Shutterdrag

Ol' dirty bastards

2010-09-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

Derek Brower

Over labor day weekend the guys running the legendary BMX trails Catty Woods held a jam including some fun contests, a steady supply of grilled delicacies and a good turnout of riders and spectators. It's really impressive how committed these guys are to these trails. Each piece is like a work of art, carefully crafted and shaped to be both functionally superior and aesthetically admirable. Hours upon hours of shovel time have went into building this empire in the woods. They've also worked hard to make this spot a legitimate, insured place to ride that is known around the world as some of the best trails on the planet.

Click through after the jump for a few more shots from the day. Other than a few mixups with photographers swapping Pocket Wizard channels, I felt very lucky to be there shooting. I can't wait to go back.

(click photos for larger versions)

BF - "I hit a branch up there with my chest...."

Derek Brower

Clint Reynolds

Corporate Life

2010-06-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

I shot a lil' photo series recently. Without including people in the images, I tried to photograph objects and settings that conveyed the feeling of working in a cubicle city. I usually like shooting portraits or at least photos with a human element present, but I think these inanimate objects are so telling of the environment and the people within it that it's still almost a portrait of those people.

Enjoy. Or don't. Thanks for looking either way. Have a good day.

(click the images to view larger versions)

The Last People

2010-07-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

The online design/art/BMX magazine The Last People posted a feature with a few of my photos and some ramblings I wrote to go along with them. Go check out the site and if you look at some of my photos while you're there then so be it. They work hard on the site and have a lot of great, regularly updated content there. It's worth a spot on your bookmarks list.

Construction Life

2010-06-30T22:53:00.000-07:00

As a contrast to the Corporate Life series I posted the other day, here's a series from the other side of the tracks. Thanks for looking. More after the jump.

(click the images to view larger versions)

PDN "Faces" contest

2010-06-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist in Photo District News' annual "Faces" portrait contest in the Self Portrait category. The photographers and the work submitted for PDN's contests is generally of such high caliber that I was really surprised and honored to be printed alongside those images(I sandbagged my way in with the Self Portrait entry; I would have had no shot against the editorial entries - amazing work).

The image to the left was the photo chosen. More info and a list of all of the finalists can be found here. PDN will post all of the winning entries online later this month and they can currently be seen in the July issue of the print magazine.

Sidewalk Studio

2010-06-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I wanted to shoot portraits. Well, I always want to shoot portraits. But, this time I had no one to shoot. I cherish a free Saturday, so I wanted to come up with something a little different. After some thinking I cut off a piece of seamless paper, grabbed my camera and headed out the door to Philadelphia. I stopped on a corner near the Italian Market that was in the shade and had some decent light coming in from one side. Wall. Tape. Paper.

I stood on that corner for about an hour with my camera in my hand and talked to people that walked by.

"Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm a photographer..."
"No."

"Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm a portrait photographer. May I take your photo?"
"Of me? No, thanks."

And then someone said yes. Then someone else. And another.

The big problem with asking random strangers to shoot their photo is that you're asking random strangers to shoot their photo. Unfortunately, everyone assumes you're going to Photoshop their face on a body doing something that your parents wouldn't want you to do and post it online. It takes finesse to talk to someone and put them at ease in the 10 second window that it takes for them to walk past you. Knowing that is exactly the reason that I wanted to do this project.

I've always been an introvert when it comes to people I've just met. When I pulled up to this corner I felt silly. I almost didn't get out of the car. Then I remembered that the entire reason I wanted to do it was to work on those skills as a photographer.

The first shot was the hardest. I nervously asked 5-6 people and they all said no immediately. Then two guys asked me for cab money. $2 for two portraits:

I'm not a big fan of paying people for their portrait. I want to be able to talk to them and convince them that I'm a trustworthy guy that just wants to take photos and not a creep with a camera. In this case, I needed a bump. And it worked. After getting a couple of shots my confidence grew. I noticed people reacting more warmly when I started talking to them because I was becoming more comfortable doing so.

I'm fascinated with people's reactions when they step in front of a camera. Some people smile. Others freeze up. I didn't give anyone any direction other than to step in front of the background.

Shooting passersby on a street corner in Philadelphia is boot-camp for getting comfortable photographing people. Grab your camera, man up and go shoot a stranger.

More to come.

Bicycle Motocross

2010-04-07T20:31:00.000-07:00

It's pretty obvious that I've failed miserably at regularly updating this blog so from here on out I'm going to change that. I may just be doing it to unload the endless flow of photo geek thoughts and terminology in my head, but hopefully someone else can come away with something from what I post here and a dialogue can happen as a result. Whether it's a couple of quick shots or a lengthy diatribe, my goal is to post at least once a week. So without further ado...

All of the Northeast snow has melted and in its place is beautiful weather that makes you want to be outside and smile. Being outside more means I've been shooting a lot of BMX lately. Here's a few recent photos and a description of the lighting and setup.

The shot above was taken in Trenton, NJ. If you've ever been fortunate enough to visit Trenton, then you understand the blossoming city that it is. And by "blossoming" I mean frightening in broad daylight. We parked close to the first spot that we planned on shooting at - a courtyard in the middle of a housing project. The little kids playing drug lookout outside of apartment doors were pretty obvious. This spot is a BMX/skate mecca and is basically an accidentally-made skatepark. When we turned the corner to enter, we rolled up to 6 guys smoking blunts, drinking 40s and playing cee-lo. Understanding that a lot of bike riders come to the spot, they told us to "come in and pull out the cameras". I had a 50lb bag full of about $8k in gear on my back so we decided to try someplace else first...

Fast forward to 3 hours later, where we stopped to shoot this quick shot on the way back to the car. Two bare SB-800s behind the rider to the left and right and another SB-28 in front of him slightly to the right. All firing full power, as the sun was still murdering my flashes at this time of day. There's a little bit of blur on him for two reasons:
1) The ratio of flash to ambient is so close that my flashes don't completely freeze the rider the way they would if I was shooting, say, a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio or more.
2)I was firing all of my flashes at full power. With small speedlights, your flash duration becomes longer as you increase the power(the opposite is true for large studio strobes). The SB-800 and SB-28 have a flash duration of about 1/1000th of a second at full power. That's on the slow side when it comes to flash durations and freezing action.

Just before taking this photo, a police officer came into this empty parking lot and told us we had to leave. I could literally see the building where our friends from earlier in the day were getting high, gambling and selling crack out of their apartments. Right away, officer. Rider: Phil Care

This photo was an experiment to try and shoot a sequence of action frames lit with speedlights. The lighting setup here is one SB-800 to the left and another to the right, cross lighting the rider. When you're shooting several frames like this, having the camera on a tripod is a must so the background does not move and the frames can be easily composited together later in Photoshop. I manually triggered five separate frames with a shutter release cable at about 3 frames per second. Shooting at the D700's max of 8 frames per second(with the vertical grip) would have overlapped frames and made them harder to combine. I prefer the look of frames that don't overlap anyway, so it's a win-win.

This sequence required a little bit of trial and error. The problem with doing these shots with speedlights is that if they are spitting out a lot of power then they don't recycle in time for the next shot in the sequence. You'd end up with the first two frames lit correctly, the third lit by one flash and the last two completely black. The flashes simply can't keep up.

So, for this shot I decided to bump up my ISO to 1250 to be able to lower the power output on my flashes to 1/16th. My flashes were happy to fire off 8-10 frames for me at that level. I could have opted to open up my f/stop from 4.5 to 2.8 and save myself the risk of high ISO noise. The D700 can handle a little bit more ISO sensitivity though; and my depth of field was already shallow enough at f/4.5. I didn't want to risk him riding out of the sweet spot and being out of focus. Rider: Justin Care

Finally, here's an icepick that Justin and I shot after we had already gotten what we came for. I set up the first shot this way initially, but there are a million BMX photos taken with a fisheye from the bottom of a rail. If it ain't broke, don't fix it I guess. I wanted something different from the hangover toothpick in the first shot so I switched some lights around and tried to take advantage of the sky color that the dwindling ambient light was giving us.

This shot was taken using four speedlights:
1)SB-800 as a main light high on a stand almost directly behind me
2)SB-800 behind the rider on the sidewalk as a rim/separation light
3)SB-28 far camera left, zoomed tight as a fill on the rider
4)Vivitar 285 camera left, zoomed wide to light the grass a little bit. The ambient light was getting so low that the fall-off of from the SB-28 was too dark and distracting on the ground. This flash helped bring detail back into the grass, as well as adding light to the stairs to soften the shadows from the rail.

More to come soon....

Black, white and everything in between

2010-01-09T20:21:00.000-08:00

I've had some people ask about my post processing with b&w conversions of digital images. I was planning on putting something together, but a friend recently sent me a photo saying they wanted to see what my conversion would look like, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to walk through my processing.

Here's the original image, and my resulting black and white conversion is the image above (All photos in this post copyright Tristan Afre):

This is an extremely low tech walk-through of how the photo was converted. It's about 15 minutes long, and is me editing the photo and explaining what I'm doing. I apologize for for a lot of filler to get to the good content, with a monotone voice mixed in. I didn't plan this or do more than one take, so I've mispoke slightly a few times and left out some points(i.e. the use the of the blacks slider in Lightroom). Questions are welcomed, and if you sit through this I applaud your uncanny attention span.

Every black and white conversion is different, so there's no settings that apply to every image. But the important thing with this look is that you want dark shadows and bright highlights that don't clip, and an even range of tones in between.

Sam the Meat Man

2010-06-06T20:18:00.000-07:00

Risk vs. Reward

2010-04-27T15:07:00.001-07:00

The cover of the new Dig BMX Magazine is the best BMX magazine cover I've seen in a while. Possibly ever. The photo is technically amazing; it's lit well with a careful, thought out composition. Ben Hucke, the rider on the cover, is a fresh face that's never been seen on a cover. Oh, and he's doing a can-can handplant on a tyrannosaurus.

What's even more impressive is the process that went into shooting this photo. Jared wrote up an article describing the time and effort it took on his blog that's definitely worth a read. Bookmark Jared's blog while you're at it; there's plenty of good content there on a regular basis.

If you've shot photos like this before, then you understand the dangers involved. If it's not a routine trick(and the best photos usually aren't), then there is a risk for both the rider and the photographer. The rider is trying something dangerous over and over again(over 350 times in the case of the Souney/Hucke cover!) and you're shooting photo after photo trying to perfectly capture a trick that most likely will never be done again. The rider doesn't want to risk getting hurt without walking away with the accomplishment of both the trick and the photo to prove it. If you, as the photographer, lose sight of your vision after the 50th try then the final photo will show it. You need to shoot the 63rd photo with the same anticipation, attention to detail and enthusiasm that you had when you shot the 2nd photo.

Every person that's held a camera has blown a photo. Every BMX/skate/action sports photographer has shot a photo of a rider and screwed up the timing or framing. I can't tell you how many times I've been laying on the ground after shooting a dozen photos and then when the rider sticks what he was trying, I look down to see that my composition is way off. There are few feelings worse than having an incredibly excited rider come up to you after pulling a difficult or dangerous trick and having to show him the photo you just botched. Instant deflation. We can't all fire out perfect photos every time, but if you don't lose sight of your vision you had when you set up your first light then you can drastically reduce the percentage of disappointing encounters that you have with the riders that you photograph.

Party time

2010-05-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a prom-themed party in the Philadelphia suburbs. I was asked if I could take pictures at the party so I decided to throw something together that encompassed the feeling of the night. You'll notice an obvious progression of debauchery and alcohol consumption as the video moves through the night(note:possibly slightly NSFW content. Unless your boss is less like Lumberg and more like Michael Scott). For the photos, I started out asking people to stand in but later put the camera on a tripod and set the intervalometer to fire off a frame every 10 seconds. People tend to loosen up when there isn't someone looking through the viewfinder. I wasn't looking for glam and fashion here. I wanted to show that I was set up in the corner of the basement and people were boozing it up and having fun. Speaking of having fun, I gotta go...

A day in the park

2009-09-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

I used to ride a lot of BMX but now I mostly just shoot it. Here's a quick video walk-through of an average BMX photo session. Here I used three lights (key, rim, fill) in a typical triangle pattern that can be applied to any number of action and portrait scenarios.

And here's the resulting image:

(click for larger version)

More to come.

-RS

These are a few of my favorite things(and photographers)...

2009-08-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago when adults began emptying their thoughts onto online journals(teenagers had been using them to complain on the internet for a decade-Livejournal anyone?), the word "blog" really bugged me. The words "web log" just seemed to me like they should have been joined together so that people were posting on wogs or even wegs. "Blog" just doesn't roll off of the tongue. It sounds like some sort of onomatopoeic word to describe someone choking on a pork chop. Pow! Kerplunk! Blog!

But as more and more photographers, artists and publications started using blogs as an avenue to organically share and exchange information with the public, I started warming up to the idea of blogs. I got a sense of personality from the people writing them, rather than just seeing a photographer's work or reading an interview or bio about them.

In the photographic world, blogs have transformed into an evolving community that creates conversations between big time pro shooters, amateurs and wannabe pros alike. People like David Hobby, of Strobist.com, are the forefathers of this share-all mentality. Being a veteran pro shooter himself, he created his blog to show off some of his DIY, low cost tips for great photographic lighting. Other than expensive workshops, personal experience and schooling, photographers had few resources that offered detailed, practical and useful information in this high of volume. People flocked to his site in droves and internet chatter about his helpful blog spread like the plague. As advertisers and sponsors started noticing the traffic that he was attracting, a blog was turned into a useful business tool.

I've obviously waved the white flag in the fight against all things blog and recognize how valuable they've become. Time I spend browsing the internet is now almost exclusively used to click through a number of blogs I have bookmarked that offer great content and regular updates. I still prefer paging through an issue of PDN to sitting in front of my computer monitor, but there's much to be said about the instant availability of information over the blogsphere. Did I really just use the word blogsphere? What have I become?

So, here's just a handful of my favorites from both pros and ams that if you don't have them bookmarked already then now would be a good time. Click away:

www.zarias.com
whereisben.com
Tony Sweet's blog
http://robertbenson.com/blog
Chase Jarvis' blog
http://www.digitalprotalk.blogspot.com
PopPhoto blog
http://www.photoattorney.com
http://www.davidbergman.net/blog
Joe Mcnally's blog
http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Enjoy! - RS