CRDESIGNLAB

Can I tell you, spending the entire weekend with hardly any use of technology, only the occasional check of the email, is quite nice. Today’s society is so wrapped around the use and reliability of technology, that no matter where you go, it will always be there. When you do find time to spend a few days away from it, for the most part, it turns out to be very relaxing.

This weekend wasn’t a complete waste of time because I was able to snap a few decent pictures. If anyone has ever been you’ll know what I mean, but Ladera Ranch is a fantastic place to go outside and take pictures. It’s a great neighborhood which produces great pictures. I have not looked through any of the pictures that I took, but when I do, along with some editing, I’ll be sure to share.

By the way, GO SAINTS! I was very excited to see that they had won. In my opinion, with it being there first time in the Super Bowl, they played a great game. I hope that everyone got to enjoy the game as I did, along with today to recover.

While Christopher and I were setting up the camera and equipment for our light painting on Friday, I was able to take this picture. In it’s unedited state, I thought it was fairly interesting. That is Christopher’s hand grasping the flash light. Kind of random, but I needed to have something to feature with this post.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with that.

Today, after school, both Christopher and I went over to his house to plan out the weekend and sort through all the equipment we borrowed from the Mac Lab. Christopher has already mentioned most everything that we borrowed, so for me to restate the entire, final list, would take too long. But, all I have to say is that it was a lot!

The first thing that we did after looking through everything was, like usual, cleaning all the lenses and filters.  It’s amazing how some things can get to be so dirty, especially camera equipment, which spends most of it’s life zipped up in a bad. All I have to say is, that was pretty bad. That is something which needs to be done much more often.

We created some interesting light painting  images using a flashlight hung from a spinning ceiling fan. It was the first time that we’ve tried using this technique, and it turned out fairly well. The images are being imported into iPhoto right now, but before we post them, I’ll want to edit them in Camera Raw a bit.

Oh, I forgot to mention. Today we experimented with Snapz Pro, the application that Skocko uses to create his tutorials. Pretty cool! This is how we plan on making our tutorials for the “This is how we do it” page. Again, kind of random, but I’ve finally figured out why at the end of some of Skocko’s tutorials you hear a loud “cut.”

This weekend, I will be in Orange County, more specifically, Ladera Ranch and Newport. Both of these places are great locations to do light painting. So by the end of the weekend, I hope to have taken some pictures that are worthy of going on this blog and hopefully here as well.

Today was devoted entirely to working on the VHS Birthday project for Mr. Owens. Yesterday, I took photos of the school for Fadi to pen tool, but the images were not detailed enough for him, so today I went and took some more. To achieve the required detail, I decided to make a panorama of the school. Quite simply, a panorama is a group of images of different parts of the same thing that are merged to create a single, massive image.

I took 132 photos for two panoramas, which took over an hour total to render. The first file image was 4.24GB and the second was 4.56GB!!!!! Photoshop cannot save images over 2GB, so I had to flatten the dozens of layers, which reduced the file size by a factor of sixteen. The final JPEG’s (which are around 50MB) are here and here (give them a LONG time to load).

Now it is Fadi’s turn to work his artistic magic with the pen tool.

Yesterday, Kyle tasked Fadi George and I with creating a “Valhalla Birthday” poster for Mr. Owens. The school is turning 35, and Mr. Owens plans to hold a celebration. Part of his plans include a very large poster that will be created by Mac Lab students. Kyle R, Kyle W, Fadi G, and myself have taken up the challenge.

Today, I took photos of the exterior of the school using the 5D Mark II so that Fadi can create a pen tool version of Valhalla. The photos only turned out average because whoever used the camera last did not remember to set the ISO back to 100 (it was at 400), so the dark areas had horrible granulation. Tomorrow I will try again with the correct ISO. Fadi has started the pen tooling, but the image is not clear enough for him to work well, so I plan to take multiple photos tomorrow and stick them together into a super-high resolution panorama (as if 21.1 megapixels wasn’t already enough!!!). The entire project is due on February 12th, so we only have 9 days to work. That shouldn’t be a problem, depending on how long it takes Fadi to do the pen tooling.

On another note, I was talking to Phillip Behnam at the end of lunch, and we made plans to do a cooperative light painting project sometime in the coming weeks. In light painting, the more people you have, the better, more detailed, and more extravagant the image, so with our combined talents, something really amazing should be created.

Yesterday, my sister and I were playing XBox and I happened to glance out the window. I noticed that it was hailing, and we paused the game and went outside. We walked around in the hail for a few minutes before something interesting happened. In a split second, the hail went form the size of peas to the size of marbles. We were stunned and each attempted to deflect the falling ice away from our faces. After a moment, we realized what was happening and that it was more cool than painful, even though it did hurt a little. In just a few minutes, the hail was piled high and in places looked like snow.

As the hail died down and I started to go inside, my sister yelled for me to get my camera. At that moment, something went off in my head. I registered that this was a once a year opportunity that I could not let pass by. I was going to get pictures, good pictures, of this winter wonderland no matter what. I ran inside and called for my mom to get my camera, as I was soaking wet and didn’t want to get the floor dirty. When she arrived with it, I transformed into photographer mode and started snapping away.

In ten minutes, I took 385 pictures. That is a picture every 1.56 seconds!!!!! Most of them were, from an artistic point of view, a complete waste of memory card space. A few, however, turned out to be pretty good. The one I have chosen to be featured on this post was taken from about six inches above my driveway and looking down so as to capture to sun’s reflection off of the wet ground. I think it turned out nice.

The whole point of this anecdote is really very simple: when presented by a rare opportunity, seize the moment and make it worthwhile. That is what I did yesterday. When the hail was done and it was safe outside for technology (the rain had paused also), I acted fast and captured a rare event on camera. The bottom line: when an opportunity arises, seize it.

As Christopher mentioned, this weekend was filled with photography, and lots of it, with close to 2,500 pictures taken over a three day period. And let me say right off the bat… the 5D Mark II is an absolutely amazing camera, and with it we got great results, both with light painting and traditional photography in my backyard. The picture that goes along with this post is one of several taken in sequence of a bee drinking the nectar out of a large rosemary bush down on a hill of my backyard.

Being one of my favorite pictures of the day, I thought it would be one worth editing in Camera Raw, and my premonition was correct when I saw the final result of an already beautiful photograph. Is it still in need of work? Yes, of course; nothing in the Mac Lab is ever finished. But as it currently stands, it’s not all that bad.

As time permits, with finals and all coming up, more editing and posting will take place and we will show some of the great pictures we took throughout the weekend.

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.

I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that Kyle and I borrowed more equipment from the Mac Lab today than probably 99% of people have on a single occasion before us. We took a tripod, two lenses (a 12-24mm Wide Angle and a 70-300mm Marco), a lens hood, a hood hat, a bag full of filters plus a 58mm UV Haze filter and a 58mm Circular Polarizing filter, a cable, two remote shutter buttons, some cleaning wipes, a cleaning pen, a Cintiq and its cables and pen, and a Canon EOS Rebel 5D Mark II along with its 24-105mm Zoom lens. Kyle had to bring a duffel bag to carry all the equipment.

After school, we tested the equipment and took some pictures around Monarch Ridge with our friend and fellow Mac Lab (Digital Arts) student Cameron Rabell. The three of us took about three hundred pictures before we filled the 4GB card in the 5D Mark II. The last person to borrow it had left several videos on the card that took up most of the space. We had also brought my Rebel T1i along, but primarily used the 5D Mark II. We returned to my house and unloaded the pictures, but had to hurry back to school before we could view or edit any of them. Kyle had to work the concessions stand at the 6pm basketball game as part of his ASB duties. I came along and brought both cameras. I took eight hundred plus pictures in just over an hour and a half. It took me a while to fine tune the settings on the camera in order to get good shots, as this was only the second time I had shot a sporting event.

By 7:45, Kyle was allowed to leave and we parted ways. I went home and unloaded the picture from my camera, and deleted all of them. Heh, practice makes perfect. Kyle took the 5D Mark II home with him, as well as most of the gear. I think that camera has the better pictures on it.

I decided to switch gears. I enlisted my sister and we light painted for a little while. I spelled out each letter of “Mac Lab” individually and then assembled them in Photoshop. I had to do all of this twice as I forgot to change the ISO back to 100 from 1600, which I had set it at for shooting the game. I think the finished product turned out good, sorta. Mr. Skocko demanded good work in return for letting us borrow the 5D Mark II, so we are under tremendous pressure to make something cool.

Well, this is it for today. I have been working nonstop since 5am. That’s eighteen hours. Tomorrow, we plan to meet and do some more light painting. We would like to go to downtown at night, which is a good time and place for light painting.

Kyle summed up what we plan to do this weekend fairly well, but I would like to add a little myself.

Both in “The Night Sky” post and several comments on the “Dawn and Dusk” post, I have explained how I have been trying for a while now to take a picture of the night sky but have had only limited success. I would like to add to this weekend’s plan that I will attempt several more photographs of the night sky and of the moon this weekend, weather permitting. I have taken pictures of the moon before and they have turned out pretty good, but I was using a lens with a less powerful zoom than the one we will borrow this weekend, so I would like to take some more.

Sometime this weekend I will create a page devoted to the technical aspect of photography. “How to” sections, essentially. The first entry will discuss photographing the night sky.

In downtown, we will try to do some light painting, although we may end up going somewhere in Monarch Ridge or Cottonwood if that doesn’t work out. We have attempted light painting on several occasions in the past, but we have never had the right equipment and so the final products were not even close to being good enough to post here. There is only one picture from those instances that will make it onto this blog, and it is one where I wrote Kyle’s name with a flashlight. I think it would make a nice Gravatar.

Most of this depends on Mr. Skocko letting us borrow as all the equipment we want. We spent half an hour outlining the weekend and making a list a third of a page long of all the things we want to borrow. Kyle is even bringing a duffel bag to carry all the equipment. I told him we should carry all the stuff to the top of Mt. San Jacinto and take some shots from there, but lugging thirty pounds of gear for sixteen miles did not appeal to him. I can’t imagine why not.

Well, I say goodbye for now as I go to read twenty-five pages from the AP U.S. book and solve some trigonometric equations.

As the week draws to an end, Christopher and I have planned out a weekend devoted to photography. Along with the usual homework, studying, and prepping for finals, we also plan to spend at least one full day, maybe two, taking pictures and painting the world with light.

Along with Christopher’s Canon Rebel T1i, we plan to borrow a Canon Rebel 50D from Mr. Skocko. With the combined force of both cameras, amazing things can and will happen! In addition to the cameras, we will be brining along the standard 18-55mm IS, the 70-300mm Marco, and the 12-24mm Wide Angle, along with both UV and Circular Polarizing filters. As far as stability goes, we will bring a tripod, a monopod, and a gorillapod.

Instead of exploring around Monarch Ridge and Cottonwood (which is usually where we go), we will hopefully be going to downtown, where we have never been to take pictures and which has the potential to be great for light painting.

Once we are finished with the day, we will head back to Christopher’s house for the usual importing and editing in Camera Raw and Photoshop. We do this editing on his 27 inch Quad Core iMac, which has the brains and the brawn to keep up with us. Finally, once even that is done, we will try again to get the Wacom Cintiq tablet to work on his 15 inch MacBook Pro. We would connect it to the iMac, but the Cintiq does not have the required cable adaptor. The first time we tried to get it working (last weekend), we were unsuccessful and simply did not have time to try again, but sense the tablet costs $1,000 and has the potential to be extremely useful, it’s worth giving it another shot.

Well that’s enough for now. As the weekend progresses and the pictures start to flow in, we’ll be sure to share what we did and how we did it.