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Archive of ‘Personal’ category

Event, Personal, Photography | 0 comment

SingStrong A cappella Festival

SingStrong 2012

This is a unique music festival held yearly at South Lakes High School in Reston, VA. The focus of the weekend is on a cappella singing – music made without instruments, only with voices. It may sounds restrictive, but much like haiku, the creativity that can come from making entire musical compositions using voices. In some cases you they use percussive mouth drumming, or foot stomping as well. All will amaze the listener! I was in a cappella group in college, and have spent most of my music budget since then on collecting my favorite collegiate, professional, local, national, and international groups.

In 2010, I asked the organizers if they would be in need for a photographer for their event. It has been a privilege to attend, and get some great images of all the performers. There are performances that are open to the public in addition to workshops for singers. Topics range from vocal performance for the studio, on-stage presentation, different styles of a cappella music, to legal considerations of recording and selling music.

SingStrong Single Singers TimeLine Media www.timelinedc.com

Charitable contributions

The best part of the festival is that proceeds from ticket sales and the silent auction go to the Alzheimer’s Association. So you can support a good cause while enjoying this very creative musical form. I encourage you to go to iTunes to sample some of these artists. To get details on this year’s event, you can go to the SingStrong website [ http://dc.singstrong.org/ ] and get information on tickets and groups that are planning to perform.

SingStrong Pentatonix photo TimeLine Media www.timelinedc.com

Having the kind of access that the organizers gave the photographers really helps to make some unique and memorable photographs. I was able to go back stage, get in front during sound checks, and in the balcony to find places that others usually do no go. These are the kinds of photos I want to make, not snapshots that the crowd can get with their camera phones. I need to get these in order to show that investing in good photography is worth the price. If I am only getting shots that everyone can get, it is impossible for my work to stand out, and be recognized. This is a goal that every photographer strives to achieve, and I try to make on every shoot.

SingStrong Blue Jupiter photo TimeLine Media www.timelinedc.com

TimeLine Media – http://www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Personal, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

Tysons Corner – personal photo shoot

Tysons Corner photo - TimeLine Media - www.timelinedc.com
Tysons Corner photo - TimeLine Media - www.timelinedc.com

Tysons Corner – Garage C

Finally the clouds have gone away! I was able to go out and get some photos of the some of the development projects being done in the Tysons Corner area. At first is a photo of a cluster of buildings looking south from Garage C of the Tysons Corner Center. I think this would make a great background for portraits and would love to try sometime! Similarly to shooting nature landscapes, early morning or early evening has the best light for these types of photos. There is still blue in the sky, However, the light is coming at an angle. This adds dimension to the photos, as well as creates reflected lights in the windows. Once the sun moves high into the sky, you lose this as all the windows turn black. Also the harsh shadows turns your creative landscape photo into an ordinary snapshot.

Tysons Corner – Garage E

The recently completed HOT lanes from 495 have opened, and the Metro train lines are moving along quickly. From the Tysons Corner mall garages, you can get a good view of the Metro construction along with the new Tysons Tower. According to their website the new tower will rise high above the area providing panoramic views to DC. Many DC landmarks can already be seen from the parking garage where I took this photo. The ISO was set at 50, and the aperture was set at f/11. I used this for the best quality raw file to work with, and to keep allow for a higher shutter speed. The exposure time for this photo was 4 seconds which gives a nice blur to the moving cranes in the scene, and the workers moving around on the ground.

Here the sun was still not over the horizon, so there is some nice color in the sky. To balance the light in the scene, I processed the photo in Adobe Lightroom, and adjusted the mid tones to bring out some of the darker parts of the construction area to bring out more of the details in the photo. It will be nice to come back to this spot to see how the building progresses.  Thanks to the Tysons Corner for suggesting some ideas for shooting spots!

Tysons Corner photo - TimeLine Media - www.timelinedc.com

 TimeLine Media  – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Personal, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Adobe Lightroom Library – Tech Thursday

Adobe Lightroom Version 4

In photography school, my first digital class introduced me to Lightroom when it was still a free downloadable beta program. Much like Quickbooks for accountants, this program is the most essential piece of software for photographers today. In each version, they have added so many features, that it is rare when initially editing an event where I have to go into the full version of Photoshop. I think of Lightroom as the version of Photoshop with all of the non-photographer functions stripped out. Then fitted with a modern interface that is analagous to working on touchscreen or tablets more than keyboard and mouse.

Library Module

In the screen capture below, you can see the Library module – the default for working in Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom 4 Library

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com

In this module, you can get a quick overview of the photos in your collection. Each cell shows the file name, and some of the important data in the corners. There are also many icons around the image which help to identify your progress. You can sort by photos that you want to keep, delete photos that are not usable, and organize the thousands of photos into sections that you can break down prior to working.

On the left side of the screen is a Navigator which has an enlargement of the selected photo, then a file explorer-type interface for working with the files on your computer. This allows management of images whether they are stored locally, or on network drives. Collections also helps to keep track of photos that you may want use later, or favorites of especially good photos that you want to go back to in the future.

On the right side of the screen, there is a histogram of the selected image. This is a graphical representation of the tones in the images from darkest on the left, to lightest on the right. This helps to see how good an exposure is for each photograph – a curve skewing to the left will tend to be underexposed (too dark) while a curve skewing to the right will tend to be overexposed (too bright). In the Develop module, I will talk about this more, but it is in the Library module too if you want to use any of the Quick Develop functions just underneath the histogram.

Keywords

Keywording, underneath the Quick Develop, is another way that Lightroom makes managing photos great for working photographers and saves them lots of time in the process. If you have a catalog of thousands of photos of various events from weddings, ballroom dance, personal photos, etc., keywording lets you tag photos with descriptive words to help you identify photos in case you need to find them quickly in the future. This can be powerful for photojournalists or sports photographers to find previous subjects when requested by newspapers, customers, etc.

The last buttons on the right perform “Sync” functions from selected photos. “Sync Settings” will let you apply changes that you make to one photo (Exposure, color balance, saturation, etc.) and apply those same changes to a group of selected photos. This is an AMAZING time saver and helps me to work on more important aspects of an image, rather than having to make adjustments to many photos one at a time.

When I first started using Lightroom, I could not foresee that my photography career would lead to shooting ballroom dance events with 10,000+ photos each. This program alone has allowed me to make many photos for dancers and edit them as quickly as I can for them to see within 2 weeks of events. It is still a lot of work, but from the feedback I get from customers, I think the results are worth it.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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