Concert Shooting! April 6 (total time = 26.5 hours)

My girlfriend and i had planned to attend this jonny craig concert for a few months, but it didnt occur to me that i could possibly shoot the event.  i called the venue a few days before, and got the clear to bring my camera.  i met with my mentor and discussed different photo options and what i could get, although you cant fully plan for something like this until you're in the venue.  i ended up bringing my telephoto lens, expecting a large venue. to my surprise when we got there, the venue was maybe about the size of a normal south city classroom or two.  i felt really awkward with all my gear there, as there was only one other person shooting the show.  once i got the setting for the best results with the openers, i got a lot more comfortable with the setting and angles.  i think the only downside about the shots is that i wasnt able to use the full natural lightiing of the venue; it was just too dark.  so i had to use my newly purchased flash to bounce light off the ceiling to give me a bit of extra light.  if i just left it at that, i would get really harsh, cold lighting, so i turned the power down a bit, and went with a slower shutter speed, allowing hints of the concert lights in the pictures.  the concert pics can be found here
*about a month later* i contacted one of the bands at the event that night and showed them the photos got, and they messaged me back and thanked me! not a big deal, but i found it very exciting xD

Trying out my new flashes! march 28 (total time = 22.5)

This past week ive been experimenting with what i can do with my flashes.  ive done some high speed photography in the past, but with this project, i really want to focus on portraits.  not many people in my house want to be my subjects, so i shot my dogs instead! click here for the pic.  my family thought i was kind of weird for photographing them, but oh well. i think the result shot wasnt too bad! i also built some softboxes made out of everyday material i got from dollar tree. it was challenging, and they're too small for my liking.  but i found that they work well with product photography! i had a softbox on each side, and just set them on the floor.  the bottle was set on a piece of posterboard i got from dollar tree as well.  overall very pleased with my flashes and cant wait to get more shots!

Flash Research, March 18 (total time = 19.5 hours)

So today i spent about four hours watching videos, reading reviews, and doing tons of research on not only speedlight flashes, but also on wireless triggers, as well as actual light studio equipment.  I for many resons dont have close to 1000 bucks laying around, so there's no way i'd be able to afford nikon gear in this situation.  so i knew i had to go with a third party brand.  the first strobe (flash) brand that came to mind was yongnuo.  ive had a single yongnuo flash before, but it was the cheapest of the cheap, and didnt last very long.  thankfully after a few years, ive read nothing but good about their products, and decided to purchase three of their higher-grade flashes.  it was a tough choice, but based on what i researched, they were the most affordable and met pretty much everything i needed.

Nature Shots (March 2nd)

My mentor suggested i add a few more nature-ish shots to my portfolio. what better way to do that than go to Muir Woods?! We just had a kinda made a last-minute trip and brought our gear. my camera isn't the greatest, so it was a bit difficult for me to capture nice quality images because my camera sensor cant record too great of a dynamic range, but thankfully i was able to post-process a good amount of images so that they were a bit more accurate as to what my eye was seeing. it was a quick run, but we managed to squeeze in about four hours of total shooting time, plus another two hours of my personal time editing my photos. the photos are uploaded to my portfolio under the nature section here
*NOTE, total hours at this point is 15.5 hours*

February 23rd

I've been shooting in my garden and around the neighborhood,  hoping to get nice images to create a nature-type section for my photo portfolio. I've done about three hours worth of shooting in my neighborhood alone,  and got the idea of not only including  still images in my portfolio,  but maybe being able to incorporate time lapse videos as well.  So I set up a little studio in my kitchen and chose a daffodil bud that was almost ready to bloom.  I set up an interval timer to take a picture about  every minute or so, and framed up the shot in my camera.  I used a single desk lamp to light the flower,  as well a makeshift softbox to evenly distribute the light on the flower, reducing the harsh shadows. I did this using an unfolded plain white napkin. Here's, rough edit of an overnight shoot consisting of over 500 still images played back at 25 frames per second.  Hopefully I will be able to shoot other nature-type time lapses to create a longer video with an overall theme.
*edit* in case the link didn't work,  here's the url
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUwE6H0gzfQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

February 3, 2013

So I didn't meet with my mentor this day, but he told me that for future projects, I should familiarize myself with adobe lightroom. So i downloaded the program, and spent a few hours learning the interface.  I'm not a very organized person with my photographs, so I pretty much have folders of pictures all over the place.  And from what i've found, lightroom requires you to be fairly organized.  I thought there would be an easy way to just kinda drag and drop photos to edit, but from what i found over my time using the program, you have to assign folders to import from specific locations, and you also have to create output folders (in an organized way).  So after a few hours of organizing, i was ready to start editing.  Thankfully, the actual adjustment settings were very similar to adobe photoshop, so i didnt have to learn a whole lot of how things worked (adjustment-wise).  So overall, things went well and this new program is really teaching me to organize myself digitally with my photography.

January 29th, 2013

The first meeting with my mentor went a little better than expected.  I met him at his house when he got back from shooting a project, and we basically just went over the guidelines of my senior project.  We talked about what i could possibly do for my physical presentation, and what i wanted to get out of this whole project.  When I first got there, i didn't really expect the meeting to be as productive as it was.  We went through different ideas of what i could do, and what would be the most suitable for a final presentation.  And towards the end, we even got to show off both of our previous works, and what we're proud of.  I even got to share my technique for different things he wasn't sure of how i shot.  So overall, i think the first meeting went a lot better than expected.  What i thought would be about 15 minutes turned out to be about an hour and a half of just throwing around ideas and different shots.