I am working nights now, 6 AM to 6 PM; so my days/nights off get pretty boring.  To fill my time I really only do one of three things: homework, read, or surf the interwaves.  One of my latest things I have been looking at online (not porn) has been a photography website called Liquid in Plastic. On his site he has a tutorial on how to do star streak photographs.  (and yes, I blatantly stole his idea for the title of this post.)  With the help of the liquid in plastic site, and also THIS SITE providing the very easy to use software I was able to make this star streaking picture.  This is one of my first tries, and I can think of a million different places to try this in SoCal, but the problem is obviously leaving your camera outdoors for two hours. 

And pay attention to the reflections in the window of the house, you can actually see where the stars had reflected off the window.



Let me know what you think, and just to add some impact to this whole mess, I stitched all the separate photos together to make a time lapse.  Pay attention to the window at about two seconds in the video.  You can see the light flick on, Amy must of gotten up to use the bathroom.  HA HA  Also at the very last second in the video, you can see an airplane streak by very quickly in the upper left frame of the video.

We went to the Wild Animal Park again the other day.  It was such a nice day to get out of the house with perfect weather to boot.  There are always a million different photo opportunities at the WAP, but two of my favorite pictures of the day are the burrowing owl up near condor ridge.  That section of the WAP, is very under rated.  Most people don't know it is there, which makes it perfect for me; mr. anti-social.

I used my 70-200 L with these shots.  I had to shoot through the netting that kept the owls in place.  To do this, I had to open the lens up to F2.8, to knock out the fence; and I think this is what makes the photos seem a bit soft.  All the exif is still attached to the photo's.  I hope you enjoy.

I did have this cool long post with a back story to tell you about these pictures, but I was using Internet Explorer while I was typing, and it crashed.  BIG SURPRISE right.....Nope, It is a piece of $h1t.  So now I am using FF (like I should have been) and I will just post the photos. 

Last week I assisted Ben at his lighting workshop, and was able to get some behind the scene pictures.  We were lucky enough to get Janell Thurston for our makeup artist (MUA), and Andrea for our model.  Unfortunately, I was not able to stay for the whole day, but from what it sounds like the seminar was a big hit.

 

 

HI everyone, if anybody is still looking at this thing I am sorry for not posting.  It has been probably around a month and a half since I posted last.  SORRY.

Today Amy was at her friend's house, and I was bored.  So normally, that means getting out my camera and seeing what I can come up with.  Normally it is junk, and I delete it before it even gets to the computer.  BUT today is different; I was taking pictures of water drops into a bowl.  They turned out nicely, and I am happy with the results for my first time.  I learned a few things on the way that will make the pictures look a little better.  Keep your eye open for some pictures in the future of water drops.

On a side note, has anybody downloaded Windows 7 yet?  DO it, DO it now.  It is really the best product Microsoft has put out in a long time.  My opinion is that Microsoft should stop the beta-test right now, through the software in a box, and ship it.

On another side note, I just finished my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) certificate, so if anybody knows anybody that needs a Cisco guy, let me know.

On with the show:




I hope you enjoy these, I had fun playing with this.

The Boston Globe has a picture blog, of all sorts of recent and very interesting events.  They post some of the most amazing photographs, as well as some of the most graphic I have ever seen.  I love this site, and I constantly visit to see what they have in store.  They will take a story, and tell it though the pictures posted, usually there are anywhere from 20 to 30 photographs with short narratives underneath.  Some of the blog entries I am following now are the Hubble telescope galaxy pictures.  They are releasing one picture a day until Christmas, like an advent calendar.  The other story I am looking at has to do with Guantanamo Bay Cuba.  The U.S. has a prison (I don't care if you agree or not, I don't want to hear about it) that holds suspected terrorists.  Anyways, I am scrolling through the pictures to see what they have and I come up to this......


....Oh MY, Harry Potter is going Jihad on us all! 

Anyways, none of us can stop the boy wizard now that the Muslims have gotten a hold of him.  In all seriousness, check out the 'Globe's site, it really does have some amazing pictures.

Dude, we are so close to being in Utah I can feel it.  I have one more day of work to suffer through and then we are out of here.  Not that anybody checks this blog, but I will post this anyways.  We are leaving Sunday night and will be to Utah in around 12 hours.  Yep, it is a long-ASS drive, there is no other way of putting it.  I won't be updating this blog much while I am gone, maybe not at all.  So I will leave you with this one image that Google was so nice to make.

When I posted the picture of Amy last week, I said that I would post some zoo pictures from that same day.  Well, I have finally gotten two of them that are presentable outside of my own viewing pleasure.  This is of course a Meerkat, from the Sandy-eggo zoo exhibit.  I love these things, and between the show on the Discovery channel, the Zoo, and The Wild Animal Park, I could really watch meerkats all day long.  Yep I am that much of a dork. 

I did another shoot with Ben Chen and I should have those pictures up in a week or so, so keep an eye out for them.



(I thought from now on, I might post my exif data from the pictures, so here you go.  Also I leave all the exif embedded in the pictures so you can see it all if you would like to)

Both pictures were shot with the 70-200mm at f2.8 and 1/50 and 1/40 respectively iso 400.

Friday turned out to be a complete waste of a drive. When I arrived in Glendora, it was overcast and even worse at the site Ben and I were going to shoot at. Today, Sunday, turned out to be a very nice day, with pretty skies that made great backgrounds.

This is John and Adrianna; I think they said they would be married in May of ’09. They were a nice couple to hang out with, and I am glad they did not mind me tagging along for their engagement shoot.

Sometimes, with certain clients (I have noticed shooting with Ben) it is harder to get nice shots.I realized today that sometimes the reason is that people are not always comfortable in front of the camera.I could tell John was nervous and really did not want to have his picture taken. I guess that is most guys in general, but he stuck it out and I think we took some nice pictures.





BTW:  If anybody has the Nintendo DS, you need to pick up the game "Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords".  Yep, it is as nerdy as it sounds, but it is SO fun I want to play it all the time.  And now that I am finished with school for a while, I will have all the time in the world to play. 

Yesterday, November 28, I drove to help Ben finish off an Engagement shoot for Candy and Hsi-Ping.  We drove up into the Glendora mountains to finish the shoot, and the fog started to roll in.  D'oh! 

So I drove an hour to assist Ben with the shoot, Candy and Hsi-Ping drove and hour to have their photos taken, and we had to cancel. 

Not all is lost; HERE are the pictures from Ben's blog for you to look at. Hopefully Sunday will be better weather and I can get something worthwhile posted.  Until then, you can enjoy some of my favorite videos from the inter-waves.  Will it blend from Blendtec blenders.

"WOOO Clock Smoke!"

We went to the zoo last weekend (pictures to come) and out of all the cool things to take pictures of, I wanted to take pictures of Amy.  Seriously, who wouldn't want to?  She's hot.  So here you go...