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Two Pontiacs entered into the Spider Awards

The Black and White Spider Awards is the leading international award honoring black and white photography. This year I submitted two of my car images, both classic Pontiacs. Click on the thumbnails to get the full view.

Photographing cars has always been one of my favorite things to do outside of actually driving them, and classics are the best kinds of cars in my mind. I just love their curves and all the chrome, I mean if Bling is your thing, the makers of these cars did it over the top and yet, with some elegant style.

I think these two images in black and white are a testament to the timeless beauty of these machines. I hope you agree.

My new Stage Zero Dolly

So I got my Stage Zero dolly kit from Dynamic Perception, built it and figured out to make it work. Of course, by the time I was finished it was too late to take it out and set up a shot somewhere (or I was too lazy) so instead I made a shot of the dolly itself.

 

 

Within in the next couple weeks I will post some (hopefully cool) video that I actually take while using the dolly, until then consider this a teaser…

What I learned at Alexa School

[dc]T[/dc]hanks to my affiliation with IATSE Local 600, Cinematographers Guild, I had an opportunity recently to attend a class given by ARRI to learn more about their new Alexa camera series and though I have shot with one once already, I did learn some new and interesting facts about what is quickly becoming one of  my favorite camera systems.

Continue reading “What I learned at Alexa School”

Culver City Car Show

The car show that takes over the main street in Culver City every year is one of my favorites. There are usually a selection of George Barris creations, some cool music and of course, some great cars. Here are a couple of images I made this weekend.

DSLR.Bot and Venice HDR Images

[dc]I[/dc]n the on-going battle between Nikon and Canon owners as to which camera is better, one feature that I, a devoted Canon owner, have lamented is Nikon’s ability to bracket to 5 images as opposed to Canon’s 3, which becomes a real drawback when making High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. But now there is a new iPhone/iPad app that allows me to extend the number of images captured for HDR to as many as 20, and I have only begun to experiment with it. Continue reading “DSLR.Bot and Venice HDR Images”

Forced Perspective in Motion Photography

forced perspective
I shot this in-camera forced perspective image as a test

[dc]C[/dc]an you teach new dogs, old tricks? It seems these days if you want to show something out of the ordinary in your film or video project, the default option is to composite, green screen, photoshop, or fix and create images in post, on a computer, in a digital realm. But before the days of instant-gratification cameras and super fast, powerful and affordable computers, a lot of special effects had to be created “in-camera”, meaning they were accomplished with lighting, optics and physics, which are the key elements in creating forced perspective images. In this article I’ll go over some history of the technique and show you how I used it recently. Continue reading “Forced Perspective in Motion Photography”

Steven Spielberg Portraits

I had a job last year shooting some images of Steven Spielberg for the opening of Universal Singapore. Here are a couple of those images. Click on them to see a larger version.

He was quite nice and very easy to work with. We had a great conversation about the next film he is going to direct about the Lincoln administration on the road to abolition. At the time Liam Neeson was going to play Lincoln and Spielberg seemed pretty excited about it. Since then, the lead role has gone to Daniel Day-Lewis.