Not much photographic technique to report here or insights – the primary challenges were:
1) Getting close enough to the bars of the cages to defocus them, but
2) Not getting so close that the tiger can stick their paw through and steal your lens (and/or flesh!) from you.
They are such gorgeous creatures though, aren’t they?
On Sunday, I attended David Tejada’s Small Strobes, Big Results workshop held in Buffalo. I don’t really have anything to compare it to – it’s the first photography workshop I had ever attended – but it was a ton of fun and I left with my head crammed full of information and ideas.
We started the day at Nickel City Studios for introductions and a bit of classroom instruction. After lunch, we headed to the Buffalo Central Terminal with our models to demonstrate what David had been teaching us that morning.
Even though I grew up in Buffalo, I had never been to the Central Terminal before. It’s an utterly gorgeous building even in its current state of disrepair – I wish I could have seen it in its heyday. It almost distracted me from why we were actually there – to practice lighting!
For each of the different lighting setups that afternoon David explained what his thought processes were as he was setting up, we photographed the setup, then he handed off the flash controller (pocketwizards, in this case) to each of us so we could get our own shots in.
I snuck this one in off of natural light, while someone else had the flash controller. I really like what I got out of it:
After the workshop we all headed off to Anchor Bar for some wings. Even though I prefer Duff’s wings myself, the company and conversation more than made up for it.
I’m finally working on getting a dedicated photography blog started (you are here). I’ll be creating a few backdated posts with some content that I previously posted on my personal journal so this place doesn’t look completely empty at first glance.
A few short blurbs about me: I grew up in Buffalo, NY and so far I’ve lived in Raleigh, NC, Nashua, NH, and Somerville, MA. I’ve been working for a nifty little software company called Red Hat for the past five years. I’m an amateur photographer always looking to learn and get better, hopefully this blog will chronicle that.
Upcoming posts will include the Small Strobes, Big Results workshop recently held in Buffalo, the Zeiss 100mm f/2 Makro-Planar lens, and getting up close and personal with a couple of tigers.
Last month I had gotten lucky looking for tickets for the New England Aquarium’s whale watching cruises – there was a sunset cruise listed on the ticketing site, but it wasn’t advertised on the Aquarium’s website itself! Probably as a result of that the boat was fairly empty, hardly had to jockey for position at all, and I’m pretty pleased with a couple of the images I got:
I had rented the 24mm f/1.4L II for a little bit to play around with – I love fast lenses, and 24mm is a fun focal length. I ended up really liking the lens but I don’t think I would use it enough to justify it right now – I already have the 17-40mm f/4L after all. Some of the better results from the 24mm:
Just a couple from around the city that I thought worked pretty well as black and white images:
