Racket Ball Challenge

Clifford Lester has been playing racket ball for a while now. He has gotten really good at the sport. So when Luis Munoz challenged him to a match, it sounded like it was going to be a good competition. Luis had been playing up the challenge all day trying to psych Cliff out. He new that Cliff played a lot, but Cliff didn’t know that Luis had never played before. It wound up being less of a match and more of a practice for Cliff. At the end you could see who won by who was sweating less. During an intermission for Luis, Grace went in and gave it a try. Wearing completely the wrong cloths and having no shoes did not help her game either.

Most of the time while Luis was playing Grace was shooting video with the Canon 5D Mark II. She is trying to get a feel for it so she will be able to show students how to work it. I on the other hand decided to shoot with the Nikon D700. After a few minutes of getting use to Nikon’s ergonomics, it was a good and responsive camera. The autofocus was very quick and the aperture priority seemed to give pretty good exposures. It was fun to use something other than my regular old Canon 5D. If I hadn’t already invested so much money into Canon I might have gone over to Nikon. But at the time I went with Canon they were to only ones with a full frame digital sensor. Now that times are changing it seems that both camera systems are equally as good now. It is now at the point were Canon and Nikon are just playing leap frog with each other. Canon had full frame sensors then Nikon made one. Nikon had amazingly high ISO’s and now Canon does also. My best advice in getting a camera is to get whatever feels good to you.

Our Broken Window

On the same night of the Available Light Class we had a problem at the Cypress College Photography Department. Grace went into Studio 2 and noticed some glass lying on the floor. It didn’t look like any of the typical glass that we have around the department that might have broke. On closer inspection, she noticed that it had the same tint as the large plate glass window that are in that studio. Once she opened up the blinds there it was. A perfect shaped hole that fit the glass found on the floor. Grace immediately called campus security and talk to the auto body department to make sure no one was standing under the window. From upstairs the window seemed to be fluctuating with the wind and seemed like the rest could fall out at anytime. When Campus security arrived, they decided to break the rest of the window out just to be safe. So with all of the excitement going on, Grace and I decided to document it by photographing upstairs and from ground level. After patching the hole with some black plastic the nights excitement ended. The next day a plywood board now sits where the window us to be.

Available Light Field Trip

A couple of days ago Clifford Lester took his Available Light class on a field trip. The trip was to a building he had found that was still under construction, but the walls there were great backgrounds for a fashion photo shoot. I came along because I wanted to see the class in action. While I was there I also worked as Cliff's Digital Tech for the first part of the class. It was actually fun being on location as a tech. Since we didn’t have any outlets, it was a new experience trying to set everything up and try to conserve power. Cliff had Krista and Chris scout the models that we were shooting that day. After Cliff’s demo I took part in some of the shooting. I mostly focused on taking pictures of Krista’s model Courtney. I really like the class and next time it is offered I will see about enrolling in it.

Flickr War - October

Well another month down in Grace and my Flickr war. Now there is only 5 more months to go before our year long battle is over. Since we started I have been in the lead and she keeps talking about when she is going to pass me up. Hopefully she will start that soon. It isn't really fealing like a challange anymore. Come on Grace you can start anytime now.

Grace's Flickr

My Flickr

Time Lapse Photo Shoot

Time Laps from John Halligan on Vimeo.

I have been wanting to do a time lapse of a photo shoot for some time now. Krista allowed me the opportunity to try this on her photo shoot with Ross Davidson. I wanted to make a video showing how the setup, shooting, and tear down goes. Because of sometime consternates on my part, I wasn’t able to start shooting before everything was setup. Next time it should go a bit smoother now that I know how to get everything setup. Now I just need to learn how to actually use my video editing software.

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

What is new in Lightroom 3 Beta - Part 2 - Part 3

An instructors of mine told me that he never looked forward to Photoshop upgrades because he had to almost relearn everything. Once he started to use Lightroom all that changed. He actually started looking forward to updates and upgrades. Everything new that was put in to Lightroom just help to improve the program without changing much of the layout and feel of the program. Well, now it the time to start testing out the next version of Lightroom. The Public Beta was just released yesterday, so do not need to have a previous version of Lightroom to try it. All you need to do is go to Adobe Labs to download it. Some of the new features in Lightroom 3 Beta that are listed on the Adobe Labs site are:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
  
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
  
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
  
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
  
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
  
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
  
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
  
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) have already released some new videos to help get people up to speed with the new changes to Lightroom 3. The videos are demoed by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski who are great speakers on anything Photoshop and Lightroom related subjects.

If you do decide to use Lightroom 3 Beta it will be valid until April 30, 2010. So it seems like the new version will be out hopefully be fall of next year.

A New Use of an Old Toy

My friend Robert Williams needed some help with a project for the Advanced Digital Workflow Class. He needed a partner for the midterm practical and his schedule was booked solid because of work. I decided to help setup a shoot so he could tech for me. I really had no idea what I was going to setup for the shoot. He wasn’t able to make it to the fashion shoot that I setup with Krista Skustad, so that left me with one day to think of something. The day before Robert and I were going to shoot I received the Drobo that I had order a couple of days earlier. I had planned on replacing my HP MediaSmart Server with this new fine and shiny Drobo, which gave me an idea. This would be the thing we would shoot. After all, from the time that I got the thing, it was a little bit of a pain to manage. Most of the time I just left it shut off because I was tired of having to trouble shoot it. Now I finally manage to find a use of the old thing. As a Prop it worked fantastic. It never beeped at me, got angry and flashed red lights at me, or just constantly give me warnings that it processer was working at 183 degrees Celsius. Now I actually like the thing. More or less as a paper weight now.