Region 7 Showdown

Before I cut to the chase, I'm just gonna say: we're finally done shooting our Old Spice video. It took like 4 days spread over 2 weeks because we're so slow. 


But we did it, and I'm editing it this week at school. Crossing my fingers to get it done before UEA and show it to the world!


So yeah, my camera was starting to gather dust in its two day break, I decided to put it to use. I woke up this morning at 8 and grabbed my camera bag and went to Scera Park to watch the Region 7 XC Meet. 


I met up with my team on a tarp in the middle of the park and started snapping pictures. I went off for like 3 hours, and these are some of the shots I ended up with.

Cory before the races

Jake was my sidekick for the day

JV boys team at the starting line

Tanner during the JV race

Spencer on his last lap

David leading Tanner and Ben to the finish line

Ben took some tree to the face like a man

Cassidy decided to come support Orem's team

All hail Captain Bunker

Montana running the varsity girls race

Boys varsity prepping for the race

Pugs

Around the desert

Tay sprinting in first towards the finish

Check out that time

Orem's Academic All Region Athlete's

We did really well overall. Our guys team took 2nd in region. And the girls took 5th.

All of us are going up to Sugarhouse Park next week for the State meet.

I love my team, it's been a fun season.

A Lengthy Day With The Rebel

I woke up this morning at like 6:30 and realized that I had a trip for Adv. Photo up to Park City. I also realized that I should've probably charged my camera battery last night.

The orange "not charged" light had barely switched to the green "good to go" light when it was time to go to school, and I carried all my camera stuff to school with me.

We spent the whole morning and afternoon up in Park City. I had a good time splitting off from my group and walking through random people's backyards taking pictures. I got some weird (and at times, hostile) looks, and this seemingly nice lady kicked me and my friends out of her store for making fun of the horse saddle on the wall... ? Oh, and for having cameras with us. I didn't ask any questions.

While I was off on my own walking through backyards, I came across a nice couple, John and Barbara. They were happy to show me spots around the yard to take pictures, and they were sure to give me their email so I could send them "their pictures".

This is an HDR I took of John's 4,000 lb. statute. Called "Chinook" by Deborah Butterfield

I took plenty of other pictures, but I'm hating how long it takes to upload pictures onto this site, because the files are so big. So maybe later, when I'm not feeling lazy.

Anyways, after I got back, I met up with the guys and we got all our stuff together to film another scene of our video. Turns out we didn't have EVERYTHING ready. So long story short, we're filming on Monday.

I got home from all that just in time to get a call from my friend, Jessie. She's on the school tennis team and said she needed some pictures taken. So I got all my stuff together, again, and went to the tennis courts and took some pictures.

I've never taken sports shots, on this camera anyway, still figuring it out. But I think they turned out alright for my first time.

  

Day Two

Our last day working on our video was a flaming success. Didn't take too long to set up, but took forever to film. Today's was the opposite.

Not that it wasn't a flaming success, it was. Not sure why I'm using the word "flaming" to describe it. But today's was equally as good. It was opposite in the fact that today we shot the shortest scene in the video, but spent the longest time in the world setting it up. From the pictures you'd probably think it was super easy, but trust me, it wasn't.

Trying to coordinate three trucks, all of them parked in the middle of the road for long periods of time, thus pissing off the other drivers, wasn't fun. But the little kids and their moms had a good time watching us the whole time. Good for them.

Check out the pictures from today.

Prepping the take off

A frame from the video

Day One Filming Our Video

Long day today. Me, Kyle and Jesse took all of our camera equipment to the school. Which consisted of:

• My camera
• My camera bag with all the goods
• A long microphone
• A dolly track
• My camera stabilizer arm

We spent all of third period setting up our shot. Figuring out what we though were ALL the kinks in our plan to shoot.

Then after school we got together with some people who wanted to be in the video. It took forever to get the shot right, we had elevator problems, people talking, people not doing their part right (including me), and all that crap.

After two hours, we got our shot perfect. We're all really happy about how the video's coming so far. Check out some pictures from the first day.

HDR Photography

Ever since I discovered Sean Stiegmeier's Vimeo channel, I've been really interested in shooting HDR photography. (http://vimeo.com/sstieg) 

Long story short, normal HDR photography is shooting 3+ pictures at different exposures, then layering them on top of eachother, and you get a really cool, detailed effect. A lot of times, to get a different effect, you can take up to 7 exposures. But today, I started small with 3. That's HDR in a nutshell.

So today I went down to Vineyard with some friends, and after hopping the "No Trespassing" barricade, we came to this old abandoned house in the middle of the open farmland. And here's where I gave my first go at HDR photography.

Here's an example. I started out by taking these three pictures.

 

 

And I got this:

I think it's a pretty cool effect, I'm still learning though.

All the HDR's I'm putting up have very little editing done, most of them are just layered and tweaked a little to get the right look. So other than that, they're straight off the sensor. 

Check them out. 

Remember to click on the image to see it full size.

I Hate Studio Photography

It's true. Studio photography is one of my least favorite things to do. I like taking pictures in real life situations. But... when it goes on my grade I end up doing it.

I've only shot studio pictures one other time in my life, and I was horrible at it. It was chaotic.

This time around we all knew what we were doing. So we took pictures of eachother, and even got Ashton to come be in our pictures. He's the only super senior I really love.

I think most of my pictures turned out pretty cool. It kind of sucked we only had a black back drop, seeing as almost everyone was wearing dark clothes, but whatever. Check out how they turned out.

You can click on the picture to see it bigger.

Ben, trying out split lighting

Ashton (left) & Ricky (right)

Ben

Jesse

Ben, we thought this one was pretty sweet.

Ashton, so photogenic. Love him.

Ben, and Jesse's thumb. Not sure what the idea here was.