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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

DEATH VALLEY GOOGLE+ PHOTOWALK 2011


DEATH VALLEY GOOGLE+ PHOTOWALK 2011


Photo of me jumping on Mesquite Dunes by +Mark Esguerra.
Wow!
What a GREAT weekend I just got back from!
About 50 of us descended on the small town of Beatty, NV this weekend and spent an entire weekend doing very little sleeping and lots and lots and lots of shooting in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Our weekend Mayor of Beatty +Luc Asbury — who was on his 7th trip to Death Valley — gave us a great itinerary of some of the most iconic Death Valley locations and right now some of the most amazing Death Valley photographs are popping up under the #DV2011 hashtag on G+.
There are so many highlights to this weekend that I don’t even know where to begin — so many talented photographers and good friends were on this trip. Many of us stayed at the Atomic Inn Motel (which was hard to find because the HUGE neon sign outside said Phoenix Inn, but the staff was super nice). Food was somewhat limited in Beatty, although a few of us did brave the smoke filled casino to get to the 24 hour Denny’s and get our fix of steak and eggs.
Some people got in as early as Thursday, but I came in on Friday. Our first stop was the Ghost Town of Rhyolite, NV where we got a great sunset and also did some fantastic night shooting and light painting into the evening. We took a brief break to take over the back room of the Sourdough Saloon for drinks and adult beverages, went out and did some more light painting, and then came back yet again to the Sourdough Saloon where I think we frightened some of the locals.

In Ghost Colors – Rhyolite, NV, by +Matt Roe.
If you’ve never shot Rhyolite at night, you definitely want to put this one on your list.
It was fun for me to finally get to try out the Jarvie Window (this flash ring thing that+Scott Jarvie uses for making really awesome wide angle portraits of people). After some good drinks and fun bar portraits most of us headed off to bed to get ready for our big sunrise shoot out at the dunes the next morning.
+Bo Lorentzen had also made up the *coolest* +1 Death Valley 2011 Google pins and he handed those out as well. Thanks again Bo for having those made up!
The Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley are really something. Saturday morning some of us got up at the brisk hour of 4am to meet up for our 4-5am departure time to make it out to the dunes by sunrise. Still others (+Amy Heiden+Scott Jarvie and+Sly Vegas) got up at 3am to make it out there even earlier.
Shooting the dunes is tricky, but they are beautiful. I still think I’ve got about 5 hours of work left on one of my photos from that morning’s shoot cloning the thousands of little footprints out of the sand. We also had a good time just playing around on the dunes too. +Lotus Carroll took the challenge to roll down the Dunes and not to be outdone +Matt Roe decided to jump off of them gonzo style+Mark Esguerra got that great photo of me doing my own jumping up above. :)
We thought we lost Sly in the dunes later that morning and had a good time at breakfast coming up with scenarios on how Sly had disappeared to have his Carlos Castaneda/Jim Morrison sort of dune experience. In actuality Sly had really just snuck off back to the motel with +Cliff Blaise:)

Google I Love You So Much I’d +1 That, Death Valley Edition.
Breakfast was a great but greasy all you can eat thing. At breakfast we thanked everybody for making the trip and introduced the folks who had made the trip from Google — +Dave Cohen+Brian Rose+Vincent Mo+Tony Paine+Ricardo Lagos,Tim St. ClairVega PaithankarGerard SanzAgata Krzysztofik, and +Priscila Queiroz. (I’m sure I probably left somebody from Google out, if so let me know so I can add them).
Also at breakfast I got to finally get my +Ricardo Liberato Liber Angry Guy portrait.:)
After the Dunes and breakfast in Stovepipe Wells, we made our way to the grandaddy of them all in Death Valley, The racetrack. We stopped off for a brief nap at Scotty’s Castle on the way where +Luc Asbury told me the story about his first ever trip to Death Valley which was preceded by a dream that he’d had about lighting up the grandstand at the Racetrack. We also made a stop at Ubehebe Crater.
The Racetrack is a mysterious almost spiritual place. You have to drive in on a somewhat treacherous dirt/rock road for about an hour and half. I had rented a 4×4 and still couldn’t go much more than about 70 mph (joking, really the pace is about 20 miles per hour or slower on this road). We saw a Ford Expedition that had a flat tire on the road on the way in — bummer. +Matt Roe told me that it’s about $6,000 to get a tow out of there if you get stuck.

All i can say about Death Valley is “WOW” ! ! ! by +sly Vegas.
Out at the racetrack (a giant hard mud playa) are some amazing moving rocks that are referred to as “Sailing Stones.” These large stones in some cases have travelled 100 feet or more and have long tracks cut into the hardened mud. They really are amazing to see. Apparently there is some sort of a scientific explanation for them, but I liked fantasizing in my own head about supernatural or spiritual explanations — because that’s how the place feels. We were able to do some great night shooting out on the Racetrack and +Michael Bonocore and +John Getchel brought some steel wool to do some awesome night fire photographs.
#dv2011"/#DV2011 by +Brian Rose.
Unfortunately +Ricardo Lagos, +Matt Roe+Lotus Carroll and myself stopped at THE WRONG PARKING LOT!!! and missed some of the fire fun — instead we wandered aimlessly around the middle of the Playa but got some great shots out of it. :(

Death Valley Google+ Photowalk Weekend 2011 (6 photos), on Google+, by +Dave Cohen.
Many people stayed out and slept on the Playa that night. We did end up making it out alive though, only to have to get up for a 4am departure time for Zabriskie Point the next morning.
After driving about halfway to Zabriskie Point behind +Elizabeth Hahn (who thankfully drives fast!) I unfortunately realized that I’d made the boneheaded mistake of leaving my camera back in my motel room. Fortunately +Karen Huttonwas right behind us and I was able to drop +Ricardo Lagos into her car and go back and get my camera.
Although I didn’t make it to Zabriskie point by sunrise, I did get to almost hit four donkeys in the road (hey, we were warned with a Donkey Crossing sign) and still got a wonderful sunrise shot of the salt flats. Stefan Bäurle (and a lot of others) got a pretty kick ass shot though!
After breakfast on Sunday people sort of broke up to do different things. We were able to get some amazing abandoned buildings and cars at the old Cashier Mill and Aguereberry Mining Camp along with some great rock shots on the Canyon into that mine. We also made a sunset/night excursion into Badwater, but we were robbed of our sunset by a heavy layer of overcast fog and a bit of rain. And I finally got the giant “Cowboy Steak” that I wanted back at Furnace Creek and got to watch +Karen Hutton talk for about 5 minutes with our waiter about show tunes.

Aguereberry Mining Camp, Death Valley. 2011, by +Ricardo Lagos.
Some people stuck around for still another Monday Morning sunrise (you’ve got endurance +Cynthia Pyun!) and I heard +Luc Asbury took people the long way home on the drive back to the Bay Area on Monday.
I’m sorry I didn’t get to name each and every person on the trip in this long blog post. I met so many more great photographers on this trip and was really impressed with everyone who made it out for the weekend. It was truly one of my best weekends ever and my only regret is that I didn’t get to spend more one on one time shooting with even more people.
I don’t know about those of you who went on the trip but I’m thinking we ought to make this an annual event and head back there again next year at this time. Death Valley is so rich and there is still so much that we didn’t get to shoot — I feel like we barely scratched the surface and know that as great as the shots that we got this trip are that we should all think about having just as good a time again next year.
Thanks again to Google for the great turnout and for supporting our event and to every photographer who made the great weekend out there. I had a total blast and I hope you did too.
If you’d like to add some of the great photographers on this trip to your Google+ account, you can find a lot of them doing a search on Google+ for the hashtag #DV2011.
Update: Also don’t miss +Amy Heiden’s excellent list of what she loved about Death Valley and +Scott Jarvie’s equally amusing 45 Fond Memories.+Elizabeth Hahn’s take here as well.

Learning to See Light.....


MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Learning to See Light


As photographers, we are pretty intuitive about recognizing interesting ambient light when we see it. But stick a flash and umbrella in our hands and we tend to default to much more standard styles of lighting -- especially at first. 

In the real world, great light rarely comes from 45 degrees up and to the side. So if you want to be able to create more interesting light with your flashes, you should work to better recognize how ambient really works. This way, you can recreate those different looks when you are in control of the light. 
__________

My daughter Em rides horses, a quality she surely gets from her mom. Even though I grew up with horses, it is my strong preference that any vehicle I ride have a failsafe means by which to stop. 

Saying "whoa," or pulling up on the reins doesn't cut it for me. And since they won't let me carry a big rubber mallet when I ride, I'll stick to motorized vehicles.

I drove Em out to the barn this weekend, and took a camera along. It is easy to forget to grab the day-to-day types of photos that are so fleeting when your kids are growing up fast. So I try to always have a camera with me, but also to balance between shooting and just watching.

Seems like only yesterday she was an equal mixture of new, excited and nervous around horses. But at 13, she is full of confidence -- trotting, cantering, even jumping. As a dad who never got the horse thing it still makes me a little nervous to watch. But I am happy to hang out and take photos. (For one thing, the moment I take my finger off of the shutter release, I know at least my camera will stop running.)

As she was getting her assigned horse ready, I noticed that the light was gorgeous. There wasn't much of it, but it was beautiful. It's the kind of light that you are not sure will translate in the camera, so you take a frame or two and chimp it to adjust the exposure before shooting more.

This is exactly the kind of light I want to be able to create with flashes. So after shooting in this environment I always try to take a moment and notice the sources. And lately, to do an ambient lights pullback and make some visual notes for later.



Here, I was amazed to see that nearly all of the ambient in the photo was coming from this long strip of windows behind them. There were windows on the other side of the barn (way behind me) but they were far enough away to be contributing very little. Ditto the door at the camera left end of the barn. I know this because the strongest shadows from the horse's hooves are pointing forward.

So most of this light was coming from the back, then wrapping around and bouncing off of the ceiling and reflective objects in the frame. 

I love the light, but it is something I would have never previously tried to create. Which is exactly the point about trying to more consciously see and analyze different types of ambient light.

If you are constantly looking at interesting ambient, you'll have no shortage of ideas when it comes time to create your own light with flash. In fact, this scene quickly seeded an idea for an upcoming portrait of a local poet. I want to push everything in from the back -- a single light source -- and build the portrait with internal reflections.

I won't have a fill horse. But I will have fill boards, which should work even better. (I will state for the record that I have actually used a fill goat on assignment, which long-time readers will remember.)

And while I do not own the dozen or so boomed strip boxes it would take to create this horizontal bar of light, I think I can do a lot with a backlit sheet or two. The trick will be to put something opaque (in frame) in between the subject and the huge backlight to allow the light to wrap around the edges (out of the frame) without contaminating with flare. 

Or maybe let it contaminate. Sot sure yet. Either way, we'll see. If it works, I'll post it.

New Canon EOS 1D X Breakdown!


Canon EOS 1D X Breakdown

October 18, 2011 by   
Filed under News
In a not so surprising move, Canon has combined both the 1Ds and 1D series into one high performance full frame camera. What did surprise me a bit was the reduction in megapixels from the 1Ds III, however the reduction in megapixels has obviously allowed for smaller image sizes which in turn allows for a higher throughput of images and thus higher FPS. Additionally the lower megapixel density has allowed for increased ISO options and performance. The American press release states the ISO is rated up to 204,800.
61 point focus system
252 zones for general metering or 35 zones for low-light metering to help ensure accurate evaluative ambient or flash exposure.
The camera can combine up to nine individual images into a single composite image, with no need for post-processing in a computer.
14 fps at full 18-megapixel resolution in JPEG mode.
The dual CF card slots.
Rated for 400,000 cycles.
Built in LAN connection
March 2012 (5 months away)
$6,800 US as of the press release but wouldn’t be surprised to see the price go up.
The dual digic IV system of the EOS 1D IV has been upgraded to a dual digic V system, along with the addition of a dual digic IV strictly for metering and autofocus computations.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

A Six-Step Survival Guide for Search Engine Updates!!!!!

A Six-Step Survival Guide for Search Engine Updates

A Six-Step Survival Guide for Search Engine UpdatesAnyone who has suffered a sudden loss of website traffic understands the frustration of trying to adjust tosearch engine algorithm changes. This year alone, business owners have been scrambling to modify their sites following Google's Panda update and a more recent change that aims to provide users with "the most up-to-date results."
But what if, instead of struggling to restore traffic after algorithm updates, you stayed ahead of the game and effectively bulletproofed your site against an unexpected plunge in visitor traffic?
If you're ready to go on the offense, here are six steps for surviving whatever algorithm changes the search engines might concoct in the coming months.
1. Focus on quality, authoritative content. 
The algorithms search engines use take hundreds of factors into consideration when determining which sites to rank first in query results. Among them are page quality, relevance to a search query, and the number and quality of inbound links. The relative importance of these factors fluctuates as search engine algorithms become more sophisticated, resulting in the changes that throw unsuspecting webmasters for a loop.
But remember what search engines value most: Providing high-quality results for their users. The "analysis of a site's perceived value to users" is the factor that will increase most in importance in ranking algorithms, according to the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors, an annual survey of top search strategists from Seattle-based search engine optimization tools developer and online community SEOMoz.

Firmware updates for free!

October/November firmware update round-up

Date posted: Wednesday, November 16, 2011


It's time again for a round-up of recent firmware updates to cameras and lenses. For this update, I'm going back to the beginning of October, since I didn't do this last month. Thanks to the folks who pointed out some of the updates that I initially missed.
  • Canon EOS-5D Mark II: corrects possible bug when using AE bracketing
  • Fuji FinePix X10: corrects incorrect aperture display and AF hunting in tracking mode
  • Fuji FinePix X100: improves AF performance at close distances, abnormal patterns on LCD when using "shadow tone" feature, and changes when AE/AF are locked when using self-timer
  • Nikon D7000: fixes numerous bugs related to memory cards, U1/U2 spots on mode dial, battery info, playback zoom, and more
  • Olympus E-P3: fixes issues with the touchscreen being disabled when the optional EVF is used, and disappearing focus points when using an Eye-Fi card; use Olympus Viewer or Updater to install
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-G3/GF3: adds support for power zoom lenses, optimized operation of classic Four Thirds lenses when used with optional adapter
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2: adds support for power zoom lenses
  • Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2: adds new 24 Mbps video mode, support for power zoom lenses, burst/bracketing speed boosts, noise reduction improvement, and more; coming in December
  • Panasonic power zoom lenses (14-42 and 45-175): adds support for the GX1, improves AF performance and, in the case of the 45-175, OIS system performance as well; coming November 17
  • Pentax Q: improved stability, general performance, and image rendering when using fine sharpness setting
  • Pentax standard prime / standard zoom lenses: improved stability and overall performance

Monday, November 21, 2011

This Gay American Life, in Code or in Your Face!

ART REVIEW

This Gay American Life, in Code or in Your Face

“Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” a diligent exhibition centering on 20th-century portraits and self-portraits of or by gay artists, is now at the Brooklyn Museum, and it is more or less intact. Which is to say that once again, nearly a year after it was first mounted at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, it includes “A Fire in My Belly,” a four-minute excerpt from a video made in 1986-87 by David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, at 37.
Courtesy of the Artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum includes Catherine Opie's “Papa Bear.” More Photos »
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Early in its run at the Portrait Gallery, “Hide/Seek” was abruptly divested of the Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) video, whose spliced-together imagery reads as a sometimes furious pictorial lament about human suffering. A brief close-up showing ants crawling frantically over a small plastic crucifix offended Republicans in Congress, who made threatening noises about the Smithsonian’s financing. G. Wayne Clough, the Smithsonian’s director, evidently agreeing that art should never offend anyone, immediately had the video removed from the show. (He later indicated that he regretted acting so quickly, which was small comfort.) That video, along with the longer version from which it had been excerpted by the show’s organizers, became widely available on the Internet, and was in all likelihood viewed by many, many more people than saw the actual show.
Another result of the contretemps is that “Hide/Seek,” which was originally not scheduled to travel, has been reassembled and brought to Brooklyn, almost in its original form. (A handful of the loans could not be renewed.) In March it will travel to the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington State.
There are plenty of criticisms to be made of the exhibition, which was organized by Jonathan D. Katz, an art historian at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, and David C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery. It is more a sketchy overview than a thorough exploration of its subject, clinging too closely to established names, from Thomas Eakins to Robert Gober, with Marsden Hartley, Grant Wood, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Agnes Martin and Keith Haring in between.
With a couple of exceptions, there is almost no work from the last decade, when art by avowedly queer artists, especially women, continued to flourish. And the material that is included often seems tame and mild-mannered when stronger stuff is available. The American modernist Charles Demuth (1883-1935) made vibrant watercolors of sailors dancing together, one of which is represented here, but he also portrayed sailors engaged in more explicitly erotic activities. Demuth felt compelled to keep nearly all his sailor images out of sight during his lifetime. More than 75 years after his death, it would seem to be time for Demuth’s more risqué efforts to be seen in museums.
Still, this show is a historic event. It is the first major museum exhibition to focus on homosexuality and to trace some of the ways that same-sex desire — and unconventional notions of masculinity and femininity in general — have been manifested in early Modern, Modern and postmodern American art, as evinced primarily in portraiture. It was organized not by a big private museum with lots of resources but by a national institution whose purview as a portrait gallery is relatively narrow and implicitly conservative. Like many events that are the first of their kind, it feels both overdue and a little behind the times.
In his essay in the catalog Mr. Katz makes it clear that the exhibition’s parade of familiar names is quite deliberate. “Our goal is not to challenge the register of great American artists, but rather to underscore how sexuality informed their practice in the ways we routinely accept for straight artists,” he writes. In other words, this register, like most other sectors of American life, is already full of, and actively shaped by, individuals who do not conform to the heterosexual norm. The show sets out to look at their already recognized achievements through the lens of non-straight sexuality, and also to tell something of their stories as it goes.
And it is very much a storytelling show, with works carefully parsed, lives outlined and various circles of friends indicated in extended labels. In Romaine Brooks’s stylishly mannish self-portrait, painted in 1923; in Berenice Abbott’s 1927 photograph of the writer Janet Flanner wearing a white top hat appended with two masks, one white and one black; and in Abbott’s photograph, also from 1927, of a relatively demure Betty Parsons, future art dealer of the Abstract Expressionists, we see vivid portrayals of what a label calls the “elite expatriate lesbian society” that flourished in Paris between the wars. With Florine Stettheimer’s saintly, androgynous portrait of Marcel Duchamp, who had himself photographed by Man Ray in drag as Rrose Sélavy, we glimpse a friendship played out in the New York salon of Stettheimer and her sisters, “a space,” according to the label, “where sexuality remained fluid, ambiguous and largely unspoken, yet at the center of social roles.”
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The tensions of being gay in straight society are insinuated in works like Grant Wood’s 1930 “Arnold Comes of Age,” a portrait of a pensive young man against a sparse landscape where two male nudes frolic in the distance. And there are occasional bravely open declarations, like the tender male couples among the mostly nude crowd of Paul Cadmus’s latter-day history painting “What I Believe,” of 1947-48.
Some works are fascinating period pieces, among them Brooks’s 1936 portrait painting of the photographer Carl Van Vechten, a white married man, known for his role in the Harlem Renaissance, who also went uptown to cruise young black men. Perhaps this is why Brooks embedded five shadowy black heads in the back of the looming armchair in which Van Vechten sits.
Other works are cornerstones of American modernism, including Hartley’s “Painting No. 47, Berlin” (1914-15), the roiling semi-abstraction of signs, symbols and a plumed helmet with which the artist commemorated the love of his life, a young German officer who was killed in the first months of World War I.
As the exhibition moves forward, it touches many stones, even if it doesn’t completely turn them over. Works by Mr. Johns, Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg represent a distinct break with the machismo of Abstract Expressionism, while continuing the coded references to same-sex relationships that prevailed in earlier generations. The gray tone and implicitly distraught mood of Mr. Johns’s 1961 “In Memory of My Feelings — Frank O’Hara” in which a fork and a spoon dangle from a wire like a metaphor for upended, dysfunctional domesticity, commemorate the end of his relationship with Rauschenberg. It takes its title from a poem by O’Hara, who is visible nearby in a full-length nude portrait by Larry Rivers and a clothed one by Alice Neel in which he is shown in profile, against a profusion of lavender lilac blossoms.
The references to sexuality are often more pointed in the show’s final third, where most of the work is from the post-Stonewall era, and photography is the dominant medium. It registers in the efforts of older artists like Lucas Samaras, shown vamping with a blond wig in 18 of his Auto-Polaroids of 1970-71. Among younger artists’ work, Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1979 photograph “Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter” shows two men in black leather and chains in their antiques-filled living room.
Yet even here the exhibition pulls its punches and glosses over a bit of history by avoiding the more sexually explicit Mapplethorpe images that did so much to set off the cultural wars of the early 1990s. Peter Hujar documents the prickly, high-flying dignity of Ethyl Eichelberger in drag, but also the more subtle androgyny of Susan Sontag in thoughtful repose, an image more in keeping with Abbott’s photograph of Betty Parsons. Catherine Opie’s images of male-identified women are bracingly confrontational.
The specter of AIDS and its politicizing effects are visible in Wojnarowicz’s video and even more in his 1990 photograph “Untitled (Face in Dirt),” which shows his face almost completely buried in dusty earth. It was made three years after Hujar, whose friendship had been Wojnarowicz’s salvation, died of AIDS, and several months before he learned that he himself had H.I.V. It depicts him, as the label puts it, “at once disappearing peacefully into the American landscape and being violently suffocated by it.”
By the time you reach this point in “Hide/Seek” and look back over the immense amount of art and social history that has been covered, and the lives and personalities brought into sharper focus, you may be inclined to forgive the show’s deficiencies and oversights and its general air of caution. It is trying to win converts, after all. It is a significant beginning to which the most fitting reaction may simply be: Good enough. Now, more, more, more.