Wedding shot day of earthquake

Could you imagine it's your big day and then an earthquake strikes....

Check out this dude's Xanga page...

http://www.xanga.com/lelandwong/657607591/photographing-a-wedding-and-then-an-earthquake.html

HDR photography experiment

Hdr is a generally new/ highly evolving style of photography....

Basically what it does it increases the dynamic range (hdr=high dynamic range)

What does that mean really??? basically when you take a picture, if it's too bright you lose the detail in the highlights (turns too white) and if it's too dark you lose the detail in the shadows (turns all black)

So why don't you correctly expose the picture correctly??? well even if it's exposed correctly, you lose some details in both the shadows and highlights...

So HDR is basically setting your camera to take multiple exposures (one dark, one light, and one normal or any number of exposures in between). Then you can combine those pics in photoshop or a program called photomatix and make an HDR. They've been doing this in movies for years.. so you get an eerie sky but the main character is still visible and bright...

Now what they've found is not only do you get the lights and darks correct, but you get a higher selection of light and dark colors... so the people at photomatix have found a way to boost these colors to get that illustrated feel but obviously still a picture... Some people dont' like this at all (**cough cough john** cough) but I think it looks like an oil painting but with more detail! Great stuff!!

Here's my example below:




More examples here

Visit my Phanfare site: http://albums.phanfare.com/heespharm

Flickr alternative

Are you not happy with how flickr displays your pictures? Do you want a free alternative source???

www.phanfare.com is your answer....

It has a very organized and very user friendly structure for outside people to view your pictures. However, the user friendliness of the interface is not that great UNLESS you download the desktop program (which is free).

The real draw for me here is that the slideshows can have music to be added to it...

Check out the results here

albums.phanfare.com/heespharm

DIY: GF origami diffuser. 4 bucks!!!

So after recieving the Origami Diffuser and playing around with it a while... one of the side arms broke off... I thought great... now I have to spend 30 bucks replacing it right??? wrong!!!!

It got me thinking... What is this thing made of anyways and how can i mimic it so I don't have to buy a new one???? So I made a new one out of simple cheap materials...

Materials:

- Sticky velcro (2 bucks)
- 32 ounce CVS rubbing 70% alcohol (1 or 2 bucks) (the large size... tall and cylindrical)
- one rubberband (wide)
- Cut out of JPG (enclosed) in this post)
- scissors
- Goo gone (or anything that can help remove a sticky label... like rubbing alcohol maybe????)

Steps

1. Drain the alcohol bottle out completely

2. cut the top and bottom off then cut a line down from the top of the bottle to the bottom of your bottle, so your left with a sheet of opaque plastic

3. Take the label off with goo gone

4. Download picture below (yes you have my full permission to use it) and cut it out
- you need to cut on the outside of the black lines not the inside of the black lines...
- Don't cut on the dotted lines... those are fold lines
- fold on fold lines... use a ruler to help you get a straight line
- Make sure that the picture is 6 and 3/8 inches from top to bottom when printed out

5. take the sticky velcro soft side and measure around your speedlight so that you know you have enough velcro....

6. Remove only the part of the velcro backing so it can cover the center piece of the diffuser (see pic below)

7. Cut out a 2 inch strip of the hook side of the velcro and take the backing off and stick it to the end of the back side of the soft velcro... (see pic below)

8. Wrap rubber band around the top of your speed light..

9. Wrap the velcro around you speed light flash end...

10. Take pictures





Taken with the Gary Fong Origami

Taken with the DIY Diffuser

Please pray for me

Please pray for me as there may be many changes in my work. Pray that God's will for me may be done and that I will have the wisdom and knowledge to see what decisions He wants me to make.

Groomsmen Golf

Well I hate to put posts back to back but it was a busy photography weekend...

Billy took us all out for golf for our groom's men gift...
Had lots of fun even tho I don't play golf...

Congrats to Chae for shooting the best game in his life (I think it was 13 over which is like an 85??? WOW!!)
1. Chinaman's Game

2. Off Roading in our Carts

3. Did I just hit that?

4. The Look of a Winner

5. The Mythical Hogan Ball

6. Focusing

7. GO TO YOUR HOME!!

8. En Garde

9. Nutmegged

10. Mid-Flight

11. Cruisin'

12. What???

13. Get There!

14. Silouhuette

15. Can we go home now??


Check out more pics at my Flickr

Photos from Christine's and Teresa"s B-day/Crawfish boil!

So learned a couple of things:

- Never buy 104 lbs. of crawfish! People will ask "Why the four pounds??"
- 104 lbs. is WAYYYY too much crawfish for 20 odd people.
- Trivial pursuit pop edition is really hard to find!!
- If I ever had kids I would NEVER let them play GTA 4

So it was crawfish all day then Komodo's for drinks, then MaMa's Cafe for late night dinner...

Komodo's was my type of place! It's a house theme (so living room, Kitchen, patio, TV over fireplace... wonder where the bedroom went... hmmm) Good place to chill.. Nice pick Jo.

Here are the pics (more at my flickr)

Looking For Photography Podcasts

My favorite two are

TWIP at www.twipphoto.com

the digital photography show

at www.thedigitalphotographyshow.com

Galveston 2008

Galveston 2008

So back to the photography that I love... Landscapes...

JS and I have been jealous of everybody's beach/sunset shots... So this weekend we decided to change that!

So after working a 10 hour day at CVS with only 2 hours of sleep, John, Christine, and I went down to Galveston. A very ill planned trip, but once again made the best of it. After driving half an hour to Galveston beach, we made it!!! Unfortunately there are too many people on the beach and it faces east... Now as we know, the sun sets in the west! So armed with a GPS we decided to find somewhere where we could get the sunset. After driving around for another 20 min, we found a small boat dock which ended up being perfect!!!

BUT one more problem... because it was so windy, and the beach having lots of sand, I ended up getting alot of crud on my sensor which ruined about 2/3 of my shots!!! So once again I had to make apple pie from bad apples.... I think the six shots i was able to salvage turned out well... And with a little tweaking from CS3 made them even better!

Thanks Christine for dinner! and THANK YOU STROBIST!!!

So here they are... Submitted for your approval.

Well xanga is getting pretty tiring so I decided to switch to google... So here is my last blog post from Xanga!!

Well I wasn't really expecting or prepared for taking pics of Billy and Mei Mei.. We got there so late that we had only 10-15 min of daylight left... so that meant high ISO, long exposure times (which blurred many of the pics to uselessness) and lots of fill flash... Gotta learn to dial down that flash more.. but anyways... i think it turned out well...

Despite all my excuses... couldn't have asked for a better photoshoot!!!!
Got to use my new lens which i have absolutely fallen in love with!!!!

So here it is... the soon to be married couple.. thanks for putting me in your wedding

(if you look at this pic, the constellation orion is in the background... boy was it dark outside!!!)





Left: This shot was so blurred it was unusable... or was it??? Right: (The correct sharper pic taken seconds later)



My Fav.. Took LOTS of work to get it right



Went for an antiqued look for this one.. like 1930's



Queen on her throne



































Took 2 pics just for me... experimenting with HDR... Makes the capital and street look so eerie



More can be found at my flickr.. www.flickr.com/photos/aznpharm79