My son Jorden (who you have seen many times if you read this blog regularly) is the goalie for the Santa Cruz High School Cardinals Lacrosse team.   He was also on the basketball team this year. Hes very active and works very hard to keep fit. When he does an activity, he puts 110% into it and I am very proud of him for that.

Like any proud father, I want to shoot his games so he has a records of the things hes done in his life.  Until recently, I had not ever been to a lacrosse game, let alone shot one. Truth be told, I had never even watched a Lacrosse game until he made the team. Lacrosse was explained to me as a game that is similar to hockey in the rules, and has all the action and hard hitting as football does without the head injuries. Shooting the first game was a big hit to the ego for me. Being legally blind, this sport was nearly impossible for me to shoot. With my vision, basketball was at times challenging. This games played with a tennis ball sized rubber ball that travels at what feels like a million miles an hour!  I had to come up with a technique to shoot the games and get some decent images. When I shoot planes, I have a family member on either side of me telling me the direction the planes are coming from so I have a chance to get a shot. Being on the Lacrosse field meant my regular technique was useless.

  The best thing about Jorden being in the goal is that I have a constant target to shoot for. I know at least where he will be. When the mass of bodies roll towards that side of the field I point and start shooting the person the others are converging on. It goes against every shred of being as a photographer to be a machine gun shooter, but in this case it seems to work pretty well. I put the camera on high speed shooting and I am shooting in jpg format instead of RAW. I get a decent range from my 70-200mm lens and the 7d.  It took a couple games to get the method down, and I get a lot more unusable shots than good ones, but ones like these make it worth the effort.

Its a tough game to shoot for sure and I have learned a lot as I do from everything I do with the camera.

–EDIT–

This was Jorden’s last game of the season. In an exhibition quarter for the Junior Varsity he tore his ACL. We are waiting for an MRI results and hoping surgery is not on the horizon for him.

Each of the four departments are showcased, Radiologic Technology, Medical Assisting, Dental Hygiene and the RN Nursing program. Each team was a joy to work with and Carrie and I learned a lot about not only the programs offered at Cabrillo for those fields, but what it means to be registered in that course track. It was fantastic to see students with such pride and ownership over their programs.

From a shooting standpoint, we used a Canon 7d, with Novatron flash units and a series of bounce discs to illuminate the dark spots in the labs. The 600 watt flash pack was barely enough to light the larger rooms seen in the Radiologic Technology lab. All post processing was done in Lightroom and a custom black and white filter was used for the images to provide not only longevity for the look of the project in the final installation, but consistency in the imagery throughout.   Photoshop was used only for removing brand names from the equipment (as requested) and fixing small dings in  some of the equipment.

In this image, we are checking last minute placement options and getting ready to hang the final images in the lower lobby.  All of the images were done by Bay Photo http://bayphoto.com/ printed on aluminum matte finish. This was to cut down on glare in the atrium style lobby.  We used a mixture for 30 X 30 inch images 20 X 20 inch images and 12 X 12 inch images in the installation.

The lower lobby has four 30 X 30 prints and four 20 X 20 prints.

Here Carrie and the Department head Debora are going over final options for the upstairs lobby. The upper lobby which is part of the collaborative study area has two 30 X 30 inch prints and two 12 X 12 prints.

The lobby has several panes opposite the images which are colored yellow and orange. The combination of the yellow tinted walls with the warm colored glass panes really does a nice job warming up the black and white prints,  making them feel like part of the lobby.

Here are the final installation pictures. We really had a lot of fun doing this project and would like to thank Debora and Sandi for the opportunity to be involved in it. We learned a lot and look forward to our next big photo adenture!

Here are the remaining images from the Fall 2011 Studio Lighting class. You already saw one as your Christmas present, the cookies for Santa.  This images is a do-over of an image I did last year. I was happy with the one I did last year but I wanted to make it a bit more edgy. This is my Son Jorden, hes been working out a lot since the summer so doing a shirtless hard light shot seemed to work really well for me.

Here, hes standing a few feet in front of a large black piece of foam core. (how did I survive before I discovered foam core?) The strobes are positioned close on the left and right firing directly at him. I am at iso 160 f32 @ 1/250. The goal was to drop as much light off the background as possible while still lighting his face hard with the strobes.  A little desaturation and noise reduciton finishes the image out.

This next shots pretty simple compared to the last one. All I did here was setup some pieces of the hardwood floor (leftovers from putting in the new floor this summer.) With Jorden’s Shoes and water bottle.  Standard camera settings apply here I’m at iso 100, f5.6 @ 1/125. I set up 2 tripods with a bar between and using a super clamp I attached a single strobe with a medium softbox directly overhead.  I wanted a fairly soft light because I was trying to simulate the light form a gym which would be fairly far from the subject matter here and be casting pretty soft shadows. I used white foam core angled down a bit to try and soften the shadows under the ball and the water bottle.

The story behind this last image is one of stress and burning the candle at both ends. Gnerally I try and avoud fast food, but the wife and I were on the run to and from the SPE West conference at Cabrillo (which one of my images was shown at yay!) and on the way we stopped at McDonalds for a quick bite. While standing in line, I saw a picture similar to this advertising a Happy Meal. I decided to try and recreate the shot as part of my final.  This one is the shot that I am the most proud of believe it or not. iso 100, f11@ 1/125 using 2 strobes and a dizzying array of bounce cards, reflector discs and white foam core went into the creation of this shot. In retrospect I am going to start taking shots of the scene I setup to get this sort of shot, its just crazy sometimes the lengths you go through to get a seemingly simple shot right in the camera. Sure I could have just taken the shot and then fudged it in photoshop but where would the fun and challenge be in that?

As always thanks for listening to me I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year celebration. Coming very soon I will have a big reveal here of the big project the wife and I have been working on. Its all very exciting. Concurrently, with the big reveal will be a facelift of the Tahquechi.com site.

As always, thanks for all the great feedback and comments keep them coming I read each and every one.

Ted

Merry Christmas to all. I hope all had a great year, thank you for all the wonderful comments and suggestions throughout the year. I always take the time to read what you post. I wish you all the best and safe New Year!

Your Christmas present this year is a cookies for Santa shot I took for the final in my Studio Lighting class. I set up the Christmas tree, and used a 100mm macro lens set at f4 to throw the lights on the tree out of focus. The cookies are lit from below with white LED lights under the cotton “snow”. Its a 15 second exposure, and I painted light onto the cup and the cookies with an LED flashlight during the exposure time.  I hope you enjoy.

This weeks assignment was high and low key photos of the same subject. I decided not only to do the high and low key shots but do similar composition for both images. This is my Bearded Dragon Ginger. She was very tolerant of sitting on the set for the half hour it took to get both shots right. The goal in high key ts to get as much white information in the shot without overexposing the image. Make it as light as possible controlling your light. The key here is to have some part of the image exposed properly and I chose that as the focal point of the shot, the eye of the lizard. I lit from diagonal right and left above the subject and bounced in from the top to remove as many of the shadows as I could while still maintaining a proper exposure.

The low key image is done quite the same way, get as much dark information in your shot without underexposing the image. The part I chose as the properly exposed area is the throat scales, and the rim lighted nose area. I switched from a white background to a dark background and went from 2 strobes and a bounce disc to 1 strobe powered down all the way. I had to move the strobe in and out of the set to get the proper rim light and exposure. Both of these shots were taken with a Canon 7d and a 100mm macro.

So what did I learn? Most importantly I learned that when your shooting reptiles on your set that the more light the hotter they get and the more active they get, in retrospect I should have done the 1 light low key shot first rather than firing up all the lights and getting her all warm and active.

Here is the final shot and how it was done for photo class this week. Note, the setup shot was taken with my iphone so its not DSLR quality but you get the idea of how e setup the shots.

As you can see here, we have a couple sawhorses setup with a piece of glass between them, then a piece of acetate is draped over a C-Stand and over the glass. The subject is placed on the glass and its lit from below with a hot light or a strobe.

That is the basic setup, to which we added a strobe behind the C-Stand to light the background. Getting the light positioned directly behind the subject and directly in line with the camera is critical for good reflections and an evenly lit background. The double layer of acetate did a good job of diffusing the light coming from the strobe, but in the final shot we added a softbox to spread the light out even more.

Here is my final shot.  My original vision for this shot was to have a couple shot glasses next to each other and a bottle of Jack Daniels ready to be opened. The problems arose when you put transparent objects in the scene. The light that is going through the glass to the camera is transmitted and any solid subjects you put in the scene (like my bottle of Jack Daniels) offset that if they have labels or other solid areas that reflect light to the camera. It opens up all sorts of difficulty because your lighting setup changes drastically.  Anyway after fightign with the Jack Daniels bottle for an hour I decided to take it out of the scene and just put the shot glasses in there. This one was one of the first done with that simpliied method. The biggest challenge was getting the hoizon line to match up with the elipse of the lower shotglass. I did forget to mention that a small yellow gel was placed over the lower strobe.

Pretty neat illusion huh?

This year for my sons birthday I got them tickets to the Rockstar Uproar festival. They both love many of the bands that were playing which included Bullet for my Valentine, Seether and Three days Grace.  They were sad that the headliner could not attend but we were promised a makeup date in December. We had pretty awesome seats fourth row to the left side of the stage. All the bands rocked the house and I brought along my trusty Canon Powershot A640 to shoot the action. Its funny how much you appreciate a good DSLR when you have to use a point and shoot for any length of time. I feel like I can really get what I need out of my 7d, and while I know I can get great shots out of the A640 (it had full manual mode) I still miss the menu structure and the comfort of my good old DSLR. Here are a few of the best shots taken that day I hope you enjoy.

Last night the wife and I headed to Moneterey for a belated Anniversary celebration. We ate dinner on Cannery Row and afterward wandered along the pier. It was 75 degrees at 8 at night, very unusual for Monterey let alone this time of year. I of course had to bring the camera along and take this snap of a sailboat enjoying the still water at sunset. The white sail of the boat crossed between buildings where the sun was still coming through so I snapped this while the sail was lit by the setting sun and all the rest of the area was going dark. Sometimes your in the right place at the right time for sure.

I entered three images and my son Jarren entered one. I entered in three different categories, visual manipulation, portraits and photojournalism.  My son walked away with a first place in the junior photojournalism category for his awesome shot of a F/A 18 breaking the sound barrier. Its a truly awesome shot. He really did a  fantastic job of capturing the moment.  This shot was right on exposure wise, he asked me to sharpen a bit for printing but otherwise it was as shot.

This HDR shot of Moab Utah was my first place winner, I entered it in the visual manipulation category. Here is the original image taken during the golden hour and badly overexposed.  I used this shot in camera raw and made three separate exposures then combined in photomatix.  I printed the final image on Metallic paper to bring out the highlights in the rocks. It amazing that the HDR process can take a blah shot and make it a winner shot.