Meet Multi-Light Training Camp

So, this is a light. And a very stern TA in the background.
(I was paying attention!)

Be safe: protect your equipment from Dynalight VD.

Esten keeps Rita on one lapel and David on the other so he can be a well-balanced,
driven photographer at all times. And because the buttons are super cool.

Woo hoo! Cross lighting achieved!

Now with fill light! Esten approves.

Apparently the cool thing to do in lab is be serious and point at the camera.
(PFal, why so serious?)

Things I forgot to say before I took this picture:
"Hey Esten, I'm going to take a picture of you holding that fill light." (sorry, buddy)

Break dance party.

"J-School Rocketman" -or- "Who needs wrists to photograph?"

Meet my ode to learning flash: labs in review.

I didn't think I'd survive it, but I've made it through all the individual assignments involving flash for Advanced Techniques. A look back on the painful process for all to enjoy (or lament), done in the style for competition submission (amped up contrast, saturation AND vignetting: the trifecta):


Flash? Really? But...but...I can do fine with available light...

And flash just makes me that much more conspicuous to my subjects! (This shot was an intentional
homage to the amazing and hilarious laundromat shot we saw in class.)

Yeah, Jimmy, the idea of juggling another piece of equipment and
technical calculation makes me feel dead inside, too.

It's going to be okay, Will. We're all scared. Just wait it out.

I feel your pain, Anjali. Trust me, girl, I feel. Your. Pain.

Jakob's fancy German Leica flash has the ability to reach a higher power (badumpching).
He wastes no time calling out for help.

A huge, special, wonderful thanks to Catalin for holding our hands and drying our tears through this painful process.

Meet Balance Flash

(November 13, 2008, Columbia, Mo.) Sonny Schwarte, a mechanic for Big O Tires on Broadway in Columbia, Mo., rolls a new tire through the garage to be washed before being placed on the car Thursday morning as he changes the tires on two different cars. Schwarte, who has worked at the garage for “a year and a day, exactly,” says he spends most of his shifts doing standard procedures such as tire and oil changes.

Extra assignment (Pop Flash):

(November 8, 2008, Columbia, Mo.) Dan Hatfield plays the steel guitar during a warm-up rehearsal of the Beacon Street Band Saturday evening at Hazel Kinder’s Lighthouse Theater near Columbia, Missouri. Hatfield, a Springfield, Mo., native, began playing the steel guitar and the piano in high school and enjoys country, bluegrass and gospel music.

Meet Andrew Paul Jons

While looking through some photographs I forgot I had taken, I found this little gem that is such a telling portrait of my bestest friend Andy. We've known each other since seventh grade and reconnected after high school in Boston, where he was at Berklee, I was at Boston University and we both sang in the Inner Strength Gospel Choir. We ended up living together for my last year in Boston and had some of the best times two friends could ever hope to have. Andy's always looking sharp and is always singing something; here's a photograph of him doing both of those things on Mass. Ave. last spring after a delicious lunch at the Indian buffet. I love this kid.

Meet my li'l point-n-shoot

When I was working in a camera store, I wisely took advantage of the employee discount and, among other (more useful) things, bought a small but well-made point-and-shoot camera so I wouldn't have to lug a big SLR out to the bars and so I could have something to keep in my bag for photo ops. I have a Panasonic FX-06, which has a wide angle (complete with vignette!), great black-and-white and really nice video (I may or may not have edited a small "news story" on bar nachos with video clips taken by this plucky camera. I highly recommend the camera and would like to point out that Panasonic also manufactures the Leica point-and-shoots and Leica just slaps on a red dot and $200. The quality is still there.

Anyway, I was digging through some archives and found a bunch of decent shots taken with this camera so I thought I'd share them here. All the black and whites were taken in B&W, I only juiced up the contrast a bit.

Enjoy!


Nicole in left field at Fenway Park. She was my guest for Family Day last year; I've always loved this shot but wish I had done a better job on the framing. I like the hyper-green tone of the photo: getting to run around the outfield at Fenway is a fairly surreal experience.

Shots like this are why I'm glad I keep the camera with me. Pastor Lorraine at First Holiness, working in some beautiful light.

Taken on the fly in Paris while walking in the tunnel that goes from the Arc de Triomphe to the outer circle of the Champs-Élysées. One of my favorites from the trip.

Taken on the fly in New York City.

Dominick doing my dishes as a thank you for me cooking a farmer's breakfast as a thank you for him taking care of me after my widsom tooth removal surgery.

Life as a young professional in New York City - or - John Tozzi after work.

Tozzi showed me the New York Public Library; I got this while he explained (or made up a story about) the lion statues.

Jodie. IHOP. A delicious breakfast at the end of my trip to Indiana (2007 was a year of such travels!). Don't be fooled: neither she nor I were ever this proper on the trip.

Meet Painting with Light

I call it "Vitruvian Dude"


Leonardo da Vinci sketched the Vitruvian Man near the end of the 15th century as a representation of the proportionality found in the natural human body. For many, the image serves as a hybrid of art and nature (science) that developed during the Italian Renaissance. Since the creation of the original drawing, man’s understanding of himself and his world has evolved in ways da Vinci would have never imagined.

How we did it (major kudos to Polina for directing this fiasco):

Meet suffrage!

When I woke up this morning to both my phone alarm going off and NPR blaring from my clock radio at 5 a.m., the first thing I remember hearing was the announcer saying "It's here! The election is finally here!" I had the same feeling. I couldn't sleep last night because I was so excited to vote - I haven't been this excited about anything in a long time, including starting grad school. How grand to be present on a great day in our country's history.

Because my mother said she is always one of the first in line at her polling place, I made it my goal to do the same. I was the first official voter in my precinct and cast the second officially tallied ballot. Below are some (pretty terrible) photographs of my voting experience, from seeing some fellow grad students groggily stroll in through getting my free "thanks for voting" coffee at Starbucks. I am guarding my "I Voted" sticker with my life.


Me, Vivian and Wendy, pumped that the day has finally arrived.

Up before dawn, making my voice heard.

I voted and you should too!

Meet Barack Obama (and about 40,000 Missourians)

I won the battle over fatigue and tromped around the Obama rally, taking pictures, hearing his voice for real-real and admiring how many different people turned out to show their support.

I left my apartment a little after 9 p.m. for the 9:30 speech but my friend Clint (he's the beleaguered but joyous one toward the end) got in line at 1:45 p.m. - he's just better at caring about stuff like this. It really paid off for him, though - he shook the senator's hand.

It was nice to just wander around, taking nice little pictures for myself, listening to Obama and the fans as I relaxed from one of the toughest weeks I've had in school.


Watching the speech on one of the screens.

I don't care if this was done for a photo-op backdrop, I liked it a whole lot.

Sorry for the quick & dirty toning on this...perhaps one day I'll come back and clean it up...

He's in this shot, I swear! Go to the shorter lightpost to the right of "CHANGE" and go down to the big black box. That's his lectern. Woo.

Hooray for arts & crafts.

This is deliciously Midwestern and Obama thanked the crowd for it. He even said "Mi-zur-uh."

Because no one has ever seen the Lectern of Change...

Clint is such a trooper.

Can't have politics without a protest.

...or campaign buttons.

Meet Color Correction

(October 27, 2008) Andy Ritts, a Missouri graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, ponders his response to a discussion question at Monday night’s Bible study in the Wesley Student Center at the Missouri United Methodist Church in Columbia. Ritts leads the Bible study, which spent Monday studying the third chapter of Ephesians, a book in the New Testament. Over the course of the fall semester, the group will study the rest of Ephesians.

Meet Single Flash

(Columbia, Mo., October 21, 2008) Donte Bennett sings the tenor part of “He Has Made Me Glad” at Tuesday evening’s rehearsal of the Legions of Black Collegians gospel choir in the Gaines Oldham Black Cultural Center at the University of Missouri. Bennett, a senior, is co-director of the choir and also plays drums and bass guitar on occasion.




(Columbia, Mo., October 21, 2008) Carmen Fields, co-director of the Legions of Black Collegians gospel choir at the University of Missouri, laughs at a joke made by one of the choir’s musicians during rehearsal Tuesday night at the Gaines Oldham Black Cultural Center. Fields had the members of the choir stand in a circle next to singers of different vocal parts to help the group fine-tune the song “The Blood”, which they are preparing to sing at their winter concert in December.

Meet Metal & Glass

Here is my best image for the metal and glass assignment. Though I had the metal half of this, my object had both, plus a shiny box in the background, so there was a whole family tree of angles. I'm fairly pleased with the results, though I'd tweak the framing, back up a bit for deeper depth of field and try to get that one facet to not have a light reflection. But, overall, I'm happy with the shot and certainly learned a lot on this assignment.



(Columbia, Mo. October 15, 2008) When designing baseball’s greatest prize, a world series ring, the 2007 World Champion Boston Red Sox formed a committee of both players and front office members, who opted to modify the team’s 2004 design, replacing that year’s “B” with the team’s other logo, hanging red socks. The ring is cast in white gold with 42 total diamonds, eight natural rubies and four synthetic sapphires. Along one side of the ring is an engraving of Fenway Park with “7th World Championship” and “4-0 Sweep” and on the other are the Boston “B,” a replica of the World Series trophy and the ring owner’s last name. Inside the ring, the date “10-28-07” is engraved, commemorating the date of the title game.

Meet some bling:

This isn't my final "metal" shot yet...I'm hoping to go back in and brighten up the underside of the ring so that "champions" is easier to read. Just wanted to put this out there to see what people think...