CRDESIGNLAB

Well, yesterday was quite a day. Kyle and I spend eight hours taking pictures around his house in Cottonwood and my house in Monarch Ridge.

We met at Kyle’s house around noon and spent a few minutes outlining what we were going to do the rest of the day. After all our gear was assembled, we hiked a few hundred yards down into the canyon behind Kyle’s house. We spent about a hour photographing anything that we found interesting and then hiked back. At this point, the day started getting good. Kyle has the perfect backyard for photgraphy, and we took advantage of that. We spent over three hours working our way back and forth across his yard. He was using the 5D Mark II with the 70-300mm Marco plus a 58mm Circular Polarizing filter and a lens hood, all on a tripod. I was using a T1i with the 5D’s 24-105mm. We each covered the same ground, so we got two pictures of everything, ensuring at least one good shot. We only stopped because both of the T1i’s batteries died and we had filled up almost all the 24GB worth of memory cards we brought along. We took a break, ate some grapefruit, and charged the T1i.

As the sun started to set, we grabbed our gear again and hiked back through the canyon to a patch of rocks that offered a good vantage point of the sunset. We spent about forty-five minutes photographing the sunset and filled up the cards the rest of the way. Then we hiked back and went to my house.

At my house, we proceeded to unload the pictures from the cameras. We used both my MacBook Pro and my iMac to make the process go faster. In the end, it turned out that we had taken a total of 2160 pictures in just over five hours, and we were not even done for the day. We quickly looked through the pictures, deleting the duds, test shots, and obviously awful ones. We also marked the ones that were clearly superior. We will return to these at a later date.

Finally, we set up the cameras for light painting and went out to my driveway. We traced my truck with flashlights and, after several tries, actually produced something that looked quite cool. Next, we traced the driveway itself and added light at different heights to add a three dimensional effect. Our masterpiece for the evening was a two minute and seventeen second exposure of the driveway where we wrote “Mac Lab” outlines by layered light and with cars in the background. We tried tracing my garage door and the brick path to my entryway, but those didn’t turn out as good. After an hour and a half, we decided to stop and unloaded the pictures onto my iMac. We suspected, the “Mac Lab” one turned out to be the best. As the final activity of the day, we took it into Photoshop to brighten up the colors a little.

Overall, it turned out to be a very productive day. Of the 2160 pictures we took, over a hundred are good enough to be edited and maybe twenty will make it onto this blog. It is only a matter of finding the time to do it.