Everchanging visual stimulation from the biggest little city

Tahoe, Stars and Wordpress...

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:33:19 -0700

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

PS, I'm thinking of closing down this blog because I've been cheating on you guys with my wordpress blog. If anyone knows a way to export all of my posts from Vox --> WP please fill me in. And while I'm on the subject of leaving Vox, let me just say that the process of submitting posts to groups is ridiculous! I've used vox for over a year and still can't believe the Vox design team hasn't come up with something as simple as checkboxes! Look at Flickr's "organize group" system and how easy it is to use. It takes me more time to submit to select groups than it does to author the post for crying out loud...

Sorry for the rant...

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The lost memory card returns from its 100 mile journey!

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:39:36 -0700

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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Camping trip/portraits on the blackrock desert

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:13:19 -0700

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

Above: Same camera setup as before, diffuser panel to camera left (sun was harsh on that dress), quantum flash to left to even everything out, sb-800 on right for rim. The wind was also helpful in this shot.

As always, comments welcome and look for more photos from this shoot soon.

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A couple portraits

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:22:41 -0700

A couple from last week.

Alone

Tasha

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Shooting watches worth more than my car!

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:16:27 -0700

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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Solitary Confinement

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:12:01 -0700

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

Comment welcome...

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A few long exposures

nobody@vox.com(Dan) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:37:47 -0700

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 Overpass: 6mins, f/8 @ ISO200, noise reduction off, 12-24mm

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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