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.

September 26, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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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.

September 09, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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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:

IMG_9492_1.jpg

That image establishes the 'studio'. I  moved to the landing berm and snapped a couple of available light photos.

IMG_9494_1.jpg

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.

Test Subjects 2 Test Subjects

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.

IMG_9501_1.jpg IMG_9502_1.jpg

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.

September 08, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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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

August 26, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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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.

December 26, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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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.

IMG_6344-sharpened.jpg


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.

IMG_6345.jpg IMG_6344-sharpened.jpg IMG_6346.jpg

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:

Pennybacker Bridge 6344-6345-6346_contrast_eq.jpg


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.

December 05, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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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. 

Glass Curves

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.

November 16, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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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.

broken

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.

caged

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.

IMG_1000

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...

October 08, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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I got my new toy

Instead of using it to do what my job wants me to do, I took a bunch of photos of the kids. I tell myself that I'm just learning how to use it, but really, I'm slacking off.


The transition to kids in school has been a little rough - without Jack to play with, Ben is focusing a lot of attention on Anna. That's not a good thing - Kathleen caught him the other day wrapping ribbon around her neck. Jack has reverted to being an extremely picky eater. Frustratingly so. But we press on.

Oh, and the toy? A really nice digital SLR.

September 07, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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Self Portraits

Tonight's Farktography contest is "Self-Portraits". I'm rarely the subject of any photo (self- or otherwise) and I was not all that fired up for the theme. And then I was inspired: I'd reproduce the cover image to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", except I'd play all four subjects. The difficulty was that (a) I had to take the photo and (b) I could not use Photoshop to composite the final image. And (c) I needed to figure out the lighting. Turned out to be a very fun and creative exercise. Major props to Strobist for the technical ideas.

Here is the original:

Bohemian Rhapsody 

 And here's what I wound up doing:

Not too bad, but not perfect. The "front" me is too ghosted - if I ever re-shoot this, I'll probably try to solve that by twiddling with the light for each exposure.

The other shots in the series (including my riff on the "Mac vs. PC" ads) can be found by clicking on the cover:

Self Portraits

The technical details are as follow:

 f-stop4.0
shutter speed
1/125 (flash sync speed)
Film Speed
100
Focal Length
~80mm
Flash Output Power
1/16

I used my brand-new Vivitar 285hv off-camera flash which was zoomed to its narrowest beam (to get the hard-light fall-off on the left- and right-me's). I shot film which meant that (a) I could do the multiple-exposure thing on one frame and (b) I could not see the results until after I developed the film. To handle (b), I twiddled with the flash power and the f-stop to bracket the results, and the image presented above is the best one (it was actually the third one in the series).

The physical layout is as shown below. I selected an unused and windowless conference room in the office complex where I work. The camera was probably 9 feet from where I was standing and I ran a flash sync cable up and across the ceiling where I suspended the flash unit (pointed straight down). 1 foot behind where I was standing, I hung a 90" x 72" drape of black broadcloth ($1.99 per sq yard at Michaels!). It doesn't show up at all in the images.

I used my remote shutter cable to trigger the self-timer, had a friend turn off all the lights in the room and quickly positioned myself on pre-taped spots on the floor. I waited for the timer to expire and then I did it over again. And again. And again. For each "Brent Schneemian Rhapsody" composition, I had to make four exposures. I got a bit tired near the end.

June 27, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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Some more summertime images

Some more photos taking during Graduation Day. I noticed that my scanner is getting dark - the thing is 8 years old. Maybe time to get a new one. Sheesh!

The kids and the dad.

Jack in flight, celebrating being a graduate!

Ben mugging for the camera. 

June 12, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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Some summertime photos

Jack graduated from preschool last month. While I don't have any photos scanned from the actual ceremony, we needed to load a new roll of film during the event. The roll of Fuji NPZ 800 was developed at Costco, which provides relatively inexpensive scans of decent quality. Costco doesn't process slide film, which was used during the ceremony. Scanning that takes time since I have to do it myself. And time is of short supply, unfortunately.

 
Here's Ben screwing around in a tire-based playscape. This is on the grounds of Jack's old preschool. Fortunately for Ben, he'll be going there in the Fall.

More Ben and the Tires. He seems to enjoy them.

Ben has moved onto a swinging tube. This is a really good candid photography. Almost as if I placed Ben in the tube and told him to look at me.

Jack and his good friend from preschool Sam. They are playing with a water faucet. As I type this, it occurs to me that this was the last time they are likely to play together in this location. Sam will not be going to Jack's school in the Fall, but they've played on the same soccer team and have gotten together in the for playdates and birthday parties and the like.

Ben, looking like he is having fun

Jack, showing me that he has learned to swing by himself.

Jack and Ben on the swingset.

June 11, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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Brent the Minimalist


I went shooting with a co-worker the other day. I seem to have some sort of a photographic rep at my place of employment and people ask questions and want to see my process. Little did I know that I was setting myself up for universal ridicule when I took out my tripod, cable release, wind-blocker/reflector and stemholder all to take one photo. But I should have known better - I've been working with this crew for about eight years now.

Here's the photo of me taking a photo:


And here's the photo. I evaluate the depth of field as too shallow - the front elements of the subject are out of focus, which, too me, distracts from the overall photo. I probably would not print this one. I do, however, really like the tiny droplets on the petal to the right. This photo does not reveal them too much, but they are there.


After that setup, I started looking for other opportunities. Here's one. Almost nice. If I chose to print it, I'll probably alter reality a bit and put an additional petal at the 10 o'clock position. The flower is unbalanced with out it.


Here's the field we were in. This photo was pretty difficult to frame - just over the top of the photo, there it a wooden fence. I needed to frame so that the fence would not be visible, and I needed sufficient depth-of-field to capture the various flowers.


The following four images are a study in using the reflectors. The first one placed the white side of the reflector behind the thistle(?) to see what would happen. What happened is that I forgot to do a little exposure compensation and everything turned out a bit too grey. +1 stop probably would have helped a bunch.


Since I had the flower clamped and the camera locked on a tripod, I was able to change the environment without disturbing the frame. Here's the thistle natually lit. I removed the reflector from the rear and made the photograph.


Next, I took another reflector (this one with a gold reflection side) and threw a little warming light onto the subject. Compared to the previous photo, you can just make out a little bit of gold highlights in the structure of the flower (or whatever it is).


I next replaced the gold reflector with a silver one (which you can see in the photo of me). Silver light is much cooler than gold light. The effect is there, but very subtle - compare it to the natural light photo, especially the stem behind the main subject.

May 25, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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A Tale of Three Images



Why am I leading off with an image of Boticelli's Birth of Venus? A colleague of mine pointed a new image-editing technique, courtesy of the people behind the Unfocused Brain website. A quick description:

Photoshop CS introduced a tool called "Match Color". This allow an editor to load up a series of photographs and match colors across the series. Good for assembling panoramics or for other applications where the aggregate tonality must match.

This tool allows one to load any image and use it as the source of the colors to match in another image. The technique is to load a classical painting and use it as the source. Imagine if Raphael were the lighting director on your photographic set. Or even Botticelli.

My daughter was recently baptised and we wanted some photos of her. Here's one we chose to use:



This is straight out of the scanner - I used Fuji Sensia 200 (Provia is getting too expensive) and the muted colors are what my scanner "sees". Sensia is a relatively "cool" film, good for portraiture (but not a good as Provia) and is typically muted. But not this muted. After applying the device profile (created with the IT8 target from Wolf Faust and the software from K. Lee), the image subtly shifts to this photo:



The colors are a little brighter, the whites whiter. This is what color management can do for you. Using the device profile, the image you are working with is really close to the image on the film. But I decided to get a bit artistic and see what would happen if, in fact, Botticelli actually was the lighting director for this image.

I loaded the Birth of Venus and used the color match techinque.



My wife and I talked about all three colors. I tended to go for the Venus version, but Kathleen liked the middle one (Anna is not that yellow is what she told me, and she has a point). Since she liked the middle one and since that is the "right" answer, I was happy with the choice.

Color Matching is a pretty interesting techinque for experimentation. I tried it on some other images and Botticelli did a terrible job. If nothing else, the technique gives me some other considerations for photography.

May 10, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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Intel Inside


What are these people looking at? The other day, I got up at 5:30am and rode my bike to downtown Austin to watch the shell of the Intel building implode (you can see my camera-less tripod below and slightly to the right of the girl in yellow). Back in the height of the dot com bubble, Intel convinced Austin that it wanted to build a design center downtown and Austin gave Intel all sorts of incentives to do just that.


And then the bubble burst.

Intel, due to the lucrative incentive package, was able to walk away from the half completed structure. It sat, looking like this for many years as Austin and the Federal Gov't tried to figure out what to do with it. Finally, it was determined to create a Federal Courthouse on the site, but that the existing structure had to go.

I got there at about 6am for the scheduled 7am implosion. Several people were already there, cameras in hand or on tripods. I staked out my place and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally at 7:35 am, sirens went off and the demolition team started a 10-second count down. At zero, I held down the button on my remote shutter release and started making images at 4 frames per second. I'm a film shooter; I only had 36 frames total, which amounted to ...checks math... 9 seconds. The implosion was supposed to take 15 seconds, in two stages, so I had to be careful.

The first stage blew some of the interior secondary support columns. This photo (probably the neatest one of the bunch and well worth the click) managed to capture the det-cord as it ignited, which is pretty nifty. Most of the other photos of this stage look exactly like this one, minus the det-cord exploding.

The second stage is when they blew the main support columns in an attempt to get the building to collapse in on itself. This was much more dramatic - louder explosions, more dust and more destruction. The end-state is as shown.

During the spectacle, I was right next to a guy who had the camera that I really want with a lens that I really want - he paired his Canon EOS 5d with a EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM and fired away. It was pretty sweet. I also had to resist the temptation to yell out "Stop the implosion, Intel's Inside!" right before the button was pushed.

I used a free webservice to create the following Shockwave-based slideshow of the implosion. I could not figure out how to turn off the zoom effects, which really sort of ruins the presentation. But it was free, and it is on someone else's bandwidth, so whaddaya want for nuthin?


Go to ImageShack® to Create your own Slideshow

March 01, 2007 by Brent Schneeman

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