July 25th, 2010
Work has slowed quite a bit over the past few weeks. That’s okay though summer is a busy time for everything, I’d love some work but I’m keeping busy just fine. Promotions really slow down during the summer because it is year end, just gotta wait for the industry to get back online. For the time being we’ve been doing extras, two weeks ago we went down to the Sand Dunes, what a place to take photos! I’ve been there a few times before but every time I go I’m a better photographer and see more opportunity.
One photo that I grabbed, right before I broke my remote shutter release cord, is below. We happened to be down there on a very clear night during the new moon. The stars were absolutely amazing, Alamosa, CO is right near the dunes but they don’t have much light pollution, this means some wonderful long exposure, night photos can be taken.
About the cord, it was dark, I set my tripod with my camera down for a second with the cord wrapped over my shoulder. Well, the tripod was not level, I even did a double check! About 5 seconds after I put it down the whole thing toppled! Luckily, there was some twine between posts directing people where to go for grounds recover. The tripod fell right into one of them, it scraped against the ground (the lens hood did) but it did not hit the ground thankfully. The cord however stayed around my neck and snapped the connector off in the camera. A pair of tweezers and $30 later I have a new functional cord but man oh man, scary times.
Back to the photo, it seemed appropriate to post the photo because I saw some serious discussion on reddit.com this week about stars photography and I think a lot of people make it much harder than it is.
Milky Way above the mountains in southern Colorado
I took this photo without any fancy star photography equipment in one shot. No need for star tracking equipment, no need for $100 filters. What you need is: Read the rest of this entry »
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July 25th, 2010
So, first things first. I sat down and crunched all the photos on my laptop tonight. They are now all on my server except the ones I still need to work. Yay!!! To all my friends I am creating a personal, private area of the website. It will be password protected, I can separately protect galleries but right now once you are in you are in. Link will be provided along with a username / password, probably through Facebook. Some of the photos are a year old and I was just so lazy that they sat on the laptop waiting for editing and uploading.
Tonight, done! At least once the desktop stops crunching.
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June 26th, 2010
So I finally found the time to really site down and redo the actually website part of the website. Blog and Client areas are untouched but now the website matches. Yay!!! It only took me several months to find an afternoon to really just do it. Also I have added a Sales Gallery where I can sell prints of some of my more artistic and pretty photos. Now you can buy my art! Well, as soon as I get some more galleries added. Currently I have some photos from Chicago up just to test it and give everyone a chance to play with it, maybe even buy one of them.
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June 23rd, 2010
Congratulations to Mark Stoddard and all of Team USA. As it turns out Mark, from the Denver competition, was one of the top finishers in NYC and advanced to the finals held in New Zealand (home of 42Below). Team USA brought home the gold, congratulations to them!
Tags: 42below
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June 10th, 2010
So one thing that a lot of photographers know about but I feel a lot of people outside photography don’t is color accuracy. I don’t know how many people have really sat down and worked on a photo, get the white balance right, get the saturation looking great, oh bump up those yellows a little, ah, finally it looks good. Then you print it or put it online somewhere.
Oh man, those prints can look absolutely awful, way over saturated, bright fake looking reds, but how, it looked so great on your monitor, you can even hold them side by side. This is not the photo you edited.
Well, I’ve seen this from time to time, more on the online side, since a lot of the work I do is online (websites, uploads to clients, emails) I’ve found that this problem extends well beyond printing. Monitor calibration can play a huge role in what the client and prospective clients see. Just this week I uploaded some photos from a Ron Zacapa event, I spent Read the rest of this entry »
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June 9th, 2010
So one thing about doing photography for work in your freetime is that sometimes you work all day and then you have to go work. It can be tough, especially when you have a 2.5 hour drive to get there, really kills the whole day, luckily I enjoy the work.
So Ron Zacapa, a 23 year old premium rum from Guatemala, had an event up in Beaver Creek. It was an event to celebrate a successful promo / winter season up in the mountains that had many promotions. A lot of people from the resorts and bars around the area were invited to sample some cocktails, have some food and just all around have some fun. They had giveaways, a photo booth and a DJ. All around a fun night for everyone.
I luckily carved out a space at the bus station in the kitchen to store my equipment, I carried with me my 5D2, 24-702.8, 70-200 2.8 , 50 1.4, and my 580EXII. Happy that at any given time I just had to have the camera with the lens and the flash. I also carried my flash bracket with me but when I was setting up my TTL cable broke, the part of the cable that mounts into the bracket was on a swivel, no good I the flash can rotate in any direction it wants to. I had to skip it as a result and am now in the market for a new TTL cable.
Zacapa in a glass illuminated from below
More after the fold…
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May 10th, 2010
So I know I said I had plenty more posts to come but really I’ve just been busy and lazy. It is time to really take some time for photography, the website and the blog, they’ve all been taking a backseat lately but at the same time it has been a nice break. Christina, the dogs and I have a house, a rental but a house none the less and a yard for the monsters to run in. If anyone is looking for a condo near Wash Park, I can help you there too.
Back to the blog here. I’ll come back to the event I spoke about previously for the time being I’m taking this route.
My brother in law has been working with this Denver band for a while. Born in the Flood. Born in the Flood became the Wheel, the Wheel became Nathaniel Rateliff and the Wheel, and then the Wheel part got dropped. These guys have been great with me. I’ve carried my camera to many of their concerts, I got to go to the Sand Dunes for a photoshoot with Brantley Gutierrez (his website gave me a weird error on Chrome but it looks all good to me), back stage photos, lots of stuff.
Well now has come the time, Nathaniel and the Wheel (the Wheel remains, just not in name) have released an album (Amazon, also on iTunes but I don’t have the direct link). It’s soft music, not normally up my alley but I really enjoy it although I won’t lie, I miss some of the Born in the Flood stuff from yesteryear. Well, they had a little in-store at Twist and Shout. I decided to go, unsure what to expect when I got there. The place was packed, the stage was really cool, in front of some great posters, album art, etc. The acoustics could have been better but really what can you expect from an in-store? I didn’t move around a lot to get photos, it was only about 5 songs, I missed part of one of them and like I said the place was packed.
Please check out some of the live recordings I took and check out the samples on iTunes or Amazon. If you like it please buy it, support these guys, they’re a great Denver band.
Nathaniel Rateliff Live 1 | Live 2 | Live 3 | Live 4
The place was packed
More after the fold.
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April 23rd, 2010
Wow, I was just sitting here and it suddenly occurred to me. I have not updated this thing in quite a while. I have some photos from a Ron Zacapa rum event I did up in Beaver Creek, I have some fun photos and probably plenty more to talk about. But man oh man, we’re in the process of looking for a new place and moving, trying to sell our current place still, the Av’s and the Nuggets are in the playoffs and I got Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the Xbox. Just like that my free time is gone.
I will post soon.
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March 30th, 2010
Alright it’s been a little while since my last post I’d like to say I’ve been too busy but really I’ve just been lazy. Plus it hasn’t helped that I picked up a Nexus One. The amount of time I can spend personalizing a new gadget, setting up new apps, tweaking things, making it mine is a little ridiculous. This is especially bad when I’m replacing a gadget that has been so integral in my life for three years, the iPhone. Sadly I’d just had enough of the iPhone and of Apple, I needed something new and fun. I’m really enjoying the new phone, better screen, more open architecture and apps and it has a much better camera, not sure how much use it will get still. So cool, just need to find replacements for all those iPhone apps, most of the games can’t be replaced.
So anyway back to the photography thing. I was approached about doing an Oscar viewing party. It was sponsored by Moet, the official drink of the Oscars. It was a new concept, one that truthfully I wasn’t sure could be pulled off. (Alright, up until this point I typed the whole thing on the phone, trying out Swype the keyboard from that commercial about setting the record for the fastest text message ever, I’m not that fast with it still, time for a real keyboard) The concept was to have a red carpet outside and have some photographers out there shooting photos like crazy, flashes going off, etc, give it that red carpet feel. The problem, I was supposed to figure out how to make that work. Luckily I had two friends willing to come out and help and even more luckily one of them had his own SLR to shoot some photos with.
Once inside people would stand in front of the Moet / Academy Awards wall and get their photo taken. I’d work inside and take some photos of people enjoying themselves and some of the surroundings. Still I wasn’t sure two people would be enough to give it that “red carpet” feel.
Luckily the response was great, two cameras / cameramen were enough to give people that wow feel. While my two buddies worked the crowd outside I offered up photos to all that wanted them inside. During down times I walked around and snapped some more photos of people and once the party was really started I got to kick back, relax, drink some Moet and Belvedere and eat some delicious food. After some relaxing, back out there to shoot a few more photos. All in all it was a really fun party, branding wasn’t as easy to come by as the 42Below event which meant the photos and angles weren’t nearly as easy to come by. Here are some of the results:
A nice chilled bottle of champagne... mmm, headache here I come
More photos and final thoughts after the fold…
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Tags: moet, party, Work
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March 15th, 2010
Baby photos… babies are like dogs, they don’t like to cooperate for photos. ”Look this way,” “Open your eyes,” and the ever so hard “Smile!” Babies are also not quite like dogs for many reasons (one I noticed is that they can’t run away from photos, depending on age) that I’m sure many parents could tell you about, that’s not my role.
I now have two close friends that have had kids, I must be getting old. My friends TJ and Kathy invited me up to Longmont to take some photos of their newborn. I went up within a few days of Joslyn’s birth and got some photos in the hospital and then went up that first weekend for a more intimate photo shoot at home. The wonderful thing about baby photos is they have such a more significant meaning than a lot of other photos, at least for a few people. They will be photos that end up in albums, and Christmas cards. They are a capture of that moment in life, which I guess is what all photos are, but we aren’t all growing at a ridiculously high rate looking different every day.
Pretty much with no idea what to expect I took every lens I have. 5DmkII, 24-70mm 2.8 L, 70-200mm 2.8 is L, 50mm 1.4, 100mm 2.8, and the 580EX II. I’d like to share some of the photos with the world.
Baby and dad at the hospital
More photos and final thoughts after the fold…
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Tags: baby, friends, kids
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