Thanks Matt for getting me out of the house to shoot some photos.

My friend Matt has been wanting to do a few night time HDR shots of certain building he and I saw a month or two ago. Here is my version of the building. It is near Deer Valley Airport in a business park just off of 19th Ave. Matt took some great shots. I took three photos, and this is the one I liked most. It is an HDR shot with exposures taken at 510 (8:30), 256 (4:16), 128 (2:08), 64, 30, 15, and 8 seconds. I am glad Matt got me out, and got me home when my voice started getting raspy.

On an unrelated note, I hope to soon a post on replacing the bulb in a Nikon SB-600 speedlight. I had the strobe on a light stand when my 1 year old knocked it over, and it landed bulb side down on the tile in the dining room. ARRGGHH. The zoom feature works, and I can easilty see the broken bulb through the clear plastic. Nikon's part dept. was closed 5 minutes before their scheduled closing time :p by the time I tried to order the part.

The bulb is on ebay for $29 + shipping but I hear that they are cheaper from Nikon. I have my soldering iron ready (three solder points), I just hope I can save it. It is on life support, and I hope it doesn't die on the operating table (my soldering is pretty bad).

Note: I am not a big fan of the "fakey/surreal" looking HDR photos, though they do have their place. If you look at this photo at full size. It looks more realistic.

Tiffany

Shot this photo of my sister-in-law in the garage. Two lights: an SB800 gelled blue shooting on a white background, and an Alienbees 800 with a large softbox camera right. I would have liked a little more distance between the subject and the background, but this was in my garage. Oh well. Then did about 3 minutes of post in Photoshop, just a quick high pass filter set to 75%ish opacity, vignetting, and desaturated just a tad.

Arnon, good luck on getting your black chair back. I love it.

Black chair on the hill

Tessa always does a good job of helping me compose photos. Borrowed a black leather chair from the Livingstone house, and went up to a little hill not far from home. The chair turned out to be a lot heavier than it looked. Shooting through an umbrella, I think I would have preferred a softbox to control the light fall-off a little more. But I don't mind a little illumination on the immediate surroundings.

dumped

My aunt was given the assignment of using strobes to take portraits. She decided to do a series of "dumped" photos. Here is one of the shots. We did it in my garage (I think it may have been a ploy to keep her own garage clean). Check them out here.

Three Alienbees total. Two on the sides and slightly above with 7inch reflectors (come standard with the strobes), and one alienbees shot into silver umbrella as the key light. We tried an sb-800 on the floor shooting at the background for a few shots. It was set to fire with the built in optical trigger. With the exception of two sb-600s, we used all my light.

We were able to shoot between 3.5 frames per second and 4.5 frames per second. The alienbees did a good job of keeping up, but a little power was lost. The first frame of each burst was noticeably lighter than the following.

Here are a couple of the setup shots. The shots are from our second sitting. As result, we managed to keep the mess somewhat under control. The chair front and left is where I stood to pour the food product on the poor recipient.

Before:

After: