DIY Bounce "Card" and Barn Door

This is a tutorial that a friend of mine made about how to make your own bounce card/barn door for your flash. He's a canon shooter and did this for his 580EXII. pretty slick. it only cost him $2. And he gave me one for free! Of course, I bought him a hot chocolate at Starbucks to thank him. =)

You can find the original link here if you'd like:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22692750-Stofen-upgrade

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Composition slides from MYT class 1

I got the slides posted, finally, from our first class. Take a look to refresh your memory about what we went over. For those who couldn't make class 1, please look it over before class 2.

Which picture(s) did you like, and why did you like them?



[Further Reading]
A Basic Look at the Basics of Exposure

Welcome! Gracepoint MYT Photography, Session 2

Hello everyone!

We're going to spend 4 Fridays together learning the craft of photography! I hope you're excited. I'm excited and a little nervous and humbled to be able teach you all, to tell you the truth.

I got started with photography in 1997 when I was still in college. I had a paid summer internship and so in the Fall of 1997, I bought my first SLR (single-lens-reflex) camera through the mail, bought a box of film at the student store, and shot like crazy, at really anything that moved. What I wanted to accomplish with a camera was document what my eyes saw. My favorite subject then was people within their context (more photo journalistic rather than portrait), their expressions, and their emotions. Taking pictures of people is still the most interesting subject for me.

Now I shoot with a little digital Canon P&S (point and shoot) and a couple of larger digital Nikon SLR for larger events such as G-Live or retreats or mission trips.

Please share with me what camera (and lens if it applies) you will be using, and 1 thing you want to learn to do after our 4 weeks together. Also please feel free to ask me any questions that you might have, and I'll try to answer it for you. I'll be mainly corresponding through this blog.

For the first class you don't have to bring your cameras.

Thanks and I'm looking forward to hearing from you all.

Dennis.

Polarized Filters

I was at Lake Chabot this past weekend with my friends Jim and Kevan so I thought i would try out a polarized filter that i borrowed from a friend.  I'm posting the same photo taken with the exact same parameters but only adjusting the ring of the polarized filter less than a 1/4 turn.  Take a look. Pay close attention to the color of the sky and the definition of the clouds. 

Lastly, here's the pic of the one who got away. It was a behemoth of a fish.  Large striped bass.  Here are some pics from far away.  The filter allowed me to take shots directly through the water, nearly impossible without it.  I was about 100 feet away on the top of a hill peering straight down. 

ND Filter

During my last trip to Yosemite I decided to try using an ND Filter throughout my trip.  At the suggestion of Ken Rockwell, I went for the Tiffen 77mm ND .6 filter - pretty cheap off of amazon. I guess you could describe it as sunglasses for your lens.  It helped to bring down the shutter/aperture to a more "normal" range for one so that I didn't have to have crazy shutter speeds to compensate for the brightness of the scene. 

But I think the best usage for me was capturing some of the incredible waters of Yosemite.  The ND filter allowed me to really dial down my shutter to something like 1/8 or 1/5 so that I could capture some great pics of water flowing and looking slightly surreal and ghostly.  Of course, this would have been ideal with a tripod but I made the best of it I could. 

Flickr Slideshow

Here's a quick post of how I do a collection of pics.  To be honest I know I overuse this but it's a quick/fast way for me to show off the pics from a trip without having to tell much of a story.  I wish I had the time to do what Kairos did with their journey through their trip with pics, which I love.  Also, at the end of their photo journal they have a cool array of pics which they did with a Wordpress Plug-in called Flickr Gallery.  

Anyway, one website I use to generate slideshows like the one below, is Flickrslidr.  You go to the website and fill out the simple form, which basically takes your flickr photo set and generates this nifty little slideshow with iframes. 

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Been a little busy...

Ok, trying to keep things on track here. I haven't posted but i've been taking pictures like mad in the past few weeks. i ran up about 700 clicks on my trip to Yosemite. I think i ended up posting about 200.

We'll be starting our 2nd session of MYT next week. In the meantime i'm going to drop a couple of posts about number of actuations and I'm going to reference a few Aperture tutorials.

The Power of an Image

Interesting read from Breakpoint today re: the power of an image.