So I needed to get outside and play. Luckily, a few of my classmates were eager to join me to Whistler Bungee and jump off a platform.

I’ve bungee jumped one other time in my life while visiting Rotorua, New Zealand, about 9 years ago. It was a blast then and it was a blast today. It jumpstarts your heart like nothing else. The sensation of free fall is incredible!

I brought my Canon 7D along with me and shot at 1280 x 720 60 fps. That way I could bring it into Cinema Tools on my Mac and easily conform the 60fps footage down to 24fps and make the footage slow motion. Enjoy the video.[/box]

VFS is a great school so far. Each one of my instructors has worked on major films and all my classmates are talented and friendly. I have 30-36 hours of instruction per week not including assignments. It is a very intense program that lives up to it’s motto: Results Matter.

If I make anything cool I may post it here, but for now, it’s back to work . . .

See the timelapse video below:

• Miles driven: ~2,700
• Photos taken: ~8,600
• Photo taken every: 15 seconds
• Avg. Canon 7D battery usage: 1.25/per day
• 10 seconds of this video = one hour of driving
• Average mpg (Honda Fit): 18-28
• Strongest headwind encountered driving: 60 mph (that’s why I got 18mpg)
• Frequency my dog farted in the back seat: 1-3 times per hour
• Flat tires: 0
• Times stuck in snow: 0

I recently finished my first wedding videography, which you can see on my wedding page, and read more about my experience here.

While I was editing on my Mac station in Final Cut Pro, I used several image stabilizers: Smooth Cam, Magic Bullet Steady from Red Giant, and a free-trial version of CoreMelt’s Lock & Load X. The difference I found between these plug-ins was interesting, and despite one of their names, makes you realize there is no substitute, or magic bullet, for having stable shots from the beginning.

Plug-ins can only do so much, even though they may promise more. The key is to get stable shots from the get-go, but if you can’t, these little guys can help.

But which one is better?

Well, it’s not that easy of an answer. On the first clip above I liked Magic Bullet Steady the most, but the second one, Lock and Load X did the best job of detecting foreground and background differences. (All of these tests were done with basically the default values of the plug-ins.)

I was definitely not impressed by Lock and Load X’s rolling shutter artifact reducer, in some instances it actually exaggerated the rolling shutter artifact!

Here is a comparison chart from CoreMelt’s website, that I found at least one inaccuracy on, which was that Magic Bullet Steady was about as fast as Lock and Load X in analyzing footage:

[box]If you have any more plug-ins or suggestions about how to stabilize footage please do so in the comments below! Thanks![/box]

I feel very honored to have been allowed to be apart of something so special for this couple. Thanks goes to them for this opportunity.

I started the day covering the bride prep, then headed over to get footage of the groom getting ready. They were both so excited, she could hardly sit still to get her make-up on, and he had to tie his tie about 4 times he was so excited. They were both radiating love for one another even when they were getting ready separately.

I switched between my 28mm and my 70-200mm for the bride prep, mainly the 28mm. The 70-200mm is just money when it comes to getting tight shots without having to be in everybody’s face about it. The focus on that thing is soooo sensitive though with video, it just takes the smallest adjustments on the focus ring to get people in crisp focus or totally ruin a shot, so when people are moving around you really have to be on it.

My monopod was key today, again. I was able to move around during the ceremony and get fairly stable shots with it even all the way in at 200mm. As Yuri explains in this video, the rubber foot can come off easily on that monopod, and I lost mine tonight, oh well.

I am going to download and try Coremelt’s Lock and Load plug-in for Final Cut Pro to help stabilize footage and repair rolling shutter effects even with having that monopod the shots could be a bit more stable with a little plug-in like this.

Overall, I’m surprised more stuff didn’t go wrong or I forgot anything to be completely honest. Typically, at least one thing doesn’t go right, but this time, I might have scrapped by even better than I thought.

The worst fumbles I had were total ‘doh’ moments when I thought I was recording, but I wasn’t. That happened because I was hitting the record button on and off so much that I’d lose track, in the moment, whether I was recording.

I think what contributed was the high temperature warning blinking at me the whole day! I was so nervous the camera was going to just shut down, so I was playing it a little conservative on the record time so I wouldn’t unnecessarily overheat the sensor. The Sennheiser G3 mic worked well, as far as I could tell, I think there may have been a couple of static jumps in the reception, but overall good.

I used my gorillapod to hang my Canon HF100 up in a tree. That way I didn’t need a tripod and it was unobtrusive to the scene, I’ll just have to flip the image 180 in post, but was very happy to have that on hand.

The other trick I did today was to put olive oil on the rubber, shock-absorbing, connectors of my Rode VideoMic. Sounds weird, but it worked! I was having very audible creaking from the rubber pieces when I moved around with the mic, the oil completely got rid of that.

It helped to take a step back several times and really see what was going on around me, instead of looking through my camera all day. I think that helped make me aware of some shots I might have otherwise missed.

At night, I pushed the settings as far as they would go and know I’ll be running some noise reduction on the footage. I was at 1/30 at f/1.8 with ISO at 12,800! I was really impressed my Canon 7D. The image quality isn’t all that great at those settings, as to be expected, but it’s much better than not being able to get a shot at all! So thankful for those ISO settings.

I better wrap this up so I can get up early and get to Chicago tomorrow to see some friends and listen to some free orchestra music in Millenium Park tomorrow afternoon. Then I’ll be attending the Philip Bloom HD DSLR meet up on the 21st, not sure what to expect with it, but should be interesting.

We used large format cameras in that class and I spent a lot of time in the dark room working with my images, making jerry-rigged dodging and burning tools and wiggling them over my print, walking around corners and getting scared by people in the dark room, watching prints come to life in a tray, and many other enjoyable experiences.

My real photography ‘ah ha’ moment came when I was sitting in on a senior’s photography critique. One of his images of a small, feable twig hanging in from the top of the frame in the foreground with an out of focus background of solid sandstone behind it made my blood pump through my body with a tingle. I wasn’t looking for this reaction but it found me. It was like condensing a powerful emotional experience into a single instant. I realized the impact that a photograph could have.

One big, common place aspect I still think is crazy and don’t think people really consider enough is that the camera/lens can see things we can’t see with our eyes. Just think about that for a second. Here is a tool that can change the way you look at the world, literally and figuratively. By its very nature a camera reflects our world different from our own eyes. That is powerful.

I love photography for the same reason I enjoy cooking: I get to create something. (I just happen to enjoy photography more.) It allows me to express things I’m feeling inwardly, in an outwardly way, especially without words (I’m not a big talker).

I love getting that spark of an idea: “That would be cool if . . .” and then carrying it through to fruition. That usually means I have to get outside of my comfort zone.

I used to think I’d have to come up with an excuse if people saw me lugging around camera equipment: “Ummmm . . . it’s for a student project.” (Even though I’m no longer in school.) Now, I don’t really care what people think as much. I get too much out of the process of taking a photograph for that to be as large of a hurdle as it used to be.

Granted, I still struggle with making the effort it takes to go get an image I want. Either because I know the effort it will take, but usually because I’m afraid of failure. It’s what Seth Godin, and others, call my ‘lizard brain’ telling me to slow down and be careful. It is something I think we all struggle with to varying degrees. I know I do.

Photography has helped me remember, learn, and explore myself, nature, ideas, triumphs, and heartaches. I recently went through a divorce and photography was a cathartic tool to unleash things that are more difficult to express with words. Photos have acted as my journal over the recent years and articulated my thoughts and feelings better than words could. Now I just need to get in a habit of getting those images off my computer and onto a print!

No matter the course my life takes I know that I will always appreciate the still image as a tool and what it allows us to do. I get excited about the photographs I have yet to take and enjoy the constant evolution of my understanding and fascination with the art of photography.

The last two days I’ve been watching the Jasmine Star live seminars on Creative Live about wedding photography and I am getting very excited about my first wedding shoot in Florida coming in October. While it will be my first wedding shoot, I have gained a lot of confidence in my abilities over the last year and feel comfortable in taking on one of my friend’s wedding.

What Creative Live and Jasmine Star are doing these past and coming few days is pretty incredible and invaluable to someone in my position, and wouldn’t be possible to do even a year or more ago. She has been incredibly honest in her approach to photography and that has been very refreshing and encouraged me to share more about what I’m doing here on my blog. There are a ton of photography resources that help demystify the art and it’s nice to see another photographer not afraid to share what they do.

She is one of the Top 10 wedding photographers in the US and it shows. She’s incredibly energetic, positive, and professional. She does a great job and getting the images she needs out of her clients, it’s been great to watch and listen to her talk about what she does. I highly reccomend to watch today, if you’re not doing anything as they are broadcasting live, her shooting a wedding. I’m looking forward to it! Thanks to Chase Jarvis, Creative Live, and Jasmine Star for putting that on, you guys rock!

I’ve been making notes from her talks and one quote I really like is:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. -Jasmine Star (and probably some others before her )

What has been really interesting to see today was her use of natural light, and just the fact she is so great at what she does and she rarely uses external flash. She talked about hiding your light source, if there’s a natural reflector, like the sun hitting a floor through a window, just crop that out when you compose your image with your camera, that’s just her style though. I could see how there would be artistic value in certain cases to show a wider shot to include the floor. That was just one example of a topic she covered today, great stuff.

Without further ado, here was two of today’s self-portrait shots I did (during the one hour break of the like Jasmine Star seminar):

Doing the 'sure' test while holding up the diffuse reflector.

This reminds me of a Smore . . . with a human head in it.

These were shot in my Mom’s garage, and I was able to make the background black by ramping up the flash. I used my Canon 7D and a single 580 EX2 flash strung from overhead. Then I held two reflectors: one I bought on ebay for cheap, the other is a really nice 5-in-1 reflector from Westcott. I enjoyed experimenting with using both, only one, and the distance between them. Notice the huge difference between these two images with just changing where the reflectors are.

Both used the smaller diffuse reflector above to spread the light of the flash out and make it softer, but the distance between the reflector and the flash changed between each shot. Also, the larger, Westcott reflector was used in each with the white side up to bounce light back to fill in the shadows, again at varying distances to the light source, and also at different angles. The top image I held it to the side and the bottom I held it flat under my chin. I enjoyed seeing the huge differences that simple adjustments to these reflectors made on the image! I did a little work on them in photoshop, but not much.

I’m looking forward to the constant learning experience that photography provides, but not stoked on the fact that I’m probably going to have to take a lot of pictures of myself to be able to experiment! Anyone want to model for me?

I thought I’d also try and share all the photography blogs and websites that are currently in my google reader feed: Click HERE

]]> http://lucasridley.com/2010/08/27/photography-jasmine-star-inspired/feed/ 1 http://lucasridley.com/2010/08/25/photography-mom-in-the-cooler/ http://lucasridley.com/2010/08/25/photography-mom-in-the-cooler/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:03:45 +0000 Lucas http://lucasridley.com/?p=1316 I posted a photo yesterday on my tumblr photo blog of my Mom sitting inside the flower cooler of her florist shop, MacKenzies. I came up with the idea for this photo because I wanted her to have some more photographs of her and her store, I wanted the practice, and I like the idea of this photo. I think she is incredible at what she does, and want people to know it, a lot already do.

Here, I want to go into what went into the photo a little more, not because I think it’s the best photo in the world or anything, because it’s not, but thought you might be interested in my process, good and bad. Originally, I thought she could lean against the outside the cooler door, but that seemed too ordinary. Then I thought maybe I could work some symmetry with the cooler doors and frame and center her with one behind her and to the sides, but the space wouldn’t allow it. I’d have to shoot at like 15mm because there’s a wall to the left of the cooler.

So I thought it would be lighthearted to just plop down inside the cooler! Who doesn’t enjoy opening the door to a flower cooler? You get a rush of cool fresh aromatic air that fills your nose and lungs. It’s a great experience and thinking of sitting in one, that would just be cool.

I moved a lot of the flowers around so I would make sure there would be a lot of color in the frame, I also put the black buckets of flowers next to her instead of the white ones, so that her face would be one of the brighter elements in the photo. I had to take a lot of test shots to figure out that I needed a snoot to control the light, which I didn’t have. So I went to the trash and taped up a tube of cardboard. Cha ching! I needed it because I really wanted my moms face to pop out of the picture and stand out from the other lighting in the cooler.

But then I realized the color of my flash, which, is now, like a spotlight, was way off the greener color of the lights in the cooler.

Canon 580 EX2 flash, on a gorillapod stand, with my cardboard snoot and plastic bag gel clipped on the front, which I shoved to the inside and back of the snoot. This flash was placed up high and camera left.

Okay, problem number two, I need a gel for the flash to better balance the color of the flash with the cooler lights, but don’t have any gels. Okay . . . so I found a yellow plastic bag in the store and cut out a square, Cha ching. I put it on the front of the snoot, take a test shot, oops, now the snoot isn’t working to make a spotlight because the DIY gel on the front is just acting as a diffuser now and shooting light all over the place. Oops. So I shove the yellow plastic bag piece to the back of inside of the snoot. Okay, that worked and back on track.

Now I have to get my reticent mom to hop in her cooler. She says with a smile, “people are going to think I’ve gone crazy with me sitting in my cooler!” So it took some coaxing to get her to relax. Luckily she did, and the shot I chose to work on and that you see was at a point that I wasn’t asking her to pose or do anything. I thought it looked more natural than the ones where I was asking her to smell the flower or whatever.

Here’s the RAW image (on the left) – notice how green everything is, like even her hand, compared to her face. I had to correct that with a curves layer in Photoshop, dropping the red channel down, and masking that adjustment in where I wanted it. You can see the difference between the original and the post-processed photo:

Untouched photo

The touched up photo

The majority of my photoshop work on this image had to do with changing the colors and brightness values to make sure the focus stayed on the subject, my mom in the cooler.

It was a good experience and practice for me. Thanks to my mom for letting me use her as a guinea pig for some of my photography ideas. I’ve got more in the pipeline, just for my own personal projects, so stay tuned for those. Cheers, Lucas.
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Steve’s picture deserves to stand alone because, after hearing about Dan Lyons from my blog a few days ago, he cut and donated his hair to Locks for Love.

Steve cut his hair for Locks of Love.

I’m really enjoying my experience with the new lens. I’ve never had a telephoto zoom so I am learning where I need to position myself (usually pretty far away) to the subject to get the shots I’m looking for. It is pretty heavy but I also have a Manfrotto monopod that I’ll use for it on any wedding jobs, etc. to take the weight off of my arms.

The flight from yesterday was incredible. My best climb was at 6:30pm! Everyone launched after about 5pm. It’s crazy how late in the day it was. I was cruising at cloud base (6,000′) towards Chattanooga for several miles before I turned back and did some aerobatics. It was enough that I could hardly lift my head up when I landed, my neck was so tired from holding my head up during the aerobatics because of the G’s I was pulling. I did wingovers all the way down from about 4,500′.

This is a quick little video I threw together of the couple of flights that I actually set up my camera on over the last few months. It’s typically such a pain to set a camera up on my glider, in addition to the stress of usually when I do want to set one up it’s because I’m doing something a bit over the line like a speed run or aerobatics, so then I don’t want to throw another factor into that mix. So for these couple of clips I’ve taken over the last few months I’ve had many more similar flights to these that I didn’t capture.

I’ve started to spin my glider, get a little more over the top on wingovers, and am really enjoying early morning speed runs very close to the treetops (watch my shadow in the video).

The video was made using my gorillapod on my keel with my Canon 7D, and another mount that I set up using a fisheye on my Canon HF100, see a picture of that mount on my other blog. I’m not too keen on fisheyes because they distort the image so much it makes trees that I’m inches away from look like they’re many feet away, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is really happening when you watch things through a fisheye.

I will be moving soon so this may be my last hang gliding-related video for a while, hope you enjoy.

I just rotated this image from the video so you can see what it looks like if the horizon is oriented properly to my position.

To vote for this video go HERE.

I called in a favor from a local actor, Mark Murray, to help me out and we took about an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon to film it. I already had everything storyboarded out so it wasn’t too complicated. The hard part came with the post production, which is always a struggle to make your ideas actually work. That is especially true because I was pressed for time to do the post production, because after we filmed on Sunday then I went to Colorado for a week and had just enough time to finish this before it was due Monday (I’ll blog about the CO trip soon).

Mark Murray was nice enough to put his face on a dirty sidewalk for the production of this video - Thanks Mark!

It was a great learning opportunity and gained a lot of experience with trying to motion track things and also just more experience with the Canon 7D and rolling shutter issues. Whether I place in this contest or not (grand prize is $10,000) I enjoyed the process, as I always do.

All the special effects were done using Adobe After Effects and used a combination of the built-in tracker and the Mocha tracker to track in the special effects. That was the hardest part of this whole project and I think I was mildly successful with the end result, but as I mentioned I did learn a lot. The live action effects are from Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 DVD and I really enjoy working with their products.

Action Essentials 2 at work on a downtown building

I did a little location scouting way before I even wrote the story board and landed on the location next to the Tivoli Theater in downtown Chattanooga. It was a nice backdrop with the Tivoli sign, and there was a large building across the street so I could blow that up (see above picture). But the key parts were to have a building with a window, so I could put in my own tv there for the news broadcast, and then also have an alleyway for the dog to come out of. Of course, I had to figure out a way to include my dogs in the film, so I thought it would add some chaotic atmosphere to have a dog running with leash dragging behind it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make and I really appreciate Mark’s help on it too!