Short Listed
A couple of weeks ago, I entered an architecturally-theme photography contest (Strobist Boot Camp II: Assignment 3). I made a photograph of my kitchen and entered it.
Yesterday, the winners were announced ...
... and I did not win.
However, the judge (Strobist, aka David Hobby) did leave a little note saying that I made the "short list" of the entries. Humility notwithstanding, I enjoy the validation.
I did hope, however, for a little joke from the Strobist regarding me putting my strobe in the oven.
Posted at 08:54AM Aug 25, 2009 by schnee in General |
Location, Location, Location
I recently went on a little house-hunting trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. I was there four years ago and this time, I took my family. I want to move (back) to Breck and I found my dream location. Good news - a Late Mid Century Fixer Upper already exists on the property. This exclusive property features stunning views, dramatic integration into the natural landscape, a mountain lake, and extreme privacy.
The view to the North East (well worth a click and then a subsequent view in biggest size)
The view out one of the picture windows in the kitchen:
The view from the back of the property, looking out over the home and the private lake:
And finally, the dramatic lighting design
I need to find the listing agent and a broker.
Posted at 12:54PM Aug 12, 2009 by schnee in General |
Strobist: Boot Camp II: Assignment #3
Strobist.com hosts a blog authored by David Hobby, the Strobist. David writes about photographic lighting and while a whole lot more than this, he teaches one to take the flash off the camera - off camera flash. Ideally, manual flash and manual metering. He takes setting up a photograph, with its infinite possibilities, and adds an infinite number more. Why? To make a better photograph.
He enjoys a certain amount of success as a blogger - among other benefits, he gets prizes donated for contests. The current contest - Assignment Three of his Boot Camp series - focuses on interior real estate photography. Ever since I remodeled my kitchen, I've wanted to photograph it. My wife and kids are out of town. Hey, idea...
Unlike some other contest, I won't win this one. My competition eats strobes for breakfast. But I had a good time, and I cleaned up the kitchen.
Posted at 09:43PM Jul 28, 2009 by schnee in Photography |
It Is The Little Things
An unfortunate series of events conspired against me about a month ago, which resulted in a new camera. I evaluated the current offerings and decided that switching systems from Canon to Nikon made the most sense. Financially, it sucks - I need to sell my Canon lenses to buy Nikon equivalents, but the body (a Nikon D700) is more capable than anything offered by Canon for the price point.
I did purchase two prime lenses - a f/1.4 50mm and a f/2.8 24mm, in anticipation of a vacation I'll take. And I've put the camera through it's 'walk-around, snapshotting' shakedown. It passes. I need to get it into the studio and try some product photography soon, but I suspect that I'll want some longer lenses for that.
On the Fourth of July, I made photographs of the fireworks. The long-exposure, burning-trail kinds. Kids playing with sparklers, parents diving out of the trajectory of errant launches - that sort of thing. The fun stuff.
In the process, I noticed that the remote shutter release cable screws in, just like the 30 yr old Pentax ME Super that I cut my teeth on. That's fantastic. Little things.
Posted at 09:58AM Jul 06, 2009 by schnee in General |
Photocard
I don't know if you remember, but waaaaaay back in September, I entered and won a little contest at my place of employment. My employer planned on introducing a branded credit card that people could imprint with an image of their choice. The company wanted to fill an image library with stock images selected from a variety of sources, including photographs made by employees.
That feature (the "PayPal Plus MasterCard with Photo Card") went live recently and I just had to check it out. The grand prize winner:
And another image that garnered enough votes to make it to the live site:
Unfortunately, I had to apply for a card to capture those images. Now, I have an extra credit line that I really don't want.
Posted at 10:30AM May 08, 2009 by schnee in General |
Things That Go Pop!
Orange Pop
Originally uploaded by Brent Schneeman
I got a little doohickey that allow me to trigger an off-camera flash from various external stimuli. One of those stimuli is sound - any bang!, pop!, clap! or smack! will be recorded by the doohickey which will then close the flash's trigger, sending out the light pulse. What to do?
Pop a balloon, obviously.
I set up the studio by first moving the car out of the garage and hanging a large piece of black fleece to act as the background. I positioned the camera with the 24-105 L lens mounted and plugged in the remote shutter release cable. I then positioned the flash (making sure to not illuminate the background) and hooked up the little doohickey.
I hung the balloon and took a couple of test shots in the darkened studio / garage. Once i had the exposure, I turned off the lights, turned on the doohickey and threw the dart. The POP! of the balloon triggered the flash and I made this photograph. I actually made lots of these, but Orange Pop is the best one.
Apparently, I'm huge in China, Germany and France.
I'm working on other ideas for sound-generated images.
Posted at 11:04AM Feb 23, 2009 by schnee in General |
Artist's Statement
In a couple of weeks, an online art marketplace ("The way to buy and sell art online") will go live. I will be one of the sellers when it does and I needed to create an Artist's Statement. I spend some time trying to figure out why I make photographs, brainstorming descriptive words, and just generally doing some introspection.
I had the most trouble with that last bit.
I was stumped. And then I had a beer.
I make my photographs to slow down. When I look through the viewfinder, I do nothing else. My art allows me to remove the ongoings of the day and concentrate on doing just one thing. I give myself the luxury of focusing on the subject and finding what makes it interesting; finding the essence of why I lifted camera to eye in the first place.
Some of my photographs are "found" - they exist in nature and I hope to extract a different view. Other photographs are shot in the studio - I arrange the subject to suit my vision. Regardless of the photograph's location, all my photographs are "made" - I intentionally explore angles, exposures, arrangements, looking for patterns of light and dark, color and interplay until I find a compelling image. At that point, it clicks.
I don't know if that is the final version (likely not), but it will do for now. I'd be happy to have some pointers and suggestions. For example, the above says nothing about what my arts "says". I'm not sure it says any one thing. Does it have to?
Once the site goes live, you will hear about it. Oh yes, you will hear about it.
Posted at 09:46AM Feb 05, 2009 by schnee in Photography |
Yay Me
As a coda to the Photography Contest, the results are in and I did rather well.
I won the Sports & Activities category with my image of the rowers and all three of my images garnered more votes for me than any of the other finalists. That means that I also won the grand prize. As is turns out, I technically won the Abstract category with the spiderweb image, but the rules state that entrants can win only one category, so I was awarded the category that gave me the most votes. I was also awarded a rather sizable check, which will help me price my art, should I ever want to ruin this perfectly serviceable hobby by mixing it with money.
That said, soon, if you apply for a credit card offered by my company, you'll be able to select at least one of my images to decorate it.
And, our internal communications department wants to do a profile on me.
I'm so cool.
Posted at 10:05AM Sep 26, 2008 by schnee in General |
Photo Contest
A rather large financial business employs me. I'm not sure why, but it does.
The company is about to release a new batch of branded credit cards and started a contest for employees to get photographs taken by employees printed on the cards. When a customer requests a card, the customer has the option to upload their own image, select one of the employee images or select no image for background printing on the card. The call-for-images went out in mid August, right before I went on vacation. I hastily selected five images good images that I thought would make decent credit card backgrounds. It turns out I forgot to select a really good one, but I was busy. The images needed to fit into eight different categories. I submitted five (total) images into at least two categories. A total of over 6000 images were submitted. 6000! That seems like a lot to me. From the submissions, six images for each category were selected by some committee and released for voting. The winner from each category will be made available for selection by customers for the credit cards.
Of my five entries, I have three selected, two in the 'Abstract' category and one in the 'Sports' category. The ballots look like this:
And
Can you guess which ones are mine?
I have A and D in Abstract and E in Sports. I'm pretty happy.
As it turns out, the voting is run by a third-party provider, and the vote URL:
[redacted]
is open to the public. Anyone can apparently vote. Anyone. Strange. Also, the rules state that you have to vote for each category, but you can only submit one ballot. That one-ballot restriction seems to be protected by a couple of Cookies, which are presumably checked if someone tries submit twice. I'm pretty sure that the Cookies are randomly generated, meaning if someone deletes them and tries to re-vote, the system will allow it. Seems like a security flaw, but the third-party is presumably smarter than me.
Posted at 10:23AM Sep 09, 2008 by schnee in General |
Big Air
Parenting
A couple of months ago (maybe a year ago), the family and I tooled around Austin and we found the 9th Street BMX Trail, located on 9th Street near Lamar. Very close to our house. I flagged the site as some place I wanted to bring a camera to sometime. That time was Sunday.
Not really thinking about the BMX trail, I recently set up a very small jump for Jack in our street. Very small. He went over it a few times and seemed to have some fun, but I think he enjoyed watching me more. Kathleen had the brilliant idea (no snark, brilliant) for me to take the boys to the BMX trail on Sunday for an outing. I packed my camera gear and Jack's bike and we headed out. With the boys in tow, I didn't really think I'd get the opportunity to bust out the camera gear, but wanted to have it 'just in case'.
We watched the riders for a bit while Jack screwed up his courage. He got on his bike (not a BMX) and started over the smaller bumps. That did not go too well. 30 minutes of intensive parenting later, I managed to convince Jack to stay and watch the other riders (he never did get back on the bike). I also pulled out the camera gear. We watched one guy in particular for over an hour. I think it was a good lesson for the boys to see some more "extreme" sports, since it is unlikely that I'll be catching any big air on a bike anytime. Ever. Ben was really excited, and Jack seemed to get over the negative feedback that the fall provided. Maybe next time he will get on his bike.
Photography
I noticed a woman taking photographs of a rider. He was doing some visually interesting jumps so I asked to join in the photo-fun, which would keep my boys entertained. I got a big "no problem" from Rick and Jenn and proceeded to set up everything. I found the biggest jump and took a couple of practice shots:
That image establishes the 'studio'. I moved to the landing berm and snapped a couple of available light photos.
Compositionally fine, but the image lacks definition. The subject (Rick) should stand out more. I broke out the off-camera flash and the Pocket Wizards and took a couple of test photos (using some random bystanders) to get the exposure dialed-in. I hadn't done the off-camera thing for a while and forgot that my camera's sync speed is 1/200 - I was shooting 1/250. That mistake is the cause of the horizontal shadow in the first test image. Whoops. But it worked out OK.
Now I was ready to rock. Rick was a good great sport - he suggested places for me to stand to get the good visuals. I suspected he'd done this sort of thing before.
Artistically, the money shot is that last image. The sun in the upper right peaking through the clouds kicks butt. However, the preceding image shows Rick much better and would work for a publicity photo. All the images are located on my Flickr stream, handily collected into a set.
"Rick" is one "Rick Wetherald", a recent transplant to Austin, TX from Durango Colorado. The woman taking pictures of him is Jennifer (I think they are sweet on each other, but I'm not sure). Rick used to race professionally and seems to be jumping into the Texas cycling scene since moving here. Of course, he has a blog.
Posted at 12:55PM Sep 08, 2008 by schnee in General |
Wishing and hoping and thinking and praying
On Saturday, August 16th, a couple got married.
The day was filled with sweet moments and emotions as the couple exchanged vows infront of their closest friends and family. The guests travelled from all over to celebrate the marriage and to wish them well.
They wore white (yeah, right) and muted tans and generally looked very elegant and relaxed after a long planning process and courtship. Yes, Ellen and Portia were quite the statement of confidence and love.
Oh yeah, Jacque and Brian got married on that day, too.
 |
| JBWedding |
Posted at 11:04AM Aug 26, 2008 by schnee in General |
Christmas Light-ing
and 
Notice the quality of light between those two images? They were taken about 3 weeks apart, but in the same room. Same camera, and basically the same exposure. The only difference? The placement of the flash(es). The 2nd image is the prototype and was taken when we were decorating our Christmas tree. I knew that I needed to figure out a nice and user-friendly approach to lighting for Christmas and decided I'd do a trial run when we decorated the tree.
The tree-decoration lighting is direct and hard. I had a flash located camera-left, triggered wirelessly via a Pocket Wizard. It was not bounced or otherwise diffused and consequentially, it provides very sharp shadows. It is very dramatic. If you click on the image, you can navigate around to others.
The first image was taken on Christmas, after I decided that I did not want hard light. I knew that I need even light and a setup that would allow me to take images from various vantage points in the room. Here is an image of my lighting setup.
Notice the two flashes, camera-left and -right? They are pointed back away from the center of the room, and bounce the light from walls and corners of the room. The bounce light provides diffused illumination, coming from two opposite places in the room. Combined, they provide even lighting to the areas where the subjects are likely to be (near the tree and the loot). When a subject is to the left of the room, the left light is the main light and the right light provides the fill. The opposite is true when the subject moves to the right of the room. All-in-all, the setup was convenient, and I did not have to worry about lighting or exposure. I shot a few images at f/8 @ 1/60s and then switched to f/10 @ 1/60s when I decided that f/8 was too hot. Point-and-shoot is easy once you design the lighting.
All the Christmas photos can be found by clicking on the album below. See if you can tell when I had both flashes firing and when I changed the lighting.
 |
| Christmas 2007 |
Incidentally, this is almost exactly what Strobist suggested in the Christmas Game Plan lighting setup. Nice to know that I'm on the same wave as David Hobby, the guy behind Strobist.com.
Posted at 08:41PM Dec 26, 2007 by schnee in General |
Bridge to Nowhere
I do not want to turn this into a photography blog, but I seem to write about photography often.
I was asked to make some photographs for my new office space. My company recently opened an office here in Austin, the local employees named the conference rooms after local landmarks and amazingly enough, The Powers That Be asked me to create some artwork associated with the names of the conference rooms. Whoohoo, company time spent doing my hobby.
We named one conference room "Pennybacker Bridge". This bridge bridges the north and south sides of Austin and keeps the Loop 360 highway connected.
Photographically, the bridge presents some pretty obvious places to put one's tripod and that obviousness requires careful planning and image development to ensure that any particular image does not look like any other particular image.
For example, the image above presents a rather boring view. The clouds provide some interest, as does the foreground shrubbery, but it looks very much like any other particular image of the bridge. I used my camera's "auto-exposure" function. If I wanted to run with this image, I probably would have exposed for the sky a bit more, to capture the details in the clouds. But really, this image possesses a high "meh-factor". Still, I used it as part of the end result.
The "meh" image provides the mid-tone exposure of a photographic technique called "High Dynamic Range" photography, or "HDR" for short. HDR attempts to widen the exposure latitude of a scene beyond the range normally available with today's imaging technology. Basically, normal human vision has a static contrast ratio of about 6 1/2 "stops" (one "stop" doubles the brightness level), but as soon as the eye starts to move (even a little bit), we can perceive about 20 stops of light (and nature usually presents a bit more than that). Unfortunately, cameras, imaging devices (film and/or CCDs) and especially output devices such as monitors and good-old-fashioned photography prints cannot capture or display anything close to 20 stops of light. At best, one may get 8 stops captured in the camera, and 7 - 10 stops in the output device. In other words, we lose about 1/2 the total brightness levels that our eye sees once we get it into a camera (note, this loss does not result from digitizing an image, good-old-fashioned film cameras cannot capture the full brightness of a given scene either, but (good) film can capture a bit more dynamic range than most digital cameras). This loss-of-information usually means that we loose details in the darkest and brightest parts of an image.
An HDR image consists of many "low dynamic range" images (i.e. "normal" images) that have been mixed together appropriately. However, not just any set of LDR images will do - one needs an LDR that captures details in bright spots, one for the details in the dark spots and one for the details in the middle. That's three images right there. Like these. The first one exposes for the "highlights", the middle one captures the mid-tones and the last exposes for the "shadows". (Sometimes, many LDR images comprise a single HDR image - I've seen some that come from eighteen individual images). Naturally, the camera sat on a tripod when I captured each of these.
Then, software combines those images into one HDR image that preserves detail in the shadows, the midtones and the highlights. But, that HDR image cannot be displayed on any typical output device (because it has more tonal information - more stops of light - than a monitor or a print can display). An HDR image needs "tonemapping" to convert it to LDR images. Many different mechanisms for tonemapping exist - some try to imitate how the eye would have seen the scene, some emphasize contrast, some just get all weird. I'm somewhat partial to somewhat realistic images and tonemapped the HDR down to these two images:
For the Conference Room project, I selected the one on the left (or on top, if your monitor isn't wide enough). It presents a much "warmer" feel and moves the viewer into a happy place. The image on the right is "cold" and challenging. I figure that people in a conference room usually attend meetings and no one likes meetings. The warmer image should help a bit.
Technical Details.
| Exposure | Compensation | ISO | f-stop | shutter speed |
| Normal | 0
|
100
|
f/11 | 1/8s |
| Dark | -2 | 100 | f/11 | 1/30s |
| Light | +2 | 100 | f/11 | 1/2s |
Notice that only the shutter speed changes during for each exposure. This ensures that the Depth of Field (determined solely by the f-stop) remains constant for each image. I placed the camera on a tripod and hooked up the remote switch. I used the camera's "auto-bracket" and "mirror lockup" capabilities to ensure that I would not have to touch the camera during the exposures and to minimize any vibrations due to "mirror slap".
I use an HDR/tonemapping application called "qtpfsgui" to assemble the HDR and to perform the tonemapping. I made three LDR-tonemapped images: one using the Fattal operator, with defaults for everything except for the "beta" operator, which was set at 0.92. The Fattal operator tends to make very cartoon-y LDR images. For the other two LDR images were constructed via the Mantiuk operator, one with all defaults as-is and the other with "contrast equalization" turned on.
I then used an image editing application to layer the Fattal image on top of each of the Mantiuks, with an "overlay" blending mode set to 70%. Layering Fattal on top tends to saturate colors - "digital Velvia", if you will. A final adjustment with a constrast-enhancing "curves" layer led to the final images.
Many authors have written "how-to's" regarding HDR imaging. I have read a few of them: Arctic's Blog, Stuck In Custom's HDR Tutorial, and Backing Wind's HDR Tutorial.
Posted at 08:25PM Dec 05, 2007 by schnee in General |
A Tale of One Image
You all know that I'm a bit of a photographer. An enthusiastic amateur. Recently, I went digital with a Canon EOS 5D, which I spec'ed out for an assignment related to my "day job". Digital is oh-so-nice from a learning perspective. Having access to instant feedback really improves the final images. Yes, I do try to set up the photos, and mentally, I probably visualize thousands of images. But I find that I always seem to have a stray branch or reflection or something in the actual photograph. Digital allows me to re-make the image quickly.
Last night, I made this wineglass image. I'm probably going to enter it in an upcoming Farktography contest(1). I am extremely please with it as it is visually interesting, almost exactly what I visualized, and I got to turn my dinning room into a photography studio for about an hour.
Glass is a very difficult subject to photograph. Highly reflective, it is also translucent or even transparent. The combination of those two qualities means that every light source will be visible, and any stray item is likely to be viewed through, or reflected, in the glass. The trick to the above photo was to eliminate anything other than the glass and the light sources that I wanted, and to make those light sources work for me.
Conceptually, I needed to provide edge-only lighting to the glass. The glass would then work its magic and all would be well. Schematically, it looks like this:
The reflector at the top would reflect (duh) the light from the strobes. I could have used one, but I have two, so... The "gobo" ("go-between") blocks the reflection immediately behind the wineglasses and provides for the edge-lighting.
Now that I had the plan, I needed to implement it.
Step 1: Get the kids to bed.
Step 2: Turn the dinning room table into a studio table and start building the set-up.
Originally, I planned to use my projector screen (I used to shoot slides) but it was too small - the glasses could not see the edges beyond the gobo and still give me working distance for the strobes and everything else. I found an off-white sheet (white would have been best, but you don't make images with the sheets you want, you make images with the sheets you have) and C-clamped it to the bookshelf behind the dining room table (which is why I do this when my lovely bride is not around). I built the gobo / backdrop from an acrylic tank I have and some black felt. I put the flashes down below the table top (so they would not get reflected in the glasses) and sync'ed them with some PocketWizards. When I made the final image, I turned off all lights in the house (and considered asking the across-the-street neighbors to turn off their porch lights, but decided against doing that).
All told, it looks like this:
And this:
Step 3: Make the photograph.
The camera went on the tripod and the shutter was tripped with a shutter-release cable. The little yellow clip on the top of the tank holds the felt gobo / backdrop to the tank (there's another clip on the other side). Originally, I did not have that piece of black paper in the tank. Without that paper, my gobo was too short and the wineglasses could "see" the top of the reflector. That caused a reflection in the top and front of the wineglasses which did not artistically contribute to the image. The paper increases the height of the gobo.
The purple dinosaur with the Cheerios glued to it was left-over from earlier adventures.
(1)I did enter it into the contest. I placed around 3rd.
Posted at 09:02AM Nov 16, 2007 by schnee in General |
Overpowering the Sun
I play basketball on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the lunch hour. I enjoy it - the group that I play with is casual and right at my level of over-40 slowness (but what I have in slowness I make up with a lack of skill).
I've been reading a lot about flash photography and how to use it outdoors. Specifically, I'm interested in overpowering the sun, like this guy did in an article from Time Magazine (copyrighted photo, can't repro it here). Take a look at the photo of the kid. Take a look at the upper left. That's the sun up there - the freakin' sun. And the photographer managed to make a well exposed image of the kid. That's cool stuff.
"Hey, I play basketball and I've got a camera" I thought. So I brought my kit to the court and popped off a few shots.
That's the flash going off under the basket - I bungied it to the stand and sync'ed with a Pocket Wizard. It worked OK, until an errant pass whacked it and the flash wound up looking like this.
Notice the crooked hot shoe connector on the top? And if you look carefully, you can see the cracked lens on the left-hand-side of the photo. Sigh. After a bit of repairs, the flash still worked and was ready for the next outing, but not without a bit or armor.
I bungied the flash to the cage (an unused Container Store basket) so that it was suspended in the middle and bungied the radio sync (a PocketWizard) directly to the cage. That way, everything was self contained and I could move the whole assembly by moving the cage. A couple of wraps of duct tape and I was good to go.
Here is is in action. The shadows have been banished from the player's faces, but I don't think I have enough output from a single flash unit to get the exposure that I want at the distance I want. You can tell from the shadows that the sun is very bright - the "Sunny 16" rule applies here: the surroundings will be well exposed at f/16 at 1/100th of a second using ISO 100. I'm going to 1/200th (my camera's sync speed, hopefully enough to freeze some movement) so I should be able to get a good exposure of the background at f/8. But I want to darken the background. f/11 or smaller. I'm not sure I can throw out that much light. I may have to use two flashes... or even four...
Posted at 01:36PM Oct 08, 2007 by schnee in General |
