Stimulating Pixels

Last week, I spent roughly three days doing reseach/planning, eight hours driving (split between two road trips) and stood around for another half dozen hours. This was all done in order take to make a single exposure that lasted for 167 seconds and had no chance for a do-over. The subject of all this effort was space shuttle Discovery as she and her crew launched from Kennedy Space Center for mission STS-128.

Here is the result:

As far as I’m concerned, it’s completely worth the effort.

Of course, since the above image was made with a camera sitting on a tripod, I was also able to do some shooting with a telephoto lens for a more traditional liftoff image.

Finally, I had planned to attach my point and shoot camera to the tripod and shoot some video as well, but the crappy flexpod I bought that day fell apart on me. So, I ended up setting the little camera directly on the ground and crossing my fingers. I couldn’t get a clear view of the sky, but figured it was worth a shot anyway. The resulting video falls squarely in the “Happy Accident” category.

(Note: At about 1:50 seconds into the video, the rumble that starts is the sound from engines. It took that long for it to get to where I was shooting from. Prior to that, the all the rocket noise is coming from the audio on the radio. The announcer was obviously much closer.)

To give credit where it’s due:

• Thanks to Dr. T.S. Kelso from celestrak.com for helping make sure I was setup to capture the entire flight path.
• For a great set of notes on shooting launches, visit this page on phototrek.org.
• K4GCC (146.940) retransmission of the NASA audio which you hear in the video.
• M.C. for letting me borrow some additional gear.

This is the sign in the window of a pet store. They had a few offering their various services: vaccinations, boarding, etc… This one was a bit of a surprise. It’s not something I would have thought to advertise quite as prominently.

Friday, June 27, the Camry stalled out on me. I limped it to the shop over the weekend. Seems the oil seal on the distributor cap had warn away and oil was getting in and causing the car to short out. Cost to repair was going to be about $500. While that probably would have kept it running for a while longer, I decided it was time to retire the old ‘95. After 202,942 miles, she deserves a rest.

Did some online car shopping over the weekend and last Monday purchased a 2005 Honda Accord. Still getting used to her, but I think we are gonna get along fine. Here’s hoping for another 200,000 plus mile car.

Did another photo workshop a few weeks ago. Just now getting to the edit stage. Here’s one of the first ones of a model named Stephanie.

I really need to get back into using photoshop. Touch ups, contrast adjustment and color ballance are taking me forever. If I do much more of this stuff, I’m going to have to actually color balance my monitor too. Right now, I struggle to keep from just saying to hell with it and converting everything to black and white or a sepia tone.

Found this little guy when I was leaving the office one night and decided to shoot a few portraits with my little point and shoot camera.

A couple times I got too close and he did this:

Note: in this shot he was facing the other direction from the portrait above.

I probably couldn’t get that shot again with a point and shoot if I tried 1,000 times. I think would fall into what Henri Cartier-Bresson calls The Decisive Moment. From the Wikipedia article:

“Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

Last Wednesday, April 2, 2008, just before I pulled into my neighborhood, my car turned 200,000 miles.

Speaks well for Toyota. I replaced the timing belt at 80,000 and 160,000 miles and had a few other moderate repairs, but other than that, all I really did was go through oil changes and tires. I knew I wanted to see if the little car could make it 200,000, but now I have to figure out if I want to have some work done of finally get a new car. We’ll see….

If you have to edit a wedding, having Lightroom with a pretty high end machine is a great way to go. I’d guess I spent 10 hours editing the roughly 1500 shots I took at the wedding. If I was more familiar with Lightroom, I probably could have done it in half the time. If I was also in the practice of editing a lot, I probably could have gotten it down to three or four hours.

All in all, I’m really impressed with Lightroom. Before switching to it, I had been using Bridge and an app called BreezeBrowser that was pretty good, but I was running on older hardware and the overall experience was very, very slow. I’m not a fan of waiting on computers, so I tended not to do to much with the images. Worse than usual that is.

A while back I rebuilt my computer with close to top of the line components in anticipation of doing more photo work. That was money well spent. I don’t know if it was just the hardware upgrade or if the switch to Lightroom had an effect as well, but the difference is night and day.

Might actually get me shooting some again. Especially since the workload at the office is lightening up a bit. In the mean time, here’s one of my favorite images from the wedding.

Needless to say, it was a good time.

Took another trip to Atlanta yesterday. Left my house about 6am and made it back a little after midnight. Two flights, and several hours of meetings make for a long ass day. It was almost a lot longer. A couple hours before we left for the airport, it started to snow.

Thankfully, we made it out. We were delayed about an hour and a half, but managed to get past the de-icing line which would have taken another two hours. I haven’t seen snow in years, but I wasn’t too excited to see it. Worked out okay though.

So, I finally got a new computer put together a little while ago. Been so busy at work, I really haven’t had time to do much with it yet. Till tonight that is. I finally managed to dig into some old photos. Mostly, I’m just getting them imported into lightroom. 2,577 music images so far. It’s sooooooo much better with a computer that can actually handle it. In the past, it was so slow, that it really turned me off from doing much of anything photo-wise. While I think there will always be room for improvement, I wasn’t really waiting on the computer for most stuff. That’s the major hurtle to get over.

Even though I really haven’t done much messing around with the images yet, it really got me thinking about how much I love photography. Now that I don’t have to dread the computer time, hopefully I’ll be more likely to shoot some. Of course, this will be after we get our redesign launched. But still, it’s nice to think about.

Incidentally, here’s an image to celebrate the fact that I can actually work with images now without wanting to stab myself in the leg with a fork to distract myself from waiting on the machine. It’s the drummer from The CodeTalkers. Or, at least it was the drummer back in Sept. 2006 when this shot is from.

I’ve decided to decorate my office with some 11×14s of my music images. I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of them.

I think I mentioned before that I went out to Las Vegas for the first time back in October. It was just before my trip to Bama. The main reason for the Vegas trip was to go to another Supershoots event. Here’s one of my favorite images from the trip:

And here is a link to the rest of the proofs: link