A while back someone once asked me why I do photography. This caught me a little off guard as I never really thought about why I do it. It's just something that is so much a part of my life that I cannot imagine being without a camera in hand. Even while simply walking down the street I find myself unconsciously examining the quality and direction of light.
Photography allows me to capture something that would not normally be seen. Maybe it's a different perspective or distortion caused by a lens, or a manipulation of natural or artificial light. Photography also captures that one moment that will never be seen again.
All of the people I've met and places I've traveled have changed my life. I look back at my photographs and those moments come back into vivid reality. This site is an attempt to share these experiences with you. So come on in and take a look around. Feel free to drop me an email or post a comment.
f/2.8, 1/80, 70-200mm at 200mm, iso 3200
Dohee Lee gave another great performance at her work in progress show “Deep Sea”. Sight lines at this venue were rather limited so I tried to isolate performers in the frame and relied heavily on the 70-200mm. I thought about adding on a 1.4 converter to get in even closer but the loss of a stop would have been too much. I was already shooting at iso 3200-4000 and could only get a max shutter speed of 1/125 sec.
More photos after the jump…
f/2.8, 1/2500, 45mm PC-E, iso 200
I love Santa Cruz, the laid back vibe, the funky stores and restaurants, the musicians hanging out on the street corners…It’s a place I can go to just recharge. I could spend hours just watching the waves roll in while listening to the sounds and feeling the sand between my toes. I’ll never get tired of shooting beaches and sea shores, the tones of sand, water and sky, the open horizon. Yeah, this is the life.
f/2.8, 1/4000, 45mm PC-E, iso 200
f/2.8, 1/2500, 14-24mm at 14mm, iso 200
f/2, 1/6, 35mm, iso200
I spent the past weekend at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts working as part of the video crew for SYTE’s concert DVD production. I love shooting video but at the same time I often wish I could be shooting stills. I did manage to shoot some behind the scenes photos during my down time. It will give you a small glimpse of what happened before the show and a little taste of the excellent work by lighting designer Charles Griswold (though many of these shots were taken as lights were being set and were not the final lighting used in the show).
f/2.2, 1/6, 85mm, iso 200
More pics after the jump…
Here is a short video clip from some footage I shot with the Nikon D90 during a rehearsal. I’ll be working one of the three video cameras for the live concert recording next week. I won’t be using the D90 for that though, I’ll be shooting a HVX200 with a P2 card.
The D90 is an interesting animal. You can get some really great looks from the camera and the right lenses but it is very limited. The 5 minute recording limit per clip is normally not a problem when you have a planned shoot, but for something that has to be shot in one take like this rehearsal, it gets to be a little annoying having to work around this. I was using it for about an hour and a half and it definitely was getting pretty hot, but still kept going. The lack of manual controls is also something I just have to accept and try to make the best of.
I used a tripod and video head most of the time. The lighting levels were very low and came from available light through a bank of windows and tungsten room lights. Nothing fancy here…it was a rehearsal! I shot a gray card to get a color balance in camera and it did a very good job. For this video though, I wanted something a little edgier and played with the colors a little in Final Cut.
The sound from the little mono mic on the D90 is ok and useful for syncing but in a high sound pressure situation such as this rehearsal, it is unusable. Instead I used audio courtesy of a live recording by Darcel Walker who will be doing the sound recording for the concert video. He was using 4 wireless lav mics for this rehearsal. I didn’t process the audio at all and only gave a few tweaks to levels and panning.
f/7.1, 1/13, 24-70mm at 28mm, iso 800
I’ve had to dig back into a past shoot to access some images for a client so I figured since I’m going through them, I might as well post a few. These were taken at Noh Space for promotional material for a set of performances at Yerba Buena Center. It was an interesting show that combined jazz and dance with Korean and Japanese music, drumming and singing.
Dohee Lee is a dancer, singer, drummer and multi-instrumentalist. The thing that I love about her is that she never holds anything back. She is not afraid to put herself out there, emotions completely bared. It is amazing and sometimes frightening to see. Performing with her was dancer Sherwood Chen, Tatsu Aoki on shamisen, bass and taiko, and Francis Wong on sax. More photos after the jump…
f/4.8, 1/250, 105VR, iso 200
More pics from the previous shoot. All of these shots used approximately the same lighting, two Dynalite 4040’s, one on the right rear through a Chimera XS softbox with grid and one on the side left through a Chimera S softbox with grid. The only thing I would change was the power of the pack and my aperture depending on what look I wanted. The black and white photos were processed with Silver Efex Pro and the color photos were processed with Capture NX2.
f/20, 1/250, 105VR, iso 640
f/4, 1/250, 105VR, iso 200
by jasonlewphotography
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