Behind the Scenes

I just remembered that there's a little YouTube video of me shooting in Mexico. The shot, which is shown at the end, ended up running in various coffee magazines as an ad for Sustainable Harvest. The cool thing about this video is it was shot with only the camera and microphone in the MacBook. My client, David, is pretty saavy with his Mac.

Anyway, check out the video on the main page of Sustainable Harvest's site (I'm in the second video entitled "Photo Shoot of Roaster Ad in Zaragoza, Mexico."

Apple fans may get a kick out of their profile on Apple's site.

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Photo Workouts

Gym Jones Disciple

I am in Salt Lake City visiting my friends at Gym Jones. They are the folks who trained the actors and stuntmen for the film 300 and they run a lovely website with a very photo-centric aesthetic. This is due in large part to the photographic passions of Mark Twight. When I am in town I get to be the "guest photographer" and he's gracious enough to give me a nice shout out on the days I shoot.

Today my 17-55mm officially crapped out and is stuck in the 35mm range but I worked around it for the purposes of the workout. You can check out the week's efforts starting here and continuing through this coming Monday.

I built a nice set of Photoshop actions for Mark to do his thing so we should see lots more good stuff in the future. I personally love the square and his mix of ambient light and flash. It's right up my alley.

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Meltdown

It's been a tough few days on my gear. One of my D200s, the newer one, has a shutter problem rendering it useless. I dropped my 80-200 and smashed the front element into the lens putting it to the useless column. Then, I dropped my 17-55 for the twentieth time. Now, if I find myself using it anywhere in the 45 to 55 range, it gets stuck there until I bang it really hard on the end that fits into the camera body. Let me tell you, that's a bit nerve wracking. And finally, this morning, the last zipper handle on my camera bag broke so to close the thing I have to grab the little mechanism by pinching and inching it along it's path.

It just might be the Gods telling me it's time to move to Canon.

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Photoflex by Phone

I got a call from a fellow photographer friend yesterday. I was in my hotel room and when he asked if I could help him with something photographic. I agreed and wondered what I could possibly help him with. What do I know that he doesn't? Was it a lighting question? Some strobe issue? Nope. He needed help re-folding a large oval Photoflex Light Disk. If you don't know what one of those is this entry isn't going to make much sense but anyone who does know knows that that's not the easiest thing to explain over the phone.

I had to lay down on my bed and mimic exactly how I'd do it and then try to describe my thumb up, thumb down, alternating, opposing, counter-clockwise hand-twisting over the phone. It reminded me of a 9th grade french class exercise where I had to instruct a fellow classmate to do certain tasks without looking at each other.

I don't know if I actually helped matters but it was nice to hear the cheer of a successful folding before I hung up. Not content with just a single fold, I told them that it's possible to fold it yet again to make it twice as small. I laughed when he declined to take up the challenge. We'll save that for an in-person demonstration.

As a sidebar, light disks rock. If I could only have one tool to help manipulate the light for my images, it wouldn't be a strobe, or a tota or a home depot kino. It'd be the simple genius of the photodisc. It's so critical to me, I keep one in my camera bag. Where my cameras go, so goes my Light disk.

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