A couple of shots from a performance at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater. This show combined Indonesian music and dance with Chinese percussion. I was surprised at how well this combination worked together. The Chinese drums and percussion really punctuated the movements in a very dynamic way.
I was there to primarily shoot the Hei Gu Ensemble, a Chinese percussion group led by Jason Jong. Besides Chinese percussion, Jason also had drum corp experience. You can hear some of that thrown into the mix now and then. The result is thrilling!
I used the 1DmkIV with the 70-200 mkII and 1.4ex teleconverter most of the show. This was a perfect combination from my shooting position in the middle of the theater. When the Hei Gu Ensemble was setup towards the rear of the stage for the second half, I moved to the front rows and could have still used a little more reach for close ups.
Custom guitars are difficult objects to shoot. They are highly reflective and often have numerous curves and contours. Combine that with vastly different color tones of exotic hardwoods and suddenly you’re pulling out more lights and modifiers to get the shot just right.
I haven’t had time to pick up my Les Paul guitar in a long time. Probably my fingers wouldn’t really be able to move anymore, but seeing these amazing guitars from Matsuda Guitars really made me want to hold one and pick a few notes and strum a chord or two.
It was rainy and cold during the Dias de los Muertos in Oakland but the festivities were still going strong. So no blue skies and amber sun in the background this year.
For this shoot I was using the 5DmkII with a 17-40mm or the 24L along with the 1DmkIV with the 50L or the 135L.
I’m starting a new Crosswater Media video and stills project on Takayuki Zoshi, a Japanese wood carver in Sebastopol, California. His work can be seen in many temples in Japan and the US.
This project will be shot entirely with the Canon 5d II. I started shooting with that camera near the beginning of this year and it produces some really beautiful looking video. For stills, I’m still going through some growing pains coming from a Nikon D3. It’s an incredible time saver though to be shooting video one moment and then stills a second later with the same camera. Video footage to come, for now, here are a couple available light stills from the first day.
Some images from a promotional shoot for a yet unnamed music group. The plan was to deliver black and whites so I shot tethered to Capture One with the black and white preset enabled. Capture One still seems to be the quickest and easiest to use software for tethered shooting. I’m excited about the tethered shooting capability in the Lightroom 3 Beta, but I’m hoping that the transfer speed will increase in the shipping version. I could go on and on about Lightroom and can’t seem to stop telling fellow photographers how much I love the luminance noise reduction slider…but I digress.
For this shoot I kept the lighting pretty simple. The main light was a gridded beauty dish high and to the right for most of the shots. A small gridded softbox was place directly opposite this light, just out of frame. Occasionally I would pull out a third light with a 10 degree grid to give some detail to the instruments as seen in the photo below.
I recently did a couple shoots for Vanessa Vo, an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist and singer. She plays a number of traditional Vietnamese instruments including the dan tranh as seen above. I’m a huge music lover so it’s always thrilling to work with musicians and even more so when I get to work non-Western instruments into the shot.
For this shoot I pulled out a 22″ gridded beauty dish for the main, a gridded medium softbox for kicker or fill if needed and a 7″ grid spot to light the instrument. Grids, have I ever mentioned that I love grids?!
Of course I shot more than just monkeys during my time in Japan. I visited Roppongi Hills in Tokyo where there is an amazing view from the 52 floor of the Mori Tower. There’s also a killer bakery in the complex with this amazing honey toast, mmm. The view is also great from the top of the building, 2 more floors up, but hold on to your belongings and small children, it’s like a wind tunnel up there…
I’ve been on a little vacation, finally! I was even mostly away from Wifi so I was never tempted to pull out the iPhone and check email and the web. Nice! I’ve been in Japan and had a great time, even if I got really sick at one point and ended up in the emergency room in Iwata. But everyone was nice there and I can now say I’ve experienced a Japanese ER.
Anyway, I saw so many great places on this trip. We visited the Jigokudani Yaen-Koen in Yudanaka. It’s a hotspring where all the snow monkeys get some relief from the cold and snow in winter. I could have spent all day there just watching their different behaviors.
I used the Nikkor 135mm f/2 for most of the photos here. I would have loved to have had my 70-200mm lens here but I would not have loved lugging that thing all over Japan so it stayed at home. Luckily the 135mm ended up being an ideal focal length on a full frame body. It was COLD and mostly overcast. The snow created very difficult shooting conditions as I moved from location to location. I kept my aperture at f/2 and tweaked the shutter speed as needed, which was very often.
Ok, so I finally got a clip up of the video I’ve been working on. It’s been a long project with one almost disastrous computer failure in between, but it should be wrapping up this week and then going out for replication. The project seemed to grow and grow but luckily I had the privilege of working with many great people during the two day shoot and during the many weeks of post production. The concert was shot on 3 Panasonic HVX200′s. All editing was done with Final Cut Pro and graded in Color.
I’ve been MIA for a while now. Just been really wrapped up in a video project. I’ve been promising a short clip for a while now, well, it is coming soon, I promise. For now here are a couple pics from an interior shoot I did a little while ago. Cheol-sa Kim is a really talented artist, actually multi-disciplinary artist. Not only is he an incredible fine art painter, he also makes great sculptural furniture out of wood, metal and concrete. I never really knew there were so many visual possibilities with concrete in terms of texture and color. It’s pretty cool stuff. All of these photos were shot with a 5′ octobox as main and a white shoot through for fill.
