Since the weather today was so nice and I was in a good mood, I decided that I would go shoot a weather feature. More after the jump.

I had already decided I was going to take a feature earlier during classes, it was just a matter of where. I thought about it on my way back to my dorm, and then when I was walking in I looked across the quad and saw a bunch of people sitting on blankets and in chairs, studying/lounging. I realized where they were in relation to the parking deck, then I thought “hey, that’d look different” and I ran inside to grab my 70-200 and 300. I ended up only really using the 70-200, the 300 was a little tight for what I wanted (but I will keep it in mind for frisbee from up there, could look cool).

I saw the guys playing frisbee come down towards everyone else and incorporated them into the frame.

I shot a little more, and, happy enough with the results I went down to the quad. I saw some friends of mine talking and I decided to sit down with them. I liked how these two girls were sitting and decided to use live view, sit the camera on the ground, and shoot a quick photo or two when they were smiling. After I had taken the photo they asked “Hey, did you take a picture?” and made me agree to put it on facebook.

I went inside and sent photos to my editor so I could be sure they would make it before budget and might run, and relaxed a bit. When I went back outside I saw a familiar group juggling and realized that they were contact juggling and ran back up to grab my camera. I was really enamored by the orbs they were using.

After shooting a tight frame I decided to try to get some interaction between the juggler and the orb. They were moving it so fast that it was definitely more of a challenge than it looked.

After shooting those I went back to the paper and found out that one of my photos had made it for tomorrow’s down page art. Hurray for features.

This weekend’s game marked our third ESPN night game in a row. There was also a 90% chance of rain. Thankfully, I had the foresight to have my dad send his rain gear to me so I could borrow it for the game. It really, really came in handy though it was a little on the large side. The radar looked pretty ominous and at 45 minutes before game time there was a lightning warning so everyone was shuffled off the field. I went out to shoot some photos of the stands. More after the jump.

I didn’t make any worthwile photos in the pouring rain, but this is what the stairs at the bottom of the student section looked like.

Now thoroughly wet, I went back inside to wait until closer to game time. It wasn’t long after that until they let the players out on to the field. I went back out, this time with my 300, but the wind was so strong that it was blowing water inside of my lens hood and onto the front element of my lens, clouding up everything. I had no choice but to run inside and wipe it off. After I got it clean, I went and asked for an extra arm band to extend the length of my lens hood a bit, which solved my problem. The team was getting ready to go out on the field and I noticed a very unhappy Uga near the goal line in the rain. I don’t usually shoot photos of him, but this time I had to.

The team did their usual run out thing. I didn’t have a wide lens this week because of a lack of bodies and the rain, so I backed up and tried to make something with my 70-200. It worked out alright and the lens compression made for something interesting.

About that time I noticed some very wet and formerly painted fans. They deserved a frame.

The game finally started. I managed to make a few good frames this week. I’ll add a description when I deem necessary.

Caleb king decided he would start running again this year.

Rennie on a nice tackle.

AJ Green caught a nice TD pass. I got totally blocked on the actually pass, which was a pisser because I had a really nice frame lined up. The same thing happened last week too…

Kyle Williams on a kick return.

Joe cox looks back before a play.

Cox gets some nice blocking from his line and Clint Bowling.

Tavarres King makes a nice run after catch. I liked the guy, who was blocked by Michael Moore, flying through the air. Adds a lot to the frame.

Nice tackle on a kick off.

Justin Houston goes after Danny Sullivan.

AJ Green makes a nice bobbling catch.

Danny Sullivan makes a hand off.

Reshad Jones hit Jovon Williams so hard the ball came flying out of his hands. Reshad keeps coming with with the crushing blows every week.

Montez Robhinson barely holds on to Dimitri Nance.

Justin Houston with the pressure on Danny Sullivan.

I tried to make a picture of Mark Richt. Not sure if I failed or not.

Joe Cox behind the line.

Cox makes a pass.

Munzenmaier lays just short of the goal line.

Baccari Rambo with a nice tackle.

Geno Atkins with a big hit behind the line on Dimitri Nance.

Fans yell at during the game. I tried to keep the Arizona QB in there for some depth.

Houston, everywhere this game, goes after Dimitri Nance.

AJ Green makes a nasty, nasty falling catch. I wish I had had a better angle on this.

Set up by AJ’s catch, Blair Walsh came in and kicked the game winning field goal. Before the play I set up right on the line of scrimmage because I knew he would jube towards the Georgia bench.

Christina Swoope and the rest of the drum majors were dancing after the victory. Except for the guy on the right, anyway, he looks distracted.

During all the celebrations the team got up on the cheerleader’s stage and started dancing. I didn’t have a wide angle so I ran out to mid field and shot the celebration with my 70-200. It worked out and I made a nice frame.

Until next time. I’ll try to get photos from the South Carolina and Arkansas game posted soon.

I shot a portrait for a story on the fencing club president a couple weeks back. When I saw this assignment I snapped it up because I actually fence and have wanted a reason to do a fencing portrait for a while. Click the jump to read more and see more photos.

I went into this portrait with not only a plan A, but also a plan B and C, which doesn’t usually happen. I generally go in with a plan A, and then when that doesn’t work I make up something on the fly. I have to say, I really like the multiple plan method. I say that because, as usual, plan A wasn’t possible, and I figured that out pretty quickly. Then I went on to plan B and started shooting. It wasn’t as out there and original as plan A, but it worked and made an effective photo.

I had Rob, the fencing club president, do a move called a Fleche at me over and over.

Those two images were alright, but not really what I was going for, so I went on to plan C, a tighter fleche.

This is where I got my winner and the one we ran in the paper. It was kind of awkward for Rob to do because I had to get closer to get the effect I wanted. I chose to use a wide angle lens so that, because of distortion, the tip of the epee would look bigger and really pop out of the image. After a few tries it I got this.

All in all the whole shoot worked out really well and I learned that going in with a concrete plan B is definitely a good idea and makes things go a little smoother. Hope you enjoyed this post, more to come this week.

Here are some photos from the UGA v. OK State game two weekends ago. I am not going to go really in depth as usual since I have a lot of photos to put up and need to catch up on my blog with a lot of stuff from the last few weeks. Anyway, more photos after the jump.

Pregame photos from the tunnel.

I tried something I have seen some other photographers do before. It worked out pretty well.

AJ Green makes a catch.

Richard Samuel on the run.

Rennie Curran hits Zach Robinson on the throw.

Darryl Gamble and Demarcus Dobbs make a tackle.

Carlton Thomas gets a block from Christian Robinson.

Orson Charles running after a catch.

Excited OSU fans.

Roderick Battle going after Zach Robinson.

Darius Dewberry startes Zach Robinson down

Willie Martinez

Prince Miller wants the turnover.

Zach Robinson hands the ball off to Darian Stewart.

Joe Cox passing the ball to Shaun Chapas.

Chapas runing after the catch.

Teammates congratulating Rennie Curran after a big play.

Joe Cox fumbles the ball.

A nice Dez Bryant celebration.

Exasperated Georgia fans.

Another shot of Dez Bryant’s celebration after the game. I can’t decide whether I like this or the first photo better.

That is all for this post. I’ll probably post some more tomorrow.

This is some old stuff… just felt like posting it. I’ll keep things short on the word end.

A few friends of mine invited me to an Auto Cross over the summer at Atlanta Motor Speedway. I figured I would go and shoot photos. Nothing fantastic came of it, but here are some frames I like.

One of my friends, John, in his accord. He is the only one who ran during the day out of the people I was with, so he got the nicest photos.

Gotta love that body roll.

An Evo I liked with a camera mounted on top.

A kid in a go cart… these things went VERY fast though, and they actually had some of the fastest times around the course.

The Stig made an appearance.

I loved this MR2, he did some drifting through one of the big sweeping turns. There was also nice light hitting his car, though not much of it.

It got dark between some of my other friend’s runs and I got bored and played around with my 300.

I like the lens compression on this one.

There was also an orange moon, so I popped on the 1.4x extender and took a stab at it.

When I got there I saw all of the inflatables and all of the RHA people, but there was no one doing anything. I really wanted to make a photo of people going through the slip and slide because I knew it would make a good feature, so I figured how I would shoot it if people came and then did what any Photojournalist would do… I waited.

Sooner or later some people came, so I got ready to make a photo. Now, if I had planned it a little better I would have thought about inflatable slip and slides spraying water everywhere, but I didn’t think so I just had to wing it. There was really no way to make the photo I wanted without getting both myself and my camera wet, but since I wanted to make this picture I did it anyway. I ended up finding a place where there was very little spray to stick my camera into the slide. Oh, just so you know one of the ends wasn’t open so I couldn’t shoot it from outside with a 70-200 or 300, which would have made it waaaay cleaner and easier to compose, but oh well. I pre-focused my camera to where I thought the facial expressions would be good and I would be able to see them, and then stuck the camera into the slide and shot when the few people went through. Then I would wipe my camera off so it was dry and do it again. Genius, right? Luckily the four people that slid were enough to get a photo I worked, it wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t a bad picture either, so I’m happy. I wish I could’ve composed the photo a bit better, but it is a little hard when you’re leaning into an inflatable slip and slide that spews water while holding a camera and hitting the shutter with one hand. Either way, it worked out and I made a photo that we ended up running centerpiece for the next day’s paper, so mission accomplished. Oh yeah, here is the product of my efforts.

This is a really old entry I meant to do a while ago, just forgot about it and saw it in my drafts so I decided to finish.

The day I had to shoot this portrait there were a few errors in communication. The writer who did this story wasn’t the usual baseball writer, so he didn’t know a few of the procedures. By that I mean the writer wasn’t aware that he actually had to request the portrait before hand. I was unaware of this when I showed up early, like usual, with all of my gear. The baseball SID (sports information director) saw me and said “What are you doing here?”

Read more after the jump.

At first I was confused, but then I realized what happened and told the SID. I called the writer and told him about the mistake and then apologized because we wouldn’t be able to make a photo for his story. The SID apologized. I told him it wasn’t his fault and that I would see him the next day at the game and then headed back to my car. The writer walked in as I was leaving and apologized to me. I loaded all of my stuff into my car and got ready to head home. The portrait never happened. Then I got a phone call.

The SID had talked to the player and made things happen for me. The player agreed to do a photo after batting practice before he left for the day. Awesome. I headed back and got ready to put my plan in motion, the only problem was that I would have to wait until after BP. Then it started raining.

I quickly had to think of another plan since I could no longer do the portrait outside. After thinking for a minute, I asked the SID if I could check out the indoor batting cages. When I walked in I looked for a place to make a clean photo and panicked a little at first, but then I noticed the net for the batting cage and got an idea. I figured out that if I nuked out all of the natural light with my flashes, making the background completely dark, and then back-lit the net I could make a nice geometric background to make my portrait a little dynamic. I got everything ready and then waited for my subject to come in.

Matt Cerione came in and introduced himself, then we got ready for the photo. The paper wanted something fierce and intense to show his, well, intensity. Now is the point where you get ready to see an awesome photo because I had everything figured out, right? Wrong. I screwed up because I overlooked a few details while shooting. This quickly became, because of my mistakes, a portrait where when packing up I paused, looked at my photos in the LCD and said to myself “crap”. Here is what I mean.

The above shot is what the paper wanted, good facial expression, good pose, good background, but as I said before… I missed a couple of details that would’ve made this a good portrait. First off, what is that he is holding? Well, he’s holding a bat, but I was dumb and didn’t pay enough attention to get him to hold it down lower so you could tell what he was holding. That is really the biggest mistake. The bat was like that in every photo but one, which is the smiling pose you saw at the beginning of this post. Too bad the paper wanted him to look intense and used this photo instead. The other thing that really bothers me is that he doesn’t have his batting gloves strapped on. Their hanging loose and got back-lit, creating a bit of a distraction. Just another little detail I should’ve noticed that helped kill the photo for me. Otherwise, I would’ve really liked this photo and would have been able to awesomely salvage an assignment gone bad.

Don’t do what I did when you’re shooting a portrait. You’re in control of everything, so pay attention to everything. Don’t let those little details slide so that you end up wanting to re-do the portrait, make it right the first time. Oh well, the smiling photo is still pretty nice, and a keeper for me. =)

Just for kicks, here’s the photo we ran inside the article. A solid photo of a catch he made in the outfield, too bad it wasn’t a dive though.

This is the last part of the set from Midsummer Music Fest in Candler Park, and the second of 4-5 posts from concerts I went to that weekend, two of which being Guster. I just want to point out again in this long series of photos that I wasn’t credentialed, so I was stuck in one spot. I tried to get creative with compositions, but it would’ve been really nice if I could move around. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t look at this as a photo story and more of individual photos because of that fact, because there are a lot of repeated compositions. I got to the point where I was just looking for nice moments. Anyway, here are the photos.

The lead singer plays a rickenbacker, that warranted its own photo.

Click more for more photos!

One thing I noticed and then played with at this show were the stage lights. I figured out that I could make the lights look different at different exposures (duh) so it made it fun to play with the color. Red was really annoying though, I was fighting it all night.

Another rickenbacker shot. I love that guitar. The light on Ryan was nice too…

One thing you’ll notice through these photos is that all the members of the band, aside from the drummer, play just about all the instruments. They switch constantly. Adam was playing the bass in this photo. He also looked at me, which is why this was more of a keeper. Notice the nice black background I was able to get because the stage lights were so much brighter than the ambient. It makes for a clean photo, and I like clean. I’m also a fan of the yellow rimlight.

I tried to include the drummer in a photo of the lead singer. Kind of a nice photo because they’re both really into what they’re doing. Notice the drummer playing the congas with his hands in a rock band. He’s a beast.

The annoying red light I was fighting all night. It made this photo kind of interesting, though.

Adam looking epic.

I should’ve waited for better light here. At this point in the concert this girl tapped on my shoulder and said “I’m a photographer too, give me your camera and let me take some pictures!” Like that is ever going to happen… she was cute but I’m not crazy.

Ryan pulled out the harmonica. That plus nice light and a tight frame made for a nice photo. Again, good rimlight.

He went over to the keyboard and I tried to make a photo of that. The mic stand in the middle of the frame annoys me, but otherwise I like this frame.

The drum tech, Andrew or more affectionally known as Scooter, plays the set in some of the songs while Brian, the drummer, is hammering away on the congas.

Guster has a song where, on the album, they used Ping-Pong balls as an effect in the background. Fans caught on to it and a funny tradition started where, during that point in the song, people throw Ping-Pong balls at the band on stage. Ryan caught one in his mouth. nice moment.

Nice light, clean-ish background.

I started being a little slanted I guess.

Trumpet + guitar = funny face.

Harmonica came out again, this time with blue rim.

Adam plays Gretsch guitars, which I absolutely love, so I had to make a picture.

I just noticed that there are no Brian, drummer, or Joe photos in this post. Don’t worry, there is plenty of them coming in the next Guster post… sorry to all you fans of Joe and the Thundergod.

I went to the Midsummer Music Fest last Saturday in Candler Park. The above photo just about sums up how hot it was… luckily for me I didn’t get to enjoy the nice shade because my sister and I had to stake out our spots for Guster, the festival’s headliner, early.

Click more for photos of the opening acts, including Rusted Root!

The band that was playing when we got there was called Jupiter Coyote. I wasn’t too interested in them to be honest, but I did notice some nice speckled light hitting them and tried to take advantage of it.

After their show I lost the ability to move around and shoot photos because the Rusted Root fans poured in. The crowd packed in towards the stage and I soon was stuck in place up against the safety barrier. I did, however, notice a friend of mine from UGA, Eric Tonn (who had said hello to me earlier that day), standing in the crowd.

Shortly after the crowds poured in Rusted Root, who’s song is apparently the theme for Ice Age (you’d know if if you heard it, thanks Eric), started playing. The first thing I noticed about them was their drummer, who’s name is apparently Preach Freedom. Not only did he have dreadlocks, but he also kind of snarls when he plays making for interesting photos.

Their lead singer/guitarist was an interesting fellow. He had that whole curly haired and slightly unbuttoned shirt thing going and from listening to the girl behind me, who was actually quite attractive, scream, “I want your body”, and things of that sort for the whole show I guess it worked for him. I think he tried to seduce my camera at one point. I don’t think it really worked, though, he just ended up looking somewhat confused. One of my dogs cocks her head sideways the same way when she is thinking about something, so I guess they’re similar.

I made a more legit photo of him singing later. He looks like he is going to eat the mic.

They had an auxiliary guitarist come on later who was playing a Gretsch. I had to shoot some photos of him for that reason.

One member of the band who I couldn’t quite figure out was their backup vocal/random percussion girl. She pulled out so many random drums and things that I wasn’t able to figure out if it was a gimmick or not. Case in point:

She did, however, catch some nice rimlight when she flipped her hair. Notice another random percussion instrument in her hand.

The only person I really don’t have anything to say about was the bassist. He was just over there singing and grooving the whole time.

After their last song they got together and took a bow. I’m glad the drummer had a sense of humor.

All that was left after Rusted Root was to wait for Guster to come on. More about that later.

Click on the jump to see more photos and read about the process!

My first order of business was to get everything set up. It was actually pretty easy to set up, I just had to round up all of my gear. Here is a set up shot.

If you have questions about what any of that stuff is just click the photo, there are notes on it at flickr.com.

The coolest thing about this to me is the fact that shutter speed doesn’t matter. You could shoot this at 1/10th or 1/250th, it doesn’t make a difference. Why? Because the flash is what freezes the motion and burns the image into the sensor (or film, for that matter). The kind of flash I have, at 1/16th power, emits a pulse of light that is 1/11,000th of a second long, so it is basically the equivalent of having a shutter that fast. Sorry my explanation is terrible. Basically, the flash acts like your shutter.

I started out with a dark blue folder underneath the pyrex dish to give some blue color, and a red gel on my flash, for the red color. However, I didn’t really like how the red turned out, it was too strong and you couldn’t see the blue.

After about 50 frames of red I switched to green, which ended up working out a lot better since you can see the blue in the shadows, making the drop more dynamic, in my opinion. It was also cool to observe how the water acts and what the surface tension causes. I like thinking about how every drop of water does this instantaneously whenever it hits a surface. Here is a cool crater.

I wish I knew the technical terms for all of this. Instead I will just show you a bunch of photos I thought were cool.

You can really see the blue in this one.

I call this a “crown”.

Another crown, I don’t know why it went sideways.

Then I dropped a dime in to see what it would look like. I was somewhat pleased.

I am going to play with different coloration and backgrounds tomorrow. I might do this outside or in front of the window so more is reflected in the water. Either way, I promise I will only have one more post of this. I just want to make something really really cool, then I will consider this experiment done. Oh, and I also want to try some different liquids… chocolate milk might be fun.