August 25th, 2007. 18th birthday debut. Artesia, Ca.

These are from a debut almost a month ago. Its taken a long time, but I finally got around to finishing them up.. (sorry leora for taking so long!!!)

Shot these with a canon xt rebel and 17-55mm 2.8 IS lens. Borrowed another xt as backup, and rented a 85mm 1.8 and a pair of 580 ex flashes for the affair.

I also shot in raw, along with jpeg. I never found a liking for it before.. but wow.. raw is freakinawesome!!!!

September 14th, 2007. The Mission Inn, Riverside Ca.

Shot with Kodak pxp 220 Plus-X Pan iso 125 film on a Holga camera. Developed in D-76 for 5 1/2 minutes at 69 degrees. Photos are scanned by holding the negatives up to sky and taking a digital photo of it, overexposed by 2 stops, and then converting into a postive in Microsoft Paint. Adjusting levels and resizing done in Picasa, exported, and then posted onto blogspot.com

September 5th, 2007. Senior Portraits at Heritage Park, Cerritos.

1/800 sec f/1.2 iso 100

1/1000 sec f/2.0 iso 400

August 14th, 2007. Portrait shoot for a debut.

1/400 sec f/2.2 iso 200

August 13th 2007. Just a random photoshoot.

1/2000 sec f/2.8 iso 400

1/200 sec f/4 iso 400

August 3rd, 2007. Sequoia National Park, Ca.

I used to use a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 as my walk around. But it dropped 5 ft onto concrete and now my focusing motor is locked and wont budge. So now I have a $500 lens that doesn't really work.. =(

Well anyways. This finally justified me getting a Canon 17-55mm IS f/2.8 which Ive been eying for a while. hehe.. funny how that all works out.

Anyways, I didn't really see anything significant or different from my old Tamron. But I see the usefulness of image stabilization, and all I can say is just wow. You can hand hold and shoot at 1/4 a second and get crisp images! Everything across the board... sharp, no blur!! I also found it helps to shoot off continuously and shoot 3-5 frames and use the best one. So I did that for a full second... standing up.. in water.. and I didn't get a crisp image.. but I got something usable.. which is incredible!!

Right now I'm loving this lens. Too bad its not weather sealed... It sucks up dust like a vacuum!!

1/4 sec f/2.8 iso 400

1.0 sec f/9 iso 400

1/30 sec f/2.8 iso 400

June 26th, 2007. Fullerton.

So heres a surprise. A week after shooting Another Rising I get a call from their producer and he asks me to shoot another one of his bands. I was up for it, but I was getting myself into the same bind as before, cause again, I don't have that creative element. So what did I do? Well the same thing since I guess it worked the first time... the "look as serious as you can and let me shoot away!" approach, which is what we did, but these guys were just too funny for that. They had so much personality and character that I regretted not going out somewhere on location and just shooting with out being distracted by the studio strobes.

The photos are of the band Ashcroft. Our first shoot together, and hopefully not the last. There's a resemblance to those of Another Rising's photos, cause I used the same workflow. Black out the background, desaturate, burn dodge details, desaturate some more. As for lighting set up, I again used 2 strobes, some from the sides opposite each other, but most with the strobes diagonal each other with the one in the back raised over their heads to give some hair light and to give them some outline. I think I like this set up a little more.

June 13th, 2007. my garage, Lakewood.

I don't really shoot bands. I lack the spunk and creativity that makes band photography what it is. So what could I do? Rent a couple of strobes, and basically say "look really serious into the camera!".. and go from there. So again if I totally really didn't know what I was doing since this wasn't really my thing, at least I had the advantage of controlled lighting, and that in itself can add something you otherwise couldn't conjure ordinarily.

This is of Another Rising. I used to go to school with their bass guitarist and so we're old friends. He asked if I could shoot his band, and these are a few photos from our third shoot together. I shot these in my garage and set up the strobes directly on either side of the guys to get that harsh look on the singer's face (guy in front), even if it didnt have that effect on the guys in the back. (I would have used the third that I had, but I really had no space.. Its really cramped in my garage) I also funneled the light with some cardboard so that it only shone on the guys and not the background. They had asked for a pure black background, and so I did my best not to illuminate the backdrop that I had, and later cleaned it up with Photoshop CS (originally you could see half my garage in the first one). I kept desaturating the red channel, and eliminated the yellow, green, and magenta completely, though it really didn't do anything. I also burned or dodged a few details too.

June 8th, 2007, Bolsa Chica.

Shooting film on a manual camera has got to be one of the most liberating things you can experience as a photographer. It breaks down all you have come to understand as a camera and simplifies a process that has these days has become so complex, that photography is no longer a subject matter or perspective, but moreso about optimal resolution, noise control, even raw conversion. Now I'm not trying to disregard the later, on the contrary, digital photography today has improved as a result of decades of refining the photographic process. But my point is that while both tools of course enable you to shoot based off of a personal perspective and feeling, only one forces you into a niche where you have no choice but to rely on the bare necessities, absent minded of the technological advances that occasionally distract us.

May 25th 2007. Another Debut.

January 21st debut at Sycamore Plaza, Lakewood.