My Canon sx230

 Over the holiday season I acquired a canon powershot sx230, this nifty little camera has my favorite manual features like my 50D which is why instead of a horrible look of dismay I actually enjoy the small camera. For the people who don't know about it it has a 14x optical zoom from the 28mm lens. It also goes to ISO 3200 with an optical image stabilizer. It also has 1080p video all in one compact little body. This thing is great for taking out on the streets with out lugging my huge 50d around and the quality is stellar. The two images I brought along with this entry are taken from that camera.  Honestly I am impressed, the only thing I wish it did that it doesn't is high speed synch with it's flash but that shouldn't be expected out side of an external flash unit!

The camera also has a toy camera feature and a couple of other neat things on it that I will also make posts about examining them a bit further. The only huge downside is if I want to grab that underwater case that canon makes for it. Since that case is priced around 300 USD it might be quite some time before I take a camera underwater with me.  I might grab the case in the summer though if  the money and weather let me swim in the ocean.

Academy of Sciences

Well I went to the Academy of Sciences for the first time in Golden Gate Park and overall it was an enchanting experience. From the normal sciency stuff that I got to see and learn from the center I really enjoyed the aquarium. I am not sure why but they are always my favorite parts of zoo's and anything that has one really. There are a lot more images that might be posted in the near future but this was my little adventure on Christmas Eve. I have a couple of other things I need to post on the blog soon.

I have a couple of editing tutorials I need to finish. One that is very close to an Ansel Adams like contrast. The other is still the infrared tutorial, I did lose some of the images for my conversions but I might make some more of them. Anyways, Have a happy holiday season!

Photography Final

Well after a long week of printing, work, and league of legends, I have finally gotten to the press mounting part of my final. The photos are from the work in progress of what my final looks like. They were taken on my iPhone 4s, which I was kind of thinking about posting more images from my iPhone since it is basically a point and shoot camera. It all depends I guess on what images I take. It's been a hell of a week though and life with out a car kinda sucks for getting in cut may board around.

Well I present this final tomorrow and it took me a while to do all my mounting. For future reference it is easier to have the board that I mount on be about 1x1 inches smaller than the image. It helps for finals but not final products. Hopefully it gets a stellar grade but there are 3 images that didn't print as well as I hoped. Between all the junk going on in my life right now I am slowly becoming mentally drained as I begin to play more games now. Anyway I have almost kept this blog for a year now and wow. How a year has passed. I am still going to be posting and hopefully next year will be better and show even more improvements. I do want to go to some comedy clubs on the regular soon and start taking photos at them. Which would be pretty fun.

Getting Vortographic Part IV

    So I went to Haight to do the next part of my Vorographs and this is what has become of it. I have been getting a lot better with my current optic that I made to make these vortographs. I feel like I am getting more graphic in my design of these. In my first post, I just started to explore my options and range with the optic and I slowly began to understand the entire breadth of what the optic I made could do.

I have gotten a lot of comments about the optic while shooting, most people saying that is a freaky lens. Some wondering what it is doing, others just doing weird stares. I don't blame them for wondering but for something that cost me 2 dollars and a can of Pringles it is possibly the cheapest and most fun I have had with an optic I have ever bought for my camera.

Soon I will be making some more, with higher quality builds and showing them off but for now my prototype is doing a swell job. I am proud of it.

Strolling Through the City

So recently I went on a stroll with Mahkayla, Brianna and her new pup Huey. I did these while working on my other series of vortographs which is still in progress of being completed. Progress of being completed of course go along with my final grade, and not with my whole process of making vortographs. I do want to try out making a new style of optic for the vorotgraphs in the near future, but right now I need to stick with the formula I have now and carry on like a boss. Hopefully I will be able to have some pretty stellar finished optics by the time I am done with this vortograph series.

Since I am going to continue making the vortographs I figured I might as well draw up plans and get a finished final blueprint for them. I have a couple of ideas on how to draw them up since I took some engineering classes back in highschool but most of my plans look like a scribbles of a mad man. It is kind of entertaining to make them out. I don't want to post them online unfortunately but if everything goes well there is a possibility something might pop up for the first tool I used in the future.

Not that I am trying to hide how I make my images from my readers, I just would like to keep my test items a bit secluded. If everyone knows how to make them, then they won't be as magical and surreal. Sure the images look like they could be double, triple, or quad exposures but that is part of the fun.

32nd Annual College and Highschool Photo Contest

 So this is my third time going into the Photographer Forum's photography contest. Hopefully all my work in vortographs will help me reach a position other than finalist this time. Time will tell though, I am looking forward to it.

My last blog post about the contest gained a lot of attention with little input on opinions to the images. I am curious on what everyone likes and dislikes about my photos and I encourage my readers to put out their own input as viewers of my work. I would love to hear opinions about how everything has been done, positive or otherwise.

I hope one of these will be a winning entry this time in the contest though! Wish me luck!

ETD BlackOUT

 So last night was the first time I went to a San Francisco rave/club event and the lucky event was ETD Blackout. All of my images are posted on Plurlife. I did want to show three of some of my favorite images from the night and I did get to talk to a lot of neat people. I met Ross.fm who is had a killer set and Mars again. The last time I talked to him was at Mary X-Mas in July back in Phoenix.  Overall it was a pretty awesome night.

I did walk to the venue which was pretty awesome. It was about a mile walk in the rain to get to the venue and when leaving I was in the Muni underground. The Muni underground always is really creepy at night with the lack of people and all the windy tunnels. It always reminds me of monster movies or some kind of zombie attack.

Anyway ETD Blackout was a raging good time.

Vortographs the Third

     Well I sort of lied to you guys, my faithful readers. This entry will also be about my exploration in Vortographs. I am beginning to really love shooting like this and all of the editing you will see on the blog has been done in camera raw so nothing crazy. The infrared tutorial will happen this month. Probably this weekend but the next few entries will be on Vorotgraphs.


     Now some of you might wonder who invented the Vortograph? Well that is Alvin Langdon Coburn he did the series for about a year and some tried to replicate his style and his equipment used to make the images. Now I have an item I used that has a similar effect, but it isn't the same. It isn't suppose to be the same though, it is suppose to give me the abstracted qualities, but that is it. It does just that, and I am thankful when I took the leap into doing this project everything has been running smoothly with it.

   That being said I have tons of these images now. Between school and work I don't have a lot of time to study it a lot then work on it in bursts like I used to study things so now my study on Vortographs will hopefully extend into years. I would love to surpass Alvin Coburn in understanding how they work and in getting new and more exciting images from my riggings.

   All the images from my second post about Vortographs onwards are stuff I am working into a photoset and hopefully will be on another website that will be linked to after it is finished. It is going to be about abstracted details of San Francisco. The title is still in progress but it is going to focus on shape and color more than anything else. The Vortographs can alter the shapes and the reality around us. In a way it feels very cubist as a form of photography.



 

Vortographs Continued

The first attempted at seeing if the vortograph optic I made work is here. Now that I have a working optic I took it out on a walk from the Ferry building in San Francisco to my apartment a little over a mile or so away. So these images are for my final in PH100 none of these are finalized yet for the final product but they might be used in the project. These vortographs are a lot better than the first couple I did out front of my apartment window.

Now that should have been a given that the images would be better considering more effort had been put into making them but the first images were proof of concept that the optic worked!

So these are apart of a larger project called Details of the City. There will be a lot more images eventually because this is just the start of the entire project. This project will look at some of the details in a lot of the buildings and possibly streets of San Francisco. It all depends on how it plays out but there will be more things to come dealing with the project and some other projects.

Coming up will be some editing tutorials. Hopefully the next entry will be the Infrared tutorial.

Vortographs

Taking a quick break from building an infrared photoshop tutorial I realized that I needed to start getting my midterms done. So I breezed though my school work and then I remembered my assignment for PH100, I had to brainstorm and shoot some of my final. Well how can I make this interesting? I went through my simple idea list thinking this might be fun and then I realized I didn't want anything that could be easy, or simple, or semi fun to do.

My first idea was to go on and do light painting at tourist spots of San Francisco. The idea would have been great fun but I wanted to build a L.E.D. light stick and other strange things with RGB L.E.D. lights so that wasn't going to work out in my favor for my budget. Then I remembered about vortographs.

The images I shot have only been changed in tone, no other editing has been done to them. So these are a couple vortographs from outside my apartment window.

Infrared Photoshop Tutorials (Online)

Copyright Miles Nitz

So I decided to try my hand at doing some "infrared"-esk work on some older images of mine. I found a couple of tutorials online and most of them I don't think understood what infrared actually looked like. So I provided an image from my friend Miles from when he shot some infrared of my friend Jessica.  That story aside, I am probably going to do a good tutorial on how to provide a good infrared tutorial or technique.

Tutorial number 1 was the first online black and white tutorial that I found and I originally thought it worked pretty well even though there are a couple of things I could fix or make it a bit better. The normal black and white green channel is on the right while the edited green channel is on the left. So you can see the effect of the editing.

Tutorial number 2 started in color so I was wondering where they might go with this edit. Thankfully they popped it into black and white via the channel mixer. It matches up pretty well but it probably could be improved a bit more to make it look more (tonally) like the image Miles took. So in the near future be prepared you photoheads for a small tutorial I will make about doing an infrared process. It probably will be about as complicated as the layers on the right of Tutorial #2 but it won't be too horribly complicated.

Explorations

So last Friday night I decided to explore the city with my friend Brianna and we went on a long walk to the wharf and around some of the surrounding areas. So here are some of the weird little things we ran into. I wish there was a funny story that came a long with this but since we were walking around around 11:30 p.m. till about 2 a.m. not many of the crazy homeless people were out or any of the normal crazy people. We did run into a few drunks but beyond that nothing too crazy. After a long day of disappointment from some normal work prospects this walk really cheered me up and brought me back to being in my "A Game" if you will on my job hunt. I feel fresh again, confident and pretty excited that this time I will be getting a job and one I will be happy to have.

Some interesting facts about the images though, since Simon and Lewis from the Yogscast are in San Francisco's Bay Area for the Battlefield 3 lan party the first image I am pretty sure is the aircraft carrier that they are on.  We also past a protest going on still for Occupy San Francisco. Which I was surprised that they would be protesting to practically no one considering the time. Then I saw these wonderful bread animals that smelled wonderful and I wanted to eat them all. I also walked through Little Italy and North Beach and I want to visit both of the places more.

Sutro Baths

    So last Friday my class went to the Sutro Bath's for a small class field trip. Which the area was amazing to see in the morning in comparison to what I normally see on a Friday morning ( which is normally crazy people and street garbage). Anyway the area was beautiful, I got there around 8:30 with a couple of my classmates and we enjoyed the beauty of the area. Honestly it was a really cool place and the first time I was at the beach or at the ocean since I have been in the city. I am hoping to visit the ocean areas a bit more since I moved down here and never have had the luxury of having an ocean near me.


    It was pretty cool seeing the Cliffhouse and close by was a giant camera obscura. It wasn't open when I got there but it does open up at ten in the morning if you are in the area. Overall it was a nice trip and these are some of the photos I took while I was there. It was fun taking seascapes since I never really had the opportunity to shoot them before and I really want to do a modeling shoot up here at some point but as for now I am really enjoying exploring San Francisco.

     I am thinking I might start doing a weekly travel thing soon in San Francisco where I take public transit to different areas and explore around and taking photos for a couple of hours. I will have to see how my money situation pans out for that but I would love to make this a reality instead of an idea.
    
    Anyway for my next assignment in PH100 I need to do a reshoot of the secret assignment. I can shoot either both images or just one but I need two prints from the sutro baths and from the reshoot as well.

Secret Assignment

So my recent assignment for class was a themed around "secrets" so we wrote a bunch of stuff on paper and turned it in and there were a lot of things about not having money or being poor but a couple caught my attention that I had to do. The first being " I like to dress like a crow and yell at people at 4 am out of taxi cabs". I thought woah this is great but because of some class limitations I wouldn't be able to do a direct translation so I did dress like a crow and cut out some of the rest of it. The second secret that caught my attention was a person apparently wants to be a cannibal. Or at least try human flesh in the class, not sure if that one is a blatant lie or if it is true but the second image is a take on cannibalism. Hopefully my allusion in the image comes across well but I know it will make people think and I feel it is pretty smart in a couple of ways. I won't go into too much detail on it but if you want please leave a comment about what you think it is alluding to.

Slight Differences

1

Well I decided it would be a good time for a semi non school related post. One of these I might be using for homework in the near future but this post is mainly for the show of slight differences in two similar photos.

The photoshoot idea was dressing as a crow. Like I said before this might end up being used for a school assignment but I am unsure of it as my other shoots might be better and might be more appealing to the viewer.  So time will tell for that, but the model is my wonderful girlfriend Mahkayla and I think both images of her are stunning. I do like the second image more for various reasons but I am curious on what my readers think of the two shots. If you would like please tell me which image is your favorite and why.

2

Sensuality part 2

 The last post on September 13th was about Sensuality. This is the second post about the shoot because the third assignment in my class was a re-shoot on the images. I can't say that it is a good thing, or it wasn't an annoying thing because it was both annoying but helped me improve on a concept.
Conceptually I do believe I have improved a lot from the initial blog post and not only that but I also did two shoot for this one so I had a better idea of what I wanted for an end result. Two of the images I am using for my class but the others are just more examples
of what could have been prints.

Casual Portraits

So I had my studio lights up today to do a little bit of re-shooting for the Sensuality assignment which more images will appear from that soon. Right after that small amount of images that were taken for the re-shoot I decided to do a bit of casual portraits of her. That weren't of trying to chow down food as grossly as possibly.

Keeping with my class standards that I am going to try to keep from now on I will be using square format as I am quite fond of it. With this as a constant practice I hope to become quite comfortable with the square format. Anyway this is Mahkayla, she is my wonderful new friend in San Francisco, she has never appeared on the blog until now but you will end up seeing more of her in the future.

So this is just a general portrait study for the square format. Since it is digital it isn't considered medium format but I will be shooting more 120mm film once I get a way to scan the shots down here. Hopefully in the near future I will have the equipment.

Sensuality

Well my second assignment for PH100 is Sensuality. When I initially brainstormed what I could do for this I thought about my audience and how mentioning "Sensuality" and the word "Sensual"make most peoples minds, mine as well to something more sexual. Well I decided to play off that and the actual meaning with what goes a long with the senses. Sensual is something perceived by the senses  so a small amount of innuendo and the tastes and smells you get from the objects also pictured is somewhat of my small sensory overload. If budget wasn't an issue these would have more going on in them making the images themselves to also be visually overloaded but these are raw images, so no editing. The only alteration was the crop to square formatting.

On the subject of square formatting there will be a lot more of that coming from me in the near future. I really like putting everything in the square. It makes digital feel like more of a challege since my camera in RAW shoots 8x12's so cutting 4 inches off of an image might give me a new challenge.

Assignment 1 - PH 100

So here is my first assignment for PH100 at AAU. It was basically free range with no editing. It was just suppose to have proper exposure so I decided to play with my macro lens. I haven't had a lot of practice using this as a macro lens but I feel like I was able to get a good texture quality with it with a strong depth of field which is really nice. I am going to start uploading all my assignments on here along with my personal work and other things to catalog everything that I have been doing. This is just the only boring portion telling you guys what I am doing.

So the first image was of my new wonderful friend Mahkayla's jeans, the second image is of my foot. Yes, I know it is a nice fancy wrinkly foot but my feet are strong. The third is of my favorite pair of pants.  These are just a preview of my first assignment but there will be more and more interesting class work a head.

So I went to Japan Town this Sunday and

 This is what was there, apparently my friend Pandy told me about it so I was like why not it will be an adventure. So I learned that Japan town is a mile behind my new place, as well as I don't want to do anything remotely productive on Sundays.  So after my mile walk this is what I found.


 I didn't add any pictures of the people in the K-pop dancing because I didn't feel like it plus I kinda wanted to do a bit of street photography so here is my attempt at street photography.

 Some of this is shot from the hip, some of this is composed with quick composition but other than that the settings were pretty much kept the same with a minor change in shutter speeds.

I really regret not getting food from one of the food trucks but I needed to buy groceries later on in the day and I couldn't afford to spend more on one meal than on multiple meals. I did however get a free shirt from the event which was really cool considering I only popped in for about 20 minutes.