Visit to Woodward Park

I made another visit to Woodward Park in Tulsa, to pass a little time before heading to the airport to pick up my wife from a training trip to Virginia. It was the early afternoon so the light was bright and harsh, so I made use of my speedlight (with a diffuser dome) to provide some fill light to even out the lighting in the photos.

So once I arrived, I headed to the training garden to have a nice variety of subjects. There I found a nice selection of different flowers, plants as well as some structures and a pond full of colourful koi. I will be adding a full gallery of photos both here and on my website (I also posted a gallery on my Google+ profile) but as it's currently late - and I need to get to bed - I will post a teaser selection here...so watch this space for the remainder of my photos.

Hope you like the photos:

Low key weekend

Ever had one of those weekends when you planned to take some photos but events conspire to change your plans? I had one of those weekends.

The only photos I took were on Saturday morning, when I captured the colourful sunrise as I headed out to the local farmer's market. I fully intended to do some more photos either Saturday or on Sunday but abandoned the idea due to just being to tired/sleepy that I felt it unsafe to drive anywhere. Instead I just stayed on the couch and pulled up Google Maps on my MacBook and did some recon for subjects and locations.

Here is the sunrise from Saturday looking towards Glenpool, OK.

Sea of concrete

The other day I saw these flowers blooming in the midst of a sea of concrete and felt inspired to go grab my camera to record the scene. Okay, it was my driveway but why let a small detail interfere with such a nice metaphor.

I used my speedlight off camera and to the left of the flowers, triggering it via a TTL cable, to provide a little fill flash and additional texture to the flowers and concrete. Nature continuing regardless of man's attempt to cover it up and tame it.

Of course, while thinking of the contents of this blog post I started thinking more about other metaphors that this photo could represent. The main one that came to mind was how it's symbolic of me (as a person and/or as a photographer) surrounded by a sea of concrete. Trying to make my place in the world (and world of photography) while all the time hoping there isn't anyone nearby with a can of weedkiller to cut me down.

Itty bitty spider

Today has been a low key day, which I don't mind in the least as I have not felt that energetic or motivated. So I chose to stay close to home and work on some photo editing and experiment with develop settings in Lightroom.  Inspiration did come to me to take some photos of the spider that has been living out on my front porch and seems to have set up residence there.

I started out with my speedlight mounted on a lightstand, set at approx. 45 degrees behind him so as to give some controlled backlighting - and to hopefully help combat the wind that was buffeting him around. I set the speedlight manually to its 24mm zoom setting, the head tilt to 45 degrees and placed a diffuser dome over it to further soften and spread the light. This worked pretty good for about 6 photos, then I had to grab my flash and stand due to a sudden downpour of rain.

As the rain was now turning more persistent and heavy I switched to on-camera but keeping the flash settings the same. Now I had a water-logged spider and web to shoot, so I made the most of the opportunity, shooting off several photos. 

Here's a photo taken with the flash backlighting the spider:

And here are two photos with the on-camera flash of a rather damp spider:

Weekly update and portrait photos

This past week saw me with a new assignment to take a series of corporate portraits for use on the company's website for staff bios. This required the use of a fairly basic lighting setup to minimize shadows and keep the lighting even so that even at thumbnail size, the portrait is clearly viewable.

To achieve the lighting setup I used the following items:

1. pair of Manfrotto light stands
2. Nikon SB600 Speedlight
3. Nikon FL-G2-AWB flash gel (shooting under fluorescent light)
4. Nikon SC-26 TTL cable
5. Nikon D100 (w/Nikkor 60mm Micro)
6. Shoot through umbrella
7. 32in reflector (using the white cover)
8. large portable projector screen as the background

I also was trying out a new tethered setup linking my D100 to my MacBook Pro using Sofortbild (available here - http://www.sofortbildapp.com/). I can report that the tethered shooting worked very well and I will certainly be making further use of the software.

Here is a diagram of the lighting setup I used for the shoot:

As you can see, I had my subjects stand facing into the shoot-through umbrella and than turn their head back to face me, so they were not (where possible) standing square on to the camera. Where possible I like to avoid shooting straight on at a subject as it just looks wrong to me. Yes, it can make the subject look "strong"but it also looks too rigid; it was also the wrong look for the shoot. The idea was to have everyone look friendly and approachable, so a more relaxed and casual look was what I was after.

One drawback I had to deal with was the bank of fluorescent lights directly over the head of my subjects - if you look at the eyes in my examples, you will see an additional catchlight from this. As it was, I made some use of the additional light to keep the shutter speed up while running the flash as rear-curtain fill flash to balance the flash and ambient light levels.

I also had some model release forms with me and had a handfull of the models sign them to enable me to make use of the photos here on my blog and my website. Those that I didn't ask

to sign a form will only have their photos used on the company website and not on either of my sites.

Now it's time to post a few example photos from the shoot -

Whitney Adams

Sharon Reese

Richard Chance

Kristina Adams

Larry Winegar

Ribbon cutting at OU-Tulsa

There was the official ribbon cutting event this past Friday for the new IT Data Center at the University of Oklahoma's Tulsa campus. I was there in my dual roles of an OU employee and as a photographer recording the event.

The main dignitaries for the ribbon cutting were: Dr Gerard Clancy, OU-Tulsa President; Loretta Early, OU Vice President and CIO; Dana Saliba, OU-Tulsa IT Director.

Gerard Clancy at the microphone, with Dana Saliba and Loretta Early seated

Dana Saliba at the microphone

Loretta Early at the microphone

Gerard Clancy, Loretta Early, Dana Saliba and the OU-Tulsa IT leadership team about to cut the ribbon

And the ribbon is cut - the data center is officially open for business

 Commemorative photograph of the ribbon cutting

A case of DIY

After numerous failures and a large amount of money spent on repairing the sticky aperture on my Nikon 20mm f/2.8D lens I was on the verge of calling it quits and either letting it gather dust in a cupboard or try to offload it for some small return. In the last couple of years I have probably spent more than the value of the lens on having it serviced/repaired; the last service lasted less then 1 week before it failed again. However, I do like the lens so decided to do a little searching online to see if I could find anything of aid - and found a very detailed guide to repairing the lens myself at http://shimonmor.com/TEMP/20mmlensrepair.html

So last night found me sitting down at a table, with the guide on my laptop screen, disassembling the lens. Pretty quickly I spotted that the diaphragm spring was not attached to its arm (again) so I knew what was needed to be fixed. I also knew by reading the guide that I would have to pretty much strip the lens down completely to get to the spring. In the process I also discovered that there was something (oil or grease) on the aperture blades so while I had the lens apart I took a couple of cotton swabs (q-tips) and carefully cleaned the blades; making sure that everything functioned correctly and smoothly.

Now, easy part over, comes the re-assembly and insuring the lens works as it should.  It took me a couple of attempts to correctly line things up so the lens focus movement moved correctly but everything went back together and it seemed to test out okay. I attached t to my camera and tested the aperture and focussing - both of which seems to be working correctly.

I'l be interested to see how long it will keep working before either the spring comes off or the blades gum up but at least now I know I can save myself some money and just fix it myself.

_____________________

Sunday 16 September - update

Guess I didn't clean the blades that well as they are sticking again. At least the spring is still attached! I'll just have to do a more thorough job of cleaning the blades and see just how long the lens will keep working.