Monday, June 21, 2010

Another reason to love digital

This is an image of a Traulson refrigerator. I was helping out a friend at a firehouse when I saw it. We used to have one just like it at Nabisco. We had to fill it with around $90,000 worth of film and polaroid twice a year. $180,000 - $200,000 was just for the film. On top of that we had to have it processed.
Now realize that to capture the same amount of shots with todays digital cameras would cost about $200.00 for camera cards and DVD's. Why on earth would anyone ever look back at film shooting as the "good ole days"?

Friday, June 11, 2010

Another Guitar

Wow, I'll try not to repeat myself from the last time I wrote about shooting for this company but while it is always fun to shoot, it is awesome to shoot such beautiful works of art. B&G Kaufmann is the company and I met the creator yesterday. What an artist, what a sculptor. To take wood that comes to him as some exotic tree and then cut and scrape and rub until it looks like these. I am truly in awe. Oh, and it helps that he is just a great guy. Always remember: photography is even more fun when you get to shoot something that is this perfect. It almost lights itself! (almost).

Monday, June 7, 2010

One amazing Nikon

My wife called me outside on Saturday to see a tiny deer that was bedding down next to our front steps. Naturally I grabbed my new Nikon D700. I set my ISO to 400 with a Tamron 28-300 lens. Well, I didn't need the long lens because the fawn was sitting right there just 4 feet below me. I quickly shot two images but the camera's monitor was black. I looked around for the problem and discovered that I had the camera still set on Manual from a commercial shoot the day before (125th @ f/22). I quickly switched the camera to Program mode but the deer had taken off. I did use the long lens to get some shots of the fawn dancing around like a little lamb. It was really cute but I was bothered that I had missed the sweet close-up shots. I always shoot in raw. Now you will see why: I opened this image in Camera Raw and there was almost nothing there. I swung the exposure slider to the right four (yes 4!) stops and added some fill light. My final move was to desaturate the greens a little. That was it. That is the image you see above.
Let me run over this one more time. It is a 400 ISO image shot with a Nikon D700. It was 4 stops underexposed and pushed in Camera Raw. After all of that there is NO noise in this image. If I want the kind of huge chunky grain that I used to create by pushing Ectachrome 3 stops I'll just have to use Lightroom 3 to get it after the fact. This Nikon does one splendid job of shooting with little or no noise. Yea Nikon!