Setup #1: 2 minutes, 38 seconds. 48 proof images

Setup #2:3 minutes, 37 seconds, 65 proof images

Setup #3: 49 seconds, 15 proof images.

Shooting time: 7 minutes, 4 seconds; 130 images (two were in the car)

Total shoot time: 20 minutes from first shot to last shot; about 40 minutes total, as we drove around a bit at the end to get a better feeling for the location and what it offered.

Wow! Maybe I should plan all my shoots for bad weather…

So how cold is that stone on your butt, anyway?

For you budding photographers on Model Mayhem, take note. This one small fact – shooting what the model finds interesting – is probably why I have such a low flake rate, why the shoots are so much fun, and why everyone puts in 110% effort.

This shoot sat on the books for months, and we just couldn’t get our calendars to line up with the right conditions. Finally we got it together for Friday evening…. and the forecast called for snow. Great! We nabbed a few shots outside, and ran back to the car to warm up. Take a look at the makeup, contact lenses, and wardrobe… she did an AMAZING job pulling this together herself.

Waiting for the snow to stop

Before it really dumped on us we got in a few good, if brief, setups. The temperature was about -2C, so we had to work fast. The color balance in these shots is basically for incandescent, which is why it has an intentional blue cast, but it’s better than shooting in the correct white balance and doing in post production. Why? Because you can see the results while you are shooting, which means you can check highlights, background details, and watch for odd colored elements.

This was all shot in RAW (DNG, specifically), so I could adjust the white balance later if needed, and with the big buffer on the Pentax K20D I could still shoot rapidly. This is really important when the model is essentially wearing only a thin stretch lycra catsuit in below freezing temps! As soon as the teeth-chattering stopped we ran out and popped off a series of shots like this one, which might be my favorite for the day:

Hunting. Freezing, too!

… and then back into the car. The snow really started to come down. There was no way to use anything but available light; everything was getting soaked.  I think I’d like to pick up a couple of clear plastic Pelican cases for my lights, and epoxy some 1/4″ mounting studs to them. My newly replaced lens, the Pentax DA* 50-135mm f/2.8, is weather resistant, and shrugged off the wet with no issues. I would have liked to get in closer with the 16-45mm for some funkier angles, but the snow was so thick the auto-focus was picking up on the white snow against her black outfit, so I knew we didn’t have much time left before it got really dark. The 16-45mm is f/4 wide open, and looks better at f/5.6 – meaning I would have been up another notch in ISO.

By now we knew the shoot was going to have to be called off for another day. There were shots we weren’t going to get, like with the city skyline as a backdrop, that were now made invisible with the falling snow. We found another interesting location and rattled off a few quick shots:

So how cold is that stone on your butt, anyway?

The BB guns were her idea; we discussed what to do if the police were called because they are so realistic. I suggested that she not panic if  the cops drew their weapons and asked us to get on the ground Lucky for us the weather was so terrible nobody noticed us, and thankfully nobody got tazed!

We’ll be back, but not until it warms up a bit. In the meantime we have about 130 images from that day to study and discuss, so that when we next get a small window of weather we can take advantage of it.

A big thanks to Ms. Lee for coming out, freezing her tush off for a few minutes, and doing an outstanding job. I can’t wait for the next chinook!

I still haven’t distilled all the info and made it part of my DNA yet. It’s still percolating – some of the practical stuff is right at the top of my conscious mind – and some is bubbling around in my sub-conscious, making those all-important associations with everything else I know and am.

But I can tell you the experience was worth it.

I think the most important lessons were those about connecting – and not just with other photographers – but with customers and vendors too. That was a biggie; and not because it was something new to the audience, everyone knows ‘networking – yeah it’s important’ – that’s NOT it. It’s more about the quality and experience of those connections that has the biggest effect.

And there was a TON of info about the mechanics of why and how he does business, but that really serves more to illustrate the underlying philosophies, and in return how those practical things enable him to deliver consistently solid value every time. Nice.

Oh, and it was (just) warm enough for us to run outside and get a real-time example of how he works with subjects – even if he only has seconds to do it.  He shot a newlywed couple for 5 or 10 minutes, and then our headshots – all 90 of us – something like 2100 images in all – in the other 20 minutes. And not once did he say ’smile for the camera’ – he didn’t have to! Again, nice.

Here is an iPhone / thebestcamera app image of him in a race against frozen fingers:

@thebecker - work'in it!

So an open call to everyone who attended – from either day – I’ll see you at the [b]school.

And if you don’t or can’t join there, keep an eye out here – there will be a group meeting in a couple of weeks – comment here or email me if you’re interested in some of this kool-aid.

… and if you are trying to place my name with a face – I’m the Pentax shooter who wore Hawaiian shirts

But what to shoot?

Lucky me, I had printed the entire series of articles, and left them in my camera bag. All I needed to was pick out an assignment from the articles and shoot.

Just for fun I had mounted a Soligor 135mm f/2.8 on my K20D as another ‘one lens for the day’ exercise before I left the house this morning. I hadn’t really done much with this lens since buying it a few weeks back in Toronto, and with winter light being rare as it is, I really had to shoot something today… I could feel myself getting rusty, not really shooting for a couple of days.

I was quite surprised by the results of the assignment and the lens itself (click for larger images):

Pentax K20D, Soligor 135mm @ f/8, ISO 100, 1/1500

Pentax K20D, Soligor 135mm @ f/8, ISO 100, 1/750

These aren’t going to win any competitions, but a few things stand out.

For starters, I do get a sense of the ‘3D effect’ that some people talk about with certain lenses from the first image. I had always written the effect off as just shallow DOF, but I think there is more to it… perhaps ‘correct DOF’ would be a better description, where most of the subject is in acceptable focus, and the not-subject areas are out of focus.

The other thing that strikes me about the first image is the richness of color. I don’t always get this from my Pentax 50-135mm lens, and combined with some users noting that Pentax lens coatings actually block some colors (like violet) perhaps there is something going on.

The other thing that’s somewhat interesting is the octagonal blade pattern that shows up in the out of focus highlights of the second image. I did play around with the greyscale mix in Lightroom a bit to make the individual highlights more even across their surfaces, but without the tweak I find the shape alone pleasing.

Now, the act of using ‘assignments’ like this might seem limiting or unnecessary; but I do shoot a lot, and most of the time it’s what I want to be shooting… in other words, it’s selfish. Applying a little external stimulus to the creative process can really show you where your comfort zone and limits are. As soon as you feel challenged or uncomfortable – or even more interesting – at a LOSS for a shot… that’s telling you something.

For me it’s interesting to see which of the assignments are a breeze, and which are a genuine challenge – and thus where I should be putting in more practice. Yes, I think that creativity is something that benefits from practice, especially when a lot of artificial equipment enters the equation, as it does in photography.

Oh, the lens? I bought it one weekend from an outdoor table at the St. Lawrence flea/antique market.

It was $5.

One thing that came to me today is that my internal mental future-vision lists don’t match my Real Life lists and don’t match my GTD lists. If GTD is supposed to reduce stress imagine what happens when the lists don’t match… TOTAL STRESS.

I’m fairly laid back, so stress isn’t always apparent. One of the places that my stress shows up is in procrastination. The more stressed I get, the more I don’t address what’s stressing me. I’ve noticed this is really cyclical, so it takes a while to build up and then it becomes this major Catch-.22 situation.

Today’s ‘think’ session was like that.

At first I thought I could tweak my processes; I have a good system for yearly/quarterly/monthly goal setting, but translating that to a repeating weekly habit of GTD and project work is hit-and-miss. So off I went to Google to see if there was something about GTD that I was missing.

This lead me to a post and video by Merlin Mann, over on 43folders. What’s spooky about this little side-trip is that his post was exactly about seeking guidance on the web, and how at some point it’s not really productive; it becomes a distraction in itself, and one that the purveyors of these sites would rather you be a repeat visitor, than graduate and no longer return. His other point was that maybe instead of seeking advice on ’something’ you should just do ’something’ and thus gain actual experience doing, instead of gathering all kinds of fluffy meta-crappus about ’something’.

At this point I knew I should actually just look at my lists and see what was wrong; if there was a pattern to the mismatch between lists.

I looked first at the plethora of lists in my primary software app for GTD, called ‘Remember the Milk‘. I looked at the list titles. I looked at the kinds of thinks these titles suggested. And the pattern became apparent.

Most of my lists are either ‘Personal’ or ‘Professional’. In other words the lists are clearly one or the other. The ones that were neither were @someday lists that had become catch-alls for postponed creative ideas, projects, and dreams.

Looking again, I noticed another feature… ‘Personal’ really means ‘Family Obligations’ and ‘Professional’ really means ‘Work Obligations’. Huh. ‘Obligations’ was the topic of a discussion (well, rant I guess) that I had with my wife about lifestyle, career, and the ’stuff’ of modern life.

So my lists had become a kind of crutch just as described by Merlin as a kind of procrastinating auto-pilot destination that we can go to when we have ‘fear of doing’ (or the other dozens of fears we might have), instead of ACTUALLY DOING what was important.

I knew then that what was wrong with my lists was that they were externally focused. They were oriented to satisfy others, to ensure I met my obligations like a good little drone. I gave inadequate weight to my own wants and needs, not giving myself permission to do what I must to be creative. To be different than I am. To allow my inner vision of what life could be manifest itself as ACTIONS.

Ok, so that was kinda deep. Well for me, anyway. Not that I’m shallow; I just tend to stay at the near end of the pool in most of my interpersonal interactions. Back to the story….

At this point I posted a question to twitter:

Fill in #3: Personal, Professional and ___ ? A: It depends on how you define #1 and #2. Hint: It’s a huge miss in pop culture.

And got back the PERFECT answer from a new follower, @mattjamestaylor:

@afterexposure passionate? That certainly is missing a lot today and it starts with ‘P’.

It’s a perfect fit, because what’s missing in my lists are my passions. Like photography. Not that I don’t have a zillion items in a dozen lists about photography, but they are all related to the launch of the business side of photography – not about ACTUALLY being creative.

And I think if you do some searches of your own you’ll find that ‘Personal and Professional’ are often the ONLY TWO categories ever discussed, offered, implemented, or expected to exist in the pop-psych-webs of self-help and productivity books, articles, software, and the rest of the meta-tweetin’-blogotubes.

So what happens if we have Passions, Personal, and Professional? That’s kinda tidy, right? Passions are for YOU, Personal items are for your non-workplace relationships and activities, and Professional is for that super-serious “Don’t laugh cuz’ this is bidness and it’s serious” (to mangle a quote from Tom Peters).

Except maybe more categories isn’t what I needed. What if I needed fewer? What if I only really need one?

What if your Profession is your Passion? What if those around you also feed, nurture, and support you, and your Personal life is less distinguished from your Professional life?

What if by being actually concerned how well you deliver service to your customers, and took delight in helping them by doing what you really like to do and are passionate about – wouldn’t that be a harmonious way to live? To do what you enjoy, with people that value you and your creativity? Wouldn’t that be a magical state above just competently managing to-do lists?

And what if that was your brand identity? What if you were bold enough to be your brand, because you were the best example of what your brand-ideal was?

What if that were me?

What’s weird is applying this technique to shooting with a ‘real’ camera, and getting wildly different results than I’m used to; and framing shots in ways that I’d never had thought of as ‘proper’ before.

It feels good.

Granville Island, Vancouver

I was in Toronto for SecTor, a conference that’s somewhere between Blackhat, DefCon, and something more mainstream like RSA, after which I was in Vancouver for a few days of R&R, shopping, and of course, some shooting.

Actually, I had planned on doing a lot more shooting than I did. My preparations were a bit rushed, and I wasn’t really able to put together a shot list for the trip. It seems that writing, at least beyond the style of this blog, and my more to-the-point stuff I do at work (usually email) isn’t my strong suit.  Ah well; both are beautiful cities and offer a lot photographically, so I wasn’t too worried.

I sat down today to go through some of the digital images and found this single image jumping out of the stack at me:

Vancouver at sunset, from the hotel. Pentax K20D, 50mm f/1.2 @ f/2.8, ISO 1600, 1/20 sec

The shot took a bit to develop; I’ve boosted the Vibrance in Lightroom to bring out the blue in the sky, as well as some light noise reduction with Wavelet Denoise … and to get the buildings to look straight(er) I did a keystone distortion adjustment in the GIMP as well.

After I was done editing the image a few things struck me.

First, I’ve always wanted to do this shot of Calgary, because I often see the city at dawn/dusk; although given the local topography it’s never quite this dramatic (downtown Calgary sits quite low compared to its surroundings).

Second, this is similar to a dawn shot I wanted of Toronto, but couldn’t get an early enough ferry.

And it reminded me of another of the shots I was planning on doing in Toronto, but didn’t due to poor weather;  one of those night cityscapes of the flow of traffic, like this one. The CN Tower would make the perfect vantage point!

My original plan was to add shot list notes into my iphone calendar so I could be at the right place at the right time for the shots I wanted. But I couldn’t describe the scenes. I had no way to say what I saw in my mind. I couldn’t say “high vantage point, city view, long exposure, with light trails”. I don’t know why. I can say those things when I see an image, but I couldn’t seem to turn an imagined image into words in the pre-trip rush.

So as the sun set I saw these images that were familiar to me; the fading sky reflected in skyscrapers that are often used in travel magazines, and I clicked away; here is a three image panorama that took a bit of work to stitch together… for some reason autostitch thought it should be a pyramid…

Tower. Pentax K20D, 50mm f/1.2 @ f/2.8, ISO 1600, 1/15 sec, 3 images

I had pictured images like this in my mind before the trip, but for some reason couldn’t write them down. What the heck is so hard about “skyscraper reflecting sunset” ?

The last image wasn’t one I had ever planned, and the color treatment, using the Split Toning tool to amp up the blue in the shadows, well it’s quite heavy-handed… but what the heck. One thing that shooting with the iPhone app “The Best Camera” has taught me is that vivid color and simple composition are often the best to communicate an image.

Sunset. Pentax K20D, 50mm f/1.2 @ f/2.8, ISO 1600, 1/180 sec

But what is that? I’ve taken shots like this before; but never described them simply. Is this “Silhouette against twighlight” ? Or “Geometric man against fluid nature” ? Bah!

Either works, but I guess I need to start reading something other than technical standards and linux howto’s if I’m going to be able to better put what I imagine into words. Without words to help me I’m not going to communicate or remember to get all the shots I want!

Incidentally, all 5 of the images here (the first one, the 3 that make up the tall pano of the skyscraper, and this last one) were shot within 51 seconds of each other.

October 10th: Pentax World Day #7 (a whole day of shooting and posting)

and

October 17th: Pentax World SyncSnap (a worldwide snapshot, but only at midnight)

You can read about both here on pentaxforums

Also…

October 17th is World Toy Camera Day!

From toycamera.com, and the flickr group.

October 19th: My Calgary 2009 Digital Photo Contest Submission Deadline

Details here, the winner will be announced at the Photo Expo (details below).

October 24th and 25th: 2009 Digital Photo Expo

I don’t know where I picked up on this, but for some reason I had this weekend as the date for the Digital Photo Expo here in Calgary.

Silly me.

It’s not until the October 24th / 25th weekend.

I suspect I added the wrong dates from either 2008, or from a very early announcement. In any case, check your calendar; last year it was a great place to troll through the sale bins from The Camera Store and fiddle with new gear from the big manufacturers.

With Canon skipping PMA in favour of CES, I wonder if they’ll do anything local? I know Pentax (US) does…

Parkerhouse, Digital (click for full sized image)

I got some time on Sunday night to develop the Lomography ISO 100 film after some leg work to figure out the correct time for my developer… it’s ‘Shanghai’, so for Xtol the Massive Dev Chart shows a 1+3 dilution and a 16 minute (!) soak. Here is the result, a little tweaked to match the slightly darker tone of the digital image, but uncropped:

Parkerhouse, 120 Film

Click for full size!

For different editable versions, click here for the source doc in OpenOffice format.

This chart is a kind of nomograph; you select your film speed on the left, follow the line through the current weather/lighting condition in the middle, and you’ll find out which aperture to set the Diana to on the right. I didn’t put the little icons from the Diana on this chart on purpose as they are bit misleading. Just remember that f/22 is the smallest aperture, and is the little sun icon; f/11 is the biggest aperture, and is the cloud icon.

On the right side is a 35mm turn advance guide. I have my Diana’s winder knob marked off in ‘hours’, or 12 spaced tick marks, so this is the number of ‘hours’ per frame that you should turn the knob. So a ‘12′ means one full turn. The X at the start is to load some film before shooting the first frame, and the bold ‘10′ is where a roll of 24 exp might run out… same deal with the last ‘!’… you may or may not get this frame, depending on how accurately you’ve been winding.

So where did all this goodness come from? Not me! I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, here folks. Here is where I pulled the information from:

With very little digging I found a chart at Indian Hill imageworks that gives a great summary of exposure times.

But it was a little ‘big’. I tried printing it small, and hacking off the bits I don’t use, but still wasn’t happy.

I wasn’t really sure about the EV descriptions, either. So another 2 seconds of Google and Wikipedia had this to say about Exposure Values.

So now I could use more meaningful descriptions (at least to me), and I could use only the ISO values that I was shooting at to create my own chart.

I also wanted to put something on the back of the chart. Since I sometimes shoot with 35mm film loaded, why not a film advance guide that gives the number of turns per frame? With 35mm loaded there little red window is taped over, so you do have to guess a bit.

I started with this chart over at Photon Detector… but again… wanted something smaller. I also confirmed the number of turns by both putting film in the camera with the back off and counting as I advanced, and of course by shooting some film and checking the results. Depending on what you are using as a take-up spool, and if you use any masks, you might want to change these numbers.

Now, time to get out there and do some shooting!