New Jersey (pronounced "Joysey")

Nikkor 50mm 1.4 @ 2 sec.
F16, ISO 100
D2Xs


I had just been on a recent trip to New Jersey to help out a family member with some cabinets and whatnot. Night was the only time I really got out to see what was going on. So out I trekked over to the beach at Seaside Heights around 10:30 at night and find that it wasn't overly crowded. Awesome, no one to get in my way or to fear having the tripod tripped over. So I got to the end of the boardwalk at Sampson Ave. set the camera on the tripod and looked about as if I were dumbfounded by what to take a photo of. Well duh! it took me a second but it did manage to creep into my head(it was a long day). So I set up in the middle of the walk facing off center. I thought to myself that I could feather the top of the scene to bring up the foreground and keep the lights down but thought nah better to keep it just the way it is. I find it very interesting that 3 figures in the photo are very blurred and the people farther back and walking toward me are pretty much not blurred Seems to make it a little on the ghostly side. Which is fine by me. At 2 seconds exposure this is what happens.

















Nikkor 85mm 1.8 @ 10 sec.
F14, ISO 100
D2Xs

I also saw that the mist and moisture from the ocean waters were coming in very fast. A bench next to me was getting dew soaked and started getting a little shiny. So I quickly popped off the 50mm in exchange for the 85mm and took a couple of shots of the bench from a couple of different angle, this one I liked the best. I like the lines of the boardwalk and the bench being at differing angles from the frame leading to nowhere adds a bit of tension.
















Nikkor 50mm 1.4 @ 4 sec.
F8, ISO 100
D2Xs

Now, I haven't been to the Jersey shore in a long time so when I looked at the booth in the the photo above I was a bit taken aback by the fact of having to pay to get on the beach. Has it gotten that bad that we have to fence mother nature up to keep her beautiful? It may have kept out the Riff-Raff here but it sure as likely increased it somewhere else.
Anyhow, I had wanted to be able to get inside and place a flash but it was locked and no-one was around who could help out. I liked having the chair lift in this. If I had put the flash on the outside behind the booth it would have caused the dark background to lighten up with an ugly large halo around and would have spilled over to the chair lift and the light from the lamp to the right. Using a flag or something to limit the light would have shown up because of the amount of mist in the air. Fortunately the lamp to the right of the booth was far enough away that it cleared up just enough to keep the misty glow from overtaking the photo.


On my way home I managed to stop at the Barnegat Light lighthouse and took a few shots. I liked this one best. I used a high f-stop and a wide angle lens to keep a lot in focus. The focal point was figured on the hyper-focal distance for the lens.

The water current coming around the lighthouse is so strong the smaller boats have to go full throttle sometimes just to get through. This animated gif shows how fast the water is actually moving.

Until next week!
As always please feel free to comment.

A Plastic War

Hello everyone.
As having been a little boy quite a number of years ago I had always enjoyed the company of little green army men. Of course some will say I haven't yet grown up and to some extent will agree with that comment. When I married my current wife she had a boy from a previous marriage. He had little green army men strewn throughout the house and lawn. Those that were so called "lost" weren't actually lost . They were out on assignment, a recon mission for an indefinite period of time. This was about 11 years ago and to this day we can find one or two under the dirt in the front yard.





The story goes:
About a couple of weeks ago my stepson was out with his grandmother shopping at some store somewhere and he came across this package of little green army men. He said he looked at the package and it had a stealth fighter, a helicopter, flags, sandbags and barbed wire fencing in it. Oh, now he never got that in his army men packages before. Hmm, now I recall some 37 odd years ago that I got tanks and planes (no jets) in my packages of army men.
Well he looked at his grandmother and said he wanted a refund for his childhood. His grandmother picked up that package and paid for it unknowingly to him and at the end of the shopping trip, back at home, his grandmother pulled that package out and slapped it on his chest and said here's your childhood refund.
About a week later I was cleaning up around the house (a rare event) and I found these army men with their helicopter, stealth fighter and fencing just laying around under stuff. I said to myself that I should get him to make use out of these things. This is when I heard the story.


I had promptly told him that he should set up a scenario for me to photograph for him. He did with a little bit of reluctance. of course it didn't help that we were teasing him about playing with plastic men. He took it in stride though. And so I proceeded to photograph a series of 15 frames and put it in a package and called it "A Plastic War" The now teenager with his childhood refund was very happy with the results and his refund. The whole series can be viewed on my website.

It took 4 flash and strobes to create the lighting. Two of them had the Cactus V4 receivers by Gadget Infinity, one for the background with a red gel on the left up high, one for white light directly overhead with a snoot, one with a CTB gel in front and right just below the horizon to cast shadows and spill over to the background to create more than one color on the background and one to the left with a CTO gel set about 3 stops darker. Here everything is dark. It is intentional, it sets the right mood for the recon mission and having the front light spill over to the background creates 3 different colors from red to blue. Red being the firefight and bad, blue being the "good" or "homeward bound" (for lack of better descriptions)

As usual please feel free to comment and thanks for looking.
Next week New Jersey (pronounced "Joysey")

Hello world!

This is my first attempt at a blog of any sort. So forgive me of my ignorance as to what to write and how to write it. However as my title suggests it is just another day, week, month, or year in my life. This blog will cover more about my photography than anything else. But rest assured, I will throw some things in that will be about anything.

Okay, so about the photography. I have one blog that I follow, actually 2, the blog of David Tejada and Strobist. This guy is awesome in my opinion and that is where I would like to be. Doing the same thing as he is doing. But I am a long way off from that, for now. I choose the photo above for several reasons. The first being that I used 2 flash units for the photo and second being the recent activity on the so called "end of the world" scenario as depicted by the Mayans a long, long time ago and its correlation with other religions and beliefs.

For this shot I used a Sunpack 383 super for the background light. A snoot with a honeycomb attachment and a red gel was used on it to get the effect. as you can see the light is not exactly flat but has semi-wavy property to it close to a red-hot ember. The calender itself is lighted by a slave with a built-in snoot (the type that retracts to save space when not in use) plus a flag to help keep light fall-off away from the background. The use of the flag is because of the closeness of the background.

Now for the second reason. Most people believe that December 21, 2012 will be the end of the world because the calender stops on that day. This is not true and if anyone were to look at the information a lot closer they'll see that it means an end to an era. For the Mayans a 5125 year era, I believe that's how long the calendar is before it starts over again. The end of the age of Pisces. The beginning of the age of Aquarius. How about that.

This is also the date that our solar system crosses the equatorial plane of the Milky Way. I believe there will be some things that will happen that won't be pretty. But, it will not be the end of the world at all. However it will be the end of the world as we know it now. So people will just have to be prepared to help each other once it begins. This is why the background of my photo is red but the calender is as neutral as it can get. By the way it is made out of bone..Hmmm


Next week - "A Plastic war"