Cacti in February - Fun in Phoenix

Fun with Flash and Friends - Cinematic Lighting

One of my friends was starting to put together idea for her project she needed to submit to film schools she was applying for, one of which (for USC) was to submit a series of six photos that told a story. There couldn't be any description of the plot or characters. The entire idea should be easy to understand by simply looking at the images submitted. I offered to help her with her concept of telling a story of...well I'll let you figure it out, since that was the point of the project. She wanted to not only not use words though, she wanted to not even have faces, so we brainstormed sort of a storyboard and shot as close to the waist down as we could. The other criteria of the project was that the images had to not be edited, couldn't even get the slightest brushing in Photoshop, so these images are straight out of camera. We used 5 Nikon speedlights to sculpt the light as much as we could in real life (and shot after dark to avoid having to fight the sun), which took a little while, but was totally worth it.

She got in by the way...

Maserati Good Times - Nikon D300S Test of Video and Stills

My D300S arrived yesterday, and I felt compelled to go out and give it a run for it's money, buy testing out video quality of fast moving objects (driving with it showed a bit of rolling shutter problems, but acceptable until something comes along that doesn't have that problem) and low light performance. I completely forgot to set the default type of photos to RAW, so the images in the video and posted below are straight-out-of-camera JPEGs, I simply brought the ones posted into Lightroom to resize and add the watermark. Hope this is at least a little interesting to you, I definitely had fun, and was surprised no cops showed up to ask me what I was doing laying on the ground next to a nice Maserati with a bunch of flashes gripped onto sign posts and railings.

Check out the video below or click this link to view the higher resolution version: 

Great Falls National Park - Variable Neutral Density Filter Experiment

Wow, the past few weeks have been slammed busy for me, but I DID manage to squeeze in some personal shooting time (instead of spending the time blogging). I headed down to Great Falls National Park to test out a theory I had. A company called Singh-Ray makes a very expensive product called the Vari-ND filter ($350), which basically allows you to control how much light actually comes through the front of your lens. It doesn't effect color, depth of field or grain, and it doesn't directly effect shutter speed, but the reason why it is cool is that you can use much longer shutter speeds than you normally would be able to otherwise. A normal neutral density filter is just a dark piece of glass that reduces a fixed amount of light, the Singh-Ray filter allows you to adjust as needed. After watching the little animation on their site I said to myself... "that has to be through polarization!" so I decided to try and test my theory in order to save myself the $350. I tried two circular polarizers, but it didn't work as I expected, so I did a bit of research to discover that to make your own variable ND filter you need a circular polarizer and a LINEAR polarizer on top of the circular.

The circular polarizer on the bottom allows your autofocus camera to still autofocus and meter somewhat accurately because a circular polarizer is made of two layers, the top which polarizes the light and then the bottom layer that scatters the light a bit to allow your phase detection autofocus sensor to work properly.

I ordered myself a linear polarizer and gave it a good field test and it works great with one little caveat. If you stop the light down all the way as far as you can with this setup, there is a significant color shift to the blue spectrum. This effect is only seen if stopped down to 8 or 9 stops, which is rarely needed. I told a friend of mine about this issue and he's trying to come up with a solution that eliminates this color shift, but until then give it a go if you need to do some long exposures.

Here's some of my favorites from the two times I went down to Great Falls National Park this week. Most of these exposures were between 6 and 15 seconds long, which is what causes the normally rough looking water to look so creamy and smooth. None of these images have touched Photoshop, just some basic curves and white balance adjustment in Lightroom. If you want to do this yourself and already have a nice circular polarizer, all you'll need is a cheap linear polarizer and you're good to go!

The full rez gallery and other photos are at www.noahhayes.net/greatfalls

This shows you how rough this water looked without the long exposures! This was without the Variable ND filter. These guys kept climbing up the hill and riding the rapids down. Maybe I should get an underwater enclosure for my D3 and try it sometime?

Also we stumbled upon a little snake that was nice enough (or scared enough) to actually let me swap out my telephoto for a 105 VR Macro to get up close and personal (about 5 inches away from the front of my lens!)

The Variable ND array of B+W (my favorite) filters. Taken with iPhone 3GS

Smithsonian Shoot

The other day I went to hang out in DC and give a little hands-on training to a new photographer, Jermaine. I hadn't been to the Smithsonian in FOREVER, so we hit up the Natural History Museum to give him some challenging indoor light to get under control. After the museums closed (way too early if you ask me) we went out on the Mall and took some exterior shots of the other museums and the Capitol. Here's a couple from the day.

Little off camera flash for an environmental portrait of a new photog

This is a 15 second exposure, to make most of the crowd "disappear"

News Crew reporting on the Holocaust Museum shootings that day

Unfortunately the day we went was the day the shooting happened in the Holocaust Museum