February 15th, 2009 § 3
I walked around Eastern Market in DC yesterday with my wife and some friends. It was a particularly overcast time of the day, with sparse photographic opportunities, but I was determined to snap a few shots before heading home for the day. I encountered this painter below in a deep conversation with a young art student. (on a side note, I really need to get some monitor calibration going here)
Click to see a larger version
February 13th, 2009 § 0
I stumbled across this post on fotohacker.com: “White Balance Reloaded”.
I don’t mean to be critical of the site for propagating slightly inaccurate information because the post is very good information for the amateur photographer, however I believe that they oversimplify and repeat some misconceptions about light color that serve only to obfuscate one of the most fundamental aspects of image capture. Camera manufacturers are somewhat complicit in this simplification of lighting color by using Kelvin numbers as white balance settings, but it’s important to remember that “Color Temperature”, “Color Balance” and “White Balance” are all different things.
February 11th, 2009 § 0
Everybody loves cheap, but cheap comes with some specific costs.
Want a low-priced CFL bulb? No problem, but don’t expect color rendering to be very reliable. Want a cheap bulb housing? No problem, but be prepared to work with some crappy mounting options, limited flexibility and a 6′ cord.
February 6th, 2009 § 0
I am an artistic person. I am a creative person. I am NOT an artist, and I am certainly not a designer.
The topic for the day it to know your limits because the logo above proves the value of this concept to me. I could not create the logo above, and the fact that it pieced together from such obvious yet elusive elements tells me that there is so much to design that I could never understand in my lifetime lest I dedicate myself to becoming a designer. Our dear friend Sara Tomko gifted us with a new logo for our site “the Fashionable Foodie” and she knocked it out of the park on the first try.
February 5th, 2009 § 1
Now that we’ve established the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, it was now my ambition to see if I could build an off-the-shelf lighting system using parts from Home Depot. In some ways I was successful, and in others I faced some intersting limitations.
Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping. Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible. We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely. I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake.
January 29th, 2009 § 0
Fluorescent lighting has become ubiquitous in our daily lives as an energy-efficient and cost-effective lighting solution, but that familiarity can lead one to believe incorrectly that fluorescent light is interchangeable with other common sources. The truth that both pure sunlight and electric incandescent lighting are fundimentally different from fluorescents, and to completely understand the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, one must come to understand the basis of these differences.
Since I’ve challenged myself to try and create a lighting solution similar to the Lowel Ego light, understanding some basic fundimentals of fluorescent light will greatly help in choosing an “off the shelf” system that will produce optimal results.
January 28th, 2009 § 0
The truth is that I obtained this domain name almost by accident.
The wife and I had been discussing a project for quite some time to unify her two great loves of food and fashion. In prepping for a Next Food Network Star Season 5 audition this past year, we finally happened upon a theme that melded her two passions: The Fashionable Foodie. The title summed her up in a nutshell, encompassing her ridiculous lust for all things fashion related as well as her constant tinkering in the kitchen. The Food Network audition went very well, but she did not receive a callback.
While my personal long term goal is to turn the concept into a weekly video podcast, it seemed like a shame to just let the idea languish until we bought a video camera. I decided to just go ahead and jump in headfirst and create the concept for her as a website. I thought that by creating content now and working to refine our style and content, we should have a backlog of good material to pull from when we’re finally able to jump into production. Getting in a bit over my head as usual, I bought the domain name, started re-teaching myself wordpress and bought a year’s worth of webhosting at Bluehost. The hosting plan came with a free domain registration, and thus ishotalot.com was born as a side project.
All things must dovetail in life and while prepping recipes for the site, I quickly discovered that photographing food is much more difficult then I’d thought. Below is a shot of a delicious Vietnamese pork lettuce wrap. Not terrible for a first attempt, but I could immediately see that I was going to have problems with backgrounds, proper camera support and lighting.
January 27th, 2009 § 2
October 17th, 2007. It was a sunny day in Washington DC as hundreds gathered on the south lawn of the US Capitol hoping to get a glimpse of Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, better known to the world as the 14th Dalai Lama.
They began arriving early in the day, staking out positions on the lawn as if it were some festival concert. Some in traditional Buddhist robes, some carrying handmade signs urging support for a free Tibet; they crowded along the capitol steps and watched a jumbotron feed of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony taking place inside the Capitol Rotunda.
I did not watch the jumbotron because I was inside photographing the ceremony. Of the hundred plus pictures I took that day, one stood out immediately:
Click to see larger
January 26th, 2009 § 0
Easter 2006. After running around in the backyard in search of plastic eggs, the festivities die down and the simple act of blowing bubbles entertains us for a half hour. I knew I wanted to get a shot of my wife Gretchen blowing a bubble, but I had no real ideas about the image that I was trying to capture.
Looking back on it now, I’m surprised to see that I actually took 71 frames before I finally arrived at the winning shot below.
Click to see larger