Photo Traveler

Bob Krist’s Travel Photography Blog

Drop, and Give Me….How Many????

Destinations, Events, Lighting, Photo Techniques, Travel, Workshops & Seminars — February 26, 2010

I’m heading off to San Francisco, blizzard gods willing (update: they’re not, I’m holed up in an airport hotel watching it snow after a two hour battle up here because my flight showed “ON TIME” until I pulled into the airport!), to teach a seminar for National Geographic Traveler with my buddy Ralph Lee Hopkins. I’m going to hang a few extra days and shoot some stock.

Okay, stop laughing. Travel stock of San Francisco? Good luck selling it. Yeah, yeah, I know. But I’ve never really shot there, so I’m doing it for the therapy value. Peggy and I lived in the Bay Area when we were first married and I was in acting school (at the American Conservatory Theater), and I hardly ever get back and I always wanted to shoot it. So who cares if it never sells? At least that’s what my therapist says….

So the blog will be a little quiet and I thought I’d share a couple more shots from the New Hope portrait project. Like the one above of Dan and Katie, proprietors of New Hope Fitness. Now that’s what I call strength training. This shot was a lot easier for me to pull off than it was for Dan. All I did was use the regular big softlight I wrote about in the previous post.

A more difficult challenge came lighting Adele, the Ghost Lady of New Hope. Adele gives ghost tours of town, and you really need a scorecard in this town because it’s full of them, from as far back as the Revolutionary War and beyond.

To get the basic “ghoul” lighting, we took the big lightbox off the stand and aimed it up from the floor. That was a cool effect, but the lantern candle wasn’t quite cutting it, and we had a shadow of her arm across her face.

We bypassed the candles (truth is, I knew they’d never be bright enough) and instead put in a little Morris mini flash slave in the lantern to simulate the lantern light. Then all we had to do was balance the light from the box hitting all the black of her outfit with the light from the slave hitting her face—-piece of cake.

Only took twenty minutes until we had enough ND material in the lantern to provide a good balance. Then we had to work out a position where the highlights in Adele’s glasses weren’t too distracting (couldn’t get rid of them altogether—-the studio space we’re shooting in is said to be haunted too, and the ghost just wouldn’t let me have an easy time of it!).

But, thanks to Adele’s patience and good relationship with the spirit side, we got off a fun shot.

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In My Little Town…

Events, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques — February 22, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

Every time I spend some time around New Hope, PA, where I live, I’m always blown away by the great array of talented and interesting folks we have living in town. It’s a little art community on the banks of the Delaware River, and it’s home to great music clubs, art galleries, restaurants, funky shops, artists, sculptors, actors, musicians, cabaret artists, female impersonators, brewers, screenwriters….well, you get the picture.

I’ve always wanted to document my neighbors, and I have some studio space this month (courtesy of the New Hope Arts Center) to work on a project I’m calling “New Hope: In Character.” I just started shooting this week and thought I’d share a couple with you. Right up top is Andre who runs a great restaurant called Zoubi. Andre is from France and is the quintessential restauranteur—friendly, charming, and sophisticated.

Below are Sam and Stasia, the girls from Love Saves The Day, a funky shop (the original was in Greenwich Village) where you can find vintage clothing, toys from the 50’s and 60’s, and, um, all kinds of other stuff. There’s always a wacky mannequin outside the shop, and so we just had to include her.

And finally, Brendan the master brewer (so young, and so accomplished) and his associate, Dan, from the Triumph Brewery, where I often rush the growler to bring home some fresh, delicious suds that really make it hard for me to even pretend I’m leading a low-carb lifestyle!

Photo © Bob Krist

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As part of this project, I also spent last weekend offering pro bono portraits for area families with a member serving in the military. We photographed 45 families in two days!

It was an incredibly busy and rewarding weekend. We met some amazing folks who have put a lot on the line for us all, and it was a real pleasure to give a little something back.

My friend, Rich Kennedy, photo editor of the Doylestown Intelligencer, volunteered two days of his time and did all the computer work (plus some excellent art direction when I started to melt down on occasion…like when 13 people from one family showed up)!

We also had help from photographer Arun Paul and Rose Gutekunst, not to mention Peggy (aka SWMBO).

For a look at the studio space and a quick discussion of my basic light setup, hit the jump. Read more…

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Doctors, My Eyes Have Seen the Light….

Career issues, Destinations, Events, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Travel, Workshops & Seminars — February 18, 2010

I had the very great privilege of being interviewed by Jason Odell and Rick Walker, the well-known Image Doctors over on the Nikonians site last Sunday. After we three agreed that it was a fitting reward for old married guys to be able to spend Valentines Day discussing the latest camera gear and talking tech, rather than composing love poems and taking our better halves to a Nancy Meyers movie (hey, I already went to see It’s Complicated….and I loved it!), we got onto the meat of the interview.

We talked a lot about shooting travel and the two new lenses I got to shoot for Nikon recently. The Docs are great interviewers and have been doing this popular podcast for a number of years now.

Of course, choosing to start my Valentines Day hanging out with my new friends probably did nothing to further my cause in persuading “she who must be obeyed” into actually letting me buy the new glass I tested (and an FX body or two).

So I don’t know how smart a move that was….every time I start talking FX (which really only started since I shot that recent gig in Miami—-damn 24mm f/1.4, I wish I knew how to quit you), she brings out the chiropractor bills and the receipts for my Aleve usage to date….not to mention the dismal state of the business.

And speaking of seeing the light, my good friend Brenda Tharp is running a tour to one of my favorite places, Iceland, this summer. I’ve spent a lot of time up there over the years for National Geographic and other pubs, and it is a spectacular location. And you couldn’t find a better leader to show you around than Brenda. It’d be a great place to shoot that new wide FX glass I’m craving….Check it out…

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Tango Audio Slide show

Audio, Destinations, Events, Photo Techniques, Travel, multimedia — February 15, 2010

Don't click this, it's just a screen grab!!!

I posted an audio slide show about Tango in Buenos Aires….I think NG Traveler will have it up on their site too, but not sure where. This was originally going to have an interview narration with a Tango anthropologist and was going to be more educational, but then my editor said just do it a lot of dance pictures and snappy music, and I thought, why not?

Ordinarily, I HATE going out and shooting nightlife. First of all, it all starts too late (don’t you people have something to do during the daylight hours????). Secondly, everybody’s having fun, and you’re the nerd with the camera and the lightpole and no life and everybody would just prefer that you go away….

But…I loved documenting tango. I actually looked forward to getting up in the middle of the night to go out. It’s such a beautiful, passionate dance, and the Portenos were so warm and welcoming to my presence. I was blown away by the artistry of the dancers, whether the pros on stage during a show, or folks at a neighborhood milonga. It’s the real deal, it’s a lifestyle.

And I was privileged to have been a close witness to it. That’s why, despite all the bullsh… about our business lately, it’s just so cool that this camera gives you entree into so many different worlds.

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L.E.D. Candlelight

Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology — February 11, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

If you’ve ever tried to shoot people by candlelight, you know that you really need a lot of candles to cast light more than a few inches and your subject has to be really close to those candles to pick up that light.

When I was working on the shoot for Nikon Japan with the 24mm f/1.4 lens, we had a nice setup with the lovely Rose, a family friend, in period clothes at the piano of the Parry Mansion lit with several candelabras.

But the candles weren’t casting a clean, usable light.

So, how to keep the feel of candlelight, but boost the volume? Hit the jump to find out how some video technology came into play. Read more…

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Fast, Wide, and Handsome II

Destinations, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology, Travel — February 9, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

The other half of the one-two wide angle punch Nikon delivered to FXers, the 16-35mm f/4 VR, is another winner. I wandered all over a freezing cold, soaking wet South Beach in Miami (yes, let’s get out of the cold Northeast, and shoot in the nearly as cold, even wetter Southeast….Murphy, when will you and your law ever leave me alone?????) shooting with it primarily at night, as per my instructions from the agency.

I got sharp crisp results handholding at 1/4th, 1/8th, and even a couple of 1/2 second exposures (and that was before happy hour!). My brief said to avoid using a tripod, but did not prohibit the use of Margaritas to calm jittery weather nerves.

Of course, in South Beach, you have to pace yourself, because they all serve Margaritas in giant glasses as big as bird baths. Ummmm, VR II, there’s a challenge for you! The Jose Cuervo smackdown.

Stuff looked great wide open at f/4 too. Man, if I were an FX shooter (and depending on how negotiations go with my wife, my chiropractor, and my spinal surgeon, I might be one day), these would be my two wides. I’m not that much of a gearhead, and even I’m dreaming of them (oh, please come back, little 24, and bring your bokeh with you!)

The 16-35mm is bigger than the 17-35mm, but doesn’t feel any heavier and balanced well on both the big D3s and a D700. I’ll leave it to Nikon and the more techy blogs to give you all the details. I’ll just leave you with a couple of other sample pix and my user impression that this too is a killer piece of glass.

Oh, and just a request to the blogs who are grabbing and using these pics….how about running them with the copyright notice? Is that too much to ask? Geez, when a photography blog doesn’t know enough to run the damn copyright notice with a picture (and you know who you are), what hope is there?

Photo © Bob Krist

And just to illustrate how changing the framing from horizontal to vertical can really change the message of your picture, hit the jump. Read more…

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Fast, Wide, and Handsome

Destinations, Ironies, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology — February 8, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

Well, I can finally talk about those two lenses, the 24mm f/1.4 and 16-35mm f/4 VR, I was shooting for Nikon’s Japanese ad agency back in Miami a while ago. First, I’d like to apologize to the DPReviewers and Nikonians whom I upset with my passing mention of new gear I couldn’t identify until it was announced.

Guys, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to rile you up that much…. although it’s pretty much a truism that at any given time, camera manufacturers are testing new stuff, so I’m still not really sure why everybody got so, um, exercised.

Actually I do know why. Speculating about new gear is almost as much fun as eating pizza and drinking beer (you know you’ve reached a certain age when pizza and beer go from being a dietary staple to a forbidden fruit), and far less damaging to your arteries (although it seems to play havoc with some people’s blood pressure!).

There was no marketing conspiracy, though, with me making the passing mention. I just really needed a blog post (sometimes, it’s very hard to come up with bi-weekly tidbits….it’s the freakin’ digital Sword of Damocles hanging over your head!) and really it was to talk about the helicopter company and give them a plug.

But folks posited all kinds of conspiratorial sub-rosa marketing campaigns. Thankfully, nobody accused either Nikon or me of engineering the great financial meltdown or fixing the Super Bowl game. (So, my all-powerful Nikon cronies, and fellow members of the New World Order, we got away with those; heh, heh, heh….yeah, Cheney; gimme a high five!).

This shot was done with the new 24mm f/1.4, a nano-coated gem. It’s a 77mm filter mount, not too big or heavy for what it is and sharp as a tack. Nice bokeh too. I made this shot with the D3s I had to borrow to do the shoot (I’m a DX guy, still, but am sorely tempted by these lenses—I miss the narrow DOF with fast, wide glass. And this baby is just a world class optic.).

It’s Tungsten white balance and the musician, Miami personality, and all around great guy Leo Casino is being lit with an orange gelled SB900 shot through my little portable umbrella setup held by an assistant.

Hit the jump for a couple of other samples. My brief from the agency was to highlight the nice bokeh and shoot wide open, or close to it, whenever possible. More on the other lens coming up in another post. Read more…

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Everything you need to know about shooting the news….

Audio, Career issues, Events, Ironies, Photo Techniques, Technology, multimedia —

Forget journalism school, here’s the secret formula…..

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Colorful La Boca

Destinations, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Travel — February 6, 2010

Here’s another series of out-of-the camera JPEG outtakes from the Buenos Aires story. La Boca is a colorful tourist barrio, but it’s a little too touristy for National Geographic Traveler’s taste (after all, the story is called “Authentic Buenos Aires).

But I loved it because it was a visual candy store of riotous color and picturesque characters. So here’s a few snaps from a morning stroll through La Boca, all with a D90 and a 16-85mm, 70-300mm VR, or sometimes, the 17-50mm f/2.8.

Prides cometh before a fall….

Audio, Destinations, Ironies, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology, Travel, multimedia — February 3, 2010

Sleeping prides are no problem to pick off with your DSLR video rig.

Okay. You name the parable, metaphor, or simile that involves overconfidence and overweaning ambition combined with lack of experience, and you can put it in the lede of this post about my foray into being a fulltime videographer on my recent safari through Tanzania.

By day two, I had visions of myself in a second career as a cameraman for Wild Kingdom. I pretty much went through the week like that…until I got home and really looked at my work. Ay carumba! What can I say….those were just delusional dreams brought on by the strength of the sub-Saharan sun!

Oh sure, I could harp on the fact that video-enabled DSLRs have a long way to go in convenience and handling before they become viable machines for documentary work (if you have actors who can do several takes of every shot, the image quality of the video from these machines completely overshadows their handling shortcomings).

And there’s nothing like multiple takes to help cover a myriad of handling mistakes, too.

It’s no mystery that the videos Nikon and Canon are using to promote their video-enabled SLRs are more like short movie features or commercials, with multi-man crews, rather than documentary projects. As Hilary says, “it takes a village” to raise a child. To that I’d like to add that “it takes a crew” to make great video.

But if you have baboons who don’t take direction, or lions who march to the beat of their own drummers, you are in deep doo-doo if you have only one chance to capture this video action on the move with a DSLR.

Hit the jump for a rundown of the things that plagued me, and why I won’t be giving up on DSLR video anytime soon! Read more…

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