UCSB Shoot with Scott Sneddon, Victoria Hansen and Michael McCann

I've worked at UCSB for over 30 years in IT. It was only a few months ago that I realized what a great location it is for photography, particularly fashion/glamor. So, I've been sneaking up on it since then and finally got the chance to try out some of the great backgrounds and areas. Victoria Hansen (http://www.modelmayhem.com/830819) contacted me and wanted to shoot and my friend Scott Sneddon (http://www.modelmayhem.com/364472) wanted to shoot with me while he is on leave from Korea where he is currently stationed. And my son, Michael, needed some experience shooting glamor. So, we packed up and went down to UCSB for an afternoon of exploring and shooting.

This is the first post i have done where I have tried to use URL's on other websites rather than uploading to Blogspot ... it didn't work as I expected so you will only see part of an image, but you can click on the images to see the whole image. Uploaded images resize. There is no mention that this won't be the case with links. I'll be more careful in the future.

UCSB has a lot of rules. They even have a few about using UCSB as a setting. They don't want people attributing things to UCSB that are not in keeping with the University's mission or using the University's image for commercial purposes. But they do allow Brooks students to shoot assignments. Since we were not commercial and aren't using UCSB for inappropriate purposes I figured we'd be OK ... plus I know a few people!

Scott has a fair amount of experience shooting models with "Strobist" Style equipment which is all he's had in Korea. Since I had no experience but plenty of equipment we decided it would be a good opportunity.

Scott had worked with Victoria before and had a good idea of what she could do. We took my truck and were soon walking around checking for locations. The courtyard of my building is a very concrete/industrial area so that's where we started. We set up two 580EX II's on stands with umbrellas and set them to slave units on channel one, one of each bank, A & B. I put my ST-E2 on a 1DMIII with a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. We backed Victoria into a small architectural detail and played with the lights. Not the best but we were warming up.

I love to see behind the scenes shots so I know what was going on with lighting and surroundings so I'm borrowing one that Scott took of me shooting Victoria.

Next we wanted to try to shoot high f-stop to darken the sky but we just didn't have enough power to overwhelm the sky so we moved around and went with the building as background, still using the two lights held by Scott and Michael.

We had Victoria climbing around on everything. And since she climbs well, we next sent her up a tree, which was our most successful spot I think. We did have a bit of trouble getting the lights up high enough ... Michael, who is about 6' had his light on a fully extended lightstand and was on tippy toes.

From there we went to Kerr Hall which has some very unusual concrete texture on its exterior. Scott showed me how he set the lights for his "signature" shot and then put a gel on a 580EX that he held in his hand to give the concrete some color as well as texture. Very nice images.

Here's one with the gel on the wall.

I realize it would be nice to have more behind the scenes shots and I'm waiting for the price of Canon's G10 to come down to a reasonable price point, about $350, but I know everyone is trying their best to hold prices up even though there's no money around to buy stuff at the inflated prices they have gotten used to getting.

Travel Safe!

Dwight

Merry Christmas: Some Notes on Backups

Merry Christmas! I hope Santa has been good to everyone. I don't know who delivers presents for the Hanukkah kids or Kwanzaa folks but I hope they also were well blessed or gifted or whatever. I'm actually a Humanist myself so I just think of it all as the Winter Solstice, but it's a great time of year.

A few months ago I thought I'd look into putting my images onto BluRay disks. The burners are pretty reasonable so it seemed like a grand plan since they can hold 50GB per disk. So I started shopping at Newegg. Fortunately, before I bought anything I checked the price for blank disks. $50 EACH! Did you get that? Blank 50GB BluRay disks are FIFTY DOLLARS EACH! I found that quite unbelievable so I went to one of my Gurus at UCSB, Hank Rayner, and asked about it.

Yup, $50 per platter and not worth it. BluRay isn't yet about backup. It is about selling movies/videos for outrageous amounts so as to recover the research costs immediately! Same mentality of greed that wall street has. And it will end the same way, by lots of folks losing everything because they felt that they were entitled to suck huge amounts of money out of the economy for doing next to nothing. These disks couldn't cost more than a nickle to make! But it makes no difference to me since I won't be using them any time soon.

Turns out my DVD burner is double layer. That means I can burn about 8GB to a $2 dual layer DVD and then print it. The cost is about 1/6th of BluRay and DVDs stack up very compactly with numerous options for storage containers. I'm currently backing up 180,000 images, about 700GB, onto DVDs. It's slow. There are going to be quite a few of them. But if I lose one, I won't be losing 50GB of data to a coaster, it will only be 8GB. And I am making two of each, which should way improve my odds.

I am using Verbatim DataLifePlus Inkjet Printable DVD+R DL White, 2.4x P/N: 95123 disks. They got great ratings on Newegg. They work fine. They are slow. My computer doesn't mind slow. I don't mind slow as I can do other stuff while they burn. Where is the advantage to BluRay? As you can see, I'm not one to buy something solely because someone makes it and says it's the latest greatest. I don't have an iPhone either! I don't have a game console. But don't get me wrong, I have been in IT, mostly as a computer programmer, for over 30 years and I love technology. I just don't love it willy nilly and for no purpose. My computers are dual core, not quad core. But I do run RAID0, RAID1 and RAID5 disk arrays.

So, other things about backups: My friend Scott told me this week that he lost 20,000 images because he didn't have backups. He is all about backups now. But those 20,000 are lost forever. I am a bit compulsive about backups. I have not lost any images even though I have had numerous computer failures of different sorts. But backups are kinda like virginity, once you lose it there's no going back. As long as you got it you never really know what it's worth.

So, for Christmas I am giving you all the gift of knowledge. DO BACKUPS! You can do them to DVDs. You can do them to internal disks. You can do them to disks on other computers. You can do them to external USB drives. I am currently using two 1TB SeaGate FreeAgent Pro drives that support USB, SATA and eSATA and firewire. Software to manage the backups in many flavors are very inexpensive. I currently use SyncBackSE by www.2brightsparks.com which has most every option I could ever want for backups and they do continuous process improvement with a new update about every couple of months that covers all the new stuff that is available.

I have some more material in the pipeline and will likely be doing several posts over the holidays.

In the meantime, BE SAFE!

Dwight