Blog.DMPhoto

100 Strangers

2011-03-14T22:16:00.002-04:00

The concept is fairly simple - take 100 portraits of people who A) are a complete stranger and B) have been told about the project and given consent. That's it, those are the only rules. Seems easy, right? I agree the concept is not complicated, the difficulty comes in approaching people you've never met and asking permission to not only take a picture, but to take a portrait. Few people are comfortable talking to strangers and even fewer are okay with doing something as intimate as taking a portrait. I belong to that group (unless I've been drinking) and as such, this challenge is not only going to stretch me as a photographer, but also as a person.

I consider the formal start date March 1st and set a personal goal of finishing by December 31st. This gives me 10 months to get 100 pictures, an average of 2-3 per week. This wouldn't be that hard if I went with the law of averages and just asked every random person I met. The problem is I'm not only dealing with my own self-consciousness, I'm also dealing with finding my method. I want everyone I approach to be for a specific reason and you have to do so in a manner in which isn't off-putting or creepy. To take a true portrait, you have to make people feel comfortable and as such, you have to spend a decent amount of time observing to find those who seem open to it. Really it's about learning your subjects and turning what you learn into a great photo (all while stepping outside your comfort zone). I could list a bunch of reasons why I'm doing this, but the last sentence is the largest and most important.

Included below is the first and only picture I've taken for the project. I know I'm already behind the curve; I'm taking comfort in the fact that not only is the first is the hardest, but that it should get easier as time by. I probably won't clog this blog up with 100 pictures, so be sure to check out my Flickr stream or the project page on DirtyMartiniPhoto.com for on-going updates.

Ducati 848

2011-02-20T17:45:00.002-05:00

A recent acquisition afforded me an opportunity to try a few new techniques involving off-camera flash. Using the commander/slave combination is definitely a good way to get some great lighting, but it takes some practice to find the best location and still have the slave fire. For the most part I'm pleased with my first foray into this technique, even if I did have to take well over 200 pictures to get a handful I like. It's definitely something I look forward to trying more of in the future.

Melissa

2011-01-29T12:26:00.006-05:00

I shot this set nearly two years ago. I can't exactly say what took me so long to get them online, but it had something to do with taking a long series of baby steps towards the finished product. I think these photos are somewhat monumental for two reasons. First and foremost, it represents the first time someone close to me (namely my wife) has served as such a purposeful subject. To date, a lot of my work has been detached and calculated but this one feels different... at least to me. The second reason is because this set also represents a departure from the normal habits. Generally speaking, I want to process and post photos as soon as I shoot them so I can cross it off my to do list. I don't like things "hanging over my head" and tend to obsess over making sure they don't. As a symbol of me breaking free of those obsessive tendencies, I take pleasure in the fact it took me so long. The amusing thing about it is I still thoroughly enjoyed removing it from said list.

Birthday Party

2010-09-27T21:57:00.002-04:00

Hard to believe it's been 13 months since I've purposefully taken pictures of people. I am definitely a bit rusty, but it felt good to get behind the camera, really focus on my technique and think about the results while I was doing it.

That attitude wasn't present went I did all my shooting while on vacation in Europe, but I suppose that's how it should be. I want to work more in the portrait realm, so this was good practice and a welcome change from all the landscape and history pictures I've been editing.

I have to be honest and say using Nikon's 50 mm prime lens almost feels like cheating. You still have to know what you're doing with it, but I'm far from a professional and I think I get semi-pro results. I need to make better use the lens, hone in on a style and polish my craft.

Crank Monkey

2010-06-28T21:57:00.006-04:00

Six months after getting my D90, I finally managed to get out and take some pictures. The pictures themselves are less than spectacular and it's clear to me that shooting very little over the last two years has really impacted what I produce. I definitely feel out of practice and at times it seems like I'm starting over from scratch. I know the technical aspects of everything, but I just can't seem to regain the artistic edge.

The good news is the D90 has already surpassed my expectations. It's very quick (so much so it caught me off guard), the metering is smart and the screen is sharp and beautiful. I hope to really make it earn its keep in the very near future.

Photo Contest

2010-05-08T17:08:00.002-04:00

Welcome back. It's been awhile, hasn't it? A lot has happened in the last six months, hard to believe when I look back on it. Some good, some bad but on the whole a giant leap forward. No real photography developments to speak of, but hopefully soon. In the meantime, I entered a wildlife photo content. Consider voting me for, will ya?

New Camera

2009-12-25T14:03:00.001-05:00

I just had shoulder surgery so not only will I not use this for awhile, but I also don't want to spend a lifetime typing a ton of stuff about it with one arm. My D70 was very good to me over the last 5 years, but I believe it's time for an upgrade. I'm looking forward to Spring.

Chicago

2009-11-28T16:38:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to working through my pictures from Chicago. I put them in three (four, technically) separate galleries based on topic. I can't say I'm all that impressed with what I have, but I admittedly have a serious lack of creative juice these days. Grad school is over two weeks from today, then holidays with the family and shoulder surgery. I wanted to get out and shoot before surgery, but I realized I would be forcing it and you really can't force these things. I really have no idea when I'll be well enough to shoot; I have a feeling I'll be down for the better part of the winter. Here's to hoping for a fruitful spring.

Happy holidays everyone.

Gold Cup

2009-11-08T11:21:00.001-05:00

It's been awhile, hasn't it? Life has kept me pretty busy these days, but I do manage to sneak out every once in awhile. A few Saturdays ago, the coldest and wettest this fall, we visited The Plains to check out the Gold Cup. The weather was pretty miserable, so I didn't that take many pictures, but decided to share the ones I did. I'll get some proper photos up here at some point, but for now you'll have to make due with the likes of these.

Longwood Gardens

2009-09-23T21:30:00.004-04:00

The companion pictures for the Longwood Gardens movie are finally online. All these pictures were shot with my Canon P&S and I'm pretty happy with the result. I'm going to have a helluva time convincing myself to carry around my dSLR from now on.

2010 Cup Calendar

2009-09-13T21:00:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago, we had our shoot for 2010 944 Cup Calendar. I'm pleased to say the calendar is now on sale and I've uploaded my share of the photos. I wasn't in charge of the setup, including booking the models, this time and that was an unusual experience. A control freak, it felt weird knowing next to nothing until about an hour before the shoot... including where we were going to shoot racecars to avoid the rain. We squatted in a really cool building and managed to get some pretty good shots. Some of the better shots actually belong to a buddy of mine, but overall I'm happy with the results.

Longwood Gardens Movie

2009-09-08T20:15:00.005-04:00

Last weekend, I took the opportunity to delve into the world of artistic videography. I've liked making vacation videos, I now have a camera that shoots HD and I think I take decent pictures... so surely I could make a good artsy video, right? Well, let's just say I need some practice. I was going for a "movie slideshow" and while I accomplished that, I'm not sure it really pulls anything else off. It's somewhat disjointed, the camera is shakey and it does not emote much of anything. Ah well.

Vimeo doesn't allow HD embedding on free accounts so click through if you want to see it in HD.

Dogfish Head Brewery

2009-08-26T21:30:00.003-04:00

The photoshoot went relatively well, I think... but it's gonna take awhile to get through all the picture.
In the meantime, enjoy these pictures from our visit to the Dogfish Head Brewery.

The Dunes

2009-08-19T19:30:00.001-04:00

Amongst all the hullabaloo going on 'round these parts, I managed to get away for a week to rest and relax. I must have taken the R&R part to heart because despite taking my dSLR and new P&S, I only took a few dozen pictures. As most were of family, remarkably few were things I'd consider adding to my portfolio. It was actually really nice to be free of everything during the week so I only have five pictures to share with you.

Big calendar shoot coming up this weekend. While it'll be nice to get behind the camera in earnest, these sort of things are always a nightmare to coordinate. All I really ask is that it not be oppressively hot and that we get enough pictures to make a decent calendar.

Canon PowerShot SX200IS

2009-07-21T12:00:00.002-04:00

Finding myself with a bit of bonus money, I recently purchased a new point and shoot camera. My old one is outdated (~6 years) and I don't always want to whip out my dSLR, so I figured it was time. After doing some research, I opted for the recently released Canon PowerShot SX200IS. Although a bit more than I wanted to spend, it seemed to be the right option for me given its various offerings. I'll probably post a review after I use it for awhile; in the meantime, here are the reasons I picked it over some of the smaller models.

Canon. It's no secret I prefer Nikon for SLR, so this might come as a contradiction. Having done enough research to recommend cameras for others and actually using a bunch of Canon P&S myself, I can comfortable say they make the best ones.

Zoom. What can I say, I'm a zoom snob. I feel incredibly restricted by 3x and even 5x is a bit short for my taste (I use an 18-200mm [11x] on my dSLR ) so I was immediately attracted to the 12x (28-336mm) this model offers. The camera is not a "super-compact" as a result of all that glass, but with a 3" LCD to make up for it, I'm okay with that.

HD Video. I've really gotten into the whole making thing and had been thinking about upgrading my dSLR to compensate. With a pocket camera that shoots 720p, video is no longer a requirement when I do eventually upgrade.

Modes. Again, it might be the photography snob in me but I don't think I ever want a camera that doesn't have aperature and shutter priority modes. My 6 y/o P&S was originally purchased because it has them (and I wanted to learn about them) so anything without would be a downgrade.

Random Goodies. Blink detection, face detection self-timer, red-eye correction, face tracking and pop-up flash... I'll let you figure out what all those things do/mean.

DirtyMartiniPhoto.com 2.0

2009-07-07T11:00:00.001-04:00

Spurred by some new code and friendly competition, I did a somewhat major redesign of my Dirty Martini Photography website. Aside from the obvious changes you'll notice, there are many subtle changes that you'll probably never realize. I thought about listing them all out, but I suppose pulling back the curtain kinda ruins it.

It's changed enough that I wish I'd taken a screen shot of it before to compare to what it is now. Google's cache updated before I could grab it and the Way Back Machine doesn't have what I'm looking for so I guess we'll have to rely on your memory. I think the new version is much less amateur looking... something I've wanted for a long time. I'll probably be tweaking stuff here and there to fine tune but overall I'm very happy with the result.

Inner Harbor Pictures

2009-05-25T10:00:00.001-04:00

Since we haven't taken a vacation day in nine months, we used the long weekend as an opportunity to get away for a day. Budgets being what they are, I decided it would be a good time to see Baltimore's Inner Harbor. At an hour away from DC and with quite a bit to see, it's not a bad way to get out of town. We were there for what amounted to an afternoon, so I ended up taking far fewer pictures than I usually do. There were only a handful of keepers but even fewer that I really like. I tend to be my harshest critic so I'm curious which other people like. It's always the ones I'm not a fan of and these probably won't be any different.

Pictures from DC

2009-04-06T08:43:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to working through the DC Firefighters set from our walk around DC a few weeks ago. In the process of posting them here, I realized that the DC in B&W set never made it here either. These aren't really anything special, but since I'm not traveling and don't really have time to do shoots with people, it'll have to do for now.

Photoshoot - Jessa of Austin

2009-01-13T09:40:00.000-05:00

I follow a bunch of career photographers on Flickr and when you do it long enough, you eventually start to notice some of the same models appearing over and over. They aren't professionals in the sense that they are in Elle magazine, but they're pretty well known in the pro-am market. Jessa is one such model, so when she was in the area six weeks ago, I didn't pass up the opportunity to collaborate. It was interesting to work with someone who has so much experience; everything comes more naturally. What you can't tell from the pictures is we were pretty much outside and it couldn't have been more than 38°. Brr.

Pictures from California

2008-08-11T08:03:00.000-04:00

I finally got my California pictures added to my portfolio. I set Hawaii as a soft deadline for myself because I knew I'd be taking a metric ass-ton more in Hawaii. As my Tylenol PM forced sleep approaches (4 am wake-up for 6 am flight), I can now say I came in under the wire. I'm future posting though, so by the time you read this, I'll be several days removed from the continental United States. I want to post thumbnail links but I just don't have the energy, after everything I accomplished today, so you're getting text links. Enjoy!

MotoGP & Laguna Seca

San Francisco & Santa Cruz

Japanese Garden in San Jose

Redwoods Trees

Alcatraz Island

I have favorite pictures in all the sets but I think Alcatraz is my overall favorite set. I think I've really ratcheted up my game lately so I'm curious what people think. Take a peek and let me know what your favorites are. There are barely more than 50 total so it shouldn't take you that long. Thanks!

944 Cup Calendar Shoot

2008-07-27T21:18:00.000-04:00

You were expecting more pictures or posts from our California trip, weren't you? Well, it's a bit early to be gathering my thoughts and our pictures so instead lets take a trip back a month... or two. I was asked by the 944 Cup National Director (aka my dad) to set up a photo shoot for the 2009 calendar. After it was all said and done, we had 4 models booked for 3 hours and planned to shoot them with 12-15 different cars using 3 different photographers. Since I was also racing that day, I wanted to be somewhat hands off about the whole thing but you know how that goes. I had a vision in my head of the final product and without my involvement, it just wouldn't have happened. The end result was me taking more pictures than I wanted but having a nice collection to add to my portfolio. I finally got them online and am able to share. I think I'm going to have 5 (yes, 5) new albums from our trip so stay tuned for those.

Program: Lightroom

2008-06-10T16:25:00.000-04:00

Every once in awhile, a program/product comes along that makes you think "God, why haven't they thought of this sooner?" Other programs can do similar things, more or less, but these programs wrap it all up with a big fat bow on it. I'm thinking Netvibes, Google Sync, HijackThis, UltraMon and SUPER here... if you're familiar with them. I've only used Lightroom for a week and can already say it's one of those programs.

Rather than jump into all the reasons why I'm Lightroom's bitch, let's first talk a little bit about the RAW format. To summarize, RAW is basically the raw data captured by the image sensor of your camera without any processing of the image by the camera's brain. This is great if you want to work through all your pictures and post-process them on your computer or just use some program to convert them to usable images like JPG. This isn't so great if you don't have a good way to manage and process them; Photoshop not being an example of one IMO.

Before Lightroom, I decided I wanted to get everything right in the camera and do nothing after the fact. As I started doing more and more "photography work" it became apparent this was an unrealistic expectation and started processing images. I'd tweak the white balance here, adjust the exposure there, increase the saturation or just convert to he whole damn thing to black and white. Photographers generally keep/work on ~10% of what they shoot so while I wasn't adjusting every photo, we were still talking dozens of pictures that got "cleaned up" manually.

Enter Lightroom, the tool designed by Adobe with the direction of professional photographers. I'm going to blather on about all the cool features in a minute but before that take some time to "View the Feature Tour" on Adobe's Lightroom page I linked above. Go ahead, do it now, I'll wait until you come back... and make sure you watch at least through the 'Develop' section (2nd sub-clip). Pretty cool, right? Here's a list of the reasons why I love it.

Manage - If you're not using Adobe Bridge, which I wasn't, managing photos is a complete nightmare. If you take 300 photos and want to "keep" 30 of those, you're copying/deleting or using Save As to preserve your originals. Lightroom's ability to manage entire collections within the program, flag photos as "keepers" and filter on any number of conditions means you get only the photos you want in your face.
Non-destructive editing - It saves all your changes in a small config file separate from the original. When you open the picture, it applies all your changes instantaneously but the original remains untouched. No saving copies with your changes to preserve original files.
Presets - Photoshop has plugins that will allow you to easily do various things like sepia tone but Lightroom does it out of the box. What's more, Lightroom allows you to easily save your actions as a preset that can be automatically applied upon original import of a file.
Sliders - Who doesn't love slider adjustments? All the cool stuff isn't buried three menus deep with some obscure name. Instead, they have clear and concise labels and out in the open, laid out in a way that pretty much anyone can understand.
Cropping - The auto-cropping rotation is simply amazing. If you want to tweak a photo a few degrees in other programs, you're doing it by entering a numerical value, using a guide to check how it lines up and then cropping as necessary. In Lightroom, you move the little slider from side to side and it automatically overlays guides and squared cropping boundaries. Not only that, but you can undo cropping at any time, even after you do other things to the photo.
Export - Not only can you export "what you see is what you get" to a JPG but there also a plethora of plugins that allow you to export to a bevy of photo sharing sites. I've used the one for Smugmug, since that's where my portfolio is hosted, and can say it works pretty seamlessly.

So that's it, I can't recommend it enough. I used it for the last two galleries I posted and think it's changed the way I see post-processing. Let me know if you're having trouble finding a place to purchase it... I can recommend some good retailers. ;-)

Udvar-Hazy

2008-05-30T20:13:00.000-04:00

I don't think anyone needs reviews of Harpers Ferry or the Udvar-Hazy Center so I'll just link you to my galleries. These mark my first time (yes, first) shooting in RAW and with the help of Lightroom, I've been convinced to move to the format exclusively. I just got Lightroom and can already say the program is absolutely spectacular. It doesn't require that you shoot in RAW, as you can just as easily use JPG input, but I can't see why you wouldn't if you have the option. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's good enough to deserve its own post. Suffice to say, I'll probably be buying another memory card to support the larger RAW file sizes on longer vacations/shoots. I'd also like to mention the 18-200mm VR performed very well inside the Udvar-Hazy without flash or tripod. I tossed a bunch of pics out but it's amazing I got what I did if the Wii Fit is at all accurate measuring my balance.

Photos for Anytime Fitness

2008-05-08T20:25:00.002-04:00

A guy I used to work with asked me to do some promotional work for his gym. Never one to turn down an opportunity to shoot, regardless of subject, I agreed. I've taken the last few days to post-process and I'm honest when I say I'm not really that happy with the results. I managed to scrape together a dozen of two of the trainers to put into my portfolio... but these are admittedly not my best work.

There was a time constraint because of other happenings so as it turns out, I had just over two hours to shoot exteriors of the gym, group shots, headshots and bodyshots of ten people, a bunch of exercise-like shots and some outdoor activity stuff. I felt rushed and as a result, didn't really follow my normal routine of due diligence. To put things in perspective, I've had a shoot last 8 hours and result in 1200 pictures... for just two models! For these, the lighting was off in a lot of them, some of the pictures are not sharp and there's just a general feeling of blah when I look at them. I think you might feel the same way.

If they're not that good and I don't really like them, why am I sharing them? Well, I've always been one to show people the things I'm most proud of, probably in hopes of propping my ego. I'm selective about what I show and who I show it to because I don't really like not being the best at something (shocking, I know). Showing these is not only my way of saying I'm not always the great photographer I like to think I am, but also taking a step towards allowing myself to be vulnerable. Wow, that's deep. Is this what 30 does to you?

Japan Trip

2008-03-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

Everything is finally done.

Pictures on Dirty Martini Photography