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May the Fourth Be With You
Growing up the one piece of pop culture was always Star Wars. As a small child whenever me and my sister were bored we would pop in the original trillogy into the VCR and just marathon through them. I was also at a very tender age when the prequel trilogy was being released where my critical understanding were less that stellar and the entire universe captured my young imagination. I remember swinging around toy light sabers in the back yard and playing the video games like Knights of the Old Republic and Battle Front all through out the summer.
Now as an adult the universe is very much still present not only in the public consciousness but in the world that I live in. Since I started doing cosplay photography you see many individuals in Star Wars attire. Madalorians, Storm Toopers, Jedi Seth. If it’s in the Star Wars Universe it’s been don in cosplay. There is even a faction of the 501st legion present in my home town.
Regardless of where the Universe is now and where it will be in the foreseeable future Star Wars is important to the shaping of my life and it’s still a very big part of the passions I find myself in.
To all my other Star Wars fans out there all I can say to you all if May the Force be with you. and Happy Star Wars day.
The Most Physically Challenging Photo Shoot Ever.
I don’t own a studio space making one of the biggest challenges of doing photo shoots is finding a place to do it. There are so many factors to consider from time of day, the weather conditions, how populated the area is and does it work for the images you want to take. On average I enjoy doing these shoots on location outdoors. It gives you a more unique look that you can’t get from a back drop in a studio. However you get less control and in case of this shoot that I did with my friend CheeseCakePanda in her Smaug cosplay from the Hobbit, was fairly dangerous.
We shot up at the base of the Sandia Mountains at a trail that went through very rocky terrain. I wanted to use this location to reflect the nature of the cosplay. The trail goes down quite a ways to the base of the mountain and then goes strait up in almost a rock climbing fashion. The higher up we got it became rockier and more cave like which was perfect. The issues became the amount of space I have to shoot and getting the model who is in full costume up the mountain.
I felt terrible about how difficult the terrain was to work with. Lucky enough the model came with a set of shoes and was a great sport about the whole thing. When I had chosen the location I didn’t plan for spaces being so tight and and the vegetation (like cactus) to be so abundant. I put me and the model in harms way and I felt so guilty about it. It also didn’t help that there were numerous amounts of issues that I was having with light and getting at the right angles.
I was very proud of the way photos come out but it came at the cost of a lot of trial and error. If I could do it over again I would say I should have done better scouting and made life easier on the model. I appreciate CheeseCakePanda’s effort and being such a great friend through the whole process. Hopefully I’ve learned from my mistakes but knowing me I haven’t and will do another adventuress shoot. But at least next time the model will be prepared.
Photographing Live Music and Working with the Situation You are Given.
Concerts are designed specifically to be a listening experience where you get to hear music coming out in it’s rawest form. Instead of having a compressed sound file play out of your speaker you have the true source in front of you blasting the sound for the entire room to move to. This experience however is not built for photography.
The lighting is often dim, made to be highly stylized for the audience’s enjoyment but not so much for a camera sensor. You are confined to a space where you can’t get up close and personal with the subject, whether you’re in the pit or back stage. You’re compositions needs to be tight in order to keep gear and moving band member out of the way to get the shot. So at the end you just have to work with whatever you’ve been given and try to get the best shots possible.
The first thing you have to keep in mind when shooting live music is time. Major bands will normally only give you 3 songs to shoot and then you’re done. Others are just short set list where they only get 3 songs to begin with. The main way around this is to not only shoot when the band is playing. You should be willing to shoot during the set up, between songs and get the band members interactions between songs. The one thing you always have to do as a photographer is to be ready for anything and capture the moment.
The time tip is relatively situational being that if you’re shooting a smaller band you might have more than 3 songs. But one thing you will have to deal with is the lack of space to work with. If you’re in the photo pit with tons of other photographers you have multiple things you need to consider; Where are all the other photographers, What gives you the best shooting lanes to get a variety of shots and what lens you want on your camera. In the pit the best lens choice that I can think of personally is a 70-200 2.8 to give the sense that you’re right there up close to them with your shots. However using a wide angle can be useful in order to get the entire band in frame and give the photo grander context. But at the end of the day you got to do the best with what you got.
The biggest pain in the ass is going to be getting photos of the drummer. The drummer is all the way at the back of the stage with the worse lighting and with the most of amount of thing in your way. If you are able to get good shots of the drummer more power to you but it’s one of the most difficult things to shoot and often they are out of the way of the action.
So we discussed getting your shots in and getting them composed properly now how do we get the proper exposure. Most shows are going to have terrible lighting. Most show lighting is built around to be a visual experience but it doesn’t translate well on camera. The two work around to this problem is high ISO and processing the images in black and white. Shooting at high ISO will of course bring in the grain and cause problems in the color detail. So when the light is so dim and giving off strange colors the the sensor can’t process, well black and white is a great solution.
Just because the lighting is a challenge doesn’t mean you can’t use it creatively. When a show does use some kind of creative lighting can cause creative flaring and even hair line highlights. and when processing in black and white it you don’t have to worry about the tones.
The main thing to remember is to have fun and not every shot is going to be perfect. You’ll take some good ones some bad ones but every now and again you’ll get some great ones. You just got to keep shooting.
Live Music Photo Editing
By request of a close friend of mine I went to shoot a live performance of his band. Concert photography can be complicated and difficult because it backs you into corners and the lighting is usually sub par. So with careful edits you can make or break these photos. Watch my Lightroom editing process in the video.
Freedom Gundam Model Kit: Time Lapse
When I got home from vacation I did a time lapse with a Gundam Model Kit. Because I’m cool like that.
First Travel Photography Experience
I don’t get out of New Mexico very often. Theirs the occasional trip out to Texas to visit family members but for the most part I’m stuck in the land of Enchantment (or Entrapment depending on who you talk to.) So when taking a trip out to Virginia to visit my girlfriend’s family and friends I figured it would be an excellent opportunity to step into the world of photography.The first rule you normally hear in terms of travel photography is travel light. This mentality has been what given rise to mirrorless camera systems, but unfortunately all I have is a full frame DSLR and a set of 3 lenses to go with it (and other miscellaneous.) in retrospective I could have left my Flash and my 70-200 at home but it was one of those things that you just can’t account for.
Virginia is completely the opposite of Albuquerque. The roads are winding as opposed to on a grid, the whether was cold and gloomy as opposed to hot and bright and somehow the food felt empty. (Seriously I didn’t know I could miss food so much.) But the whether was the most visual part. You don’t get Snow in New Mexico (or at least not this much.)
The backwoods area of where I was staying got up to 6inches of snow which in South Western standards. It’s not something that I’m particularly used to and it offered a different set of scenery that I never get out in New Mexico.
Other than being in Virginia I got to see some the surrounding areas. The first was going up to Annapolis Maryland to see my cousin and we got to see the bay and the Naval Academy.
Among my time in Annapolis I also got the opportunity to do some street photography in the area.
It was rather interesting to be in a different area with crowded streets to actually take pictures. Street photography isn’t something that you can do that often in New Mexico where the streets aren’t crowded and you would stick out like a soar thumb with a large DSLR.
Another place I got to see is the nations Capital in Washington D.C. One thing that I discovered when I was their is that taking photos of the monuments is difficult. I’m not well versed in landscapes and architecture photography so I didn’t quite get what I wanted out of the photos.
However the more interesting thin that I had done was going the the museums of natural history
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Animals, Dinosaurs and ancient humanity was everything and getting photos of them was incredibly fun.
Overall we get it was a fun experience to get to do something I don’t get to do where I’m from and get photos I don’t get to take in New Mexico. But all in all I’m glad to be home.
Lightroom Editing: The Tara Portraits.
I’ve recently decided to start doing some editing videos using light room to show my editing process. What I like to do, what I don’t like to do and just goof around with the differen’t things I can do with photos.
I’m probably going to start being less formal in these just so I can bring out more of my personality out. There are so many tutorials out there these days that I don’t necessarily want to do what everyone else does.
This is also a part of an Adobe Student Rep program that I’m doing this semester so if you want to get a month free trial of Adobe Creative Cloud you can click this link http://adobe.ly/1jr9L5U and you’ll get access to all of adobe’s creative software to take for a test drive.
Fitting in time for photography.
Trying to be creative during a college semester can be extremely difficult, especially when all the classes you are taking are the University core requirement and you have a part time job that are not exactly designed to stimulate your need for creative production. This becomes incredibly prevalent for photographers who think to themselves on a regular basis, “I would rather be out shooting.”As opposed to whatever political science class that you’e sitting in. If this is the situation that you find yourself in the only advise that seems plausible is to make time to go shoot every once and a while. This can be fairly hard to do sometimes but if you can pull it off it can be extremely rewarding.
A few weeks ago in Albuquerque it finally felt like winter had fully kicked in with overcasting clouds and a light amount of snow which at first doesn’t seems too conducive for photography but I though to myself that if the overcast kept up it would be perfect for a mid afternoon shoot downtown. Sadly I misjudged New Mexico’s ability to stay consistent weather wise and it went back to being in the mid 60’s with bright sunny skies. However that didn’t stop me. I put out a post on facebook if anyone wanted to take part in a impromptu photo-shoot down town and like most statuses it go a handful of likes but not a huge response. However one person did happen to respond.
Tara, a friend of mine that I have done photos of several times in the past was the only one who responded to the call so we arranged to meet up down town to snap off some shots in some of the back allies, parking grarges and other interesting locations in the down town area.
One thing you’re always going to find in any downtown metro area is various degrees of street art and graffiti which can always be a great back drop for urban style portraits. Whether they are just a bunch of random tags some hooligans put behind random buildings or if they were beautiful works or art by a local artiest it’s always a great scene to add to your photos. The thought of shooting in back alley’s can seem a little bit sketchy but if you play it smart and don’t draw a whole bunch of attention to yourself you’ll be just fine. People will often leave you alone if you leave them alone. Especially when you’re shooting.
One thing that should be kept in mind at all times is lighting. Being that this was done in the middle of a bright day it was important to find shaded areas to get nice even lighting. There are of course other techniques and styles you can use to manage the light but the important thing is that you do what you feel works best for what you want to do.
The most important thing with being out on a shoot is to have fun really. If this was in anyone a more professional shoot with the photos having a more distinct purpose I would have taken in more seriously but this shoot really was for the sake of having fun. Tara is a relaxed and easy going person to be around and it made shooting with her all the more simple. You don’t have to get into insane director mode and you don’t have to be picky you just have to shoot.
I’m not only doing random portraits over the semester either I’m also doing freelance work with my universities independent student news paper so I also get to do that kind of photo work which is really exciting. Hopefully I get to do more photos in the near future.
Photographing Albuquerque Comic Con: The Challenges of Low Light and Crowded Spaces
This past weekend was Albuquerque Comic Con (ACC) and as previously mention I went to to cover the event in a photographic fashion. This year the event was being held at Hotel Albuquerque down in Old Town and while it was a great venue it came with some of the hardest conditions to shoot in. 2 factors played into making this assignment challenging .1) The lighting was awful. It was a dimly lit hotel all over the show floor using mainly tungsten light bulbs with some areas letting natural light in through windows. 2) Incredibly tight spaces with a large turnout made crowding and moving about the area difficult. Both situations were manageable however with just a little know how, patience and letting go of some nit picky things.
The main thing I needed to figure out was how I was going to deal with the low lighting. Being that the light was so low I pushed the ISO to 6400 on my D600 and was shooting at a wide open aperture. The workhorse lense I was using all day was my 85mm f1.8g and it pretty much never came off the camera body. Ideally I would have liked to stop down to f2.8 or f3.2 to get some added sharpness and depth of field but I needed all the light I could get so wide open at 6400 was where I had to go.
As a result I had to sacrifice keeping slight amount of grain out of the images and the risk of missing focus on the subjects in order to get properly exposed images and cut down on motion blur. As an added bonus for shooting at f1.8 I created some excellent Bokeh (out of focus areas) to cause awesome subject isolation. Now a lot of other photographers that were there covering the event were handling the low light differently by using a flash. There is nothing wrong with using a flash but I personally don’t like using an on camera flash that is going to cause some awkward shadows in the background and not to mention being that I wasn’t there shooting in an official capacity I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself while I was on the floor. (Note: I was aloud to shoot this event I just wasn’t there for a publication or affiliated with the con itself.)
So the main thing I did to handle the crowded spaces was to stick with my already tried and true style of shooting candidly/journalistically. As previously mentioned in a past article on convention photography you see that a lot of people will stop the cosplayers in the hall and ask them to pose or take a photo with someone else. At this event especially it caused some problems with blocking traffic and resulted in some missed opportunities to capture moments as opposed to posses. So by shooting in aperture priority and high ISO and keeping tabs on what shutter speeds I was getting I just kept shooting on the go. There were times when I would miss focus or get some annoying backlighting messing up my exposure but for the most part this style served me well. I couldn’t quite nail focus on every shot I took but being that I was shooting candidly and not posed portraits I didn’t lose much sleep over not having the sharpest image possible.
Now it wouldn’t have been a convention if my cosplay friends hadn’t asked me to take some portraits of their cosplays. This is how the final challenge of the con took place, finding a secluded area to shoot that has useable lighting. Long story short I was able to find a place outside with no people around to get some portraits of my friends. Now I could lower my ISO to low and noise free levels and stop down my aperture to f3.5 and f4 to get that added sharpness.
Overall it was a great event and I got some stellar images out of the whole thing. So far I’ve been getting incredible feedback and it’s always great to shoot cosplay.
TCK-Media 
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