Going home, giving a little back and the importance of reading the manual!

   Went home to New Orleans for Christmas. Decided to travel light, so I brought the bare minimum. One body, two lenses, a single speed light, spare batteries and cards. No computer. I would have just gone with a single lens and lived with nothing but the 24-70mm but I knew that I was going to want the 14-24mm while I was walking around the French Quarter.  I had a lot less time to wander around shooting than I planned on getting because the entire family came down with some sort of plague while we were there, but did get to shoot a little. Mostly I just got standard postcard FQ shots, nothing ground shaking.

Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral

Christmas, French Quarter Style

  My favorite series from the quarter happened at random. I took the family to Cafe du Monde for beignets and coffee, and had to make a trip to the restroom. There was quite a long line, so I just kept he camera up and shot while I waited. Wound up with a sort of behind the madness sort of series of shots that I really like.

   Also, as I mentioned on Facebook while I was there, I actually saw a guy walking around shooting with an honest to goodness Rolleiflex camera. I didn't know any of those were still actually in working condition, prior to this I had only seen them in old busted gear collections.  I thought at first that it was one of the newer digital era models, but no, it was the old school real deal. He wasn't even an annoying hipster- you never know what you will see in New Orleans.

   On the way home after our first trip out, my mom asked if we wanted to stop in at her church and see the Christmas Story performance put on by the kids group she works with. I have spent quite a few years trying to undo the damage that years of church brainwashing starting in my childhood did to me and I have no wish to inflict that same damage on my own child. But it was Christmas, how could I tell mom no? So we went. Her group takes care of some low income children a few afternoons a week when their parents can't get out of work in time to pick them up from school. This being a Thursday afternoon, those parents were still at work, so the audience for the kids' performance consisted of my family and the program personnel. That made me feel kind of bad that the kids would't get to show off for their parents, but I realized I had the means to fix that, at least a little bit. Ran back out to the car and grabbed the camera.

 Of course, since I hadn't planned on pulling any shots off the memory cards until I got home, I hadn't brought my computer with me. This meant I had to re-plan my workflow on the fly if my mom was going to be able to get the images to the kids before Christmas. No problem, I switched the primary card to CF since most places don't have XQD readers and set to shoot RAW + JPEG Fine. That way I figured I would be able to go anywhere locally, pull the JPEGs off the card to burn to a CD for mom, then do real editing on the RAW images when I got home. Since I was relying on the in camera conversions, I stuck with a fixed white balance so all the shots would be consistent.

  While this worked for most of the images, I must confess that I made a stupid mistake at the end. After the show, they wanted to get a few group shots, so I decided to drop the ISO down and slap a speed light on top for some fill. Can you guess what happened? Yup, forgot to switch the white balance from tungsten to flash, so the in camera JPEGs looked like I was shooting a group of ghosts. No bueno. Rookie mistake, something I could easily fix on the raw images at home, but that didn't help me with the JPEGs I needed to pull for mom. So, lesson one is: Pay attention to what you are doing. Since I failed to follow that advice this time, I needed a save. Luckily, I remembered lesson two, which is today's public service announcement:

READ THE MANUAL!

  Time for an aside for today's lesson. When you get a new piece of gear, read the manual! Seriously. Even if you have been a pro shooting for years, chances are there is some new feature you would never know about buried somewhere in a nest of menus on your new toy. The D4 is an amazing machine, it has more onboard processing power than most of the computers I have owned in the past-  it has its' own network server for crying out loud- seriously. So at least skim through the manual when you get a new toy. Look back at it frequently as you move into new techniques of shooting. When I first started messing with star trails and time lapses, searching the internet to read about techniques made me think I would need cable releases, intervalometers and all sorts of extra gadgetry.  Not so much. Luckily I read read the manual and found out all those bells and whistles are already built into the D4. So reading the manual can save you money as well as saving your ass.

   But in this case, for this shoot, it just saved my ass. Since I had skimmed the manual, I knew that the D4 was able to do a fair amount of in camera editing on images, but since I had never used any of that functionality, I had no idea how to even start. Rather than spending a frustrating hour of trial and error and possibly losing an image, I pulled out my handy manual and read the right sections.

  What? You don't carry your manual out into the field with you? Shame on you. I know, I said at the start I was traveling light. But it doesn't get any lighter than a PDF on my iPad. If you happen to have the Nikon/Ipad combo like me, it's ridiculously easy to carry your manuals with you. There is an App called "Nikon Manual Viewer" that you can use to download and store any manuals or setting guides Nikon publishes and have them with you anywhere, anytime. (The app also works on an iPhone, but it's wayyyyy easier to read the manuals on the larger iPad screen) Whether cannon has a similar setup or not, it is pretty easy to find pdf copies of manuals for any product out there and you can view them on almost any platform, so there really is no excuse for not having the reference on hand.

   Anyway, the manual saved the day and in about 30 seconds I had corrected the white balance on the group shots and was able to put everything on a CD for my mom to give images to the parents in time for Christmas.
 

Reading the manual saves Christmas- Can I get an Amen? Hallalujah?

   Anyway, I got some cute shots that I hope the parents will enjoy and it felt good to use the camera to give a little back. I know my mom appreciated it.

   So now I am home, recovering from the plague, still going through the rest of my images from the trip. There will be at least one more post coming from the New Orleans images, but since this is my Christmas post, I will end with the obligatory shot of a christmas tree, at least how one looks with one of my brother's blue pint glasses stuck over the end of my lens. What can I say, NyQuil leads to interesting creative efforts.

Old school instagram filters?

 Anyway, Happy Christmahanakwanzika and Merry New Year! See you in 2014!

A different sort of engagement shoot...

    I recently had the pleasure of doing my first engagement shoot for a couple of awesome friends of mine. I know the happy couple through Trapeze, the bride to be is one of the catchers at our rig, in addition to being an awesome flyer and one of my girlfriend's best girlfriends. The couple has actually known each other since junior high, but reconnected a while back and hit it off.
    We were all a bit nervous when they started dating, it seems like relationships between circus people and non circus people tend to not last that long. Luckily, he jumped right in and took to trapeze really well and is now a full fledged member of the troupe.
     Anyway, a couple of weekends ago we were all out for drinks, planning wedding and bachelor party / bridal shower festivities and the engagement shoot came up. I offered to do one, but we wanted to make it something unique to them. Of course, my first thought was trapeze, followed immediately by breaking into their old junior high and taking pics at some of the places they remembered from way back when. Apparently schools take security a lot more seriously these days, so that beer induced idea quickly went the way of the dodo bird. Luckily, one of their memories was of doing rings on the playground. Serendipitously we recently got a set of traveling rings built at our trapeze rig, so the next day it was game on.

   The shot I really wanted was the couple bridged (ie- holding a catch mid-air) one armed, camera aside arms opened and him putting the ring on her while in the air. We weren't quite able to pull that off, closest we got to that were these:

   But we did get some great shots on the traveling rings-

  When the bridge thing didn't work, the bride to be had the awesome idea to just hang out in the apron for some shots, wound up being some of the best of the set....

   Actually wound up passing the camera off and getting our family christmas card picture in the apron as well since these worked so well.

   Even though the one shot I wanted didn't pan out, I think overall the afternoon was a success. This was definitely a fun shoot and I look forward to shooting the wedding in the near future. In the meantime, you can see the whole shoot here and let me know what you think.