Photo Of The Week #2

It was a hard choice for this week’s POTW. The BonesAndStones has some of the best work I’ve done so far. I think I’ve graduated from “suck” up to “could be worse”.

This photo, of the young woman sitting very still, wasn’t one of my planned shots. I had just finished taking the Wide-Angle view of the chapel (first runner-up for POTW), and taking pains to get her into that photo, I notice she had not moved at all. I shifted over a bit and got this image, luckily without any movement on her part. There was about 5 minutes of camera wankery before getting the shot (moving the tripod, focusing, metering, enjoying the practice organ recital going one).

I like the ambiguous situation this photo invokes. Is it a “Is that you God? It’s me, Jamiroquai” moment? Is it “OK, I’m here Mr. Church, but there’s nobody at the pulpit to Save me.”

I like the blue cast on the BigHuge pillar on the right. The pulpit and pew area were lit by tungsten lights, and that pillar was bathed in the light from the bizarro stained glass (which has a lot of blue in it)

New Gallery: Bones And Stones

New Gallery, where Torin and I go on a photo shoot in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh. Originally we were going to do street / architecture stuff, but the weather was truly dreadful, so we went into the Carnegie Dinosaur Museum Thing, and also Heinz Chapel.

For folks who question the usefulness of the Nikon D3(00) Live View mode, I must say that it made many of these shots much easier, both in getting critical focus, and for composition where the camera was in an awkward position on the tripod. Much easier to see the screen than to look through the view finder upside down hanging by a rope, or something like that.

New Gallery: Ta Rent ‘Em

New Gallery, taken during some other errands today, around the little town of Tarentum, PA. Very gray, overcast day, and was spitting rain.

Photo Of The Week #1

OK, it’s a trite and over-done thing to do, but I’ve started a “Photo of the Week” gallery. Each week, I’ll upload the best thing I’ve shot that week (or at least the photo I like the best). Who knows if I’ll stick with it or not, but at least I have the first week done! Plus I’m shooting with Torin this week, so I should have something good for next week. Look here, and/or at my PicasaWeb POTW Gallery on sunday or monday for the latest one.

This particular shot was taken on Good Friday at First Lutheran in Leechburg. I had the camera there to take some pictures of the space for the Spousal Overunit before she heads to a Liturgical Textiles seminar. For Good Friday we have the cross draped in black, and here you can see the eternal candle with the cross in the background. Not much was done to the image in post-processing, just white-balance adjustment, tweaking the brightness/contrast, and adding a little vignette.

The runner-up was the Organist’s BatPhone. It was hard choosing between that and this one for this week’s photo.

Just Finished Reading: The Moment It Clicks

Rating: Borrow It

I picked up The Moment It Clicks at BNI last week. Enough websites and blogs and whatnot were singing its praises. Flipping through the book at the store I saw a lot of nice images, and some fun stories on the pages I read.

I spent most of the day saturday reading, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There are some amazing photographs in the book. The Technical Details and Professional Advice were interesting, but not applicable to my situation (I don’t have assistants or a 6 foot softbox I can carry around) If you already have a tricked out studio, some of the specific advice would be welcome, but for the rest of us, not really.

The last third of the book was my favorite - a set of war stories about the author’s life and career and some of the colorful characters he’s worked with, along with some angst about Not Being There for his offspring.

Why just a “borrow it”? I don’t see this having much re-read value. After you’ve read the stories once, you’ve read them. The technical advice isn’t something I’ll really use in the future.

New Gallery : Good Easter Friday Day

New gallery - some Good Friday and Easter shots at First Lutheran in Leechburg (PA).

Focal Length Comparison

Ever wondered how different focal lengths comare? Tamron has a cool interactive
focal length comparison tool.