I think it was actually the first time I ever used the zoom function (that’s not really important to this post, I’m just proud of myself and wanted to broadcast my mad-skills).

But the “quickie” from the title is this: look below at how drab the original photo was.  It had good composition (where the stuff is inside the frame), but it’s a little under-exposed (dark) and the colors are flat and muddy.  As a result my eyes instantly get bored looking at it.

But I ran it through one of my most used iphone-apps, the Best Camera App (named after the philosophy that the best camera is the camera you have with you).  I played around with a few filters but settled on one layer of the “candy” filter and finished by putting on a white border. That’s it.

It was easy. So easy I did it during red lights on my way home from work over a period of about 4 minutes.

I don’t post-produce everything that comes out of my camera, but there’s not much that sees the light of the internet that I haven’t first re-touched in at least a subtile way (in case you missed that: most of what goes in my camera never comes out!).

And, as you can see in the two pictures here, a little tweaking can make a dramatic difference.

This leads into the issue of over-producing, a hot and sweaty debate I am sneakily slipping out of.  For today, anyway.

Ciao.

In my normal fashion, I’ll use this to give a quick rundown of my lighting and other camera details.

Everything was shot with one off-camera speedlight (Vivitar 285 between 1/4 and 1/16 power), triggered with the absolute cheapest possible Chinese triggers and mounted on a V.A.L. (Voice Activated Light stand aka Howard, pictured below). Since it was a bit of a smash-and-grab shoot, I only used one lens, a 24-105/f4. We started shooting about an hour or so before Sunset, which gave us an overall laid back and low-key vibe.

Howard was stand-in, V.A.L., production manager, wardrobe assistant, and logistics coordinator. yeah.

f/13, 1/125, ISO 250, 24mm. In this image you can see we put the light about 30 degrees from center and an angle about that high. It was essentially the same for all of them.

f/13, 1/125, ISO 160, 24mm

f/14, 1/30, ISO 160, 24mm

f/18, 1/125, ISO 400, 55mm

f/11, 1/13, ISO 200, 24mm

f/7.1, 1/125, ISO 200, 24mm

f/10, 1/125, ISO 200, 105mm

f/10, 1/125, ISO 200, 60mm

f/10, 1/125, ISO 200, 40mm

f/10, 1/125, ISO 200, 105mm

f/16, 1/13, ISO 125, 70mm

f/10, 1/15, ISO 1250, 24mm

Check out Sami’s video:

.

i met sami sunday

and we took awesome pictures.

teaser.

editing now, more later.

It’s Kristin.

Saturday Kristin, Katie and I walked up and down Magazine Street taking pictures. We started around 5:30, which is about an hour or so before it’s dark now (too dark for pictures that is). And that means that there was a lot of really great light filling the place. It’s one of the best times to shoot in natural light.

For the photography side of it, I shot this on a 24-105 f/4 IS.  I kept my aperture between f/4 and f/7.1 (my target was 5.6, because that’s about the sharpest that lens gets, and it gives me a good depth of field for portraits).

I had to bump my ISO to 1250 for a little bit, but most of the time it was between 400 and 800. This lens has IS, so it’s very capable to go down to 1/60.  With the lower light, and less than huge aperture, it stayed in this range.

I plotted out my path (I live at A and work at B). According to this it’s a 19.6 mile round-trip.

The weather is really nice for it, but more than that, I enjoyed being in the neighborhoods and on the streets that I usually just drive through.

I encourage everyone reading this to try it.

Let me know if you need my address.

Those are the first two.

And then I saw a Lamborghini.

354,000.00

in case you were wondering.

The rest is just the randomness from the day; out-takes of Keith that I liked but didn’t make the final cut; lunch; and a truck.

truck: