24 posts tagged “daniel newton”
A couple from last week.
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.
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.
Here are a couple photos from a small get-together with some new friends. Taken about 20-25 minutes North of Reno, the photo below illustrates the light pollution that city-dwelling astronomy enthusiasts must deal with. The 10" Meade scope still provided some beautiful views. Notice the constellation Orion just over Richard's shoulder and his Edmond's Scientific scope in the background. We had a great time looking at Mars, Saturn, Andromeda, The Great Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, double cluster (NGC869 and 844) and the Moon.
There are two major hurdles doing lunar and planetary photography with a D-SLR through a scope: Focusing and combating atmospheric seeing conditions. Compared to a nice, bright eyepiece, looking through a DSLR provides a much dimmer, wider field of view that makes it very difficult to perform fine focusing. There are solutions, either using a computer to control exposures and analyze focus as you take multiple photos adjusting the focus each time or by utilizing a live-view if your camera supports it.
Even if "perfect" focus is achieved, a photo may still appear to be blurry due to atmospheric conditions (heat rising, ect). Looking through a scope during "poor to moderate seeing" is like looking through heat-waves (see this 45 second clip of Jupiter for example). The best lunar and planetary images are done by using webcams that are capable of super-fast frame rates of 100+ frames per second. Software goes through hundreds of photos to find the sharp ones.
Even under decent seeing, I'm still having great difficulty focusing without the aide of a computer, a webcam or live-view. I did get a couple sharp ones and they look amazing when viewed at their full 10MP resolution (something you cannot get with a webcam). This is not cropped and gives you an idea of the field of view I get with the setup.
Finally, here is a candid group shot with me at the scope.
Last night I made the tough realization that I need to sell off ALL of my 4x5 stuff :( I just haven't been doing any large format stuff lately and being a starving 24 year old that basically eats crap for camera equipment, I've decided to cut down my kit. Plus the cost for 4x5 e6 development is like $2-$3 a shot!
And since I converted my darkroom into a digital printing/matting room/office, I figured I'd ditch film all together.
In preparation for the online auctions I'll be putting together, I did some nice product shots of the equipment. Below is my 180mm APO Rodenstock lens.
Basically, I've got two strobes through softboxes on either side of the lens, which is sitting on a clear piece of glass I borrowed from a frame. The glass is on top of black velvet. To give a really nice clean specular, I placed some foamcore behind the lens and shot a speedlight into it.
I will soon post a complete list of all the stuff I'm going to sell including some Nikon lenses (not large format), for now, heres a quick list of stuff, PM me if you are interested and I'll set up an eBay auction for you.:
- Shenhao HZX 4x5-IIa 4x5 field camera w/Satin Snow GG
- Rodenstock Grandagon-N 75mm MC f/6.8 #109xxxxx
- Sinar Schneider Super-Angulon 90mm MC f/8 #137xxxxx
- Rodenstock APO Sironar-N 180mm f/5.6 #111xxxxx
- Schneider SYmmar-S 240mm f/5.6 #139xxxxx
- Schneider Componon-S 150mm f/5.6 enlarger lens
Comments welcome, more from this series to come...
Yesterday I requested the day off to go to the Mum concert in San Francisco. Well, everyone that was going canceled, so instead I photographed around with Kris. This was one of my favorites.
Here is the first of many shots I plan to post from the Arizona strobist meetup. Fielding and I drove over 700 miles, slept a total of about 8 hours in almost 3 days and took hundreds of photos with almost 30 other photographers and 7 models at the event. It was a blast and good use of my vacation time.
This was a shoot right at sunrise in the graveyard with Brianna. Comments always welcome :)
Strobist info:
Quantum Q flash positioned to camera left shooting through a 43" umbrella. The rising sun was behind the model to camera right. Nikon d200, 80-200 f/2.8
Model: Brianna
A few nights ago, a friend and I loaded up on caffeine and music to prepare for a very long night of shooting. We setup and began exposing the moon every 20mins from about 1am to 6am during the lunar eclipse over Pyramid Lake, NV. I shot both 4x5 and digital and here is the result.
Please note that the position of the camera was not changed during the multiple exposures and none of the "moons" were repositioned or drawn in with Photoshop. While the sun was down, multiple exposures were made for the brightness of the moon and as the sun finally came up, a final exposure for the foreground was made.
I was a zombie a few hours later when I had to go to work, but I think it was worth it.
As always, comments welcome...
Here is part of a series I'm working on. I've withheld this shot for some time now because I am not sure about it for some reason, perhaps too busy. So after going back and forth, I've decided to post it with hopes that you guys will have an opinion either way. Please click through to the full rez version, otherwise the photo looks over-sharpened and too contrasty.
