So I have finally had a chance to recover from a wild and crazy wedding shoot that went down over a 2 day period.  It was an absolute blast and even working with altitude sickness making my head want to explode.  I would do it again in a heartbeat.  I hope to soon be able to share some images from the wedding, but I want to give the couple time to go through all of them.  Final keeper count for the 2 days of shooting was well into the thousands.  Now that is not all individual images, but those were keepers plus in camera duplicates.

As a photographer shooting with digital film I always take in camera duplicates.  Back in the film days this was a common practice, and one that I was taught and will always do.  You never know if a shot might be corrupted during the writing process to the card.  Either by the camera having a glitch, battery dying, camera dropped, the list can go on.  So my advice, always take more than one shot if you can.  That’s the nuts and bolts of it.

Captured with 1 D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film / Finished in Nik Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro

Found one of the last running creeks in the area. It has been a dry year so there are not too many left this late into the summer. Could not find a regular way of shooting it, so I went for a funky angle, because after all photography is about fun and that is what I was having.

No distortion here this is all Mother Nature. This pine was growing in this very cool arc. Just made an interesting subject.

On the way back into town I came across an old cemetary tuck back off the road (the kind you don’t want to be in a night, if you get me drift). My best guess is that this cemetary had to be one established in the early history of California because some of the stones date back to the early 1800’s.

It was a good shoot and it broke the cobbwebbs loose from my brain. Now it is time to start packing up for the wedding shoot this weekend and some all around fun.

Images captured with 1D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film

I can say though, that next week will be a full week of vacation/”fun work” so there will be a lot of material to blog about then.  What I mean by fun work is that I am shooting a wedding for 2 of my closest friends Jeff and Misty.  I shot their engagement a few months back and it was a blast and now it is wedding time!!!  It will be some interesting shooting in some amazing scenery, so I am really looking forward to it.  So check back next week for some photos, blogs, and tips.

P.S.   I would like to thank Jeff and Misty for allowing me to share their images with all the readers out there.

Image Captured with 1D Mark IIN 16-35f2.8 II on Lexar digital film

With summer in full swing here it is crazy, but hopefully there will be more postings in the month of June.  I have a wedding shoot and a bunch of other stuff going on that I will be sharing.

Image captured with 1D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film

So I ran across this image from last year’s PSW in Las Vegas.  It is funny, and I don’t know if you have experienced it, but I have.  You start going through old images, and ones that you didn’t like before, you now like.  I heard of this happening to photographers from time to time, and it is interesting.  Back in the day when I first started shooting digital I may have deleted this image to save harddrive space.  But now 8+ months later I really liked the way it looked, and I especially liked it using Silver Efex Pro.   It is just the way your photography and your eye evolves the longer you do this, and it is great!!  So there is no real lesson here except this.  Hard drives and memory are cheap these days don’t delete everything you don’t like.  Keep it around, because you never know what you might find later down the road.

Captured with 1D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film

Man I can’t believe I missed the announcement, but on May 6th Nik Software released Sharpener 3.0 for Lightroom 2.0.  Go snag it and give it a try.

So the boys over at Dtown TV have started something new and it is called “Ask Brad.” None other than my great friend Brad Moore who is now the Technical editor for the Dtown show has his own spot on the Dtown webiste where you can ask him all things realted to Nikon.  So if you got a question that you need answered he is your man.

So I did the next best thing that I could think of and went to the flower shop. Right now with Easter this weekend there are a lot of varieties of flowers to choose from. So I snagged an Orchid, Cala Lily, and a Rose from the shop and headed to the house. I lucked out and had to display boards ( the type kids use at science fairs ) and left one in its wrapping because it made a great reflective surface, and the other I unwrapped and used as a backdrop. I decided to use and old trick that Moose and Joe taught me. Which was to put the camera in Manual mode set it to 1/250th of a second and then adjust the f/stop to what I wanted. If you do this right and take a pic, you will see a black screen on your camera display because setting the camera up like this creates an almost pitch black effect.

I got the camera dialed in then broke out the flash units to give me the light I wanted. I set both my 430ex and 580ex to slave mode and put them in group C, which basically gives you a great looking fill light. From there I started clicking away and had a good couple of hours of shooting. Here is what I caught.

This Cala Lily was lit from the top left with the 580ex and I used the 430ex to bounce of the whiteboard to give some depth. I finished this in Silver Efex Pro in Lightroom 2.0. Quick and easy..

Snapped this Orchid in almost the same manor except I turn the 430ex flash and pointed it directly at the back of the Orchid to back light it.

This Rose was shot in the same manor as the Cala Lily except I threw a diffuser in front of the 580 ex flash from the top left to soften it a bit more.

All in all I had a great time shooting for a few hours, and it only cost me $10 in flowers.

UPDATE:

Here is a rough sketch of the setup for photographing the Orchid, it’s painfully obvious why I take photographs and not sketch.

And now that I have tried it I have to say that there is something special about this new combination.  Don’t ask my why (and now I don’t have official specs for it), but it seems like Silver Efex runs smoother and processes faster in Lightroom 2.0 than it did in Photoshop [this is my opinion].  All the controls and layout of Silver Efex is the same so there is no learning of anything new.  It is just install and go…

I played with a few images from my files and tried them out just to see the handling and to see if the results were the same in Lightroom 2.0 and Photoshop, and they are and it is great…

So what can I say about all this?  First off you are looking a Lightroom convertee right now, and I can’t wait for the other plug-ins to be offered for Lightroom.  This one is a winner!!!

You can snag the updates that allow you to use the plug-ins in Lightroom here, just use the prouct keys from your existing plg-ins and you are golden

Captured with 1D Mark IIN 16-35f2.8 II on Lexar digital film