Bass licks and Guitar Riffs

Let's face it. When it comes to photography equipment you get what you pay for. Buy a cheap lens and you get soft images and poor build quality. Buy a cheap plastic camera(Holga) and get light leaks(albeit the results can be awesome in some cases and this is why most people buy them).

I use to always by cheap because it's what I could afford. And because of that I have a bunch of lenses that are either broken or just sit and collect dust.

But in the case of radio slaves for my speedlights I went cheap. Less than $20 cheap. To give you an idea of what that means, Pocket Wizards, the industry standard in radio triggers, are $400+ for one transmitter and one receiver. Not cheap. I'll get them eventually since they are coming out with a Nikon specific set which will be great. But for now, I got a set of Opteka triggers, a brand I've never heard of.

As expected they were inconsistent. I had to fiddle with them to get them to work and they would work for a while. Then they would quit and I'd have to tinker a little more. Did this until it stopped working all together.

But when they do work they work great.

I went out with a couple buddies of mine to test them along with a new 40 in. softbox. I couldn't be happier with the results. The softbox did exactly what it was suppose to do and the radio triggers fired my flashes without having a clear line of sight from camera to flash.

On the shoot I only used one flash because I only had one receiver. I'm generally a two flash kind of photog. So I paid $14 for another receiver that I got in the mail yesterday. I popped the new one on my smaller flash and left the same receiver/flash combo I used the other night together.

Ran some tests and the new receiver/small flash worked perfectly but the set from the other night still wasn't working. I did the obvious thing and swapped receivers and flashes. And behold, they fired every time after that.

So problem solve...for now.

Anyway, here are the shots of my friends. All were shot on a Nikon 300 with a 17-55 f/2.8, ISO 200. Sync speed and aperture varied. Processed with Photoshop CS5 Raw. This is the second round of editing these photos. I'll probably go one more round to get better color consistency, especially in the sky.







Hope you guys enjoy the shots. I will try to start updating more often. Assignments for work aren't always the best blog fodder and I don't get a lot of time to go shoot stories on my own anymore. But I will try my best.

-Dan

One Week Down

I survived my first week as the chief photographer at the News-Sentinel and what a week it was. I had a slow day, three fairly busy days, and one completely full, "how did I manage to get it all done" day. Pretty good idea of what I can expect for my time as chief.

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of the photos I took this week and the stories I was a part of. *Click on the titles to see the story at Lodinews.com

Fiddling Joe

First up is Joesph Christensen, a champion fiddler from Clements. This was a great shoot. Set up a couple lights and fired away as the kid played his heart out.

I couldn't be happier with the way the shots turned out. Couldn't have been done without help from the Lodi Living editor, Lauren Nelson, and Joe's mother, who held up my lighting equipment in the heavy wind.

Nicole Lang

This was a simple one-flash shot at Lodi High. Took a few throws to get the timing right.

Fake arrest leads to real arrest

There is nothing special about this photo at all, but the story is about as ironic as they come.

Thanks for looking, everyone. Hopefully I will be updating more now that I have a lot more stories to shoot.

News and an old photo

Obviously I haven't been updating the ol' blog as of late. I don't really have a good excuse for this. But I do have good news. I was recently promoted to Chief Photographer at the Lodi News-Sentinel. That means I will have more stories to shoot and a larger variety. So I will have more to share here.

In other news, I was going through some older photos, looking to reedit a few and I came across this shot from my Tent City story. I'm not entirely sure how I missed it because I love it.



That is all for now. Hopefully you will hear from me again soon.

A Year in Photos-2009

So another year has ended and at the News-Sentinel we've had to go through all our photos and pic the best/our favorites from 2009. And as it truns out, this year was painfully boring when it came to local news. This summer is the slowest fire season we've had since I started working for the LNS and the year's biggest controversy was whether or not to continue praying at the city council meetings.

So with that I didn't have a whole lot to chooses from as far as "Best" photos of the year. But I still managed to get some photos I like. Whether or not they are good is debatable, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

So here are my favorite shots of the year in no particular order.

*Keep in mind these are shots for the News-Sentinel and not my favorite shots of my own personal work which i think is much stronger this year.

A quick update.

Since I haven't added anything new since Sept. I thought I'd give you guys the heads up on what's going on. And what's going on is nothing. Nada. Zilch. I have shot nothing interesting since Sept. and prospects in upcoming months aren't looking good either. It's just been a boring season here in Lodi.

If you have any ideas on some photo essays you'd like to see please share.

Have a good one and thanks for reading.

-Dan

The final peppers and a couple grapes.

I have the two last shots from the pepper harvest and a couple from a grape harvest I shot the other day. It was late in the morning when I got to the grape harvest so the sun was high and harsh. Hopefully I can make it to another grape harvest before the season is over. I'd like to get there a dawn for the best light.

I'm actually not happy with the grape shots, but I'm posting them anyway just to show something that did not turn out the way I wanted. Helps me to improve myself by looking at what I did wrong and figuring out how I can do it better.

Peppers:



Grapes:

That's all for now. And as always, go to the Wade Wire. It can be found in my links on the right side of the blog.

She's a Pepper

One Last shot.

I Had A Dream...

Seriously. I had a dream just this morning at about 8:20 a.m. Indulge me for a moment while I tell you my dream.

My boss and I were driving down a narrow country road trying to find a place to pull off to photograph a giant tornado.

When we finally found a place to pull off the tornado was gone. But in the field next to us were dozens of workers bent over harvesting. Others were unloading buckets into trailers. We decided this is what we were going to photograph instead.

*MEOW

*MEOW

*MEOW

That's my cat, Darby, waking me up from my dream.

Fast forward a couple hours and I'm leaving the Target plaza on 8 Mile Rd. and driving towards Davis Rd. And what do I see? A field of workers. Bent Over. Harvesting. Others are unloading buckets full of peppers into trailers behind tractors. I quickly drove home, grabbed my gear, and rushed back just a few minutes before they went to lunch. I only got off a few shots, but from those shots I got one I liked and that is all I ask for.


All of this is completely true. Seriously.

A little less depth of field and this would have been perfect. Maybe f/4 instead of f/8. Oh well. Grape harvest tomorrow or early next week with Van Ruiten. With the strawberry harvest from earlier this year my harvest project is coming along nicely.

-Dan

P.S. Go read the WadeWire. Link on the right side of my blog.

P.P.S. This is a reminder that you should always keep your gear handy at all times. I would have had soo much more time to shoot if I hadn't had to drive the 10 minutes home and 10 minutes back.

*UPDATE* I went back out this morning. Go a couple shots I like. Also met with the Bill Rogan of Van Ruiten Winery and I will be going out to a harvest tonight after work.

These are early edits. They will probably be worked on 2 or 3 more times.

Foreigner

No, I don't mean the interesting people from abroad that come here to make a new life for themselves. I mean the band that should have called it quits years ago.

They played at the annual Rock the Square fundraiser at Hutchins Street Square on Friday. It's a huge fundraiser for local charities. Each year they bring in a different band. Last year the Doobie Brothers put on a great show. The year before that was Kenny Loggins(I can't imagine any square being rocked by the singer of Rainbow Connection). This year it was the driving force behind songs such as Urgent and Dirty White Boys.

These guys had more cheese than a pizza. And the women were going nuts for it. Was it the booze they'd been drinking all night? I sure hope so because if acting like the lead singer is what I'll have to do to get a lady when I'm older I'm afraid I'll be single my whole life.

I was laughing most of the time I was there shooting.


That is all. Remember to check out the other blogs I link to, especially the Wade Wire.

-Dan

And Now For Something Completely Different

You won't see me doing this often; wedding photos(actually, you don't see me doing portraits in general as I don't like them much). Now this isn't an actual wedding. That's not for another week. These are just some shots i took while checking out the site for next week's wedding. Very simple setup on these. Two Sb-600s triggered by an Sb-900. My buddy Brian was holding a large diffuser off camera on most of the shots, blocking the sunlight and getting rid of that ugly dappled shade/sun combo.

Paul and Naomi were great subjects. I can't wait to do more of this and get more shots next Monday.