Sunday, June 28, 2015

Red Bull Mini Drome NYC 2015

A video


I am not sure how good or bad, most likely bad it would appear here.  They are mostly from still pictures with a bit of video here and there in this 44 second edit.  I mean to make it a high energy edit so it's kind of fast and loud and only 44 seconds short.  Every time I edit any video it's a new experience to me.  Like I forgot everything I learned.  There is always some hiccup something unexpected.  Things got a little bit easier as I think iMovie is rather stable compared to Cinelerra.  And having a quad core and 16GB of RAM certainly helps.  I used to take a shower when I hit rendering.  It just took a long time to render.  Now it's just fast.

Head directly YouTube I guess the video quality is better.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Watermark

Finally I sat myself down to do some watermark script using ImageMagic.  Again it was some hack job, I didn't know what I was doing, just to make it work.  Being a no talent self important least necessary photographer, some watermarking is absolutely essential for my ego.  I don't know why I waited all these years to actually watermark my images.







Almost all of my images were taken at ISO800.  I found this ISO very much usable or usable without involving any Photoshop wizardry which I have none and in turn I can save on my flash power.  High ISO upto 800 doesn't cost me anything.  I loaded my SB-600 with fresh batteries before going to the event.  I think after some three hundred shots in iTTL, the recycling time became a bit of a problem if I were to shoot consecutively in less than 3 seconds.  The SB-600 performed admirably.  This was the only time I shot the entire event in iTTL, almost exclusively.  Not to miss any shot, I took the fresh batteries from the Metz I brought with me but didn't use, and put them into my SB-600.

... to be continued.

I used a CB min bracket, SC-17 cable for my SB-600, my usual setup.  There isn't really any empirical evidence that the lighting is better this way but I just feel like this is a cooler way to shoot on camera flash.  So psychologically it works for me.

And I don't put any, in my mind, silly dome to cover the flash head to make the light softer.  And I certainly didn't bounce my flash as the ceiling was like 50 feet above.  I just don't understand why some people chose to tilt their flashhead when the ceiling was 50 feet above.  There are so many things I don't understand.  The flashhead as it was, in my bare naked eye, didn't produce any hotspot on the face.  Though I must say I in most cases, tuned down the the camera and flash exposure and power to minus -0.7.  I always prefer under to over exposure.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

A Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man


This is my rather lame attempt to create a black background in the outdoor by using some external flash.
Nikon D700, Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR, Nikon SB-600 as slave on TTL, on-camera flash as command.
The flash has the channel on 3 while the flash had it on 1, or the other way round.  Anyway, it wasn't working initially because of that.  On location trouble-shooting is always stupid and challenging.  You or I become extra stupid when trouble shoot on location.  And you are always tight on time or running out of it.  Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.  Basically I got a minute or two or three to make it work.  It was after the race when the kids were leaving already.  Billy is a good kid and unlike my own, doesn't mind to have his picture taken by me.  I guess with some diffuser put on the flash will make the light more pleasing or add another one to the right.



Civil War (2024)

This is basically a Dorothy yellow brick road kind of story.  Also, something to do with the new replaces the old, the circle of life thing....