In fact, it was pretty anticlimactic.
A couple of hours later we saw these horses doing what all the humans had been doing all day–hightailing it to high ground and watching the water below.
And just to prove a point, tonight we climbed out onto the rocks by Kailua beach to check out the tidepools. The full moon, combined with the 5dmkII’s stellar (lunar?) low-light capabilities, made for amazing landscapes…
I arrived in Hawaii just in time for the tsunami that’s supposed to hit in about 5 hours. We just heard the warning sirens and it’s pretty much the only thing on the news, but my brother’s place (where I’m staying) is on high ground so we’re safe. This does rearrange the priorities for the weekend…
This weekend, in addition to the baseball photos, I had the pleasure of doing a shoot with my friends Monsters are not Myths. I recently shot them live, which got me thinking about doing a staged shoot. I am really excited about how these turned out! Take a look at the entire main album or the alternates to see a lot more, but these are some highlights.
We shot all around their rehearsal space in South San Francisco. The shots above are in a hallway outside their room; there was another great band rehearsing next to us when we took these shots. This was lit with just one large softbox over my right shoulder. Then we went to another end of the building and found this interesting garage door. This time I wanted to contrast Annie’s hotness with the dudes, just for fun. This was shot with one large softbox on the left, and a small flash pointed at the wall on my right for fill.
Then we ventured outside, where there’s a large covered cement patio of sorts. We set up a bare light (in a cone, of course) on the left and a softbox on the right for some fill. Balancing the shadows on the wall with the drama on the subjects was a fun little puzzle; I wanted to get some serious contrast. But before we got going, we got everyone covered in safflower oil, and I took some sports eye black (which I’d actually bought for the baseball shoot) and got their shirts, bodies, and hair a little dirty-looking. Then I had them go run around in the rain for a couple of minutes to get kind of wet–the water beads up and looks like sweat. I was back against some bushes shooting this, and needed to get down really low, so I would up laying sideways on my back on a box, holding a ring flash in my left hand and my camera in my right–which wound up making me pretty sore the next day, actually. But all worth it–they look suitably epic.
Finally, I wanted to try a closeup that would show all of their faces. We put Annie on a box in the front (to get her the right height) and switched the locations of the lights so the bare key light was on the right side–and I think we temporarily turned off the soft box for this one. I put on my 100mm lens for this (a lot of the rest had been shot with my 16-35 to give that epic wide-angle view) and set it to f22, which worked with the light and also gave me the necessary depth of field. I couldn’t back up any more because of the bushes at the side of the patio but I was literally laying into them to get the distance I needed.
Finally we turned the box on its side, and stood all of them in front of it to get a blown-out background shot, with the key light pointing at them from slightly to my right.
With all of that lighting set up, we had to get sexy individual shots, too. We’d already done Annie’s inside–love her in the dress looking foxy. Tyler was just so oily–and so known for taking his shirt off during performances. I put Evan in front of the softbox, which highlighted the contrast and grubbiness we’d created on the t-shirt. For Nick, we simply HAD to back-light his hair and beard–which also gave an opportunity to get a nice shot of his breath (it was getting cold out there!).
My good friend Sam kicked ass at the lighting–what a tremendous pleasure having someone so awesome be there for this. We’ve had some great photo outings before and I’m sure there are more to come.
Thanks to MANM–you guys rock! Hope these help you get where you’re going that much sooner…
Last weekend, I took some test shots for an upcoming “Women of the CWBL” calendar I’m planning to shoot. I’ve played in the California Women’s Baseball League for six seasons and we’re always looking for fundraising options…and a calendar almost begs to be done. Some will be more traditionally sexy, some tougher, some more/less risque, and of course, as soon as we got rolling, things just started to unfold…
Big thanks to Jen and April, both fantastic models! And much more to come with this.
When shooting outside at or around twilight, it’s pretty important to know where the sun’s going to go down (or where it’s going to come up). It’s easy enough to look up sunrise/sunset times, but the sunset/rise moves across the horizon throughout the year.
This took some digging to find, but it’s actually very easy to figure this out. You’ll need:
Then do this:
The number you’ve just found should be a degree measurement, between 0 and 360. This is the solar azimuth angle at sunset. Generically, an azimuth is an angular measurement in a spherical coordinate system. The solar azimuth is calculated (by the application at that link, anyway) as the number of degrees clockwise from true north that corresponds to the position on the horizon that the sun is directly above. If that seems confusing, it’s because it is. On the bright side: it’s really easy to work with when you get to where you want to shoot:
When you get to your location, take out your trusty compass and:
That direction is pointing toward where the sun will go down.
There’s definitely a margin of error here. First, this doesn’t account for topography getting in the way (if you’re next to a mountain, the sun will go behind it long before it’s “down”, so the angle will be off). Second, the compass is reading magnetic north instead of due north, and the reported azimuth is measured from due north. But: it’s free, it’s pretty easy, and for my purposes, it’s good enough.
Spent the afternoon there yesterday; what a great thing to do with a day. My two favorite new-to-me paintings:
First, an Olivetti poster by Givanni Pintori. I am SO going to do something like this with numbers in the colors I see. In fact, my mind is churning on that right now. One of the fun things here is that although there are different numbers with the same color (which doesn’t map to my experience), the ranges happen to coincide with my number/color sets; for example, you’ll see a bunch of 2-4s in green, and 3 is green for me. Maybe that was why it was so fun.
Second, a painting by Leslie Shows called “Two Ways to Organize.” Now I want to see everything she’s ever painted. Not only is her name a complete sentence (!) which actually describes what she does (!) but we were born the same year. Note that this piece is pretty large in person; 82″x82″.
I was planning on a Tibetan lesson last night, but when it got cancelled, I was left with “nothing” to do. “Nothing”, for me, apparently translates into:
And let’s note, that all took place between about 6pm and 1am. Solid evening! Here are a couple favorites from Pure Ecstasy at the Broadway Grill.
Stage lighting is so tricky. It looks awesome in person but is killer-hard to get right on camera. I think the trick is that you just have to completely GO WITH IT. So far as I know, there’s no good tool to “fight” it–and by that I mean normalize it somehow–other than going black and white. This is the kind of thing I can only seem to learn when I’m just messing around–like last night. By the way, I didn’t do any color correction on any of these photos–just tweaked the curves a little and added some noise reduction, along with a bunch of cropping.
Note also that I scared the crap out of the band when I snuck up behind them (whoops). Sometimes I think being a musician is a big advantage in shooting musicians–it does help me anticipate when things are going to happen–but then sometimes I think being a woman overshadows that completely.
My trip to Tibet last year was the inaugural year of the “Dream of the Turquoise Bee” Tibet trips led by Dianne Aigaki–incredible artist, world traveler, and more than anything else just one of my favorite people on the planet. You couldn’t do better than this for an authentic trip to a part of Tibet that few westerners ever get to see.
Following is the announcement that Dianne sent out. If you’re interested, check out the itinerary or Dianne’s blog, which has fantastic stories about getting ready for last year’s adventure. Enjoy!
An unparalleled experience for botanical illustrators, photographers, landscape painters, botanists, ethnobotanists, outdoor enthusiasts and those whose life dream has always been to travel to Tibet.
I finished a pair of these, and attendant acoutrements, just before Christmas–one for me, and one for John. So far I can’t take it out of the house without getting comments, and I hear he’s had the same experience–so it worked…
While walking through Kanze in Kham (Tibet) with John and our friend Sandy, I spied what looked like some sweet leather work in a shop window. We went inside and it was quickly clear that it was some REALLY sweet leather work, and there was plenty more of it; we were in a leatherworking shop, and the owner/craftsman was working there right then. The thing that had caught my eye was the bottom of a saddle bag made from yak leather. These bags were about 20″ wide and easily 36″ long, and sold in pairs (as saddle bags should be…). John and I both thought they were impressive, but what could we actually do with saddle bags? I wondered about making shoulder bags out of them and he liked that idea…and before long we were the proud owners of a pair, along with some extra leather. Back at camp they were widely admired and we sent a lot more business in that direction–and then spent the rest of the trip designing the bags I’d make when I got home. We even bought some yak hair rope from some people in the village where we were staying to re-work the existing cords on the sides.
Back in the states, I started putting together a prototype. Since I was going to be working in leather (heavy yak leather no less), I knew I’d only get once chance–there’s no real re-working with leather, since once holes are punched, you’re pretty much stuck with them. I made the prototype with canvas, plastic, and red sock monkey fabric to represent the red leather we’d picked up for ornamentation. We did the email-photos-and-modify-design thing for awhile until we were both happy with what we were planning (we eventually eliminated the design on the strap).
I got some light pigskin for lining and assembled all of the materials I’d need for sewing, both by machine and by hand. Then it was time for pattern making, cutting, cutting into the exising bags (!), and assembly. If you’ve never done any leather sewing, let me attest: it’s no small task, but I can share the secret: GLUE. You can’t pin leather, and I did use metal clips in some cases, but glue is the answer to slippage, and with a very standard machine like mine, that can be a big problem. Machine-wise the other big key is having the right needles and thread. But still, I did a TON of this by hand–the red designs were sewn on by machine, but pretty much all of the rest of the topstitching (flap, strap, dharma wheels at the sides, etc.) was done by hand. By the end I couldn’t really feel my fingertips anymore.
But WAS IT WORTH IT. There are about a million pockets, pockets inside pockets, and a whole organizer on the inside back. I wound up being unable to use the yak hair rope we got from the villagers, and instead I spun some similar yarn and braided rope from alpaca roving I had on hand (because I am the type of person who has alpaca roving on hand). And if you know me, you know I couldn’t leave it at that; I also made his-and-hers wallets to go along with the bags. The bags are huge; great for a long weekend or whatever in the West, or who knows what in Tibet, so a little satellite thing is completely necessary.
