Family & Life

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Bath Time 2 - The Video!

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I took a break from editting the latest wedding from the May 24th weekend (stay tuned for that shortly) to do this little video of my son during bath time.  Christine had just asked me to take some pictures, but since Id already done that during a previous bath, I flipped the camera over to video mode.  After a few minutes I decided I could actually make something out of this, so I got enough footage to make a little video.  No tripod, no lights, just the camera and 1 lens.... though now I wish I'd used a tripod.  Put it together in a few hours the following day, and the hardest part of the whole project was finding music!  Im still not crazy about the low quality compression the camera delivers for video, but for the quick turnaround time, Im happy with how it turned out, and people think its cute, so it's served its purpose.  Enjoy!

PS. Please remember to enable HD in the player window (click the little gear icon once the video is playing) as there is currently no way I could find to embed the video and have it automatically set to 720 or 1080.

She Movement Launch

Recently, my friend Wendy asked me to come shoot a bit at a charity event she held to launch her new She Movement.  Women getting together to support eachother.  While it was only a short hour or so, there were some emotional moments as Wendy and her cousin presented some personal stories of some of the women who attended, and the hard times they have gone through.  I was happy to be able to help her document the launch of this special group.

Ice Racing

Another instance of extreme procrastination on my part.  My friend Paul (on the #29 bike) has been my friend.... basically since birth.  He used to ride his dirt bike around our neighborhood when we were kids.  He tried to get me into it, but somehow I resisted motorcycles till my 20's.  Fortunately I also suffered way less extreme injuries than he has!  He had asked me a few times if I wanted to come out and shoot one of their friendly ice racing sessions out in the country.  Finally this year I went and brought along my friend Andrew...also a big motorcycle guy. 

While I completely expected 95% failure of these shots after realizing my tiny little flashes counldnt keep up, I was surprised to find that most of them were actually better than I thought.  The problem (not to get technical) was that the max sync speed of these flashes was about 250th of a second, and to realy freeze the motion of the bikes I needed more like 500th of a second.  We quickly realized this and changed our angle to be shooting more head-on, rather than having them bikes slide passed.

I developed these pictures pretty dark.  The almost look as if they were shot at night.  The snow flakes hanging in the air, caught by the flashes, look like stars.  In actuality it was about 1pm, overcast, and very bright due to all the light bouncing off the snow.

In the end I ended up with some shots I was quite happy with, and Im sad that I sat on them for so long without even looking at them.  The lesson is always check your shots... you never know when you'll be sitting on something good!