Category Archives: Photography

Related to Photography and taking or dealing with pictures.

Get Your Seat to the Digital Wake Up Call

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I briefly mentioned David Ziser’s tour before, and that I have already booked my seat, but I thought I would tell you a little bit more. Why you say? Three reasons: I want to see you go because David is an amazing photographer with a ton of information he is willing to share with you. Two, because I have a discount code for you, and three, because I am running my first contest, with the prize being a seat at the big show.

I forget now how I stumbled upon digital pro talk, David’s blog. I hadn’t done any weddings, and it looked like he was a wedding photographer, and I was ready to move along, but I decided to read a couple of posts. Well, I have been back many many times to read and reread his posts. He has so many¬† interesting things to say about portraits, lighting, gear, and the business of photography, that there is something there for everyone whether or not they ever shoot a wedding.

It looks like his digital wake up tour will have a ton of useful information.  What might you learn? This is from the tour site:

  • 32 ways to use your on and off-camera flashes for creative and dramatic effects.
  • 10 of the best camera settings and lens choices for creating striking images on every job.
  • 7 ways to use the new DSLR video capabilities to transform your product offerings.
  • 10 “Magic Bullet” techniques to make your digital workflow nearly effortless, highly efficient, and fun with today’s top software from Adobe Lightroom, NIK, and LumaPix: FotoFusion.
  • 20 new product and marketing ideas targeted to today’s customers¬†which will¬†add substantially to your bottom line.

Your still on the fence? How about all of this stuff you will get :

  • Tour Handbook including: program notes, photography, marketing and more
  • 2 Hour DVD with extended program content
  • $100 Rebate from American Color Imaging
  • 1 year membership to WPPI and Rangefinder magazine, a $99 value
  • FREE 3 month membership to DigitalProTalkPlus.com, a $45 value
  • FREE 3 month subscription to PPA Magazine, a $15 value
  • FREE PPA Indemnification (no-fault) insurance for all new PPA menbers, a $50 value
  • Over $2,500 in door prizes awarded each evening
  • And a chance to win 1 of 4 Grand Prizes worth over $5,000

David is bringing the event to 58 cities across the US, including the Minneapolis event September 16. I’ll be there. If you don’t win the contest, David has given me a discount code that you can use to get $20 off the event. Enter code:¬† ZCWDWC09 ( last digits are zero nine) on the registration page, and you will receive a $20 discount. Price will be only $59 after the discount.

Want to enter the contest and go free? Ok, the contest will be me arbitrarily picking the most dramatic portrait from the photo’s submitted to the Cyberward flickr group.

  1. First get a flickr account. They are free.
  2. Upload your pictures to flickr.
  3. Join the Cyberward flickr group
  4. Add the¬† tag “dwc09” to the photo’s
  5. Limit the photo’s you enter in the contest to 3 please.

The contest will run until April 11 at @ midnight (Saturday). I will choose on Sunday, and email the winner and post the winning picture on April 13 (Monday)

Good luck, and see you in September at DWC09!

Update:moved the contest end back into April (again) and added the registration code

Studio Pictures of Lorenzo

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I finally got the pictures of Lorenzo “developed”. This was a difficult shoot. He was not in the best of moods. He was tired, and bored most of the time. Very squirmy. I didn’t get any of the pictures of the family to turn out. They were never looking toward the camera at the same time. A couple of the shots of Lorenzo turned out.

We had a 1 to 1 lighting ratio set up. Two strobes at 45 deg from the subject in softboxes. There was a light on the background too. I don’t think we had the background light centered well, and with Lorenzo moving around, the light was often in my pictures. I found getting good pictures of him difficult.

Trumpter Swan Pictures

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I finally got my swan pictures processed from Monticello a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t get any of the heart shapes, when you have two of them facing each other and their necks make a heart. Part of the problem was there were too many swans. You couldn’t get a pair isolated. They would never get perpendicular to the lens either. Oh well, here are a few. More on flickr.

Pay attention to me 

Swan Couple 

DSC_5388 

Leave me alone

Photog Arrested Taking Amtrak Photos

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I am not sure how I missed this. Very funny. Well, not the arrested part, but the Stephen Colbert video piece is from Feb 2. I still don’t get what people have against photographers, but the name of National Security seems to be some great rallying war cry for security guards. What the heck?

[update:I have it embeded now]

The Art of Outdoor Photography

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The Art of PhotographyI just finished reading The Art of Outdoor Photography (Amazon). I took it out from the library. Twice. Extended my three week time each time too. Not the most riveting of authors. I had a hard time getting into it.

Boyd spends a lot of time in each of the chapters discussing film, film choice, and whether to shoot at 25, 50, or 75 ISO. My camera doesn’t take film, and only starts at 200 ISO. Does the fact that the book doesn’t deal with digital mean it has nothing to offer? No, but it feels dated. The revised edition is from 2002.

The concepts and techniques of outdoor photography and how to compose and visualize are not different on film or digital. He does have some good things to say about “seeing”, and light in the first chapters. There is a great chapter with picture examples of how perspective changes with the use of different lenses. He also has chapters on composition and using shutter speed creatively. This takes us up to about page 70. I feel this was the better part of the content.

The rest of the chapters are short sections on film types, and different outdoor shooting situations, like landscapes, close ups, underwater, and travel. It doesn’t feel like the individual chapters get to give enough attention to their subject matter.

He has some great pictures every once in a while, but most of the images are not very inspiring. I guess that on a whole, I would recomend looking for the book in your library if you want to give it a read.

Trumpeter Swans

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Trumpeter Swans in Monticello

I was in Monticello to take pictures of Trumpeter Swans this Sunday. I have to say that it is really the first time that I went and stood around in freezing cold temperatures for several hours to get pictures of wildlife. It was fun though.

I was set up with my new tripod and 70-200mm lens right beside someone that takes regular trips to yellowstone with his 600mm lens. Yikes. That was a piece of kit!

I got some good pictures, I think. I haven’t had time to “develop” them yet. I will post more soon.

We are pretty much at the end of their migration period. In fact I was told that earlier was better. Not sure how it would have been better. It was hard enough to isolate one or two birds becuase there were so many of them. Check out the Monticello Chamber of Commerce for more info.

Lensbaby Composer Review by Gavin Gough

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Lensbaby ComposerSomehow I missed this. Gavin Gough has done a review of the lensbaby composer, complete with images taken with the optic kit. It does sound like a fun piece of kit to play with. I think I will skip the optic kit, and just get the double glass. I put it on my Amazon wish list 🙂 It is also worth looking about the lensbaby web site. They have some pretty cool images taken with their kit.

Portfolio is iPhone ready

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I now have my portfolio at christopherwardphotography.com iPhone ready. The site is heavy on javascript, and loads a lot of images at once. Makes for a slow 3G iphone experience. And the images were too small once safari scaled them. So I fixed that.

After hearing David mention a lightroom gallery plugin that was made for the iPhone, and trying to show someone that site (no flash on the iPhone), and my own (too slow), I thought I should do something. I don’t have lightroom. I have Aperture, but have never tried the web sites it can create. I just decided to create something on my own.

I wanted it to be simple, and not to use javascript. I also wanted it to look iPhoneish, and look good when the iPhone was vertical or horizontal. Also, just like wptouch that I wrote about yesterday, I wanted it to come up automaticly for iPhone users.

If you go there now with an iPhone you will see the iPhone specific site. If you don’t have an iPhone, this is what it looks like:

iphonealbums iphoneblue

On the left is the first page displaying the albums in vertical mode. The horizontal mode shows all four in a row. On the right is the blue album in horizontal mode. In vertical mode the images are two wide, and you scroll a bit more. Press an image and you see just that image in the browser. I didn’t make pages for each image. Each album has that nav bar at the bottom like the bottom of the first page.

Continue reading →

Minneapolis by Night

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Part one of the studio class ended. We didn’t do any shooting Wednessday. Mostly talked about equipment. Gil is very pro studio strobe. I would like to try some strobist style shooting with some less expensive gear. I own one SB800 and would like to get another flash or two I can trigger with it with a couple of umbrellas. The trouble is getting that equipment cheap enough to make it alot cheaper than the studio strobes. Anyway, since I didn’t get a chance to shoot, I thought I would get a night city shot from the north side. This is what I got.

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Zack Arias on Creativity and Vision

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I’ve talked about vision here before, mostly from a “What the heck is my vision anyway?” perspective. David duChemin is my favorite evangalist on the vision thing, but I still haven’t got much closer to figureing out what mine is.

Today I got another perspective. It is good to know that photographers much better than I wrestle with this too. Today on Scott Kelby’s guest blog Wednessday, Zack Arias took the challenge. He definately took that blog in a different direction. Not only was it a video blog, but he went after vision, creativity, inspiration, and the winter blahs all in one fell swoop. This video is very well done, and the message is worth a listen. Or two.