrow... man am I beat.

June 13, 2009 9:44 AM

Fell out of bed about 8:20... showered, shaved, and will be heading out for the third and biggest of this weeks three shoots. What an exhausting time this has been! No flash today ('cept before and after) so I shouldn't need a frickin' gross of AA batts...

June 14, 2009 7:37 PM

Yesterday's shoots were positively EXHAUSTING! But I think it went well. At the end of the afternoon performance I knew I was in trouble tho... I had shot 20+ Gb of pictures, and I only had 22 Gb in CF cards with me. I had time before the 7PM performance so I went to best buy and purchased another 20 Gb of CF memory (1x 8 GB, 3x 4 Gb). During the second performance I shot the entire remaining 22 Gb. For the after photos I had to switch from RAW to JPG, and pull out my old "emergency card"--a 512 mB card that I've often questioned why I still carry it. Thank heavens I had it!

But 42 jigglebytes in a single day is some outrageous shooting. About 3,500 pictures. Sorting through this is going to be fun. Lightroom is chewing on them now and probably will be until tomorrow.

Emma was able to perform as Peter Pan, which was nice, though she had to hold back and give a slightly more subdued performance to prevent further injury to her ankle. It was nice seeing her dance at all though.

The "movie poster" was a big hit. About 700 people filed past it and every time I went out into the hall to shoot candids there were people looking at it and my digital frame (yay!). The thing I liked best was when I caught the dancers looking at it, they really liked it and it made for some nice photos. Have I mentioned how much I love this work?

I got more compliments and requests on Saturday, some people looking to buy the poster print. I added it to the show gallery and enabled large format printing options (and T-shirts, which my lab has begun to offer).

So now begins the long slog of post processing. But with so many pictures to choose from I should be able to come up with some that are sure to please. And the post work should be hella easier than the costume shoot was.

Gonna be a lot of busy nights tho... but not today, today I am recuperating... 12 hours of driving over the last 3 days, getting home every night after 1 AM, sore as heck from shooting...

(Good news, I had two orders today from earlier galleries. Yay! Only $70 but I'm taking it as a good sign.)

Wow am I beat. But it's a good kind of beat, when you feel like you accomplished something.

On a quick run through the performance photos I found a nice little series. Peter Pan was not on a wire, so she got about by making beautiful acrobatic leaps. I managed to snap a series of leaps (on the tail end of the leap as she was coming down) as she leapt around the dancer playing the part of Wendy Darling. In the series it looks like Peter is flying...  Sweet!

So my friend Brian had an idea for a fun photo he wanted me to create for him.  He wanted to be Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels, tied down on a beach by the Lilliputians... all of whom would be played by his wife Lynnea.

I originally wanted to shoot this on a beach (as per the original idea) but the lake in Chelmsford, MA that we were relaxing at didn't afford a beach with a suitable layout for the shot.  So we instead did it on a nearby grassy knoll.

First we "bound" Bri by encircling him over and over with a thin twine.  Then I helped him lie on a slightly raised knoll and lay flat before him so that the camera would be angled up to make him appear bigger.  I said "imagine there is a six inch high person standing on your chest lecturing you" so that he would look in that direction.  That was the first shot.

The subsequent shots all featured Lynnea using the thickest rope I could find on short notice as a prop.  Bri would stand out of shot (typically on a footstool) and hold the rope while Lynnea would pull on it this way and that.

After recording about a dozen different poses, we did the lecturing pose, and then I shot the "sitting on the toes pose" when Lynnea was just relaxing on the stool.  I thought the pose would come in useful and as you can see it did.

Shots were all done by daylight, no flash. EOS 5D with the EF 24-70mm 2.8L lens, which is the widest I own.

Then, after some cleanup in lightroom, came the hours of photoshop work to carefully clip Lynnea out of her surroundings in various pictures and edit her into this one at reduced scale.  I thought the grass, which to a Lilliputian should be knee high at least, would be a problem, but it turned out that just using a gradient transparency on the ends of her legs (or whatever was closest to the ground) worked fine unless you look really close.

Things I would do differently if I shot this again:

1. I really need to get a chromakey backdrop for shoots like this.  I shot Lynnea against a grassy green background, but that was not uniform enough to make clipping her out simple... it was fun, but it was a LOT of work.
    
2. Lynnea had been swimming prior to the shoot, and threw on a pair of pants for her poses.  But in each subsequent pose water slowly seeped through the material and created spots in various places.  I was mostly able to edit those out, but it was additional work.
    
3. Get thicker rope, or simply edit the rope out altogether and use the twine.  The size difference between the reduced rope and the twine bugs me a little.
    
4. A beach location with a nice uniform ocean background would have made for easier editing.
    
5. I would have backed off a little more when shooting Bri.  At 4x6, 6x9, or 8x12 the photo is fine, but at 8x10 the ends get clipped.  That was just dumb on my part... to produce an unclipped 8x10 print some edits would be required.

All that said, I am really pleased with how the resulting image came out.  And more importantly, my beloved friends Brian and Lynnea are happy with it, which is really what this was all about.  Doing something nice for people I hold very dear in my heart.

Love you guys, glad you liked the photo!

Back in the ides of December my niece Samantha had a big day.  She performed in a Christmas-themed dance recital with her dance troupe and then went home to have a birthday party.  After the party she went back to the stage for an encore performance with her troupe.  It was an important day for her and she was really keyed up, but did an excellent job during her numbers onstage.  Way to go Sam!

My sister-in-law Kris, Sam's mom, asked me to come to the recital and party to take pictures.  I packed some equipment up and made the long trip with equal shares of nerves and anticipation.  During the trip down Kris phoned me and let me know that the director of the show wasn't keen on photographs being made.  There could be no flash, and I could not stand close to the stage--she was concerned I would distract the dancers and block the views of the other patrons, which doesn't give me much credit but I could understand her concerns.  More annoying was that I would not be able to use a tripod (so as not to be distracting).

So the tripod stayed in the car and my nerves got worse.  How dark would it be?  Would I be able to shoot anything decent at all?  Would Kris be disappointed?

The answer to the first question was pitch black.  The stage was lit dimly but the room was black as black could be.  I went over my lens options and eventually settled on the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS.  I had both the 35mm 1.4L and 85mm 1.2L with me, but I was nervous about confining myself to fixed focal lengths given the admonitions I had received--I didn't want to be moving around a lot.  Fortunately I spotted a place to the side of the auditorium where I would be out of the aisle and not blocking anyone.  I asked the person collecting tickets if I could stand there quietly and shoot and she said "I don't see why not."

So I cranked my ISO wayyy up (most shots at 1250 or 1600, a few at 1000) and took a boatload of shots.  The angle was less than ideal.  I really needed to be in the center aisle (and on a tripod!)  Despite all this I managed to snag a few dozen really great shots (IMHO).  Choosing the zoom was definitely the right idea... it gave me a lot of needed flexibility.

Afterward I got to meet the show's director and the first thing she said to me was "Was that you taking pictures out there with the flash?"  I assured her that was someone else and pointed out there was no flash on the camera.  Then I offered to get her copies of the pictures and she seemed agreeable.

Then the 70-200mm came off and the 85mm went on for portraits of Sam at the venue where the show was held.  Then it was back to her house for her birthday party where I shot over a hundred pix of her and her friends, using both the 85mm and the 35mm primes.

During the following week in rare free moments, I post processed the photos heavily in lightroom and photoshop, and prepared a CD for both my sister in law, and the dance troupe director.  The CDs included my business card and a text file discussing the shoot.  Hopefully the dance theatre director will be pleased with the shots and decide to contract me for future work.  That would be nice!!  I did hear back that Kris *loved* the pictures, and that she gave her permission for me to share pictures of Sam on flickr, and on my business website (which very much bare and under construction), and that definitely warmed the cockles of my heart.

Sadly I don't have permission from the parents of the other kids at Sam's party, or the other dancers during her show, so I am limited to sharing just pictures of Samantha, but that's okay, in my eyes she really was the star of the day.  I suspect if you check out the photos you'll agree.  Click the image above to check out the photoset in my flickr photostream.

Happy 11'th birthday Sam, and bravo for a terrific show!

Many years have come and gone since we held hands and walked,
Along the shore, bare feet on sand, and of the future talked,
Of days when we would marry, of days when we would be
The parents of a cherished child, of our eternity.

Life has not always been kind, to us, 'twixt then and now,
And though I'm oft preoccupied I've n'er forgotten how,
We walked  a beach, and gathered shells, and spoke of things to come,
How at your glance, or touch, or sigh, my heart would surely drum.

The pages of our love may yellow, our rose may wither dry,
As youth becomes a memory, and older age is nigh,
But the essence of that joy remains, though it may hide from sight,
My heart still holds a light for you, and it still burns as bright

As the day you first took my hand and we strolled by the sea.
You are now as you were then, the only girl for me.
And so my love, old age will come, and work on us its art,
But that one thing will never change, you're always in my heart.

And so I hope our lives stretch long into our golden years,
Through stages in our daughter's life as each new one appears,
For there are other beaches, and rippled lengths of sand,
That I would like to walk with you, together, hand in hand...

Happy sixteenth anniversary, honey.

Love you,

--C

I've seen a few photos like this on flickr, and I have been wanting to try one.

This was a lot of fun to do, especially listening to my daughter giggling as I struck each pose.  Patty was nice enough to take all the pictures.  Although you only see 10 of me, there were 13 shots taken, its just that the me at the front of the car and the me at the back of the car are blocking the view of three other me's in the background.  But ten Chucks isn't bad for a first effort.  And I learned a couple things along the way (beyond the obvious: plan out the shot!)

One is, even with the camera on the tripod, it still moves a teensy bit with each shot.  I really should have set up the cable release for Pat.  Next time we try this, I will.  The other thing is whenever I've seen this shot done, the photographer tries hard not to have anything in the picture that moves... like say a car.  When I sit in the front seat, she leans a little forward, when I sit in the backseat, she leans a little back, and so on, each tiny movement creating seams and edges that don't line up as I try to stitch things together.  So either I should leave the car out of the shot, or put sandbags in the front and back as I move about to even out the weight.

But still it was a lot of fun and I liked the end result.  Y'know when I look at Vanessa, many thoughts cross my mind.  "Clown Car" isn't one of them.

So I'm learning about taking pictures... mostly by screwing up.  I'm learning that brilliant midday sun is generally not great to shoot by, at least for the stuff I am trying to shoot.  I'm learning I really really need to stop saying "ah, I'll just leave the tripod in the car, I won't need that".

I'm learning about masking in PhotoShop, and how to use it to airbrush a subject (thanks James for the link), or how to use it with layer blending to rescue a picture that otherwise comes out half overexposed and half underexposed, like the one at right.

Another thing I am learning about is photo composition, what makes a good photo, and what doesn't.  The most basic rule that I keep hearing about is the "rule of thirds".  This rule basically states that you should divide your viewfinder up into 9 equal sized rectangles (basically like a tic-tac-toe diagram), and try to place your interesting subject matter on one or more of the intersection points as opposed to dead-center in the photo.  Theoretically this makes for a more pleasing photo.  Judge for yourself... which is better?

According to the photo pros, the one on the right is far superior.  The top-left daisy falls on an intersection point, and the out-of-focus small daisy falls close to one.  Of course I am also taking advantage of another "rule" in the photo at the right, "groups of three are most pleasing".  Unfortunately I don't always frame my shots this way because I am still learning.

But thanks to photoshop, I can deal with that by cropping the photo.  I built a template that looks like a big tic-tac-toe grid where the squares are transparent.  I simply paste this over my photo in pshop and then resize and reorient it until I have the interesting subject matter on an intersection point (or on a "thirds line"), and then I crop the photo to that rectangle.  Because I start with a grid the same size as my photo and I shrink it proportionally, the resulting shot retains the same image proportions so the cropping is not so obvious.  Then I just delete the layer which has the rectangular grid in it and my composition is repaired.

Another thing I've been learning about is "depth of field".  When the camera shutter opens you have control over how wide it opens.  This is called the aperture.  The wider the opening, the more light gets in (and of course, the faster your shutter has to close in order to avoid overexposing the photo.)  Another interesting effect of the aperture is how much of your photo is in focus.  A very wide aperture leads to only a very narrow range of distances from the camera where things are in focus and a very narrow aperture leads to an extremely large range of distances where things are in focus.  If you are taking a shot of your subject and there is a mountain in the background, you use a wide aperture to keep just your subject in focus, and a narrow aperture to focus both your subject and the mountain.  The range of what is in focus is your "depth of field", and the different aperture settings are referred to as "f-stops" (as in f/1.4, f/2.8, etc...), with larger numbers referring to a larger depth of field (and inversely, a smaller aperture).

For portraits and macros (extreme close up shots, like the daisies above), a wider aperture is recommended  (I used f/4.5 on the three daisies pic, which is why one of the daisies is out of focus).  Using a wide aperture will blur the background so that your subject stands out and becomes the focal point of the picture.  A nicely blurred, even, and nondistracting background seems to be the best, unless it is intended to convey context.  The flickr folks toss around the term "bokeh" (Japanese for "blur") in reference to this effect.

Speaking of backgrounds, you have to think about them a lot.  If your background has too much going on in it, or has a major distracting element, it detracts from the photo.  When I first took the picture of this rugosa rose covered with water droplets I was sure I had a great shot.  But the barn in the background was distracting and various commenters on flickr told me so.  Unfortunately this shot can't be saved by a crop if I want to see the whole rose, but it is a reminder of a good lesson for me, so I hang onto it.

The one exception (as noted earlier) is when the background provides useful context.  If your subject is a guy sitting in an outdoor cafe with a big boat oar leaning against his table, the out of focus image of Venice in the background communicates useful information!

I seem to be pretty good with macro shots.  And some of my landscapes come out nice (and more would if I would start paying attention to the frikkin lighting).  But so far, I'm not good at portraits.  This is mostly due to lack of practice... nobody I know really wants to be photographed hundreds of times while I figure out how to do it right, it's awkward to photograph strangers on the street (but apparently legal if you don't profit by it), and I can't afford to hire a model.  But sooner or later I'll figure something out.  I've taken precisely 2 portraits to date where I was pleased with the result, and only one of them is of any quality.  I definitely need to work on this department.

I seemingly disappeared around the first of June and haven't posted a word since, ya?  So where've I been?  The short answer is "taking pictures".

Many years ago I decided I wanted to become better at photography. I always found myself seeing things and saying "wow, that would make a nice picture".  I dreamed of becoming a wildlife photographer and taking pictures of birds. But I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was using a crummy camera.

So in the early 90's I picked up a used Nikon 8008s for a hefty (very hefty) chunk of change and tried using that. The picture quality seemed better but I still didn't really know how to use it and didn't know where to go for advice. I loved taking pictures with it, but given the cost of film purchasing and developing, it became too expensive a hobby for me, and I put the camera away.  (And in the intervening years the camera has depreciated in value to the point where it is worth about 5% of what I paid for it.)

For the last couple years I've used a little Canon Digital Elph (a PowerShot s500) and I have a lot of fun with it. Without the prohibitive cost of film and developing, I can make up for lack of skill in volume. I may snap a couple hundred pictures in a few hours, and of those maybe only a handful are any good, but I'm happy to have that handful.

This having been one of the shittiest years in my life led to my wife wanting to get me something nice for Father's Day that I could occupy my time with.  This coincided wit me taking a renewed interest in 35mm-style SLR cameras.  I still can't afford the film but nowadays they make digital SLR's... so perhaps I could once again embark on my dream of becoming an excellent photographer without the prohibitive cost of film?  With my wife's blessing I started looking into digital SLR cameras.

My friend James had long encouraged me to start publishing my photos on flickr, and given the size of the membership there, that seemed like a good place to go for camera advice.  Checking the camera finder on flickr revealed that the most popular cameras used to produce their database of 525 million photos were the Canon Digital Rebel XT and XTi.  I posted questions on various discussion forums there asking for camera recommendations and talked with friends at work and elsewhere about cameras.  Finally I took a trip to Circuit City to play with the display cameras there and get a feel for them.  All the cameras seemed very cool, but I kept returning to the Rebel XTi... of all of them it felt the most familiar, probably because the icons and controls were similar to my PowerShot s500 which is made by the same manufacturer.

But the price was out of the park.   Circuit City wanted $899 for the camera.  I  was informed by the staff that the camera would come with a "temporary battery" and a small charger, but that neither of those components were standard and that I would need to by the standard ones for serious camera use.  This would be another $140 or so.  Then of course I needed a memory card and it had to be a high-speed (133x) card, which was a mere $50 more.  Add a camera bag to keep my equipment safe ($50), and Circuit City's 4-year warranty ($100) and you were talking about $1250... then add another $63 for sales tax.  Ouch.  I could never afford all this, so I took the information and went home to talk to my wife about it.

She encouraged me to look for deals elsewhere... maybe used equipment on eBay or a less expensive camera like the Nikon D40.  It always pays to comparison shop.  Eventually I checked out B&H Video out of New York (who had sold me my video camcorder a zillion years ago), from them I was able to price the same camera with the same lens for far less.  In fact it was so much less that I could add a camera bag, same exact high speed memory card, a USB card reader, an infrared remote control, and a UV-filter and still come out under the Circuit City price.  The kicker?  The kit B&H was selling came with the standard battery and battery charger at no extra cost.  And there was no sales tax.  After adding shipping it came to about $860.  Pat gave her blessing so I went ahead and bought my very own Canon Digital Rebel XTi.

It arrived on June 4'th, and since then I've been taking pictures pretty much every day.  I am really enjoying myself.  It's quite peaceful really, just contemplating a shot through my viewfinder and taking my time.  My plan (if you can call it that) is to start with still life, landscape, and macro shots. I'm glad my first lens isn't too specific because I also want to be able to use it as my "fam cam" for pix at the annual barbecue and get-togethers with friends and so forth, so for me maybe a more general purpose lens is good.

Once I figure out how to manipulate light (I am hopeless at this), frame a shot (I am dismal at this), and understand the ins and outs of the camera, I'd like to branch out into pictures of people and portraits. I love faces and pictures of people. When I get to that point, it might be a good idea to put away the general lens and get a 2-3 different lenses for when I want to switch between macro, landscape, and portraiture.

And then, maybe someday, if I can really get to the point where I don't suck, I'd love to try and take pictures of birds. I know that's very challenging but it has been a dream of mine for a long time. I love birds. If I can get there (and save up my pennies), I'd like to get a telephoto lens suitable for that kind of photography.

My photographic journey has been uploaded to flickr each day.  Feel free to check out my photostream--unlike my blog it has been very busy.  I've uploaded about 350 photos at this point and my stream has been viewed over 1,000 times.

• My PhotoStream
   
• My Sets -- this page shows the "albums" that I have grouped my photos into

Here are my 12 most popular photos:

I hope my inattention to my blog hasn't been too irritating to y'all.  I'll try to get back here and post more.  But in the meantime, you can find me posting on flickr.

Hope to see you in my viewfinder!

EDIT: The table of images was too wide... my blog was getting all stretched out, added a couple pix and narrowed it up a bit.