Aug 17
10:36 pm

Flickr Portfolio

For the upcoming Scott Kelby Photowalk event I needed to create a Flickr account. So I went ahead and got it started and uploaded a lot of my images to it. I will probably keep the account up-to-date so it will serve as an online portfolio. This prevents me from having to code my own. This blog will continue to go on as planned… all I am using Flickr for is for the online portfolio.

Check it out here: TERRY’S FLICKR PORTFOLIO

Aug 16
11:04 pm

Atlanta Trip Update & LaVonna Photo Shoot

Thursday was a short photo shoot with a model named LaVonna and Kim (Make Up Your Mind, Inc) did her make up. The shoot was a low light romantic setting in a bath tub. The lighting was especially tough simply due to the fact that there was no room to fit anything in that room. Lets put it this way… I hardly fit in that room and I am not all that wide! What I ended up doing was clamping a silver 40″ reflector above the bathtub facing straight down. I used my Canon Speedlight 580EX on camera with the Lumiquest FX softbox strapped to it with the blue gel insert. I had this pointed directly up at the silver reflector for most of the shoot and had the exposure pumped up slightly (+1 or so). This was mainly to give the scene a nice blue glow which looks great along with the warm fire from the candles. Then we filled the tub with water and half a bottle of Mr. Bubble and started shooting. A quick Adobe Lightroom develop and then into Photoshop to touch up a few little things and tada… done. Take a look below.

Not a whole lot happened on Friday. Worked on a few small projects and visited with all the family in the evening. I took Allyson over to the Discovery Mills mall again to get a rematch on Skee Ball. So we played a few games of that along with more air hockey, some racing games, and a really cool Mechwarrior 4 simulator. She beat me at Skee Ball and air hockey. My only victory of the day was getting the first place spot on the Mechwarrior 4 simulator. I used to play the PC version of that all the time years ago. Don’t mess with me and my PC game titles!

Today I had two photo shoots except the model for the second shoot pulled a no show. This is after changing the other shoot schedule around since she couldn’t make the original time she had booked. All that schedule flip flopping for nothing. Maybe I should stop doing TFP’s completely… It is turning out to be a waste of my time at least 25% of the time. Not to mention the make up artist who sat here as well. I digress… the first shoot went really well. I will talk more about it in a future post once I have a few of the photos processed so I can post them along with it. So for now I will just leave you in suspense.

Now it is time to clean up and go to bed. The alarm goes off at 5:15am so we can wake up and hit the road. We want to make it home in the mid-afternoon so we have time to unpack, go pick up the dog from my brothers house, and get Allyson ready to start the 3rd grade on Monday. Oh, and to clean up around the house since we might have a hurricane come through on Tuesday. Here’s to hoping!! You’d think as a home owner I would not like hurricanes but… still love them.

Aug 14
2:07 am

Atlanta Day 2 & Angela Photo Shoot

The first day of photo shoots in Atlanta is officially over. Well, I guess it would be first day of only one photo shoot as there was a cancellation in the morning leaving me with only one shoot for the afternoon. So I went along with the family to the Discovery Mills Mall to look around a bit. We found a place there that is much like Dave & Busters, a huge arcade game house. I challenged my daughter to a few different games… I am happy to report that I totally destroyed her at air hockey. We both made feabile attempts at the basketball game… she didn’t do well because the basket was way to far away for her to throw the ball and I didn’t do well because I just really suck at basketball. Then we went to playing skee ball and she very graciously returned the favor and kicked my butt. I was proud of my 170k score until I look over and see this devlish grin on her face, two balls left and a 250k score! Needless to say, she schooled me at skee ball. It was at this point that I retreated under the perfect excuse of having to get to my photo shoot with Angela while they stayed to continue playing. And play they did… she racked up thousands of tickets and we still have a card with 80 credits on it to use tomorrow! The kid is a game shark I tell you!

So onward to meet up with Angela Kinley for our afternoon photo shoot at Lake Lanier. We met up with Kim from Make Up Your Mind, Inc to have her make up done (of which turned out perfect!) and then drove over to Lake Lanier Park to get started. The location is absolutely beautiful. The water level is down by over 15 feet but that did not detract from the view at all. In fact, we used some rocks in some of the photos that are usually under 6 feet of water. We were there right around 5pm and had a great time other than the bees… don’t worry… no stings… just highly annoying having them buzzing around you the whole time.

The gear set up was reduced a bit to two flashes; my Canon Speedlight 580 and Canon Speedlight 550. I had the 580 on the camera acting as the master and the 550 slaved on a light stand shooting into a reflective white umbrella. I would have preferred to be using the 550 with a light box but stupid me forgot to order the proper attachment before we came up here. I also had my 40-some-odd-inch gold reflector present which was usually kept low and tilted back so that it wasn’t over done. And of course I was shooting with my trusty 5D. I just freakin love that camera. I loved my 20D… but my 5D… freakin love it. If any of you have been sitting on the fence waiting to upgrade but don’t want to pay upwards of $4K for the 5D Mk 2 or whatever Canon is going to call it… buy the 5D now. You’ll be so glad you did.

The photo above is a bit of a high key image. I had her back to the sun and boosted up my 550 slave to +2 to make up for the shadows caused by the intense back lighting. I had the little white flippy thing on the 580 up and had it aimed off to camera right and towards her a bit mainly to ensure the 550 went off. Shooting outdoors with IR flashes just sucks. I need to invest in Pocket Wizards or some RF solution. That would make life so much easier when shooting outdoors or in any indoor setting really.

All of the photo processing was done with Adobe Lightroom 2.0 to start with. Once I had all the camera RAW conversions and cropped done I exported them to PSD files and used Photoshop to make minor blemish corrections, add the “beauty border” as I call it (I forgot what Scott Kelby calls it but it is a trick I learned from him), and then the resize and final output sharpening. The “beauty border” is a very simple one minute enhancement that adds so much to an image… I will post a step-by-step tutorial with screen shots within the next few days. Or you could just go to Photoshop World in September and learn it from the main man himself… tickets are still on sale… you know you want too… come on… its in Vegas for crying out loud. And no, I am not going just so you know. But that doesn’t stop me from pimping it out. :)

And so there you have it… if you didn’t learn anything about photography from this post at least you learned that I really get to rambling in blog posts made at 2am. Actually, come to think of it… I think I ramble all the time…

Aug 12
6:56 pm

Atlanta

It seems that every time I come to Atlanta I find myself saying, “Dang, I should move here.” My wife echos those exact words too. We packed the car at midnight in the high 80 degree Florida heat. At 1:30am we departed Melbourne for Atlanta. I love driving at night… there is hardly anyone else on the road and it makes the trip so much more enjoyable. At 5am we found ourselves sitting in a Burger King in Savannah having breakfast. It took us a little longer to get there than usual because of the various stops to stretch and walk around. Have to make sure you stay alert driving at those times. Then we jumped across I-16 through Macon to I-75 and then up into Atlanta. We are actually staying in the John’s Creek area which is to the north-east of the city by quite a ways. So anyway, we get out of the car near Macon and actually shivered. Yes… the high 80 degree muggy heat from Florida does not extend up in to Georgia… at least not today it didn’t. The weather has been beautiful here all day with temperatures in the mid 70’s. Not only is the temperature better, but every building in the area is made of red brick. It is so beautiful here. Not like the architects-on-crack buildings that we have all over Central Florida.

So what is the point to all this… nothing really. My wife is set to spend the rest of the week with her brother and sister-in-law and I have a few photo shoots set up each day. I couldn’t let the opportunity to work with new people in new locations pass by! So, my little vacation quickly turned into a working vacation… or maybe it is more of a playing vacation. To those I am working with this week… looking forward to our shoots. To those stuck at work in Florida… HA HA! :)

I will do my best to get some images processed from each shoot after the fact and get them posted so keep checking back… much more to come…

Aug 12
1:39 pm

Holy Grail of Image File Management Is Here!

I few weeks back I posted about my desire to create the holy grail of image file management work flows. You can read the original post HERE. With Adobe Lightroom 2.0 insane features for image file management, we would be dumb to not figure out the best way to use them. After making that post I polled quite a few of the big time pro’s in the industry as well as opened it up for reader comments. Since my reader base at the time consisted of only a handful of people, I didn’t get too much feedback. Thats ok though… because what I did was put together a work flow from the responses I got as well as all the research I did and have been testing it out for the last few weeks.

Take a look after the jump to see the work flow I put together…

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Aug 09
3:36 pm

Shooting Tethered From Your Camera Into Lightroom (Canon Version)

On March 26th Scott Kelby posted a blog entry detailing how to shoot tethered and have the images automatically show up in Lightroom. His post shows screen shots of the Nikon Camera Control 2 software since he is a Nikon user (we won’t hold that against him) but doesn’t show any screen shots from Canon’s EOS Utility software. Jibble posted a step-by-step tutorial for shooting tethered with a Canon but they just barely touch on the features that can be used and have some extra fluff for Windows XP. So, I am going to fill in the gaps and give a good overview on shooting tethered with a Canon camera.

To avoid violating his copyright I am not going to copy / paste the relevant information from his blog. Instead, go to his blog post HERE and read what he has. Then use my Step Four below instead of his.

Step Four: Make sure your camera and laptop are connected, your camera turned on, then launch Canon EOS Utility. From the main screen (see image above), select “Camera Settings / Remote Shooting” and the camera control dialog for your camera (see image below) will appear.

From the EOS Utility menu select Preferences. You can go through all the pages in the drop down menu but the only real important ones are the Destination Folder page and the Linked Software page.

On the Destination Folder page, select the “watched” folder that you set up in Scott Kelby’s Step Three. Then uncheck the three boxes for creating subfolders. This will make sure that each image from the camera is saved in the specific directory that Lightroom will be importing from.

On the Linked Software page, select “None” from the drop down menu. Since Lightroom will be your software of choice you do not want the Canon software to open any other program to handle the images. Also, Lightroom is going to be importing the images automatically so you DO NOT want to set the linked software to Lightroom. Set it to None and you’re done!

Now go on to Scott Kelby’s Step Five and configure Lightroom to auto import your images. After that is done, start shooting!

Now to explore Canon EOS Utility a little bit…

The control dialog has all the settings that are accessed from the top window on the camera; camera mode, shutter speed, aperture value, white balance, ISO, metering mode, file type, and so on. It is important to note that you cannot change the camera mode from the software. You have to turn the dial on the camera to change the mode. Also, the dialog will display slightly different settings depending on the mode you are in. To change any of the values, simply click on the value to highlight it and then use the arrow buttons below the display to change them.

On the bottom right hand corner of the camera control dialog are two icons; a camera icon and a tool (wrench and hammer) icon. Whenever you click on either of these icons the control dialog will expand downward and expose some other control features that can be used to set up the camera. The things contained in this area will be different for each Canon camera. I will not go into this in more detail simply due to the fact that if you’ve read your camera’s user manual you can easily figure out what all the features in this area are.

One other feature that I want to talk about is the timer shooting feature. This allows you to set up your camera to capture any number of images at a specific interval or a single image at a specific delay. This makes it much easier to take those self portraits or family photos! Simply set the delay and hit the capture button. It will count down and when it reaches 0 it will focus the scene and then take the shot. If you want to take multiple images with a specific delay between them, simply check the Interval Timer box, set the interval in seconds and the number of images you want it to take and then hit the capture button. Just think… now you can take photos of the grass growing once each hour for as long as your camera battery will last!

The last thing to note is that your camera WILL NOT go to sleep when it is tethered unless you check the Auto Power Off box on the basic page of the Preferences dialog. So if you plan to take a lot of photos on a long interval under battery power, make sure you check that box so the camera will “sleep” between images.

Aug 05
11:59 am

Engagement Photos

I know I have been a little bit of a slacker this week on posting. I’ve had a few things that I have been focusing on that I will announce once certain stages have been met. Nothing to do specifically with photography… more life in general kind of things with a little photo opportunity thrown in. Anyway, I did get out shooting on Saturday. I shot some engagement photos for my cousin in the morning and then went out with a friend of mine to shoot some nice modeling shots for her. Both shoots took place in the Florida heat and harsh sunlight. Got a lot of winners from both sets though so I am calling it a successful weekend!

Here are a few from the engagement photos. All were taken with my Canon 5D with a Canon Speedlight 580 on camera flash with a Speedlight 550 on a light stand pointing into a white umbrella. Nothing too fancy on the setup… just needed a little fill light for the shots in the shade and to help balance the sun when not in the shade.

The next photo is my “Yacht Club” photo. I think it is the exact kind of shot you would see on an advertisement for a yacht club or for a sailboat supply shop. This is Matt’s “I’m too cool for this photo” look. :)

That’s it for this post. I will try not to be such a slacker and get more things posted over the next few days. No promises though…

Jul 30
10:50 am

Scott Kelby’s Photo Walk Event

Scott Kelby is organizing a world wide photo walk event. It is free and open to anyone. I have already signed up for the Melbourne, Florida photo walk and hope to meet a lot of photographers during the day of fun. Take a look at the following resources and sign up for the photo walk in your area. Trust me, you will have a blast!

Jeff Revell’s Blog Post on Photo Walks

Sign Up for the Photo Walk Event

Jul 27
10:54 pm

Solitude

Another image from the sunrise shoot this morning was gained from a lifeguard stand on the beach. I titled this one Solitude because the stand was sitting all by itself in the middle of the beach. There was nothing else around it. It stood alone. Except of course for all the trash some dirt bags left sitting on it that I cleaned off to take the shot. So take note… don’t litter.

Canon 5D, 1/500, f/5.0, 56mm, ISO100, Fill Flash

Jul 27
6:07 pm

Twilight

I woke up around 4:30am this morning and slowly went about the process of getting cleaned up, dressed, and putting all my camera gear in the car. By the time I had completed all of that it was getting close to 5am. So off to the 7-11 down the street to get a few doughnuts and a Dr. Pepper for breakfast. Yeah, I am a health nut if you hadn’t noticed. Then it was off to Cocoa, Florida to meet up with Vanelli and a few friends that he met at Photoshop World a few years back that are in the area for business.

Since I was going to meet them at 6am and was quite early I drove out to Cocoa Beach to see if I could get some photos of the lighting I had seen. Now, what I had actually seen was not lightning since there were no clouds close enough to generate lightning but whatever it was that I saw flash I am grateful for. As I pulled into the beach parking area just off SR-520 I noticed the most beautiful mix of colors off to the east. The water was still pretty dark but the horizon was a really nice orangish color that faded up into blue and then ultimately to black. It was still so early that the stars could easily be seen even in the blue areas of the sky.

Out the car I went with my camera bag and tripod hoping that I could get the shots I wanted before it all went away. I don’t think I have moved that fast before 6am since I used to be woken up by Drill Instructors throwing metal trash cans down the squad bay in boot camp just over 10 years ago! As I got onto the beach I about fell over laughing after a few homeless guys who appeared to be quite drunk yelled out asking if I had a map to the beach because they were lost and couldn’t find it. I made it down to the waterline without eating sand, got all my gear together, took a WAG on the camera settings, and started shooting. The best part about this whole situation is that my favorite constellation, Orion, was sitting above the horizon and became the center peice of my shots. Orion is the first constellation that my dad taught me about when I was little and the first one I taught my daughter about when she was little. It has been a family favorite for a few generations now.

Canon 5D, 4 sec, f/3.5, 28mm, ISO400

Jul 27
5:47 pm

Fenced In

Canon 5D, 1/100, f/5.6, 100mm, ISO160

It is not often that I compose a photo in such a way as to produce something that I would personally consider to be “too artsy”. You know… the stuff you look at and immediately think “Huh?”. While I can appreciate a lot of art, I’ve always been more of a detailed photograph kind of person. Well, this morning was one of those “not often” moments when I saw something that looked moderately interesting. After making it a black and white along with some little tweaks in Camera RAW I got something that I really like. A bit more “artsy” in that it makes a statement (which I am not nearly artistic enough to do with every photo I publish) but… whatever.

Jul 26
3:40 pm

First Degree Black Belt

My first degree black belt ceremony was this morning. It is something that I have been working towards for many years now and I am proud to say that I earned my black belt. The actual test or qualifier was a few weeks ago. Today’s ceremony was basically a demonstration of all the material we learned coming up through the system and then the belt ceremony itself. To say that it was hot out would be a gross understatement! I was sweating before we even started and my gi was soaked through after the first 5 minutes of the performance. Overall it went really well.

Check out the photos after the jump…

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Jul 24
10:48 am

Florida Weather

This time of year you can pretty much set your clocks by the afternoon thunderstorms in Florida. We get a lot of them on the central east coast due to the sea breeze and the geography of the area. Bill and I went out to try and get some lightning shots Tuesday afternoon but by the time we got to a good location it was already pouring. I shot a few frames from inside the car where my Canon 5D was protected from becoming an over-sized paper weight. The following photo is my latest HDR photo taken like all the others from past posts… basically, the camera was set to bracket mode with +/- 2.0 EV and the drive mode set to multi-shot. I hand held the camera with my elbows braced on the interior of the car for stability. I used Photoshop CS3 to merge the three photos into an HDR file and saved it in Radiance format. I then used Photomatix Pro to do one round of tone mapping and then saved it as a 16-bit TIFF. Then I took it back into Photoshop CS3 for minor touch ups and framing.

The next photo is a quick shot I took while the car was moving. I like how the lights on all the vehicles turned out. I really over did the processing on this because I like the harsher look to it. It was all done in Lightroom 2.0’s ‘develop’ mode. I basically maxed out the contrast, recovery, fill light, and blacks sliders. Then dropped the saturation a bit and adjusted the brightness and exposure sliders until I got the right look. I then exported it to a PSD file, opened it in Photoshop CS3, did the framing and sharpening, and saved it out as a JPEG for posting. Simple stuff.

Bill posted a good shot he got of a storm yesterday. I was not out on that trip but it looks like I should have been. Check it out on his blog.

Jul 23
11:06 am

iPod Touch for Photographers

Apple iTouch

I may not ride the forefront of technology but I do like to think of myself as at least knowledgable as to what kind of technology is out there ready to make me even more broke. One such technology that I have been watching closely is the Apple iPhone. Yeah, I know… who isn’t? It is remarkable. And now the iPhone 3G is out and the geek factor is taken to a whole new level. But I must say that I do not have an iPhone or a 3G. I refuse to switch back to AT&T for my wireless carrier and don’t feel like installing the crack on one to use T-Mobile. I have Verizon and more than happy to stick with them. So for me an iPhone would be wasteful. Enter the iPod Touch.

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Jul 22
12:10 pm

Melbourne Office Depot Robbery

I got a call this morning that led me to bust out the police scanner and dive into the truck for a chance at playing Photojournalist again. The Office Depot in town was robbed this morning and it was believed that the employees were being held hostage. You can real the Fox News story or the CF News 13 story for more information. This is about the time that I wish I had a much better telephoto zoom lens. Having the Canon 100mm-400mm fast lens would be great compared to the 75mm-300mm slow lens that I have now.

I got there just after the SWAT team had breached the building. They did not find anyone inside; the bad guys must have fled before the police arrived. If I had just found out about it a little earlier or traffic didn’t hold me up then I could have gotten photos of the SWAT team breaching the door and going in. Figures I would miss all the action.

The good news is that I spotted a few sniper nests that no one else had seen (as far as I know). So I made sure to be in the perfect position to get photos of them coming down. Its not all that hard to know where the snipers are going to be if you have some common sense. Of course, my military training doesn’t hurt.

So there is my big excitement for the morning. I got to play photojournalist. One really good thing that came out of this is I made a few contacts in the news industry. One guy is going to Afghanistan in September for a few days and I am going to work on getting on the same trip. That would be awesome.

Keep an eye on the news websites and TV channels. I sent the photos off to a few different places and it looks like a few channels might be publishing them.

Jul 20
11:36 pm

Emotions Project

Heather came to me with a project that she wanted to do a while back and since then we’ve been working on the details. This weekend we did the first shoot to get the project started. I cannot give out all the details of the project but it is really cool. The shoot involved the model displaying different emotions for each photo. Anyway, I took a few shots that stand well by themselves and figured I would post them here. Once Heather gets the first image of her project completed I will post it here so you get to see what all the secrecy is about.

The girl that appears in these images is Vanessa, a talented model from Orlando. The make up artist that worked with us is Sunanda Brammer. Look them up if you are ever working in the area and need talent.

Jul 17
9:31 pm

Blogging

Blogs are great for photographers but I am quickly learning that they are not the best tool to use as a website. I like having my blog to share my work and, here soon, share a lot more tutorials, tips, and tricks. But I’ve found that my images are not readily available for those that want to view them. Sure, they can flip down through the front page and see my recent posts, but not too many people go through the archives. Thus, all the photos I posted a week ago are already off the main page and hidden from the casual viewer.

I know you’re thinking, “then make a portfolio dip stick!” I hear you. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long while now. In fact, I’ve already started a few times and then changed my mind on the implementation. I started on a standard XHTML/CSS portfolio and then switched to a flash gallery generated by Photoshop. Then I decided to make a really nice flash portfolio using FlyPaper. After that I decided to just make the portfolio directly in Adobe Flash.

And now… now I am just not working on it. But I really need to. I just don’t want to start the vicious circle over again.

Eventually I will have something online but I don’t know when I will finally decide what to use and put it all together. Whatever I create I will make it a static page on the blog within WordPress. Not sure whether it will be the first page you see when you come to the site or if I will keep the blog on the front. I just do not know at this point.

So how about you all… What software do you use to keep your online portfolio? Should the blog be the opening page or the static portfolio page? Or the about page? Thoughts? Throw em in the comments!

Jul 16
11:41 pm

Terminal Velocity

Every black belt test at the studio is given a name based on the individuals testing. My test is titled “Terminal Velocity” and will be on July 26th, 2008. The poster below was created by Robert Louis Vanelli from photos he took last weekend.

I just wanted to show off some of his work and show a little bit of my non-photography related interests. Enjoy!

Jul 16
4:53 pm

Lightbox 1.8.2 Bug Fix

This post is for people who use the Lightbox plugin for their WordPress blog.

The 1.8.2 update caused my Lightbox install to stop working. The problem was in the lightbox.php file located in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. The path saved in the $lightbox_path variable changed from what I had with version 1.8. If your lightbox install breaks when you update, just change that line to the correct path and you’re golden.

The correct line for my install is below:

$lightbox_path = get_option(’siteurl’).”/wp-content/plugins/lightbox/”;

For those that do not know, Lightbox is the plugin that makes all the images open in the fancy box when you click on them.

Jul 16
10:33 am

Lights, Camera, Air Conditioning!

Sorry for slacking on the posts as of late. I’ve been busy researching information for the image file management process I am coming up with as well as preparing for my black belt performance next weekend. Then there is the usual life and work stuff to deal with as well as my ability to ignore all the things I am supposed to be doing and waste time and brain cells surfing the net.

Onward to the interesting stuff…

Once again I converted a room in my house into a mini-studio for a shoot a few days ago. It is a small room but not too bad. Add a queen size bed and a headboard and suddenly you have very little room to move. Not only that, but you have very little room to set up light stands, reflector booms, tripods, assistants, and so forth. What do you get when you pack some studio lighting, a model, an assistant, and a whacked out high energy photographer into a small room? A high energy bill after having to drop the AC to 70F just to keep from sweating my butt of is what! Oh well… I cannot complain… too much…

Anyway, I have a big shoot coming up this weekend that I am using that room for so I wanted to do some homework and make sure I got everything figured out before then. So I called a friend of mine, a model who I have worked with a few times in the past, and had her come over for a shoot. Do you recall the show “Gilligan’s Island”? What was supposed to be a 2 hour shoot turned into a 6 hour shoot! We didn’t even realize it at the time though the fact that my iPod had cycled through at least 5 different albums should have clued me in. Hey, time flies when you’re having fun, right?

So I settled for a minimal lighting set up. I used an Interfit Colorflash 500S with a white reflective umbrella as the main subject light. I set up a Versalight 300 as the background light. I used the Canon Speedlight 580 hot-shoed to the camera to control all the other lights and every now and then I threw in the Canon Speedlight 550 to try out some lighting effects on some shots. I kept the Versalight set to the lowest setting most of the time since it is a small room and I didn’t need too many photons to get a nice even lighting across the background. Every now and then I would boost it up a notch to blow out the background but mainly left it on the lowest setting. The Interfit Colorflash was set according to what I needed for each shot but usually just stayed around 1/2-1/4 power. The hot-shoe flash was bounced off the ceiling or wall depending on the shot that I was trying to get. Again, nothing really fancy or “McNally-ish” about the lighting but a little more than a simple on camera flash.

The only real problems I ran into is dealing with exposure due to metering settings. It didn’t happen all that often but every now and then the metering (or something else) would be off that caused the exposure to be REAL low… as in “the image came out completely black” low. I messed with the metering modes on the camera a bit but it seemed to happen no matter what mode was selected. If I changed my angle slightly, boom, problem solved. But sometimes I really wanted that angle! So after the shoot I busted out my trusty Canon 5D user manual and basically read exactly what I already knew… how each mode works. But that didn’t tell me squat about why I was having problems. The obvious answer is the camera was metering incorrectly due to one of the lights but I haven’t spent the time to figure out which one yet. I’m going to call my buddy Robert Louis Vanelli later today and ask him since he is the best lighting guru that I know. He gets a lot of phone calls and emails about stuff like this from me… and you see how long I can talk about a specific subject in a single email or post… and he reads his emails on his Blackberry… Let’s just say that he probably has nightmares about reading my 30 page emails on a nightly basis! That sound the Blackberry makes when a new email arrives… it must trigger mental break downs when he see’s my name pop up…

That about sums it up for this one. I will be posting some more stuff really soon so keep an eye out for it. Vanelli did a karate photo shoot with myself and the other black belt candidate last weekend and created a bad ass poster to display in the studio and at the test like he does for every test. When I saw what he had done my jaw hit the floor. It is really awesome… I will post it soon along with some other stuff.