New Lens, Bailey's Turntable Project
July 23, 2010 / Tags: 5D Mark II, Bailey
I've been thinking about getting a small (in size and weight) lens like my 50mm f/1.4 USM, except a little wider. After reading a bunch of reviews (The-Digital-Picture.com is awesome!) I decided on the 24mm f/2.
It's certainly not as fancy as the L version, but I don't have the budget for another L lens right now. And besides, the L version is a lot bigger and heavier, defeating the purpose of getting a small lens. Fortunately, my birthday's coming up, and my mom was very nice — she got it for me early so that I can take it to Amanda's wedding today.
On a very tangentially related topic, Bailey's been working on building a turntable at my place. He needs a photo dataset of 360° views of cars for his image recognition research, and the quickest/cheapest way to get the dataset he wants is to create it himself. We had a couple of different ideas, like rigging a microcontroller to a motor to stop the turntable at various positions, but the cheap motor we're using doesn't stop precisely enough. So our next idea was to use my 5D and capture video at 30fps, then just run the turntable continuously (and slowly).
As part of the project, we built a lightbox, which is what I used to take the photo of my new lens, above. Unfortunately, the lightbox we built is meant for the turntable (and it's a little too short), so the photo didn't turn out that great.
Anthony Turns 21
June 13, 2010 / Tags: Anthony, Beer, Birthday, Cheesecake Factory
My little brother turned 21 this month, so I took him out for his "first" drink.
As you can see, he's grown up to be very mature.
Wildflowers
April 4, 2010 / Tags: Heather, Pete, Photo Outing, Wedding Photography
As more of our friends start getting married, I've been looking more closely at wedding photography. Last September I covered Carol and Murim's Wedding, but I hadn't done an engagement session yet. Meanwhile, Kathy had been browsing for photographers for our own wedding, and she found this great location for outdoor engagement photos.
The flowers are only in bloom this time of year, so they would be gone by the time Christina and Hao take their engagement photos this summer. Instead, I asked Pete and Heather to come out and model for us. Yes, they're already married, so it's not technically an engagement session. But they're very much in love, and that's what we're really trying to capture, right?
Thanks for coming out, Pete and Heather! I hope you guys enjoy the photos.
The Vintage Look
March 15, 2010 / Tags: Kathy, Photo Outing
I see a lot of photographers post-process their digital photos to make them look "vintage", so I thought I'd experiment a bit to see how it's done. But first, I needed some photos to play with, so I dragged Kathy out this afternoon to be my model.
Once I had the photos, I looked around online for tutorials. Somewhat frustratingly, a lot of search hits took me to sites that were trying to sell Photoshop Actions, but I found this site that offered free Actions — but more importantly, breakdowns of what the actions were doing. I played around with some of the Actions on the site and settled on a modified version of Johnna's Tea Party. I basically followed steps 1-5, then jumped straight to step 10, except I used Overlay instead of Soft Light for step 10. I set all of the adjustment layers to 35% opacity except for the Saturation layer in step 1.
Here's the result:
To get a better idea of what's going on, here's a before/after comparison — before is on the left and after is on the right.
I also tried the Action on a couple of photos from the last post, just to see how they'd turn out. I think it works pretty well, but the effect is more subtle.
Engagement Photos
March 12, 2010 / Tags: Jon, Kathy, Our Wedding, Wedding Photography, Weddings
Kathy and I took engagement photos today. Update: The first few photos are up on Sean's blog -- thanks Sean, they look great! As with most things, I totally underestimated the amount of effort involved. We had to scout a location, find things to wear, Kathy had to test makeup... it's not just showing up and getting your photo taken.
We chose Laguna Beach for our engagement photo site. The first four photos in this post are from a few weeks back when we went to scout the location. We were kind of messing around when I took this one, but I liked how it came out.
The next photo was taken on our porch. Kathy was testing her makeup and wanted to see how it looked through the camera. It was raining outside, so I used the reflector to bounce some light back from the darker (inner) side of the porch.
The last two were taken today while we were waiting for our photographer to arrive. Since I got my 5D MkII, I have been using my 24-105mm almost exclusively, so today I made it a point to use my 50mm 1.4 prime. I love how this one turned out.
