so i took some Engagement Photos, right?

I took some engagement photos for a couple of seniors at Rice the other weekend. I was pretty nervous since it was my first time doing that sort of thing, but they turned out pretty good. I did some neat flash+nice-light stuff, etc. Anyway, to the photos:

More Urban Abstracts

Hey everyone. Here is some of my recentmost work. Thanks for looking, and remember you can leave comments if you want to ask questions or whatever (well, no one's done that yet, but oh well).

--davers

Powderpuff + Pumpkins

Here are just a few more photos I've done recently.

That's my friend Julia in the last one. She's carving a lolcats jacko, heh.

Awkward Self-Portrait with an Awkward Crop

Why not try alternative crop shapes?

I developed my first rolls of 120 color film the other day. Turns out that I should've done a test roll to make sure my Mamiya RB67 didn't have any light leaks before I started shooting. Anyway, hopefully some of the photos will be salvageable even though there's a bit wide stripe of over-exposure on all of them. I'll see if I can find a scanner and learn how to use it and get them digitized so I can work with them an eventually show you.

Fun with Light: a fieldtrip downtown

Hey, so I finally got around to figuring out a system for editing photos and getting them ready to put up on teh intrawebz, so I should hopefully be able to to this much more, etc. etc.

My photography class went downtown for a field trip a few weeks ago. Here are some photos from that:

Logan was trying to light-write 'LOVE' at the bus station, but there was way too much ambient light for him to pull it off.  He did, however, get a good shot of this later, and it's on his flickr.

There were a lot of cameras on the lightrail train. Yay.

I'm trying to use my flash more and more. It's really tough for me for some reason. It's kind of a complicated machine. There are a lot more variables involved: flash power, distance from subject, aperture size, ratio to ambient light, bounce direction, etc. I'm getting to the point where I'm able to start shooting in full manual successfully, but I'm still pretty clueless with how flash works. Hopefully I'll get the hang of it with practice.

One fun little technique I played with involved exploiting the fact that the flash's temperature is balanced to that of daylight. This means that the colors of, say, a street light will be different from that of the flash. If I set the color-balance to normalize the street light, then I can use the flash to essentially paint in tungsten. Combine that with setting up a tripod at night on a streetside and with a bit of patience, and you can get something like the photo below. Thank goodness Paul, our prof, decided to leave his camera for a bit, since this wouldn't have been the same at all otherwise:

Here's a fun little thing: these next two photos are from the same scene and were shot only seconds apart. Since I'm shooting in RAW, I can have awesome control over things like white balance after I take the shot instead of futzing about with it on the go. The different emotions that can be brought out from just different white balances intrigue me.

For this one, I had my camera set up with the flash pointed to bounce off the ground and the camera lenses pointed straight up, supported by the tripod slung over my shoulder.  There were a series of convex reflective hemispheres as I was walking, so I shot upwards as I walked, and it kinda worked:

Once I had that setup going, I decided to run with it. For the next two shots, I simply rotated the camera so that the lens was pointing left or right, i.e., left if I was walking on the right side of the street. This is a fun thing to do, to shoot from the shoulder while walking. It's like shooting from the hip, except  a little easier to compose and a little more unwieldy.

I saw this guy, stopped, and asked if he'd like to have his picture taken. He said sure. With the camera still slung over my shoulder, I pressed the button, said thanks, and walked off to his voice trailing, "Uh...was that it?"

Finally, I was a bit late and just barely missed the bus with the rest of my classmates. In the intervening five minutes before the next bus, I made this:

So that's it for now I guess. Thanks for looking at my photos, and I hope to put some more up soon sometime.

Reality?

Here is a photograph:



This will be running in the satire page of our newspaper in a few weeks. Is it Photoshopped and faked?

No really, what do you think? You don't have to know how photography works or what the technical telltale signs of Photoshopped fakeness are. If someone just showed you this photograph and asked you if it was something that actually happened or if the photograph was faked (let's say the guy on the right is an important faculty member like the head assistant to the dean of undergraduates at the university), well, what would you think?




The photograph above is real; the event it depicts actually happened.

If you're feeling strange about your understanding of photography as something accurate or as something not to be trusted, why?






EDIT: Here is the original file for comparison:

My goal, once I had opened the file on the computer, was to make the real photo look like it had been photoshopped together while not touching the compositional integrity of the original. Did this experiment work?

A Couple of Unshared Shots

I'm really digging the squarer formats. It feels like I'm taking the easy way out with digital and with the perfect square crop, but when I get my RB67 up and running, I'll actually be able to shoot in a near-square format without losing the option of vertical/horizontal orientation, since it's a 6x7 negative rather than a 6x6. Hopefully I'll have it all the parts together, some film, a developer nearby, and access to the film scanner all by the end of the month.