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.