Kim and Josh Engagement Photos

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We almost called this shoot off because it was raining and windy and cold. A couple of hours before we decided to go for it. A half hour before, the rain stopped, the clouds cleared, the sun came out at full force, and the wind picked up.

We took the pictures at the Millennium  Gardens in Plymouth. It is a nice setting. So nice in fact, that there was another wedding taking place there. A couple of the choice locations were not going to work.

We had full on sun, lots of wind, and no shade at 3:00. Not the best, but that is what worked with their schedules, so we made it work. I tried to find some shade, and use some fill flash, but there wasn’t much to be found at that time on that day. I tried to position them so the sun was like a hair light, then blast them with a SB900 to try to fill in the shadows as best I could. Only so much you can do with a little light in full sun.

Still, I think we got some good shots that I hope they will like.

The Jeffery Clamp

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Have you heard of the Justin Clamp? It is made by Manfrotto, and you can get it here from Adorama. It costs $54. Recently I saw a post via twitter on adapting it to work work with a SB900, because the clamp is for a SB800. I can’t find the article/pics, or I would link to it.

Anyway, I have put together my own clamp like this with parts from Adorama.

The above clamp is what it looks like put together. There are three parts that you need.

So, for $32.65 you get pretty much the same thing, but you get pieces that you can reuse for other purposes if needed. Also, this shoe mount will fit any flash, including the SB900.

Ok, why do I call this the Jeffery Clamp? Well, I order stuff through Jeff Snyder at Adorama, so that’s the name I gave it. Give him a shout if you need help ordering stuff from Adorama. (jsnyder@adorama.com)

So, what do I use it for? Well, it can be clamped onto anything, which makes is quite versatile, but here is one thing I used it for recently.

Look at the upper right of this image. See the light there? It is an SB900 on my Jeffery Clamp, connected to the background stand. No need for another pole. I used this like a hair light, or a side light depending on where I aimed the light. Here is a picture where the light was added to bring more light to the right side of her hair.

iPad Camera Connection Kit Review

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So, what does the Camera Connection Kit come with for $29.95? A SD(HC) card reader (left), and a USB adapter (right) that plug into the iPad. Seems a little high for what you really get, but hey, it’s the only option right now.

I tried both connections, and they both worked when done as intended. You can take images off your cards, and you can connect your camera via USB cable. However, you can’t connect a hard drive, and I couldn’t find a way to put images from the iPad onto a card. It appears to be a one way deal. iPad as a data consumer again.

When you connect a card or camera, you get the photo’s screen with a camera tab. The screen quickly fills up with dashed outlines for the images on your camera (or card) and then starts to fill in thumbnails.

There are now buttons at the top for “Delete All” and “Import All”. Once the image thumbnails are there, you can choose which images you want to upload to the iPad.

By clicking on a thumbnail, you can select individual images to import. You can flick up and down with your finger to scroll through all the images. These thumbnails are from my daughters field trip to a nature center this week.

Notice the buttons at the top changed from “Delete All” to “Delete Selected”, and “Import All” to “Import”.

Pressing the import button brings up a little drop down where they give you the option of importing all again. Not sure why this is necessary.

The screen shot above seems weird to me. This is where I ended up after doing my selective import. I guess we are here because there are sill possible images to upload, but with items still having that green check box, it is hard to tell if they are selected or imported all ready.

I pressed the Albums tab to get to the screen above. Notice that I now have a “Saved Photos” album with the screen shots I took, a “Last Import” album with the images I just imported, and a “All Imported” album that would have everything I had imported and not erased off the iPad.

What is think is cool about this, is that the images are NEF files. They are Nikon RAW image files, and they show up on the iPad. What I don’t know, is what you edit when you use a program like Photogene. Are you using a built in preview contained in the RAW image, or is the iPad converting. I am leaning to the preview, but it seems to be full size, which surprised me.

You can then get the images off the iPad as if it were a regular camera. Just connect your iPad to your computer via the sync cable. These images won’t transfer via iTunes, you need to import them. I tried Lightroom, iPhoto, and Image Capture on my Mac. The RAW files come off just fine, as if they were transferred directly from your card. One interesting thing I found, was that I couldn’t transfer the screen shots using Lightroom, but they showed up in iPhoto when I tried that. Strange.

So, the question going around seems to be whether this can replace field back up units like ones made by Epson and others. I am not so sure. The screen is big and gorgeous, but it is also big. I think the smaller units while having a smaller screen are more rugged and compact, but I don’t own or use one, so I can’t really comment. What I think would be ideal would be an iPod Touch or iPhone that you could connect this to AND a laptop hard drive or other SSD drive to make a backup to. That would be much smaller and eliminate the need for a laptop in many travel situations. But that is just wishing smoke.

Anyway, it looks like a fun accessory to play with, and I will experiment with using it as a backup device when traveling.

Happy Memorial Day

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From the Archives: I thought this might be a better Memorial Day photo. I hope that many of you are having a good holiday. I realize that for others who have family serving, or have lost family this day is very different. Our hats are off to you.

PS. Kate calls this “The Big Faces”. She loved going here. Next on her list: the statue of liberty.

Seattle Skyline

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This is one from the archives. It has nothing to do with Memorial Day, other than the sky looks like this here right now.

I just like this picture. Nothing special, plain sky, skyline almost centered, but somehow I like it. I still think your eye travels around the image, from the down town to the Space Needle, to the little red boat in the middle (that would be easier to see without my signature in the way!).

Pictures from the Zoo

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I had intended to get to the zoo early, so see what kind of light I could get. I had Lily in the car and ready to go when I decided I should check the website for hours. Didn’t open till 9:00. We had over an hour to wait before we could go.

Oh well. At this time of year, the sun has been up for several hours at 9:00. The best light I got was probably this guy. He was in shade, but I had to shoot through glass. It doesn’t look that bad at this size. The water is really green, and a pain to color balance!

Prairie dog babies are just too cute.

Lily was practically crying, begging me to get going. Then the mother came out to join them.

Man, I rattled off a ton of pics of these guys. Lots of great brown on brown images 🙂

Then we walked up to the farm section. Lots of goats that you could feed. Lily was a little unsure about doing that. I bought her some food, and she just threw it them. Wish I had a picture of that.

These guys were laughing about it. Maybe because it is hard to tell the difference between food pellets and the other kind of goat pellets when they are on the ground.

What trip to the zoo wouldn’t be complete with out ice cream? Problem was, I promised it to her an hour before we finally got it. We passed five closed vendors where I thought we would be able to get it. Weekday morning might be good for avoiding crowds, but then you also can’t easily get ice cream.

Hierarchical Criteria in a Lightroom Smart Collection

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So here is the issue. I want to create a smart collection in Lightroom where I get all the photos from another collection that have either of two keywords. For a recent shoot, after pulling all the rejects, I created a collection of these images that spans a couple of days. The was a gymnastics event that my kids happened to be in. They were only a small part of the 3000 images that I took, but they were in specific sections of the show, so I found them and keyworded them. Now, how to create a smart collection of these images.

Well, that didn’t work. Notice the drop down for “Match”. If you set it to “any” then you get all images from the Spring Show collection. If you set it to “all”, the images have to have both Kate and Lily tags. I was stumped. Then I found that there is a little trick. Press and hold the Option/Alt key. Notice that the plus signs next to the rules turn into a hash sign. Now when you press that hash sign, you get to define rules that operate independent of the first Match drop down.

Now we get what we want. We first match on the “Spring Show” collection, then we match if either of the keywords belong to an image.

You could use this any number of ways.

Just Swinging Around

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Truth be told, I have hundreds of images of my kids on swings sitting on my hard drive. But most of them don’t really have any sense of movement or height. This time I was going for height.

I went with a wide’ish angle lens (18 is all I have right now) and got as close as I could without fear of getting hit. I gave her a big push, and then ran over to snap some pictures.