Daryll Schiff

The images of Daryll Shiff that I saw at Photo LA reminded me of some of the work that I've done. I'm not sure of the technique that he uses but I set up a tripod and set a long exposure with my strobes set to rear sync. I'd like to try and pop the strobes at different times throughout the exposure to get different effects. This appears to be how he's done it. Or he's done some layering somehow.
I like the effect that this gives. It's kind of like saying "This is how your eye sees." Not your brain, your brain makes sense out of it all. The eye just sees.

Here is a link to his website gallery: http://schiffphoto.com/home.html

You can read Daryll Schiff's biography here: http://schiffphoto.com/bio.html

Here is a link to an interview and some of his images: http://schiffphoto.com/bio.html

Seung Hoon Park

Seung Hoon Park is a Korean photographer that I became aware of at Photo LA 2014. I was drawn to a couple of images that were on display and I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. At first I thought that it was a mosaic of film stills. You could see the sprocket holes of the film in the images. It wasn't until I went back home and started to research some of the photographers online that I found out that the film was actually weaved together. I'm not sure if he weaved them together after exposure or before. The way that some of the images seem disjointed gives a suggestion that it was done after while others look as if he weaved them together before exposure and put the weaved film into an 8x10 camera and exposed it that way. I will have to do more research on this later. It is a very interesting result however and each time I look at one of his photographs I discover new things that I hadn't noticed the last time I looked at it. The online images do not do the work justice. At the Photo LA exhibit the images were printed rather large and the amount of detail in each square of the weave was amazing. The series is called Textus and can be seen at

http://susanspiritusgallery.com/artist/seung-hoon-park/

More information about Park as well as more images from Textus can be found at the following websites

http://www.madeinslant.com/2011/08/seung-hoon-park-weaves-stips-of-movie-film-together-to-create-photographic-images/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/08/seung-hoon-park/

Photo LA

Went down to Photo LA last Saturday. It was very overwhelming. I have never been to anything like it. So many exhibitors in one place it was hard to wrap my brain around it. There were photographers from all over the world displayed. I'm working on a short list of photographers that I found interesting from the show. I'm going to list them and try to explain their processes. I need to do some research on them so what I plan on doing is covering one every other week. I'll also put links to their work so you can go look for yourself. I'll be posting the first one in a couple of days.

Lensbaby 3G

I picked up a used Lensbaby 3G over the Christmas break from KEH Camera (www.keh.com). I've heard great things about KEH as far as used equipment and they did not disappoint. The lens arrived in the described condition, which was like new, and shipping was pretty fast considering it went FedEx Ground. I've been playing around with it a little bit and I've been getting some great results. You can see examples on my flickr page. I'll give a more detailed post on this later, I've been trying to get ready to start the new semester at Brooks.

Opteka Speed Grids

Just got three new Opteka speed grids off ebay today, can't wait to try them out. I've been checking out their stuff on ebay for open box returns and such and got a real great price on them $8.95 a piece.

I purchased one each of the 1/8th, 1/6th and 1/4th grids. I already have a 1/8th. These things are great for getting a nice tight light on your subject and for the price you can't beat them. They use a velcro attachment to attach to your speedlights that with a little fiddling works pretty well. I'll show you how I attach mine in a later post. If you've got the money head over to ebay and do a search for Opteka and check out their open box stuff. You can usually get it for a good price and usually their stuff is pretty decent.

Brooks Grades and Christmas

The semester is over and the grades are in! I received two A's an A- and a B. Not to shabby. Need to do a little more work on my Art History. Looking forward to starting next semester already.

Also wanted to say to the folks that follow this blog: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Have fun, be safe.

Brooks Institute Update and Other Things...

The first semester is over. There was quite a bit of writing in this semester and I'm expecting more writing in the next. I'm now on a four week break and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I do have some images to post from this semester and will be putting those up in the next couple of days.

I'll be putting together a little lighting talk at the Lompoc Photographers Guild on the 15th of January. I'm so looking forward to it. It should be a lot of fun. It has to be an hour long, I'm going to shoot for about a 45 minute talk and demo with 15 minutes for questions. This hardly ever works out because people always want to know about lighting.

I have never done so much writing in my life as I have for this first semester of my MFA program. I know it's only going to get more involved. I'm actually looking forward to it. I've noticed that as I've been writing about art and creativity my own creative processes have changed and I think for the better.

How lignt can interact in an image.

Chris, our Photographic Theory instructor gave us a shooting assignment. We have to create five different images exploring the ways light can interact in an image. Here are my five:

Transmission

 

Reflection

 

Refraction

 

Absorption

 

Scatter

 

Time Changes Suck

The switch from Daylight Savings time to standard time has me a bit screwed up right now. My clock says 4:02 AM but my body is telling me it's 5:00 AM so I'm up. Figured I'd post what we did in class yesterday. Our Photo Theory class with Chris Broughton was interesting. We started covering color processes and color film. He gave us an interesting assignment. We have to photograph how light works. should be an interesting assignment. In Studio Critique class with Tim Bradley we took a look at our "Shoot how the camera sees" Photos. Everyone had excellent photos. Wish I could post them all so you could see them. There was a wide variety of things. Some of them beautiful and some disturbing but all of them were fantastic. Here are a few of the ones that I did.

Cyanotypes

As promised I have my cyanotype from class scanned. I was testing the paper as I was using inkjet matte paper and we weren't sure if it was going to work so we tried a couple of different papers on one exposure. The image is a photogram of a plant that is outside my apartment here in Lompoc. It has a red flower that looks like fiber optic strands coming out of it. I think both parts of the image came out rather well. I'm planning on making a digital negative and trying that next time I do this. If your interested there is plenty of information on the web for doing this and it's so easy I'm going to teach my seven year old how to do it.

Interesting assignments for this session. I have to photograph how the camera sees and for the one after I have to shoot perfect because of the flaw. It will be interesting to see what I can come up with. We did cyanotypes in one of my classes I'll post the one that I did as soon as I get my scanner unpacked.

One of my assignments this week was to write a letter to the editor explaining why photography is art. I had to use a picture of mine to defend what I put in the letter. Here is the picture that I used.

This image was taken on September 10, 2013 using my Nikon D3s with a 14mm lens. I did not crop the image but I did some dodging and burning mostly in the kelp, the foot prints and the waves.

Living In California

We've been here for almost a complete month. It took us three weeks to find an apartment. We've moved into a place in Lompoc which is a little under an hour drive from Santa Barbara. Lompoc has two claims to fame the federal penitentiary and Vandenberg AFB.
Vandenberg is kind of cool in that they launch rockets for NASA and other countries and companies space agencies. This past weekend they launched the Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. It went off at 9:00am and shook the hell out of the windows. My 7 year old and her friend were absolutely thrilled with it. Unfortunately no pictures from me. If I had known it was taking off I would have found a good vantage point and snapped a few. There is another launch scheduled in December. I'm going to try and get shots of that one if I don't have school.
Speeking of school, our instructors in the Brooks MFA program are no slouches when it comes to assigning reading homework. I've probably read over a hundred pages over the last three weeks for class and still have several more that I have to read for this weekend. It has been a little difficult though to find time to get my homework done while at the same time get settled into our apartment. I will be working very late on Wednesday and Friday trying to get my stuff finished up. I have two images that I have to get done and a couple of pages to write. I also have to draw a sketch for an image that will be due next class period after this weekend.
I will try to post the images that I'm working on here after they are graded with explanations of what the images are for and how they were shot and processed.
Well it's back to work for me. Until next time.

First week at Brooks

First week went rather well. I have a ton of reading to do for next week. Classes are set for every other weekend, eight hours on Saturday and another eight on Sunday.

Moving Day

We'll be shipping out on the 30th for California. The yard sales are over everything is getting packed and ready to go into the trailer. I'll be packing up my computer in the next couple of days and wanted to get this last post in before we leave.

It's supposed to be hot and miserable the next couple of days which isn't going to make it easy getting our stuff organized and loaded. All the equipment is packed and ready to go except for a couple of cameras that I'm going to use on the trip. I'm taking an old Yashica 635 camera, A Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515/16 folding camera, an Olympus Pen EE-3 half frame,  an Argus C4, a Horizon 202s Panorama camera and of course my Nikon D3s. I'm going to load Black and White film in all of the film cameras for the trip and develop it after school gets going. Hoping to get some good shots, we'll have to see how it goes.

We're hoping to get to California on the 2nd of September and find an apartment or house to rent right away. I have orientation on the 5th and 6th and classes start on the 7th and 8th. Those are going to be four very long days after the trip. I won't be posting until we get everything set up in California but I plan on posting quite a bit when we get settled in.

I'm very excited to be starting this new chapter in our lives with my wife and youngest child. It will be a great adventure and I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Take care everyone and I'll be back to posting in a couple of weeks.

Robert Gainor

Bike Rides and the Nikon D40X

Recently I started riding my bike again and as one who likes to have a camera with me and not wanting to put my big expensive pro camera at risk, I decided to strap on my old Nikon D40x.

The D40x is a 10 megapixel consumer model that is about a third the size of my D3s. It doesn't have a front finger wheel to change adjustments and the colors tend to be just a bit saturated. The shutter mechanics are also very different than the D3s. It's almost like there is just a bit of a delay from the time you push the button to the time the shutter fires. Another problem is, when in manual mode you have to change the aperture by pressing a button that is in the most awkward place and then move the thumb wheel. (I usually put it in shutter or aperture priority depending on what I'm shooting because of this). It also has no internal motor so most of my lenses have to be used in manual focus, which is not a big problem for me because I tend to manually focus most shots anyway.

All that being said I've had a blast shooting with this thing. especially while going down the trail as fast as my feet can peddle and firing off a shot at a slower than normal shutter speed. I've also tried some narrow depth of field stuff. I've even shot some to convert to black and white with great results.
Here are some of my results:

I've put more pics up on flickr  and will be posting more.

Knowing your camera and it's limitations can help you get some great shots regardless of any perceived shortcomings it may have. I try to turn those shortcomings into opportunities to be creative.

Here is the link to my flickr account to check out some more of my stuff:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rgainor/

Brooks Institute MFA Program

I was recently accepted into the Masters of Fine Arts for Photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. For the next couple of weeks I'll be packing up and heading out to California so I won't be posting much here at all after the 26th. I plan on taking some old film cameras in the car with me and plan on shooting the whole trip. I'll be posting some of that here after I get to California.

I'm looking forward to getting there and working with the faculty and other students at Brooks. I also plan on posting a lot on this blog as a record of my time there.

August Quick Tip Shutter Speed

This months Quick tip is on hand holding and shutter speed. Most people push the limit on the slowest speed they use. If your subject is not moving or if you're shooting with flash it's not that much of a problem, but if you're shooting in low light with a lot of movement you're better off opening up your aperture and cranking up your ISO a bit to compensate and set your shutter speed an leave it alone.

If you're hand holding your slowest speed should be 1 over the focal length of your lens or 1/60th of a second, which ever is faster. So if you're shooting with a 300mm lens then your slowest shutter speed should be 1/300th of a second. You can push this a little as long as you have a stable holding technique. 

1/60th is the slowest I'll go unless I'm doing something special or  I'm purposely trying to get some motion blur and when that's the case I'm going a lot slower than 1/60th.

So for this quick tip, if you're in low light situations use shutter priority or manual and set your shutter to the lowest speed for hand holding and adjust your exposure with aperture and ISO.

Auto vs Manual

Cameras and lenses these days come with all kinds of advantages for the average photographer. I can set up my camera to all auto, put on a flash and give it to my wife and she could get some good pictures where the subjects are properly exposed and for snapshots they would be great... But as professional photographers we need to get the most out of our cameras and one way to do this is to shoot manually. Now I'm not saying that I don't use auto sometimes, but I shoot in manual mode more often than not. I learned how to shoot manually when I shot film and have carried it over to digital. 

It's not that hard it just takes practice, but once you get into the habit you'll be amazed at how fast you can be shooting manually. For one thing you'll be able to focus on what you want instead of the camera choosing. An example of this would be if your shooting a sporting event and your trying to get one player, but another player is in between you and your target player, the camera likes to focus on the closest thing. Well guess what, it's going to focus on the other player and your subject is out of focus. Another reason would be if you have a scene where the exposure is all over the place and you have several dark places and light places of different values. The camera is going to try to set that at an exposure that will average the whole thing but you only want a very bright portion exposed properly and you don't care about the rest. Setting the exposure manually can help you get that one part exposed properly.

Shooting manually gives you a level of control that auto won't. I'm not saying you won't get great pictures on auto, but if you want to really step up your photography shoot in manual modes and really control your camera, instead of letting your camera control you.