If high school stadium lights ...

... were like Cowboys Stadium lights, Friday nights would be much more fun!

Kaufman Jamfest

It was a good thing that the Kaufman Jamfest folks went indoors for Saturday's event... and not just because of the heat. For me, the giant windows of Jackson St. BBQ made the photo fun better as well.

Here is the setup.. small stage in the corner with evening indirect light from storefront windows. The renovated space has great character. If I was opening a studio, I would want something like this.


From inside, shooting toward the windows was interesting... dial in some exposure compensation to make up for the brightness..


Getting closer to subjects made for nice rim lights. The background is cluttery, but at least all of the clutter is informative.. guitar case, other players, rocking chair...


I also played around with the wide angle 14mm to get a view of the interior.. low angle highlights the great old wood floor.


Shooting from the window side gave beautiful soft light, but even busier background. Getting in nice and close helps, and the black ceiling works too....


Same thing, big window light...


Still working on mastering DSLR video and editing.. probably need some more toys in that department :-).


Have a great week everyone...

Don J.

Tortoises are cool.

Some assignments are tedious. Waiting for someone or something to happen can get old.

But sometimes, even when the light is bad and there are lots of other things to be doing, you get to step back and realize that the world out there is pretty amazing.

Terrell's library has a summer series of kid events called "Terrific Tuesdays." The kids have a great time, the adults, not so much.

But then sometimes you get to see a giant tortoise, which doesn't happen every day. It took me a minute to get un-jaded and say.. "wow, that is a huge tortoise."

Because huge tortoises are very cool. And we should be careful to recognize the cool things when we see them. Even if the light is bad.

Don J.

That Sky

Beautiful sky out there today.. blue with lots of puffy clouds. If you are a photoshopper, it is a good day to get some sky shots to use in composite images later. Just be sure to grab some at different focal lengths and angles so that you can match up well with whatever subject you want to put in front. If you don't the sky replacement will be obvious and possibly ugly.


Also, shoot some that are out of focus. Open up the aperture and focus on something closer to the camera then take the cloud shot. This will be more convincing if you shot the subject with a short depth-of-field, and be less distracting in the final composition.


Of course, for the newspaper we can't do crazy stuff like that, but we do get to play when mocking up concepts or creating non-news graphics.

This young cowboy made a nice news photo last year. The overcast evening sky made the light on his face perfect (And a giant white arena wall to the right as reflector helped).


But a new sky makes the whole thing look nicer for this cover concept as we work on the look of a new quarterly magazine we will begin producing later this year.


Creating a catalog of images for art use is tedious, but worth the effort. Just be sure to tag your photos with good keywords when you import so that you can find them when you need them.

Don J.