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: little or no moon, little or no city lights, a lens that can get very open (this was shot with an f/2.8 although an f/1.8 would have allowed a lower ISO), and a tripod.  I’d also recommend a remote shutter release or use the camera’s timer.

I found that finding your focus before the sun has completely set is the way to go, finding it based on dim stars can be a real challenge, if you focus before the sun goes down on a very distant object and then leave it alone until it is dark it will be beneficial.

Setup:

• Like I said, focus before it is dark
• Set the camera to manual, you will want to keep the shutter long but not too long, I’d say 15-20 seconds to reduce the amount of star trails.  This I’m sure has to do with your positioning on the Earth, I’ve shot 30 seconds in Mexico with  very little trails and in Colorado where 20 seconds creates trails, small ones but they exist.
• Open the aperture all the way up, we can play with this later.
• ISO, set to 1600, I know this may be noisy but we gotta see how many starts we’re going to get.
• Take that photo!
• Depending on your camera and the results you could play with the settings here.  Too dim, try increasing the shutter, push that shutter all the way till you get trails.  Put the ISO higher.  Too light, I’d take the ISO down before I’d shorten the shutter time.
• Even with this photo, 20 seconds, f/2.8 (which is why I say f/1.8 might be your best bet), and ISO 2000 (thank you Canon 5DmII for those wonderful ISOs), I was too dim.  I post processed and bumped the exposure up 1 stop.

I may keep playing with it as this was my first go but beyond an SLR and a tripod and a really dark sky you don’t really need much.  My photo had one small light from a building about 200 feet away, it was enough to really illuminate that tree, I wish I could have walked further out and try again but again, I broke the cord.  Go out and play next new moon, its not going to hurt, just bring a flashlight.

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.

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 lots of time editing them, getting the colors just right, they look great on my computer but you know what happened when I looked at them at work, they looked awful!  Turns out my monitor at work is not very well calibrated at all.  I’ve spent so much time calibrating it but usually for text that colors just don’t render correctly.

What is one to do, well first things first, I needed to calibrate my work monitors.  Well, in order to really calibrate a monitor you need a piece of hardware, you need something like the Spyder but I mean really, who is going to spend anywhere from $70-500 on a calibration device unless you are doing it professionally and color accuracy is of the greatest of importance.  I know I still haven’t bought one but I really should have a few times over.  Thankfully you do have some options that are a lot cheaper, like free.  QuickGamma or the Monitor Calibration Wizard will allowa you to look at your monitor and make some executive decisions about how it displays things.

What you’re going to run into though, is the monitor will only be as good as your eye is and you have to know exactly what color they monitor is trying to make, your perfect grey or red may look totally different than my red or grey.  On Mac computers there is also a built in color calibration tool.  It is under the System Preferences -> Displays -> Color -> Calibrate…   This is quite the tool and it has allowed me to really calibrate my laptop exactly how I want it.  I calibrated just the way I thought it would look, then I adjusted a photo, a colorful photo and got it printed professionally at my favorite print shop.  Held them side by side, darn, what I was seeing still wasn’t what the print shop was seeing.  Well, I tried again, and then again, and then one more time.  Finally!  There are resources on the net where people have professionally or at least carefully calibrated their monitor and uploaded the calibration file for the world to use but it is monitor build specific, more on that later.

So now I have a MacBook screen that is totally aligned with my printshop, the problem is now different printer profiles, papers, etc stuff that is pretty much over my head.  My real goal with my simplistic approach was to have prints match my monitor which they now do.  Sadly, I don’t know how your monitor out there in the Internet world is calibrated.  For all I know all my photos are too dark, too saturated, too blown out on your monitor.  I witnessed it myself this week!  It is frustrating knowing that all the time I’ve spent making the images look amazing by me might not translate over to you but sadly this is a problem that won’t be solved anytime soon.  Every manufacturer has a different “white” and “red” and every other color under the sun.  And even manufacturers that hold their products close, like Apple, have monitors for their MacBooks that don’t match up.  A MacBook Pro manufactured in June will have a different monitor than one in July just because of the manufacturing process that it underwent.

Color accuracy is amazingly complex and really I don’t know how to beat it.  Until every monitor comes equipped with a calibrater built in or everyone goes out to buy one themselves, I don’t know how to fix it.  I guess what I’m saying is, if you hire a photographer and you aren’t exactly pleased with the results, get some prints you can hold in your hand, look at the colors in that world, maybe it is time for you to look at your monitor calibration.

Heck even me looking at this website, it appears that my whites are too high, I can’t see the difference between 251->254.   Another resource here and another here.

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…

Zacapa pour, I drank this one after the pour, quite delicious.

Model stands holding the photobooth images by the photobooth

One of the many fun character at the event posing for a photo

Another group posting with a bottle of Zacapa

This next image I tried to get about 20 times from about 5 different angles with about 20 different exposure / flash settings.  What a challenging shot, I still didn’t get it the way I wanted to.   I really needed to have my flash off camera, off to the side and maybe even two flashes hitting it from each side.  Not exactly something you can stop and set up for in the middle of a crazy event.  Perhaps I’m wrong on the setup, maybe someone can enlighten me.

Bottle and box of Zacapa by the fireplace in the restaurant.

Every event has its challenges, with this event I had to go out of my way on several occasions to have the patrons grab a bottle, hold a box, stand by the photobooth and any other trick I could think of to get some branding in the shot.  As time goes by I’m more and more comfortable doing this as it turns out, I have yet to have a single person not want to do it or even care that I asked.

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.

Yup, its a harmonica

Sadly it is hard to read the sign, "All that remains of the Rainbow Music Hall"

Much like the last one

You can imagine that singing can't you.

I will post soon.

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…

Yeah, that's an official Academy Award booklet. I have an extra or two if anyone would like one.

Follow the yellow brick road... it leads to the end of the buffet line.

Thank you for dressing up, it makes my life easier.

Another bottle of Moet with a more colorful background.

Thank you, again bartender, labels out!

So this was most of the branding in the place, bottles and a few banners, it made it a challenge

Even Christina and myself got our photo in front of the Moet / Oscar wall. Thanks Chris.

There are many more photos to be found, especially of attendees, I am hosting them for all the party attendees for the next three months. Not every party can be as decked out as the 42Below event but its in the job description to make it work and to find the angles.

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…

Poor girl, could barely open her eyes.

A baby can make a chair look huge!

Kathy pinches the cheek of Joslyn trying to wake her up

It's like a seedpod for a baby

Finally after some food and some napping Joslyn opened her eyes for some photos.

Just strike a pose

"I bet I can eat my whole hand"

The most expression of the day, even if it is confusion.

Overall, I was happy with the results.  Haven’t taken many baby photos, don’t spend a lot of time hanging out with babies you see.  And a guy with a large camera and telephoto lens can’t exactly just walk up and take photos of babies, culturally that is.  That would just be weird.  Anyway, I have plenty more photos if you’re interested: Photos at the Hospital & Photos at Home