stillphotojournalist.com

This week I entered my first Digital Image competition, meaning rather than physical prints being judged, they judge your images by looking at them on a big (30″ in this case) monitor.
I entered three images that I took within the last year as according to the rules of the competition, and to my surprise I did amazingly well with all of my entries.

In the Photojournalism, Event and Editorial category, I placed both 1st and 2nd.
And in the Architectural, Design and Still Life category I placed 1st.
On top of that, my winning image in the Photojournalism, Event and Editorial category received the Best in Show award for the competition along with an award of merit!

Here are my entries (click for larger views), after which I will give some detail on what I was doing when I took them and what results I was trying to obtain as I adjusted my camera.

One very common question for a photographer planning a landscape shot is where the sun and moon will be setting or rising.
This question has been coming up a lot recently for me, as I will be traveling to Kauai next week to get married. Since we’re getting married on the beach in Hanalei Bay, I wanted to find the best time and location for our ceremony in order to get those glowing shots that only a good Hawaiian sunset could provide the light for. As well, I wanted to know where the sun will be setting on that day as my memory from living there tells me that it sets behind the mountains at this time of year and not over the ocean as it does in the summer.

Ironically, one of the local photographers that I know came across some software yesterday and sent the link to me without knowing that I was even looking for this info (Thanks Garry!).
The software he informed me of is called The Photographer’s Ephemeris and is currently “free” software being developed by Stephen Trainor.
While sunrise and sunset information is readily available on the internet, the location of where the sun will rise and set is not so easily found, nor is the ability to have all of this information in one easy to use application.
Read more »

Do you own an iPhone or an iPod touch?
If so, you may want to check out this little piece of software that I was recently turned on to.

OnOne software’s DSLR Camera Remote.
For the low price of $1.99 (or $19.99 for the professional version), you can have a powerful tool which allows you to:

• Remotely fire your Canon or Nikon DSLR Camera
• Remotely control your camera’s settings, like shutter speed, aperture, white balance and more
• View images saved on the camera from your iPhone or iPod touch
• Look through your camera’s viewfinder remotely (requires a camera with LiveView)

Read more »

Last week I was laid off from my job as a Systems Administrator.
Yes, it’s pretty bad timing, and I definitely didn’t see it coming…
However, now that I’ve got little to do with my days after I’m done hunting for a job, I have more time to get out there and do what I really love. Taking photos, of course!

The Station Fire at this point has burned someplace around 144,000 acres, and destroyed over 60 houses. It really is a tragedy!
I decided yesterday that I would take a drive over to the fire line and get some photos.
I must say, after being close enough to have one of the water dropping helicopters drop half it’s payload on my truck; those firefighters really earn my respect!
As you’ll see in some of these photos, the wall of fire completely dwarfs these men. Though I was standing some 500ft away from it, I could definitely feel the heat and hear the roar of the flames.

Read more »

This may not be very “photography related” news for my blog.  However, I do find it pretty sad news being that I have personally shot photos of him recently and have been watching his freestyle motocross career take off for quite some time.

This news clip borrowed from the Associated Press:

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — Jeremy Lusk, an American freestyle motocross rider, died of head injuries Tuesday after crashing while trying to land a backflip in competition. He was 24.

Jorge Ramirez, chief of the intensive care unit at Calderon Hospital, said Lusk suffered severe brain damage and a possible spinal cord injury.

Lusk won a gold medal at the 2008 X Games. He was injured Saturday night when he failed to complete a full rotation while attempting a Hart Attack backflip and slammed headfirst into the dirt. Lusk crashed in almost identical fashion in the freestyle semifinals at the 2007 X Games but was not hurt. Read more »

When taking photos, there are certain rules that you can follow in order to make them more pleasing to the human eye. However, these rules should not be something that you set in stone and always follow! Rules are in some cases, meant to be broken after all. Ansel Adams can in fact be quoted as saying “The so-called rules of photographic composition are, in my opinion, invalid, irrelevant and immaterial” .  I whole-heartedly agree with him about it also. After all, the photos you take should not only be a record of an object or event frozen in time, but they should also be a tool of self expression. You certainly can not express yourself if you’re following rules made by others all of the time.

Read more »

Picking your photography equipment can be just as important as the photos you take. If you pick equipment that is too basic, you will be limited in how creative you can be with your photos. However, if you pick equipment that is too sophisticated for you, you may very well be deterred by the thought of trying to figure out how to use it. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction! Read more »

This and the following few blog posts are intended for those of you who have little to no experience with photography. However, those of you who do have some, or even a lot of experience may learn a something also!  Read more »

After going over the topic of converting color images to black and white for the past couple of days with a local photography group, I’ve come to the conclusion that some things are just thought about way too much when it comes to black and white conversion!

We started out with a basic assignment: take some photos of a local historic area, convert your favorites to black and white, and return later to present them to the group with a description of what you had done to achieve your conversion. Some of the people that presented images spent literally hours on one photo. To me, thats way too much time to be spending on a single photo unless your intent is to sell that photo for millions (which likely isn’t going to happen). Read more »

I think that every blogger should have a first post explaining what the goal of their blog is.

This is mine…

My goal with this blog is to publish for the world, any photography tips, samples, news, ideas, etc, that I find interesting or that have helped me out on my journey as a photographer. My goal for these posts are to give you, the readers, something that may help you out in some way or give you some insight to something else that you may want to expand upon.

Some of you may turn up your nose at my posts, yet some of you may genuinely appreciate them. Either way, no offense will be taken on my part. I feel that photography is a definite artform. True artforms can sometimes only be seen by the artists themselves. Therefore, everyone is entitled to their opinion here, and I welcome any comments or suggestions that you may have.

This site, though geared for my fellow photographers, is also intended to be a place where people looking for a photographer can learn more about me, see the kind of photography that I do, and of course hire me to do a shoot for them.

At some point I also plan on posting desktop wallpapers of some of my photos. These wallpapers will mainly be for those people who are like myself and use multiple monitors on their computers. Generally wallpapers that are meant for these large desktop resolutions that span across multiple monitors are quite hard to find; hopefully I will be able to provide content which everyone can appreciate. However, I do also plan on providing some of these wallpapers for the majority of the world that only use a single monitor on their computer.