At long last, our group project for Advanced Techniques is done. In some respects, this is a first draft of our story of Hulett House Gym, a mixed martial arts team in Columbia, Mo. I’m sure that come this fall, when classes reconvene, we can find a way to perfect this into something that we might submit to cPOY.
Many thanks to my teammates, Chris Dunn, Elisa Day and Matt Cloud, for their hard work towards making this project a success.
Starting last night and not really ending until early this afternoon, a large storm system passed through Columbia. It was pretty severe at times: I lost power a multiple points last night, often regaining power just to lose it once more twenty seconds later. Unfortunately, the storms this morning produced pretty heavy rain, so I did not feel comfortable with following through with my original plan to drive out to St. Louis to visit Wild Bird Rehabilitation, the focus of a long-term project. I’ll be going tomorrow, instead.
However, the storm did provide the opportunity to photograph lightning from my balcony. Sadly, by the time I was really set for it, precipitation had finally reached my building so I had to move indoors quite quickly. The most interesting photo, really, was a 30 minute exposure of the patterns the lightning was producing on the walls of the bedroom of my apartment:
Canon 1D Mark II N & 16-35mm f/2.8 L II; exposed 30 minutes @ f/8, ISO 200
I would have used the 5D Mk. II for its superior noise performance, but its battery was dead.
View of Elm and Hitt Streets, Columbia, Mo. Canon 5D Mark II and 24mm f/3.5 L TS-E lens
The other morning I found myself on the rooftop of the Hitt Street parking garage at sunrise. It had been a long night of paper-writing and I decided to take a break before finishing it up and going to bed for a nap before class later that day.
While I’ve owned a tilt/shift lens since 2005 and have used it extensively for landscape and architectural photography, mostly for the Scheimpflug effect, but I have never before intentionally made use of the tilt function to distort my subject. Vince LaForet’s “tiny landscapes” inspired me to try my hand at the technique.
Of course, my first few attempts were utter failures because, while I was able to compose the image properly and could “see” my subjects transforming into “toys” in front of me, I then stopped down the aperture to get proper depth-of-field. Why not, I thought–that’s the way it’s done, right? Wrong.
This is an image I made on my way back to my car last night after working in the journalism school library for a couple of hours. I was only parked on the third floor, but decided to go up to the roof (sixth floor) for a different perspective. Next time, I’ll take my tripod and tilt/shift lens. It’s nice to take the occasional break from photojournalism!
View of the MU School of Journalism from Hitt Street Parking Garage, Columbia, Mo.
I made this image last Friday while scouting for locations for a group “painting with light” project. I had just gotten off of I-70 and was headed back home when I noticed the way that the “Chevy’s Fresh Mex” sign was framed by one of the car wash stalls. I turned around and pulled over to make a couple of frames. The weather cooperated to to give this an eerie feel.
Photographed with a Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4 IS, exposed 1/40 sec. @ f/5.6, ISO 200.
Romantic ghosts of prom past on the MKT Trail, Columbia, Mo.
For a group project for Advanced Techniques, Vivian Esparza, Charles Ludeke, Lesley Freeman, and I met up at the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial along the MKT Trail in Columbia, Mo. to make a long time exposure with added light–also called “painting with light” for its surreal effect.
Charles friend, Michelle, agreed to be a model for us on the bridge. After thinking on it for a bit, we decided that we should include a male figure in the photo, and Charles volunteered that he had a yellow tux (rental) in his car from a social gathering a on Friday night.
The background trees were lit with a Nikon SB-900 gelled green. I fired it off at 1/4 power for the nearer trees, and worked my way up to 1:1 for the background trees (knowing that they would be far too dark otherwise). Vivian did a great job of painting the bridge blue (an SB-900 with a blue gel), and Lesley walked along the bridge once with a flashlight aimed downward (on the ground, along the railing). Lesley then used a different flashlight, gelled red, to paint the post and upper railing of the bridge.
Finally, Charles and Michelle would pose on the bridge, and I used my Canon 550EX with the Panera straw-grid, dialed at 1/2 power, to “freeze” our ghosts in the frame.
All told, the exposure came to 5.7 minutes @ f/8, ISO 200 using a Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4 IS lens @ 81mm…and a couple hours of experimentation. It was a great collaboration….and I think we might go back in a week to do something a little bit different ( but not in time for class).
Everyone in Advanced Techniques was asked to create a photojournalistic image using second curtain (or “rear curtain”) snyc with their strobes. I actually haven’t used the technique much in the past, largely because it’s inordinately difficult to do so with the Canon flash system. Comparatively, the Nikon system of switching the flash mode from “normal,” skipping over “red eye reduction,” and landing on “rear” is all that has to be done. It’s stupid simple. More stupid for Canon…..c’est la vie. (But cameras that start with the letter “N” do seem to have strange white balance………)
Click on the diagram for a larger version.
For the simple reason that second curtain sync is easy to achieve with Nikon, I borrowed a D700 and an SB-900 from the photo department. I only took out the 24-70mm, knowing that 90% of what I had planned could be done with that one lens. First, I went to the Hulett House mixed martial-arts gym, the subject of a longer-term group project, to practice with the technique. I set up one light on a stand, gelled CTO, and bounced if off of the ceiling.
After only a few frames, I captured this image, which is one of my favorites from the evening:
Kevin Croom tries to place Kristin Rambo into a headlock during a sparring match at the Hulett House Gym on April 22, 2009, in Columbia, Mo. Croom, who is yet undefeated in his mixed-martial arts career, is helping to get Rambo ready for her first Midwest Fight League contest on May 25.
It’s been on-and-off pouring rain today, so I’ve been going through some of my photos in Lightroom. I found a few that I made just for me–they’re not photojournalistic and they’re not for any of my classes. What’s funny about the ones that I found is that all of them were made on my Lumix G1. It definitely pays to carry that camera around. I am still just using the kit lens (equivalent to 28-90mm), but plan to pick up the 90-400mm equivalent lens soon…and either the new wide-angle zoom (no price yet) or the fixed focal length f/1.7 lens that has been rumored for some time if/when that ever comes out. Micro four-thirds has turned out to be a great system that delivers on the original promise of Olympus’ four-thirds. Funny that Panasonic would be the ones to show them how to make that format useful!
