hooleeshiet

well it's been a bit of a while, huh. anyways, been an interesting few weeks. as far as volunteering at the aquarium goes, it's been great - in the morning it's particularly cool cause glen and i have this bond thing going on and he only listens to me half the time. it's awesome LOL. he's a cool kid, kinda stuck in his own world half the time and doesn't give two shits about what he's sposed to be doing - screw crafts, he's a dragon dammit! kinda reminds me of me when i was a kid, i remember making my mom/sister/dad act out as a certain animal of the day, every day, when i was like 4 or 5 or whatever; i was apparently a dragon to glen haha. good times.

and i got my grad photos taken. i kinda don't like them though, the dude made me teeth smile and i look like a derp-y shit when i teeth smile, and the "badass" poses just make me look like an asshole. im too pudgy in the chin and cheeks for that shit LOL. there was one pose i was pretty hopeful about but it didn't turn out that great either, but meh. here's that one:

i guess it would've looked cool if i actually had the tripod ontop of my shoulder or something, but it doesn't quite work like this imo. meh.

actually looking at my grad photos from a photo standpoint is pretty interesting though. everything i read on portrait taking and stuff is all ZOMGSHALLODEPTHOFFIELD, ZOMGNOHARSHSHADOWS. well they're definitely not afraid of causing shadows, but i guess in fairness its not that harsh. and in their pictures in their lobby/waiting room/whatever, there're quite a few pics where the depth of field isn't all that shallow, and they had a wallful of awards which means they're doing something right. 2+2=4, i guess that means shallow depth of field isn't everything in portraiture.


speaking of photography, so two interesting things have happened recently. the first is while googling shit for some photo assignment, i came across this PP technique which...well, basically it makes things look all atmospheric/grungyish. i don't have that many pictures that it works well on, but here's a quick example:

                                                              
                      before...                                                                                                         ... and after


personally i find this looks rather badass; this picture isn't all that interesting though but it does show off the effect. next time i go out photowalking i guess i'll have to try and find some shots where this'd work well with it. basically what the thing is (in photoshop) is i open up a channel mixer layer, select monochrome and juggle the sliders until it looks cool, and select multiply for blending options, tweaking it where neccesary. the difficult thing is it'll make it a lot darker, so i guess if i'm shooting with this in mind i'll have to overexpose somewhat. still though, this is pretty damn cool and i'm excited to try it out.


and speaking of exciting to try things out....:

                                                                            sex on a stick.
now that i've got an external flash (oh yeah, i got an external flash. a cheap fake one from china, but whatever,  it works) i don't have any need to ghetto it up with my card of aluminum foil to bounce the light anymore. and so to fill up the void of ghetto DIY equipment, i give you... that. ^. it's for macro, to bounce (and diffuse) light from the flash onto the subject - in macro, a lot of the time you'll need to stop down the aperture to get a larger depth of field - even in f-11, at 1:1 the depth of field is tiny. like, half an insect's head tiny. so that alone will telll you something - at f-11, i'll need either a lot of light, or a slow shutter speed. the latter is why i got a tripod, which is pretty useful. also, at such high magnifications, a lot of the ambient light is cut out, making it darker over all - again, needing more light or slower shutter speeds. hah, almost typed slutter speeds. but if i have this, then i can shoot at 1/180 of a second and have perfectly bright photos at iso 100. which is pretty damn awesome - any hand shake or motion blur will be frozen, and i don't have to spend forever setting up. i look like a retard with that thing, but hey, at least it makes for interesting conversations.

anyways, this thing works great, and the built in diffuser combined with my shitty (unintentional) crumpling of the aluminum foil that's inside the great sexy beast makes for pretty soft light without the need for attaching tissue paper to the end of it. and it is fun as hell to use now that i don't have to have a sniper's steadiness when i'm trying to take a shot, nor do i have to spend 5 minutes setting up a tripod. here's a few shots i took with this setup - shooting macro has never been easier or more fun. this seriously reinvigorated my love for photography, how a little bit of DIY lets you do so much:

yes, i know, this is backfocused. blow me, i leaned in a bit too much.

this shot goes to show how shallow the depth of field is at 1:1, even though it's taken at f11. and the framing and such aren't perfect cause it's kinda hard to hold this thing perfectly steady at my mom when she's not standing totally still either.

the earplugs i brought to the concert/school dance. yes, i know. i washed them. well i haven't washed them yet, but what i mean is, brb washing them.

so that's that. i really can't wait to go for a walk with this setup and see what i can do with it. the only problem i guess is, focus stacking might get tricky if i start hand holding every macro shot. but i guess we'll see. the cool thing about this is, since the ambient light is so low, when i use this the background is black or almost totally black, which gives it that cool studio-or-something look. i think it's cool, anyways. but yeah, these shots were also the first in a while that i took with my 100/2.8 macro. i've missed it and it's missed me.

and while captioning these pictures, i remembered something else that i haven't written about yet either:

is it sad that i just went to my first high school dance a week ago?

probably. but yeah, what makes it a bit sadder is that i didn't go to go, i just went as one of the photographers. it was pretty fun though ish i guess. even though the dj was kinda noob and allegedly smoking pot. photographically speaking, it was a pretty learning experience esp cause it was my first time out with my flash. it performed pretty well throughout the night, but it did eventually die or stop communicating with the camera - it said it was ready and powered up, but it wouldn't fire when i took a shot with the camera. this was after about ~200 shots though at full or half power, and after recharging batteries it worked fine, so i guess it was just cause the batteries were dying or dead. oh yeah, and the fire alarm got tripped like two hours in. good times.

edit: oh yes, i forgot one more thing that's exciting that's photo-related: lightroom 3. i passed over this initially to torrent photoshop cs5 instead, but after reading some tutorials from a beast concert photographer on lightroom and how it sped up his workflow dramatically, i decided to torrent that and gave it a try. 

it is awesome. it's so much more convenient than cs5, with more or less all the same controls there but in a more streamlined package - it feels less like just an addon, like ACR kind of does in cs5. it opens automatically from the moment i put my sd card into my laptop, and i can import all the files right away to a preset folder, and then go straight to developing them. what with all that i've learned to do in postprocessing now, like sharpening, i do end up spending more time per photo than i did before. but because of the last and best convenience of lightroom, it's all worth it: in lightroom, it automatically saves/converts to jpg all of the photos i worked on in that session. in cs5, i would have to go ctrl-s--->hit enter---->hit enter---->click x---> next photo, where each arrow represents another 5 seconds of lag cause of the file sizes. and i had to save each individual picture individually. this mass save in lightroom does take a while, but it's significantly faster than in cs5, and damn it is awesome.

also, have you seen the lightroom 3 ui? it is damn sexy.