Family Photoshoot with the MacDonalds in Treasure Island

My recent photoshoot with the MacDonalds went well. Laurie wanted family portraits, a portrait of Ian for the invitation for his communion and business portraits for their website. They own an insurance company in St. Petersburg.
Time went fast, photoshoot was done all at once at sunset in Treasure Island.
Thank you all for the participation, it was a lot of fun!!!!

Blue Hour

I came across this image a couple of days ago- Blue hour at the Pier in St. Petersburg. I had an earlier post about the blue hour, so check it out. A year ago I was trying to shoot more silhouettes, leading lines and the magical blue hour.

If you have no drug prescription coverage ...

I'm going to share a few links with you since you have no prescription coverage.
Partnership for Prescription Assistance (Free or Discounted Drug Program)
Supplementary Prescription & Health Insurance
Florida Discount Drugcard designed to lower Prescription Cost for Florida Residents

You can also contact the pharmaceutical companies directly for reduced cost medications. You'll need to know the name of the medication and current dosage.

Social Media – 3 Free Tools to Grow Your Business- Part 1

As I promised last week, here are my comments about Alan Brusky's presentation about social media. Alan is the Founder and Creative Director of Fireleaf Design and an excellent speaker on social media and more. Please follow him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and on Flickr because you can learn more from this dude who is also a brilliant photographer!

The power of social media is unreal. Today social media is part of communication and institutions need to integrate new communication tools into their marketing and recruitment strategy along with online media (web presence through promotional videos/news stories on the institution’s website) and traditional media (including newspapers, TV and radio, direct mailing). The goal is to network, interact, collaborate, and attract a global audience, including a technologically sophisticated audience who uses social media. I noticed most institutions, including USF employ social media tools for marketing and recruitment. USF is also present on iTunesU with a lot of free educational podcasts, including the podcast I created, Multimedia Tips , a podcast pn technology and media, USF students and professors, and local photogs who use technology and media effectively in communication.

Unlike the one way communication in traditional media, social media means interactive communication through multiple channels. The key is to keep interacting, collaborating and networking with other people. Social media if fast and cheap, and it pays off if messages are clear, consistent, and engaging.
This is the basic model some companies are implementing to generate most of their business through social media. Successful businesses are strobist.com that relies on online advertising and Creativelive. This last one is an online education platform that relies heavily on social media to spread the word about their courses in photography, video and web design. The best photographers and videographers offer workshops and courses online. Workshops are free if the audience watches them online live because the organizers realized the power of tweets. A local example is Rafael Concepcion (RC) from the Kelby Media Group who sold his last book in a couple of days on Amazon thanks to the retweets on Twitter. RC uses his audience on Twitter (he has about 6,300 followers) to branch out to his other businesses (books and workshops). In addition, Columbia Journalism School has built on social media and has created social media courses and workshops. The dean of student affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Sree Sreenivasan’s free panels on new media on BlogTalkRadio circulate the name of this institution to a global audience and impact student recruitment.

US 441 Venture

Yesterday I had a great day, my camera got a workout. I visited old Florida with my buddies. Check out some of the photos from Micanopy and Paynes Prairie.
Here is the album on Flickr.

I used a filter to bring out the sky and yes, I experimented with HDR. I am still not happy with the results but I am getting there.

My dear friend, Chuck Vosburgh taught me some tips and tricks in HDR. I won't tell you the secret, check out Chuck's website and find out more about his workshops on lighting and HDR.

citraquick.mov

Recently, we did a field trip to Citra. I am using a cheap handheld camera and I did minimal edits in Final cut. I am still trying to figure out what has caused the color discoloration but I guess it is just the bad video quality.

Simple Flash Photography

I noticed that I got caught up on lighting gear lately- beauty dish, softbox, umbrella, etc. Lighting is fun but how about going back to the bare minimum? Yes, the bare flash. I forgot that a bare flash mimics the sunlight so I went out yesterday and shot some pictures of Nicoleta in St. Petersburg.
I dragged out all of my gear from the car, 6 flashes, lighstands, reflectors.... and then I suddenly decided to use one bare flash for the whole night.
Here are some pictures that demonstrate that sometimes going back to ONE bare flash can become a fun experiment. Since I am using an SB600 on a lightstand, I need no triggers for the flash.
Here is a great and SIMPLE tutorial by Chuck Arlund on how to use one basic flash to improve your photography (read the comments posted too).
To read more about Nikon's CLS system, click here.
I put the flash on a flash stand instead of the flash gun (monopod) and placed it in different angles to create different lighting effects. Unlike Chuck Arlund, I used no reflector, just one flash (1/200th is my syncspeed). I also used one lens- Nikon 50mm, 1.8- this lens is sharp!
To see Nicoleta's other shots, click here.
Some of the shots (Nicoleta wearing a white shirt) were taken with the 3 lighting set up (one beauty dish to the right or left of the camera, one flash to the right of the subject and the other flash was on the left side of the subject).

Blue Hour Photography

A good exercise for a beginner photographer is to take pictures of a place at different times, during sunrise, sunset, blue hour and at noon to see how the lighting conditions change (as the sun rises you have harsher light and shadows, during sunset you have warm colors, during overcast you have even light). I have always wanted to take pictures Downtown Tampa during blue hour. Blue hour is a magical time to shoot after sunset or before sunrise. I have not shot blue hour shots before sunrise so I will talk about blue hour photography after sunrise. The characteristic of the blue hour photography is the rich blue sky you get if you take pictures after sunset. Blue hour varies- if the sky is clear, you have more time to take blue hour pictures after sunset, if the sky is cloudy, the blue hour happens earlier and you have a narrower window of time to shoot. My advice is to start taking photographs from East to West because of the narrow window of time and use shorter shutter speeds to obtain richer colors. Longer shutter speeds may give you a nice sky but they wash out the lights on buildings. Because of the low lighting conditions and slower shutter speed you use for low light photography, a tripod is a must to avoid motion blur. To see if your exposure is correct, don’t use your in camera meter but use your histogram. I don’t leave the camera’s white balance in auto because most cameras try to warm up the cool colors in the sky. Instead I set the white balance in manual mode and I start at 3400 (note- you can solve this problem in post processing by changing the color temperature). If you can’t set your white balance manually, set it at tungsten. Chimp to see if you got a nice blue sky. I usually take a couple of shots and adjust my white balance accordingly to bring out the blue sky. I start with the following camera settings: ISO 100 or 200, f 6 or7 and 1/45 (if I shoot right after sunset and I have some light). I do test shots and change the settings each time I change the place and the sky gets darker. You have to experiment. The last University of Tampa images were taken with 4, 10 and 15 seconds exposures and f 15 (with the higher fstops, I wanted bring out the starburst). Still, the third minaret remained overexposed so it is something I have to pay attention next time. All the pictures were taken using a wide angle lens, hence the lens distortion that I never got to correct in Photoshop. I only shoot in RAW file format and I use the manual mode. I prefer getting the perfect image in camera because I want to do as little post processing as possible. I only used tripod for the night shots and not for the blue hour shots (big mistake!). I should have used a shutter release cable to avoid camera shake and manual focus as I had focusing problems. I will remember these things next time .
Things to remember:
! Tripod!
!!!!! Do not set your ISO higher! Even though I used a tripod with my Nikon D300 and the pictures I took with ISO 560 are noisy.
!Check the lights on the buildings and street to see if they are overexposed!
! ISO 100 or 200 to minimize the digital noise in the picture
! Long exposure!
! Use a moderate fstop (use high fstops if you want to achieve the starburst effect on the lights; higher fstops are needed for full zoom)
! Remote control! (I don’t have one but I will get one soon) Instead, I will use the “self timer” function in the camera, this allows the camera to rest a couple of seconds before the exposure.

There is even a Blue Hour Site where you can figure out the exact time of the blue hour in your area and a blue hour group on Flickr. Have fun shooting blue hour images and let me know about your results.