Faces
June 27th, 2008 by Camilo ArevaloI shot this last night. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but this and that always comes up.
Finally I did it. Below are the results.
The lighting was simple. An umbrella and strobe overhead and to the right. Camera about face high in front. A black reflector on the left side to absorb the light and keep it from coming back… white background.
Camera specs were 1/40 sec f/5.6 ISO640 @ 50mm, manual focus. Strobe was in manual @ 1/16. Tripod.
Processed in Lightroom and Photoshop.
I plan on starting a series of shots similar to this with differing people.
Here’s a new one from the series.
Fairchild Ecosystems
June 22nd, 2008 by Rafael RobaynaThese are some of my photos from yesterday’s Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden morning walk. When Oscar said it was hot, he wasn’t kidding. The humidity in the garden was at least 30% higher than the Miami average which explains why visiting the gardens at night is so popular. If you’re adverse to sweating all over your camera gear you might want to try checking out Fairchild during the cooler months or remember to bring a towel.
Fairchild Tropical Gardens
June 21st, 2008 by oscarrobaynaHad some fun today walking around a small portion of Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami. The place is huge! It was a warm day and the mosquitoes were all out and about feeding. This garden is well known for exotic plants and is probably the largest in the States. For you guys in Orlando Lue Gardens is a drop in the pond compared to Fairchild. Its definitely worth a visit. Most of my subjects were plant/flowers but there are many lizards/iguanas as well as butterflies and TONS of insects for the macro inclined. Hope these pics influence you to come down and visit the gardens.
HDR in Maine
June 18th, 2008 by Rohit DeshpandeI went to meet Julie Ziffer. She is an assistant professor at the Univeristy of Southern Maine. She was my senior here at UCF. My primary reason to go was to work with her on asteroid data. But I took the opportunity to visit the lighthouse and the harbour. Here are two pictures taken in HDR. Wow, I cannot believe I have posted after 4 months!
Mini Takes the States 2008
June 17th, 2008 by Camilo ArevaloI’m a pretty big mini fan. So as soon as I heard they were coming to Miami I made it an item to visit. They were stationed down at the Homestead Raceway. Quite a drive to say the least, but well worth it. I got there early in the morning and spent most of my time on the track test driving the cars. I laughed like a little school girl as the mini screamed around those tight curves. Joy. What fun. But alas I had to give the next joe a turn and I proceeded to take the following shots. Taken with 24-70 and 70-200 & Mark 3. Processed in LR. Oh and I added a few Michelle Branch photos too. I ran into her at the event.
I also posted a video of one of the test drives on my facebook.
Images | 4 Comments »Red Bull Air Race
June 15th, 2008 by paulgardnerThese are some photos that I should have posted a long time ago. I shot these a couple months ago down at the Red Bull Air Races in San Diego, California. For those that have never heard of the air races, imagine Nascar but in an airplane. The planes do timed runs around a pylon course, one at a time. The planes are flying at around 250mph and are sometimes as close as 10 feet off the water. The speed was amazing and presented certain challenges with regards to taking photos; Tracking had to be spot on. After a few runs the track became pretty predictable and it was easy to visualize a shot and set up for the shot at a certain pylon or angle. For this event I was lucky enough to get Media Press Passes for both myself and my fiancee Lindsay. Having press passes was awesome. We had access to great food, air conditioning, high speed internet, more food, free redbull and access to the air force base where they had the “pit” setup with all the planes and pilots. On one day they had a meet the pilots day for the press and we got to go interview and photograph the planes and pilot up close. These photos are a combination of my photos and Lindsay’s photos. I shot mostly with my D3 and a 300 f/2.8 with various combinations of teleconverters. I had a 1.4x and a 2x TC with me. Lindsay used my D200 with the 70-200mm and occasionally the 17-55mm for some unique wide shots of the area. There were well over 100,000 people at the event and without press passes we would have been hard pressed to get the angles we were able to get. I highly recommend the event to anyone that can make it next year.
High Sierra Hiking
June 11th, 2008 by paulgardnerContinuing to help get some more momentum on the site I thought I would also post some recent photos. Two weeks ago I went on a nice hike up in the High Sierras, about 5 hours north of Los Angeles at a lake called Saddlebag Lake. The lake is located JUST outside the park boundry for Yosemite National Park. Elevation was 10,000 feet and 98% of the hike was through snow. We hiked for about 8 miles with the intention of climbing a 12,600 foot peak. When we got out to where we would have started to climb up the weather started to look less than ideal and there was still too much snow on the ridgeline. We called it off and just hiked back out. For the photos I had my D3 and a rented 17-35mm f/2.8. I had rented this lens for another gig and kept it through the weekend to try it out. I really loved the lens; I can’t wait to get rid of my 17-55 and buy the 17-35. It seemed to be the ideal lens for an all around outdoors adventure lens. The 14-24 is too wide and the 24-70 would have worked but doesn’t give that ultra-wide view that 14 or 17mm gives. So it worked out great.
Gatorland
June 11th, 2008 by Tom PiteraIn an effort to keep the momentum going here, I thought I’d post some shots from my trip to Gatorland a few weeks ago. There were a lot of good photo opportunities and here are a few of my favorites. I had a chance to borrow a 70-300mm f/4.5-5.5 AF-S VR lens for the trip and it turned out to be a killer little lens. Sure it doesn’t stack up with some of the high-end telephotos but it’s an excellent lens for the price. Everything was shot with that lens, a D200, processed in Lightroom, & sharpened in CS3.
The james dean of ISOfifty
June 9th, 2008 by Camilo ArevaloThe snap was done with a nikon D3 50mm 1.4 and an iR filter. Composition was done through live view. Finally a good use for it ;).
I also posted a shoot shot taken by Paul with the Mark3.
Sunrise Balloon Race
May 26th, 2008 by oscarrobaynaA second post…just a day late. Made it to the Sunrise Community Balloon Race balloon race a few weeks ago but haven’t had the opportunity to post. It was nice to see them prepare the balloons and fill them up. Unfortunately the race was really short. They went up maybe 300 feet and came down about 1 mile away in another field west of the Tamiami Executive Airport. Their baskets looked a bit too crowded and a little hot to ride in. Nothing special went into taking these images, I was more like a kid in a candy store learning about how these things work
The next was one of the more interesting events at the Balloon Race. Its a balloon ride from Orlando which did not perform up to par. The dog made it over one runway and came down quickly onto the second runway.
