Danger’s Crew at CC

Danger Gill turned a year old about a month ago, so he and his crew met me at Carbon Canyon to recreate some photos we had done there when Becky was still pregnant. We didn’t recreate many, but a lot of the other shots turned out great. I love this family, and the chance to be there as they grow is one I cherish.

Without further ado, here’s a sampling of what we took. For those of you reading this at 22:00 Sunday, I’ll add more a little later.

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This is one I like to call “Who’s this lady think she is, trying to get my Cheerios?!?”

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Seeing Double (Part 1)

As part of becoming a better photographer, I’ve decided to start giving myself assignments. This first one can be called “twins” or “seeing double” or “the setup for these shoots is hard!” If you want to read more about this process, feel free to do so after the pics below. Oh, and I still need models for the remaining shots. Let me know if you want to participate!

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So notes on the project:

As I mentioned, I have decided to give myself projects in order to improve my skills. I chose this one because it requires work in some very discreet areas:

  • Setup and positioning
  • Photoshop, in particular layer masking and good selections
  • Concept (which I have not been very good at in the past)
  • Wardrobe
  • Working with a diverse group of models

The concept for this is to shoot multiple exposures of the same person so that it looks like they’re interacting with themselves.  This is not an original idea by any means, but because it did require sort of a “professional mindset,” I thought it was a good one to start with this summer. In all, I have about 15 shots planned, with the above 5 representing a small portion of those (I’ll post the rest when they’re shot). Once I have the full set up, I’ll explain more about the technical details of how I set these up in case anyone wants to try it for themselves!

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Jakie Goes to Hollywood

(For the record, please don’t call me “Jakie.” Hopefully you get the reference. Thank you. :) )

My friend Roger Chong works in the film/TV industry, and along with some friends who are in the same business, decided to make a short film called “Decoded.” The idea is that if it does well at film festivals, someone will give them money to make a long version. If any Hollywood producers are reading this, you should probably just fund them now. The movie is pretty much inevitable.

Roger wanted a set photographer to document the crew and to get still photos for the EPK and asked if I could help him out. Although I was nervous about my first such job, it was a ton of fun. Since the entire movie was shot in low light or night conditions, it was also one of my most challenging photo shoots to date.

Here are some of the pictures from the shoot, including cast and crew alike. If you’re into photography, stay tuned after the pictures for more on what I did and what gear I used to accomplish all of this.

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For those of you who stuck around, here’s some technical info on my process.

First off, I shot with 3 cameras. I used my Canond 40D, a Canon Rebel XTi, and a new Nikon Coolpix P90 I picked up for this shoot. Although I didn’t really want to do it, the two Canons were running at 1600 ISO pretty much the entire weekend. Even at such high ISOs I still struggled with the dark set Roger was using for mood. The 40D did pretty well at 1600, although a few of the pictures have pretty significant noise artifacts. The Rebel worked hard to get good shots, but it really had trouble at 1600. Most of the pictures here are from the 40D.

I brought the Nikon along for two reasons. First, it has a tiltable LCD screen that I could use for overhead, wide-angle shots. Second, it has a nearly silent shutter/mirror that I had planned on using when the mics were live to get up and close to the action. Since blimps (1, 2) are so limiting, I thought this would be a good choice. Turns out, I was wrong. The Nikon really struggled in conditions less than strong light. Surprisingly, even at ISO 400 noise artifacts were substantial, and going beyond that yielded pretty much unusable photos. In its defense the Nikon P90 is still a point and shoot, but even though it’s an “advanced” one, it’s definitely not ready for the big time. Daylight shoots, restaurants, and pics for your Facebook page are probably going to turn out fine.

As for lenses, I spent most of my time using a Canon 50mm f/1.4 prime, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L, and Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8.  Even though f/2.8 is pretty darn wide compared to most lenses, the cameras still struggled to get good exposure. And that was with 1600 ISO!! I spent almost the entire time using spot metering to look for tiny areas of brighter exposure.

The 50mm is a little soft at f/1.4, so I tried to stay away from being wide open if I could. Even so, I spent a good amount of time there in order to get a number of the shots. Ideally, I would have had the 50mm f/1.4 and another prime lens at like 100mm. I don’t know if Canon makes like a 1.4 or 1.8 at that range. I’ll have to look.

Finally, I switched my Canon 580 EX flash between the cameras as needed. I didn’t use it that much, as it mostly killed any artistic value of the shoot when I had it on camera. Having it off camera wasn’t really an option, as I never knew where the film camera would end up pointed.

Hopefully I get to do this again some time in the future. It was a lot of fun!

So that Google picks up the very talented people who worked on this film, here’s a search-friendly list for that purpose: Roger Chong, ,Matt Maxwell, Bryce Scherer, Michelle Luchess, Derick Green, Channing Ross, Kyle Harbour, Nic Thorson, Nico Guidote, Jamie Hewlett, Joyce Tom, Victor Pages, Richard Orta, and yours truly, Jake Reinig.

Actors included Jack Samet, Ian Pfister, Ricky Pak, Jameson Young, and Manley Woods.

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Carbon Canyon

I got a new Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 macro yesterday, so when my brother asked if I wanted to take it out for a spin I jumped at the chance.

Since my left arm is pretty much useless, I took my monopod to help hold up this lens, which easily weighs 784 pounds. Combine that with my camera, and my kit weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,026 pounds.

It was a fairly windy day, so shooting macro was a nightmare given that everything was flapping about. Nevertheless, it was a fun day and I did get some good shots.

Clickety-pop to make larger.

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Getting There…Slowly

I’ve been experimenting lately with glow chemicals. And by experimenting, I mean acting like a little boy and cutting the tops off of glow sticks and pouring the jazz all over every thing to see what it does.

Still unable to get out and wrestle bears because of my shoulder, I opted for the next best thing: try and position some flowers in water and suspend droplets of glow stick juice inside. So, with emergency syringe in hand, I slowly…and carefully…moved…the syringe…into position…and then proceeded to squirt glow juice everywhere. Which is why my flowers are a mess. The stuff is pretty sticky, which means I should be able to refine my process to get this right eventually. My aim isn’t very good yet, but it’ll come.

Here are some samples from my mess “shoot.” Click to biggefy.

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Back from the Dead Part Two

After borrowing my camera back from my friend Becky, I decided I wanted to shoot some photos at the beach. It’s funny: I live very close to the beach and yet I almost never take pictures there. I think it’s because I see beach photography as somewhat cliche, and that’s a shame. When we stop looking for new ways to shoot something just because others have done it, we fail as photographers.

I’ve been very intrigued lately by long exposure shots of water and in particular waves. I’m still not able to lift my camera properly even though it’s been 7 weeks since my surgery, so better attempts will have to wait. Also, I need a ND filter!

Sometimes ghosts get in the way of long exposures (click to see larger).

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Her name was Lola…

In addition to meeting my friend Nita’s cool husband Chris today, I had the great pleasure of meeting and photographing Miss Lola. Although she didn’t smile much for me (I think she was solving math problems in her head), she still took some adorable photos. Thanks go to Nita and Chris for letting me into their family for the day. Enjoy these samples!

Click previews for larger versions.

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Day at the Getty

Some friends and I went to the Getty museum yesterday as part of an assignment. Unfortunately, the gallery we were supposed to look at was closed, so that was a bust. But the Getty is beautiful, and it was fun to walk around and shoot. Of the samples below, the second to last picture was taken by my friend Sonja, with retouching by me afterwards. Click all to make bigger.

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Lost and Found

Not much to say about these; just some random photos from my trip to the beach with Heidi and Arce today. Click for embiggening.

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Will Mismanage for Food

In my third shoot of the weekend I convinced my cousin Juan to help me out with a school project. My team’s goal is to shoot a magazine spread documenting the financial confidence crisis, whatever form that might take. So, I dressed JB up and had him stand out on street corners holding a sign reading:

Investment Banker

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Below are a few of my favorites. Click for larger versions.

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