You must watch this video! Then read the short story below. It looks really good if you click on the full screen icon right underneath the video between the HD symbol (already on) and the Vimeo logo.

Nice Shot! from Blownapart Studios on Vimeo.

Last weekend, I went down to Sacramento California to help out my brother Michael Poole and cousin Steve Bailey who are the creative forces behind Blown Apart Studios with a video shoot which was a lot of fun. They are putting together a Still Photography Tutorial DVD called Lighting Boot Camp with Mark Behrens. We were filming at Elk's Tower with a bunch of models and guns at a workshop called guns, guts and glory. I helped them shoot a special feature for the DVD which was a short action based movie which hopefully I can share soon once the editing is finished.

This was a shot that Steve made towards the end of the workshop. I'm going to quote their story on this shot here:

This is a single take steadicam shot during a photographic workshop at the Elk's Tower in Sacramento. The workshop put on by Mark Behrens and LookPW titled "Gun's Gut's and Glory" featured 22 photographers and 20 models. This shot actually came together completely unplanned, when most of the photographers and models had gathered into one room. It started out as a "wouldn't it be cool" and turned into an "alright everybody, listen up" in about 30 seconds. It took about 5 minutes to bring everyone up to speed, place people around the room, and figure out a rough path. The original shot is a little over two minutes long. The only editing we did was "speed ramping" which is basically just speeding up and slowing down the footage. It's obviously really hard to get 40 people to hold still for that long, so a lot of the sped up sections hide some of the movement. The other sped up and slowed down parts were just to emphasize it's epic awesomeness. Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

For more information visit: http://www.blownapartstudios.com/

On a recent vacation, I ended up visiting a car museum. One of the things I ended up being really interested in was the hood ornaments.

I thought I would try to capture them portrait style as much as possible. It was a little difficult to get the right angles but here are a few that I thought were pretty good. Right now, I'm too lazy to do any cropping or any processing at all, so these are all with the cameras settings untouched.

This post is a continuation of Aerial Panoramas 1. These are more pictures taken out of plane windows. I'm going to use the same introduction to this post because I am lazy.

If the lighting is good and the window isn't too scratched up, you can take pretty good pictures out of a plane window. I'm sure someone else has done this but I've never seen images out the windows of airplanes stitched into panoramas. Here are a few that I've taken. I'll probably post up most of the others tomorrow. While planes are traveling at a few hundred mph, the distances to objects are enough that you can still take your time when snapping the pictures to stitch together. The exception to that rule is right around takeoff or landing. One of the pictures here is flying over Sacramento around sunrise and you can see that the panorama is distorted. I waited too long between pictures...

Just click on the pictures to see slightly larger versions.

Over Sacramento












On the image below the plane was low to the ground so I wasn't taking pictures fast enough.











This is over the Great Salt Lake. The reddish color is supposedly due to unicellular organisms that live in the salty water.

This is a continuation of Aerial Panoramas 1. These are different pictures taken out of plane windows while flying.

Here is the same introduction because I am lazy.

If the lighting is good and the window isn't too scratched up, you can take pretty good pictures out of a plane window. I'm sure someone else has done this but I've never seen images out the windows of airplanes stitched into panoramas. Here are a few that I've taken. I'll probably post up most of the others tomorrow. While planes are traveling at a few hundred mph, the distances to objects are enough that you can still take your time when snapping the pictures to stitch together. The exception to that rule is right around takeoff or landing. One of the pictures here is flying over Sacramento around sunrise and you can see that the panorama is distorted. I waited too long between pictures...

Just click on the pictures to see slightly larger versions (Full Screen).

I took about 850 pictures over the 3 days I was vacationing with Liz. About 40 of them were pictures of lights. There is something about taking long exposure pictures of lights that I really enjoy. It's probably because there is a bit of a random nature to them. I don't quite know how they will turn out until I see them. It's not like standard photography in which you can truly compose your pictures. On the other hand there still are techniques to learn that when applied produce similar results.

Anyways, here are a few of my favorites from this trip. Most are 30-60 second exposures at minimal ISO for my camera (100) and the most closed aperture for the stock lens for my camera (f22). Next to the picture you will see the approximate technique used. If you like the picture click on it to see a full screen version which is still much less detailed than the original. None of them have been photoshopped any more than cropping, resizing, a little bit of blurring/sharpening and little changes in brightness, contrast and saturation. It's mainly the original picture you are seeing here.

Zooming


Panning down


Panning across


Walking forward while holding camera


Panning across


In close crop of picture above showing one section details. Due to the detail on this I really want to print up a large scale version of the picture above.


Panning diagonally slowly jerking


Zooming out then tilting and zooming back in. I like the 3D effect this gives.


Making lots of little circles!


Walking forward while holding camera


Walking forward while holding camera

This post is going to be a bunch of random pictures that I think demonstrate something interesting or cool. The first few are just some close up nature still life shots. There are some high speed water pictures, some pictures playing with lights, a picture that shows the earth spinning, an ultra closeup of an eye, and a couple that show an interesting idea of changing zoom while taking a long exposure. I've commented on most of the individual pictures with the technique I was using/idea I was going for. All of the originals are 4000 x 3000 but blogger only allows 1600 x 1200. I still recommend clicking on the picture to see it at this size.



I really liked taking pictures of the lizard in the next 3 pictures. He was trying to hide so he was staying as still as possible. The camera is less than a foot away from him. Only the last picture is a crop.

Here it has an eye wide open



Here you can see a little bit of the front of its snout.



Click on the picture below to see the crazy details. This is cropped to actual pixels from the first picture of the lizard.



Close up of water drops on a leaf. I really like the shapes that water drops form depending on what surface they are on. I also really like the reflections. I need to play around with arranging water drops sometime.



With a shutter speed of 1/4000 of a second, you can get some pretty cool pictures of water though due to all the motion it is really hard to focus on. I took a bunch of pictures of water coming out of a spigot. This one turned out pretty cool.



Another of the water shots. In this one it is coming out at the camera.



This was shot at late twilight with a tripod. I started out zoomed in a 10x and then with a long exposure zoom out to be completely wide. This would give you straight lines. In order to get the smooth curve I rotated the tripod head while zooming out.



The camera was on a stationary tripod in the picture below. (The camera was not moving with respect to the ground at all) At 10x zoom with a 60 second exposure you can really see how the earth is spinning. I've really boosted this picture beyond where it should go in order to see more streaks. In the original you can see the colors of the different stars. I need to shoot in raw so that I can keep more information and this even after boosting would be much cleaner. I'm really tempted to see whether I can look at the distribution of path lengths in order to find what the center of rotation is and calculate the rotation rate of the earth. It will be like the old days tracking particles in Wolfgang Losert's Lab!



Long exposure taken at 10x zoom of city lights while moving the camera up and down multiple times to get so many streaks.


This is a 1 second exposure using a tripod where I start out zoomed in 10x and then zoom out completely wide. This causes perspective lines to appear where there are bright objects being photographed. This works really well on the guitar. I need to play with this in a cooler location than my classroom!




My brother's eyeball. This is not a crop. I used a cheap macro adapter and zoomed in at 10x. His eye was probably about 2 inches away from the lens. The depth of field is crazy shallow. I need to take this picture in daylight instead of indoors and I need to make sure my white balance settings are right! Still pretty cool, look at the detail on the very center of the eye.