Well its been fun, but I've moved my blog to www.liquidinplastic.com.

I'd love to invite any regulars to check out the new site. Please Feel free to subscribe (RSS). BTW, I'm choosing not to delete this blog for archival purposes.

So long and thanks for all the fish

-Dan

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A few of us drove up to Tahoe for some good times and long exposures. The first shot works out to be about 1.5 hours of exposure with the 10.5mm. The second photo is a stitched panorama composed of 4 photos taken at ISO 3200 @f/3.2 with my new Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8.

Starry night over Lake Tahoe

Milky Way Lake Tahoe Panorama

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I've been very behind on my editing lately and its frustrating to have photos piling up and no time to properly finish them.

Most of my time has been occupied by work, and when I'm not at work, I'm doing side jobs. I've been getting a good amount of eBay jobs as of late as well as a regular job tutoring in Photoshop. I'm also gearing up to teach a bi-weekly image editing class with a coworker (if we can get the syllabus finished up). Last week I did an on-site color calibration and some other photo work on the side!

I can't really complain because work = money, but I don't want to ruin my hobby/passion. Working at a camera store is bad enough... One of the problems I'm running into is that I'm forced to keep heavily focused on the technical side of photography and I feel that it is affecting how I think artistically. I would have a ton more ambition, photographically speaking, if I wasn't so involved with selling, teaching and constantly learning the latest imaging technology. Its hard to get inspired to do anything besides buy the latest equipment. In college, I was always interacting with artists, absorbing the work of both modern and classic photographer and never was I more inspired. I feel like a tool salesman as opposed to a carpenter.

A photographic retreat is what I need, a sabbatical of sorts to focus on a project, perhaps finish a series or start a new one.

In the meantime, here is more of the same: One from the recently recovered memory card, and another of Tasha from a while ago.

Black Rock Desert

Hey its Tasha again!

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In my last post I mentioned that I had lost a 2GB memory card full of photos from our camping trip at the Black Rock desert. I tore apart EVERYTHING looking for it and nothing. I spent almost an entire day cleaning my car, double and triple checking my camera bags, unpacking all my camping equipment and making phone calls to the places we stopped on the trip.

A couple days ago, after I had finally accepted that my photos were lost forever, I received a call from someone saying they found my card! The card must have fallen out of the car when we made a brief stop 100 miles away from home.

Moral of the story: label your memory cards with your contact info and make backups on the spot if possible!

Although I'm way behind in my editing, here's a couple from that card...

Tasha

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Last weekend I joined a group of friends for a camping trip on the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, NV. I actually grew up there and hadn't been back in about 4 years, so when Katie and Scott asked me to do some formal wedding portraits of them, I immediately said "we should go to the playa!" BTW, I've never shot a wedding in my life!

It was a great time! A few of us stayed up all night BSing and watching the amazing sky (you can see the band of the milky way perfectly as the nearest city is about 100 mi away)! We were up early for the sunrise and I got some pretty good stuff, although I still need to edit a bunch. The one caveat of the trip was that I lost a 2GB memory card with some pretty damn good photos on there. Luckily, none of them were wedding portraits.

Below: Nikon D300, Cheap Tokina 28-70mm 2.8 lens, Quantum Q-flash to camera left through Westcott Halo.

Scott and Katie

Katie

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A couple from last week.

Alone

Tasha

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Here are some watches I recently shot for a client who sells on ebay. He specifically asked for photos that were realistic looking but professional *whatever that means*. I used my two studio heads with large softboxes and combined with my sb800 to shoot most of these.

The Navitimer is worth something like $4000. The other two watches were worth around a grand each.

Breitling Navitimer World Watch Chrono

Breitling watch

Ferrari watch- v2

Breitling Navitimer World Watch Chrono

Comments welcome.

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This was only visible sign of life that we found during our expedition inside the multiple mile long wooden flume near Reno, NV. Fielding, Nick, Tony and I spend hours exploring and photographing this amazing find!

The flume turned out to be a fairly dangerous place as one of the photographers in our group almost fell through the rotten, wooden floor. We could see light coming through the floor in places. The flume runs about 15-20 feet above the ground, so falling through would not have been too fun.

Solitary Confinement

Fielding was climbing around like a spider on speed. Here he is setting the strobe for the shot above.

Fielding is a monkey

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Here are a couple of long exposure shots with the new cam. Noise performance is really great compared to my old D200. The last two photos were taken WITHOUT long exposure noise reduction.

Verdi bridge (look closely for the train), 12 mins, f/8 @ ISO 200 with the fisheye, daylight WB.

Verdi Bridge under light polution

Robb Drive long exposure

Verdi bridge v2: I lucked out and got another train (2 out of my 3 shots had trains, although it is harder to see in this photo) 12 mins, f/8 @ISO 200, 12-24mm, no noise reduction. I'm not sure if I like this version better than the fisheye shot.

Verdi Bridge under light polution v2

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I finally got my new camera on Monday and I've been really itching to shoot something, so I decided to play around with some flowers.

White on Black

Orange on Silver

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