September Thoughts

Well I didn't get the end of August or beginning of September posted. Oops. Oh well. Tomorrow is my last day off before Fall quarter. I'm actually not nervous this time. It is the first time in memory that I'm not anxious at all for a new school year. That probably has something to do with the fact that I just got off of summer classes. I'm looking forward to seeing some friends and taking English and Geography. I'm not so happy about having to take Pre-Cal though. Oh well. It is the last Math class I'll have to take so that's good I guess. Probably should just lower my head and push right through my class. I have some help too so that's good. Baseball is almost over. That is pretty depressing. AAA Tacoma just won the PCL championship though so all is good. Football has started and I'm enjoying running around to different games for Washington Prep Sports. The Seahawks are playing now too. They beat San Fransisco in the first game of the season. I was impressed even thought they got rid of T.J. They are looking pretty good this year too. Kentlake is also looking good. They are now 3-0 with wins against Auburn Riverside, Kentridge, and Mt. Rainier. They beat MR 67-0. Mt. Rainier has yet to score this season. They have been out scored 202 to 0. OUCH. I just got Snagit for my computer with the help of a friend from WPS and KVS. The same friend made me an Admin on the KVS forum. That is a lot of fun. I'm glad it's fall now. The calender doesn't say it, but it is fall. It's really like Autumn really. The leaves are taking forever to turn, but it has been progressively cooler ever since September started. Looks like it is going to be a great Winter for me. Snow, snow, snow. I can't wait. I remember the only snow last year was the last day of the High School Football Championships in Tacoma. I was inside for most of the day, but it was still fun. After that, nodda. Very disappointing. It feels like it's Halloween right now. I can't imagine watching the Mariners on Halloween, but one can always hope. As soon as the season's over, the team will probably be getting a major overhaul. It hasn't been the best year ever. Ichiro hasn't reached 200 hits yet, but he will, and Fifi won't be getting a Cy Young even though he has the best stats in baseball. The only think he lacks is the number of wins. *Sigh* Oh well. A friend of mine on the KVS forum was nice enough to hook me up with a Tel page. It is an online service that is very much like an online business card. I just need to get normal business cards now. I had my first publication last week. A photo of mine was used in the Tacoma Weekly. That was very exciting. I feel like things are starting to come together finally with my photography. I have a few possible Senior Photos shoots lined up and I got some really good advice from a friend about how to proceed. It will take a little money, but I think my parents are thinking about giving me a SmugMug account so I can start selling my photos. I can't wait. Well, my pizza is getting cold so I will pick this up again in October.

Nikon SB-600 Speedlight

http://www.nikonusa.com

This is my latest acquisition. I took me a long time to come around to a flash, I think that I'll be glad that I did. Studio photography isn't my thing so I don't have a lot of experience with a flash. I guess my hated of flashes started because the built in flash on all of my cameras are simply crap. They should be put on only for those who use cameras as point and shoots. Right away I found out that this flash is different. Yes is still has that horrible "Ghost Story" look when you point the flash right at the subject, but it gives me the ability to point the flash elsewhere. There is a manual mode so I could simply adjust the power, or "degrees kelvin", to have a softer shot, but I think bouncing the light is much better. It gives the photo the appearance that the light is coming from elsewhere, like a lamp or an open window, instead of the camera. There are several advantages to this. With a direct on flash, you get to see every detail of a persons face with no contrast and creepy shadows, or no shadows (which I think is even worse), in the background. I would put an example photo in here but Blogger doesn't allow photos in the middle of the text. If anyone from Blogger sees this, fix it, because it is really stupid that you can't. Anyway, a bounced flash adds shadow because the light isn't being forced onto the subject, it is coming at the subject after it has bounced off of something else which means it will look like everything else. There is also a diffuser that I want, but that can wait until my birthday or Christmas. The reason I got this in the first place, is that I have an opportunity to be taking senior photos this year. Unless you bring the subject to the sun, there will not be enough light, even outside, to get a perfect portrait. That's why studios get so bright when taking pictures. In order for me to take good senior portraits, even outside, which is where most seniors in Western Washington have their photos taken anyway, I need a flash to fill the face of my subject. I still hate flashes, but this flash is growing on me. I'm sure there will be some flash work up here soon.

August Thoughts

Hot August Nights? Nope, just the sun setting through the pollution and smoke from Vancouver B.C. The weather has been freaky lately. This sun is actually blood red at this point, but my camera refused to see it. Also, we just had a massive thunderstorm roll through. Now when I say massive, I mean massive for Western Washington. For the rest of the country, if a thunderstorm had child, and that child farted, and that fart had a child, that would be the relative size of our thunderstorm. It was cool though. Unfortunately the clouds tonight, are preventing me from seeing the Aurora Borealis. That happens every once in a while down in WWa. When the pollution levels are really high, and we are experiencing solar flares, usually now in August, we can have a rare viewing of the extraordinary sight. I need to get up to Fairbanks at some point and really experience the lights. August is a great month. Everything about it is awesome except one thing, the heat. I hate the heat and this is the month where it flourishes. Lazy days and fun all around. My class is almost over, I'm turning in my last normal assignment tomorrow and the final is due on the 12th. I think I'm going to go to the land of Macro for the final. I need to find the cause of all of the freaking dust on my negatives. I have already cleaned the camera like 500 times, and I clean all of the negatives before using them, but most of them all have the same damn pieces of dust on them. I think the problem is in the negative holder. After the 12th, school is over until September 21st so even though I took summer classes, I still get a good month+ off. Good deal. I've been going back and forth on shooting in a RAW format on my digital camera. Shooting in RAW/NEF format has several advantages, the biggest one being the ability to change the exposure in photoshop. That will probably be extremely helpful when shooting football. The downside is that it takes forever to go through all of the photos. I need to open every file, set the exposure, then save them as JPEGs through Photoshop. That would take forever for the number of photos I take during a football game. If I was shooting a wedding or something special like that, I wouldn't mind spending an entire day working on photos, but because I have about an hour and a half to work on an entire game, I don't think I'd be able to get it all done in time. Maybe for the Saturday games I can spend the time, but it just won't fit into my schedule, especially when school starts again. That is the best thing about having school start so late, High School Football season is half done by the time I go back to school so I can have all of September to really get some good shots. I guess I'll have to make my decision soon as the first practice is on the 18th of this month. August will be over before we know it and with it, summer will start to die. Autumn comes in September in Washington and I can't wait. That means that Winter is right around the corner and this year, the government is predicting a great one. Well, a great one for me anyway. Snow, snow, and more snow. That is awesome.

Tel

This is a cool service. It allows you to share all of your information on one page. You can completely control the level of security and privacy on what you want shown or not shown. Check it out at Tel Main Page. Check out my Tel page here.

Black and White, Black and White, oh lovely lovely Black and White.

...or Monochrome for those of us in the photography world. I've been having trouble with the quality of my photos in my film class and I'm sure part of it has to do with getting back into the routine of cleaning the negatives, processing film, and keeping my hands off of the middle of my photo paper, but I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I simply no longer think in monochrome. Back when I first started taking pictures, it was with a film camera, and was in color. When I took Photo I in high school, it wasn't that hard to get my brain to think in black and white. I really hadn't been really focusing on photography before that so it wasn't that hard to get the rewiring done. When I got my P80, my first digital camera, I almost instantly switched over to color. I started to take some black and white stuff, but I was more focused on more important things like learning how to make higher quality photos and taking a crash course in sports photography for my work with Kent Valley Sports. I thought I'd successfully entered the world of photography and am now shooting to go "pro". It wasn't until I developed my first role of film at school during this second go around at Photo 101 that I started to realize that I had lost something just as much as I had gained something when I made the switch from Film to Digital. It really hit me when my photo didn't get one vote the photo of the week in my class this week. I know some of it is because I need to refine my developing and printing processes, but there were a lot of photos in the class which were simply better than mine. Without trying to toot my own horn, I know I can produce better photos than most of the other people in the class and way way better than the ones I've been producing. Because I do take so many photos, I can pretty easily go between "Sports Mode" and "Creative Mode". I'm going to need a lot of that creative stuff to re-wire my brain again to look at the monochrome side of things. So as a brilliant solution to my problem, I go back to digital. I know that doesn't make much sense, but during the summer, considered to be the "Slow" season for sports, I can really focus on the problem and Digital is way easier for me. I have changed my camera to only take monochrome photos for the duration of this experiment. If I need to shoot color for something on WPS, I can easily change it back, but this will force me to think in B&W. Because I have my DSLR with me at all times except at school, I can also test the photos on my DSLR before committing to a photo with the film. Digital film is cheap, and I've already paid for about 100 years of infinite memory. I have also switched the lenses that I will keep on the camera. I have a 50mm lens on the film camera for the class so I'll keep my 50mm lens on my DSLR so everything but the image format (Digital vs Film) will be the same from one camera to the next. I can't wait to get started. I haven't been this excited to just get out and shoot in a long time. TIME TO GET BIZZAY!!!