121 posts tagged “photography”

My cousin Hayley is all sorts of cute, and this picture makes me smile every time I look at it. This photo was taken Christmas morning. She was unbelievably wired and all-too-anxious to open presents.

Check it:

• Nikon D300 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D
• 1/100 sec at f/1.4, ISO 3200
• In-camera monochrome Picture Control with added sharpness and contrast.
• RAW image edited in Lightroom to match camera LCD preview as close as possible.

I think I’m going to be shooting a lot more low-light images in black and white. This is just too awesome.

(BTW, this is Jeremy. He’s a kick-ass photographer.)

Well, it's done. On New Year's Eve, I took my final shot for 365 Days. It feels so good to be finished with this monster of a project. It was educational, inspirational, sometimes very tedious, and mostly a lot of fun.

I could get all chatty about how much I've grown as a photographer over the past year and how much I've learned by shooting the same subject everyday and how many great people I've met (online and in real life) through this project and how much I'll miss but won't actually miss shooting everyday, but I won't.

I will, however, go stat-happy and list some numbers that I think are fun.

Days Missed: 0
Cameras Used: 11
Interestingness on Flickr: 54
Ranked in the Top 10 of Explore: 12
Jumps: 52
With Mia: 28
With People: 54
With Cats: 9
With Food/Drink: 26
Reflections: 36
Parts of Me: 30
Sunsets: 11

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do for my next long-term photo project. I thought about doing another round of 365 Days (366 this year, since it's a leap year), but I don't think I have the mental capacity to handle something that large. Maybe the 52 Weeks project. We'll see. I need to take a break from photo projects right now and just shoot for the pure enjoyment of it. Knowing me, though, I'll be back on something soon enough.

She really wanted me to eat that brownie. Mia did a variation of the shot as well. You can see it here.

It's been a while since I've done a proper jump shot. Figured I'd get another one in before the end of my 365 Days project. This one is day 362, and it also happens to be the first jump shot in the new apartment. And this only took me 4 takes to do. :)

Brittney and Kate were kind enough to model in their wedding gowns for a fun little photo shoot this past weekend. Someone also decided to bring pink flasks as props. Let's just say much hilarity ensued during the afternoon. More images from this shoot on the way later this week (after I finish processing things and after all the crazy-busy Christmas stuff).

Kimberley and Kirt said they wanted to do some jump shots as part of their session. So, we went up to the roof of Mia’s apartment building, set up some lights, and did some jumps in the dark. It was awesome.

Here’s Kimberley and Kirt posing for a relatively atypical couple portrait session. They didn’t want anything that looked like portrait studio or fashion work, so we just goofed off in Mia’s apartment building until we got tired of shooting.

Here are a couple more shots from the first photo shoot with my new Nikon D300.

The location is Mia's apartment building. The model is Tara. I wasn't really planning on doing the fashion editorial/film noir thing going into the shoot, but that's what I ended up with. I must admit that I do like the looks I got that day.

After dinking around casually with my Nikon D300 for nearly two weeks, I finally got around to doing an actual photo shoot with it this past weekend. I must say that it really is leaps and bounds better than my D70 and D70s both in terms of operation and image quality. For the $1800 I paid for, it had better be!

Using the camera is a dream. All the controls are quick and easy to access. Auto-focus is fast. The viewfinder is big and bright and has all the shooting info I need to see. The 3" LCD is absolutely wonderful for chimping. And the camera just feels well-balanced in my hands.

Image-quality-wise, it's awesome. Color, exposure, sharpness -- the all rock. Mostly, though, the amount of shadow detail and dynamic range is simply amazing. In the shot above, the model and city were actually mostly in silhouette. Even though she was lit with three speedlights, the sun was still too much to overpower. Despite that, I was still able to pull out a ton of shadow detail in Lightroom and get pretty darn close to the shot I was originally envisioning in my head. Sure, I could've spent more time tweaking light setup to get it right in-camera, but it was freezing out there, and we really needed to move to the indoor shots. Basically, I was lazy and hoped that I could salvage the shot in post. And I managed to do it.

In short, I'm loving this camera. Worth every penny.