PADT – First Official Group Meeting – Little Tokyo

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I would call this the first official PADT group meeting. This is when people from San Diego actually drove up to LA to meet up with the LA crowd. We had a few models show up and we were able to get some decent shots. I still want to remind you that this outing was semi experimental and a learning experience. The group has been growing at a rate that is alarming and outstanding. We started this group in August of 2011 with 5 people. It is now March of 2012 and we have hit 163 people. So it was time for PADT (Point, Aim, Double Tap) to try to put together some meet ups/group shoots. This was the result, the PADT So Cal Little Tokyo Photo Shoot. We had 3 locations spread out through Downtown

Los Angeles. First location was Little Tokyo Cultural Center and Weller Court.

  

Then we migrated to the Los Angeles Music Center

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There were some restrictions there. They would not allow us to use any type of “Big Lighting”. They will not let us use any light modifiers, only speedlites.

 

The restriction can be a hindrance, but the surrounding area is just too nice to pass up.

What we followed up with that location was the DWP building. The DWP building is famous for its multicolored fountains and mirror effect from its bed of water.

These pics were taken with 100% ambient lighting.

PADT Members in attendance

Patrick – Photographer

Jason – Photographer

Tanya – Photographer

Tiffany – Video

Tee – Model

Kathay – Model

Danielle – Model

Nick – Lighting

Marvin – Lighting

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Playing with Selective Lighting

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While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

 

PADT is currently doing a Negative Space Challenge. I’m still learning about shooting with strobes so I decided to study how I could use lighting to shoot my submission for the challenge. It took me at least an hour of playing around with the lighting setup but I managed to achieve my goal!

Here is a photo of the setup with all the background clutter.

Setup

How did I get this shot?

First of all, we want the ambient lighting to be as dark as possible.  So I shot at ISO 100 at f16.  Next was to light up the object.  I played with flash positions and power settings and I just ended up with light bouncing all over the place and illuminating parts of the background.  So I asked myself, what direction would the light have to be coming from so that it doesn’t even hit the background?  How about light from above and keep it as narrow as possible so it doesn’t light up the area around it?  The snoot just tightens that beam even more.  That’s the placement for light 1.

Light 2 was to illuminate the body of the guitar.  That was placed lower and had to be tight as well to keep the light from hitting the background.  I wanted the light source close to limit where the light hit and used a small grid on the flash.  Unfortunately for me one of the walls has a mirror and some of the light bounced off that but not enough to really distract from the background.

17mm 1/200s @ISO100

Here’s an image of the shot with the flashes going off.  Just a quick use of the spot removal tool and some curves adjustment and got to the finished image!  I wish I had written down the flash power settings but I believe they were about 1/4 or 1/2 power.

 

 

Gear Used:
1 Canon 1D mkIII
1 Canon 17-40mm L
1 Canon 580 exII
1 Yuongnuo 560 speedlight
3 Yuongnuo radio triggers
1 Polaroid Universal Snoot Diffuser
1 Opteka Honeycomb Grid 

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To DSLR or Not to DSLR?

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I went on a 4-week vacation to Southeast Asia this holiday season and brought my Canon 5D classic Canon 17-40mm f4 L and 70-200mm f4 IS L and my Canon S95.  Can you tell which photos were taken with which camera?

Using Adobe Lightroom to gather some statistics from this trip, I realized I only have 84 images taken with the 5Dc and 1222 images from the S95!  I was never really confident with using point and shoot cameras over my DSLR but to me this was pretty obvious which camera I preferred to use throughout this trip.  This wasn’t a photography trip but I usually take my Canon 5D with me on big trips and this was the very first major trip where it  felt like I didn’t really need to haul the 5Dc.   The main features where I needed to use the DSLR was when I wanted to use off-camera flash for the evening parties and when I wanted to use Bulb mode for some night/star trail photography.  Other than that the Canon s95 handled everything beautifully.  Portability definitely played a huge factor for this trip as well as an underwater case good for up to 140ft of water is $200 for the s95 versus up to $2000 for the 5dc.

I got the s95 as a birthday gift from my family in December and I learned how to use it while I was on the trip.  If you’re pretty familiar with using a DSLR, learning how to use the s95 with its front and rear dials should come easy.  I’m trying to avoid making this into an s95 review, but my goal is to show just how far point and shoots have come.  I’m very excited for the future of p&s and 3rd generation cameras as image quality is definitely approaching those of existing higher-end cameras.  At least now when someone asks me when photography noobs ask me what camera they should buy, I can confidently tell them a simple p&s like the s95 can do a lot for less than $300.

 

Answer:  
5dc:  1,3,8
S95:  2,4,5,6,7,9

Disclaimer: All photos have been edited/modified.  I use the same treatment with my s95 images as my 5Dc images – as long as I get the same result as the vision in my head, it doesn’t matter what the source is.

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