Back from Beijing, Gabriel Dance of nyt.com puts the viewer there during Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican National Convention. I was struck by this pano in that I can’t find a single stitching error anywhere, which is impressive given the situation and subject matter.
I asked Gabriel about the shoot and his gear. Here’s his response
In a never-ending quest for the illusive (SIC) “different” photo Reuters set up remote-controlled cameras at Sen. Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech in Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver.At any major event we need to provide our clients with what we call “the bread and butter” photos – the pictures that tell the story in a very straightforward way and will end up in history books someday. But in addition to that what we really want to shoot are just very cool images – pictures that grab you by the throat and scream at you in the face or sometimes more subtle images you look at for awhile before you “get it.”
Check it out here.
One of the most common questions that have been posed by people on this blog is: Do you delete your images in camera and do you delete images on your server or in your Aperture Library?
I think it’s a very important question, and my answer for the most part is: No – I don’t.
Why? Well here it is:
Check it out here.
In Beijing, with a total of 6 cameras, I shot: 28,444 files for a total of a whopping 480 Gigabytes of Images! That’s INSANE! Even I am shocked.
Check it out here.
This gentleman likes to watch videos while he drives at night. He places his iPhone on his car’s dashboard and watches the reflection on the windshield.
Check it out here.
I am probably not the only one who has noticed Bradford Fuller’s beautifully lit bird photos in the Strobist pool. His artful mix of flash and ambient against a 2-D background gives the photos a lyrical feel. And the red stamps added in post at the bottom make them seem as if they came from faraway lands.
Check it out here.
To bring you the stunning choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, Reuters photographers and photo editors do a complex dance of their own — and then a brutal Darwinian whittling down to select just the best and most iconic images to send to subscribers.The team shot a staggering 18,000 frames during the four hours of the ceremony. Only about 850 shots made it to the “wire” — our file of photos to customers. That’s just five percent. Less than a 10th of those were selected for our web slideshow and a typical newspaper subscriber might only print one two or three shots from the selection.
Check it out here.
Over the years, novelist Neal Stephenson (wiki), has had at least a couple different pages where he’s explained why he’s chosen to limit the access he provides via email, interviews, and phone calls. It appears to be something he’s given a lot of thought to.
Check it out here.
Need to resize images for your Blog every day? Need to send 10,000 images out to a client at a certain size – and then a second batch in a different size and format? If you’re like me – you hate doing repetitive tasks on a computer – after all that’s why you bought the darn thing thing for in the first place! (Oh – and did I mention you didn’t need to buy anything to get this done…)
Check it out here.
Late last year a video started to circulate the internet showing the Mercedes-McLaren SLR in an internet film. Not surprising, but the amazing aspect of this 10-minute movie was that a large part of it was shot using still cameras – EOS-1D Mark II N and EOS-1D Mark III bodies. David Newton met up with Roman Kuhn, the man behind the idea, to find out where it came from and what was involved in the shoot.
Check it out here.
The choice to use a darkroom instead of printing digitally probably made things harder on myself. Instead of printing in the comfort of my own home I had to live out of my car for a week while spending my daylight hours immersed in pitch black. Also, I hadn’t much experience in a color darkroom. Up until last week I’d spent all of about 3 hours printing color. But I got up to speed quickly, and at the end of the week I was glad I’d chosen to make C-prints. The richness and separation of the colors was really spectacular. I think it would be very difficult to get similar prints from an ink jet printer.
Check it out here.
The better way? Most D-SLRs in the menu setting let you take the autofocus away from the shutter release and move it to the little button on the top-back of the camera to the right of the viewfinder window.
This is my preferred technique, and its value is revealed if you tend to shoot things that move as opposed to still subjects like landscapes.I can now keep the focus mode on continuous-tracking and have the best of both worlds.
Check it out here.
This is video from Myung Chun teaching a portable lighting class using small strobes at Sports Shooter Academy IV, held April 2007 in Southern California. Chun is a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times.
Check it out here.
Video featuring terrific advice from This American Life’s Ira Glass on having the tenacity to get better at the creative work you’re passionate about — even through the times when you know what you’re making isn’t as good as you’d like.
Check it out here.
Probably the question that I get asked more than any other is about my photography workflow. I actually feel like my photography workflow is pretty simple so I thought I’d write up a brief post documenting my process all the way from photo capture to photo publishing.
Check it out here.
Archiving photos is a tedious, time-consuming experience and the transition from storing negatives to digital files on CD, DVD, or hard drives hasn’t really improved matters all that much. On the other hand, losing images because they weren’t archived properly is even worse and the potential for losing large numbers of images is arguably even greater with digital.
Many friends and colleagues ask me how I archive my photos and what I recommend as a backup solution, so I wrote this post to illustrate the strategy I use:
Check it out here.
In the video I told Fred that I shoot between 100 and 500 photographs on an average day. I’m a big believer in shooting every day. One of my goals is to shoot every single day for the rest of my life. On days where I don’t feel like shooting I will still force myself to shoot, even if it’s only for five minutes on that particular day. I think the discipline is good.
Check it out here.
Not everyone gets a second chance with a team of Navy Seals. But, for photographer Morgan Silk, inspiration is hard to shake. It wasn’t enough that he’d shot the special forces as they reenacted a hostage rescue scene. Silk wanted to get down from the director’s platform, away from the commercial constraints and create his own intense, individual portraits.
Check it out here.
Early on in my career I was working as an assistant for Horace Bristol (one of the original Life magazine staff photographers). Bristol and I hit it off right away and built a relationship that transcended more than just employer/employee. He became my friend and my mentor, a relationship that lasted until he died, about 10 years later.
One of the things he bestowed upon me, several times during our friendship was the importance of organizing your work, sooner rather than later. One day he pulled open one of the dozen or so drawers in a wooden dresser he kept in his house. Inside were several rows of 2 1/4 negs, stacked one layer deep, filling the drawer. This was just one drawer of about 12 in the dresser, and there was yet another filled the same.
Check it out here.
With a cut-off time of 10am before the first race of the day, we set up five remote cameras under the inside rail of the track, and another on an observation post beyond the finish line with a high angle general view of the end of the race. Putting in place the gear – five EOS-1D Mark II cameras, an assortment of lenses from 16mm to 200mm, and their little mounting plates was a breeze, about 5 minutes in total, compared to the next step – getting them all to work!
Check it out here.