Pickford Oscars Party – Red Carpet

Events No Comments

For the last three years I have been photographing the Annual Pickford Oscars Party. Tonight was the third annual extravaganza and, with the trusty help of my assistant for the night Jon, it went perfectly!


If you were there and you stopped by the photo wall, you will be able to find your photo in the Online Photos section of my website, then select the Pickford Oscars – Red Carpet Photos album from the list. You may purchase as many as you like as a download, photographic print or even two sizes of movie posters!



I hope everyone had at least as much fun as I did! My cheeks are sore from smiling.

Blogging is Important

Art Nerd Personal 1 Comment

I really ought to blog more. I don’t, as you can see–but I ought to.
For me, quite often, I think that if I only had more readers I would blog more. Then logic sets in and I remember that readers only follow active blogs. So I resolve myself to blog more, and by that I mean that I post another entry and purpose in my heart to blog more. Then a few months later I realize that this did not happen.


So my purpose with this blog entry is to begin to blog more. I plan to put up some entries soon about some of the projects I have been working on with my sister (Rachel Vos) and I hope to explain some of the tech that we use and the methods to our artsy, cookie fueled, madness.
I am a huge gear nut so if you care about gear and nerdy things like that I’ll be posting more information in the weeks to come.


I will also be explaining what this lovely pile of goodies is, why it was in a pile thusly and where it was going. Hint: I call this “pile o’ studio”. Stay tuned!

Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta – First impressions

Lightroom Nerd Process Product Reviews No Comments

Well, I just downloaded Adobe’s new Lightroom 4 beta and have been playing with it for the last two hours. There are some really neat things here that I will talk about. Adobe posted this list of new features: 


New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta
  • Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights. 
  • Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates. 
  • Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras. 
  • White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images. 
  • Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images. 
  • Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips. 
  • Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®. 
  • Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers. 
  • Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice. 



This isn’t going to be the most in-depth review of all the new features so I’ll pick a couple and then give my impressions of functionality.


One of my favorite new things is the white balance brush, among the additional local editing features this comes as a great relief to me because I despise mixed color temperatures in my compositions. Shooting in incandescent light near a sunlit window will give you very orange inside or very blue outside, but not anymore! 


In my test image I noticed that the color temp of the trees in the background was different than the foreground, a perfect test for the brush tool! 


Neat, huh? You may notice that I did a few other things to the image, this brings me to the next feature which I very much like; highlight and shadow recovery. 

      


The immediate difference is evident (left: Lightroom 3, right: Lightroom 4), gone are Recovery, Fill Light, Black Level and Brightness. Lightroom 4 now has Highlights, Shadows, White level and Black level. This is especially good if you are trying to pull detail out of shadows and highlights or trying to get a pseudo-HDR look out of a single raw file. 


While it is a thumbnail of my screen, you can see that there was detail pulled out of the highlights that were almost blown out in the before image and at the same time, detail pulled out of the shadows while still maintaining proper exposure overall. I noticed that, unlike adding a ton of fill light, there was no haloing effect that can happen when you fill too much. However, you still get a slight saturation in the reds just like fill light. 

If you get LR4 and you find you do not like this way of editing you still have the option of returning to the previous process (2010). 

Selecting the 2010 process will bring back the same control options as LR3, but it will leave this little annoying exclamation icon down in the corner of every image until you change it to 2012 process. 


All this talk about process brings me to my final observation in LR4, functionality with presets based upon the 2010 process. When I added my favorite black and white preset it came across almost perfect. Note that it switched the image to 2010 process, giving me the above exclamation point. 


However, it did not bring across my curve settings, I think this is a glitch with the beta and should be fixed in later releases so we will just ignore that for now. So the first thing I did was switch it to the 2012 process. 


Which zeroed the new process details (note: I zeroed out the curve myself). So I had to add my curve preset manually (the individual presets transfer over and work no problem), and with a little bit of tweaking I was able to recreate my original effect in the new process. 


All in all, I feel like this is a really good update for Adobe Lightroom. I can’t wait for them to release it! Keep in mind, this is only a beta version so I do not recommend using it for work (see photo) 


It crashed on me twice as I was working on this review. Woo! Luckily it did not damage the catalog so all my changes were saved real-time. 

Feel free to download LR4 Beta 1 from Adobe Labs http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/ and have fun! 

CJ & Megan Engagements

Couples Engagements No Comments

I dare you to just try to stop these youngsters from smiling. I dare you. Ok, I don’t, they’re just really smily! I started this particular shoot in perhaps the worst way possible. I got out to my car to find the tire was flat. Then, after borrowing my dad’s truck and scurrying over to Woods to meet them, my camera fell out of my car and broke. I can still use it, but it is now inconveniently without the top setting screen. Very sad! I shook it off and headed out with this delightful couple who made it easy to get my mind off the broken equipment. We had quite a bit of rain so there will be another shoot coming up with some sun! 

I Love Gear!

Gear Nerd Personal No Comments

Unless you’ve never had a conversation with me, you know that I’m a nerd and I love technology! If you say, “hey, what’s that black boxy thingy you point and people that makes clicking noises?” you’re about to enjoy some gear information overload. Almost as much as I love actually taking pictures, I love GEAR! You will notice that I’ve got a gear tab up top there and that leads you to some neat hints and helps when looking for gear. I’ve amassed in my head a working knowledge of Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Hasselblad, Mamiya and a few other brands’ cameras and lenses. As well as some miscellaneous accessories and fun gear like that. This sort of thing is fun for me! 


So here’s some facts. My current camera is the Nikon D7000:

Nikon D7000 16.2MP DX-Format CMOS Digital SLR with 3.0-Inch LCD (Body Only)



I love it! This is one amazing camera. From the moment I first read the articles announcing it I was hooked. I only recently finally got mine after borrowing a friend’s for a great deal of my work. Going to this from the larger, more expensive D300 was actually quite a step up. With 16 megapixels and 25,600 iso and under the $1,500 mark there is no surprise that it was so hard to get when it came out.  


I shoot with a few different lenses: 

Nikon 16-35mm f/4G ED VR II AF-S IF SWM Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

This lens is perfect, tack sharp and wide. I love editing images from it because there is absolutely ZERO color aberration. No purple fringing, no blue haze, just perfect. It’s the sharpest zoom lens Nikon makes. 

Nikon 50mm f/1.4G SIC SW Prime Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

I can’t imagine a photographer not having a 50mm lens in their arsenal. Well, my sister doesn’t, but that’s because she has an 85mm f/1.4D. Which is brilliant. There is also a new update from Nikon for it, the Nikon 85mm f/1.4G, now with nano coating for less color aberration. 

Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

This one I borrow from my sister, I’ll likely get the new one when I can afford it. Very sharp, very good, very fun. I love it. 

I won’t go into all of my miscellaneous gear in this one post. There’s so much I could talk about but here are two things I can’t live without: 

Nikon SB-700 AF Speedlight Flash for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras
My flash, I replaced my SB-600 with this little beauty. I’ve discovered that I get a lot more shots out of my Eneloop batteries with the new SB700 and it is quite a bit easier to manage settings on the fly as well with its easy off, on, remote, master switch and quick dial. 

SanDisk SDSDXP1-016G-A75 16GB Extreme Pro SDHC Memory Card

It doesn’t matter how much equipment you have or what you’ve spent to get it, if your card fails it’s all useless! So I went with the Sandisk Extreme Pro line of SD cards. They are the fastest SD cards on the market and reliable as the day is long! I keep two of them in my camera at all times (the D7000 has two card slots!), it lets me shoot an entire wedding without having to pull a card out of my camera. The leading cause of data loss is… losing the card itself! I never have to worry about that because my two cards are ALWAYS in my camera and I never have to switch them out. I’ll hit almost 2,000 images on the pair of cards. That’s a good day of shooting!

Anyhow, I hope you have enjoyed my gear thoughts. I sure enjoyed making this post! Check out my Gear page for more in-depth (and categorized) gear recommendations. And remember, any item you purchase via a link on this page or the gear page will go toward my next fantastic gear purchases! Many thanks and more to come!