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I've been amazed at all the interesting art I've seen of Barack Obama from spray painted grafitti on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles to a inauguration party in Portland. I can't imagine any other president in history has been depicted in so many forms for visual art. Check this out: Click Here
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I know it's only 20 days into the new year, but I'm starting a New Work 2009 gallery that I'll update frequently on my website, thomasboyd.net.
It'll be slim pickings for a few months, but I just didn't want to add work to my 2008 gallery. I'm not totally convinced this is a very good way to organize my work, but I want to show recent work even if it's not up to portfolio quality.
So, over the next few weeks I'll move my best work from 2008 to my portfolio galleries and update the this gallery with my newest stuff....if that makes sense.
You'll see three frames from my flood coverage and a dozen images from my two days in Newport, Ore.
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With flooding and another back to back trip to Newport, I haven't had much time to devote to my POYi contest entry. I made the deadline with only about a half hour to spare.
The cost of that is that I wasn't able to get as much feedback on the edit as I needed. I hope to fine tune this edit for the Best of Photojournalism contest coming up.
So, the gallery above is exactly what I submitted to the contest. But keep in mind this shows only the NPOY entry and not the single entries. I would say there are a half dozen photos entered in single pictures categories that are not in this portfolio entry.
The black slides separate the stories. You'll see a portrait series, the Columbia Gorge entry in the Science and Natural History Picture Story and the nightlife story in that was entered in the Issue Reporting Picture Story category.
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Sol has helped me edit my Sports Portfolio entry for this year. Here it is.
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Back in October I made a post describing how I used PhotoShelter's new embed feature to post photos to my blog.
Today, he sent out an email to all PhotoShelter users and linked my post here. Hits to this blog went through the roof and it's always fun to look at the stats and see where they're all coming from. It's worldwide.
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I hear the real rain starts tomorrow.
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| From Singles |
My good buddy Kevin German made it to Portland during his short trip back to the Northwest from Vietnam where he's currently working as a freelance photographer. Here he is weather testing his fancy new camera.
>The Oregon Ducks played a great game against Oklahoma State in the Holiday Bowl and I was there. Click here to see the Oregonian stories from the game.
>108,396 The number of images in my 2008 Aperture Libary.
321 The number of projects in my Aperture Libary.
9033 The average number of images I shoot per month.
154 The number I considered good enough for a five star rating.
1.42 The number of terrabytes required to archive the images for 2008.
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The kids put in some quality time with the snow yesterday here in Happy Valley.
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| From Blogger Pictures |
My son Cole's real name is actually Coleman. Today, he met Koleman Vance, who's worked at Les Schwab Tires for 10 years. He's a cool dude and was really surprised to meet a fellow Cool Coleman.
We were down there waiting in line like everyone else to buy tire chains for the snow. I love having Cole or Greta along with me when we have funny little interactions with strangers. I tend to be a little more chatty when they are around. I like them to be free to engage people and have some street smarts about strangers. Koleman made our day.
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I headed out on my second night of shooting. My goal is to find some interesting scenes at night as we approach Winter Solstice.
I wanted to explain some of the technical things I learned about shooting long exposures with a Canon Mark III. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but, if you're like me, you don't shoot like this very often. It took me some experimentation to get the image quality I wanted.
The equipment: I used Canon 50/1.4 EF and a 24/1.4L lenses. I had the camera mounted on an Induro carbon fiber tripod with an Arca Swiss B2 head. I fired the camera with a Canon remote trigger that allowed me make as long as exposures as I wanted without moving the camera. As always, I processed the raw images in Aperture. I then used Aperture plugins Viveza to selectively tone the images, Noise Ninja to handle the noise, and Sharpener Pro for raw pre-sharpening.
Most of the shots were at 100 or 125 ISO. If there were people in the scene, I would turn it up to 400 ISO. The first thing I did was to take off the protective UV filters off both lenses. This reduces reflections.
Focusing in low light is very difficult, even with the bright lenses I was using. The autofocus won't do it and the viewfinder is not bright enough. This is where the Live View feature comes in. For some reason, it can see very well in the dark and makes focusing easy when the image is zoomed in at 5x or 10x. I was really blown a way at how accurate it was. In fact, it was so sharp, it made me realize I probably need to set the micro adjustment on all my lenses because they looked sharper than what I'm getting with normal autofocus. I'll write an entry about that later.
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I shot this as lab manager Alan Borrud was taking a 4x5 photo of Jamie Francis in the studio.
Please ad your caption in the comments section.
>My good buddy Sol Neelman writes about his experience covering the Civil War for Sports Illustrated.
>I often get asked questions about how to make a living at photography. I always feel my answers don't fully explain how difficult it is and how long it takes. But, Chase Jarvis has a nice post that talks abou it here.
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Alan Kwan is a 23-year-old manager for the west Albany football team. Kwan, who is autistic, has never missed a game in eight years and says some of his best friends came from the team.
>Cover Charge
Keeping on the same theme of nightlife work, Thomas Boyd has recently updated his nightlife work, now titled Cover Charge.
Check it out, it's good stuff.
4 December 2008 by Zac Goodwin
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Here are the photos that Ross Hamilton, Bruce Ely, Rob Finch and myself shot at the Civil War game. There a 68 photos but pay special attention to the fan photos Rob Finch shot....pretty cool. I really like the guy in Orange suit walking through the tunnel.
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Here are some family snaps from our trip to tiny Vale, Ore. Cole rode his motorcycle and Greta rode Clipper. My mom has a second home there on ten acres.
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Freshly slaughtered turkeys destined for the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving meal are drained of blood after having their necks cut upside down in a cone. While their fate ends the same as most other domestic turkeys, they lived a better life in free-range pens on pasture are are certified organic.