Photo Traveler

Bob Krist’s Travel Photography Blog

More Fun at Home….

Destinations, Events, Ironies, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology, Travel — March 7, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

Well, I know this is supposed to be a travel photography blog, and I have been traveling lately (but again, can’t show the results just yet due to legal issues), but I am having a stone-cold blast working on my “New Hope: In Character” community portrait project.

New Hope, or Coryell’s Ferry as it was called at the time, was the place where Washington and his men crossed the Delaware to defeat the Hessians and the Brits in Trenton on Christmas Day all those years ago.

These guys re-enact that crossing every Christmas Day here in Bucks County. They get in those longboats, and unless the river is choked with ice, they row across Delaware come hell or high water. It’s an amazing sight to see and a Christmas morning tradition in these parts.

Now, I don’t want to say that they take their roles seriously, but some of the guys who re-enact the crossing had ancestors who were actually involved in the original crossing three hundred years ago. Can you say, “tradition?”

I was so appreciative that these gentlemen decided to come up and participate in this portrait project. In these parts, these guys are almost as famous as the men they are embodying.

For a look at the lighting setup, hit the jump. Read more…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…..

YouTube Preview Image

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…

Travel Photography in the Time of Underpants Bombs…

Career issues, Destinations, Ironies, Legal Issues, Photo Gear, Technology, Travel — January 8, 2010

….will be much tougher than Love in the Time of Cholera.  I just flew down to a job in Miami from Newark Airport (good old Terminal C, my home away from home and the same one that was shut down the other day because somebody waltzed up the down staircase) and while it wasn’t too bad, it’s not going to be the same either.

The time of one carryon and one carryon only is coming. Especially on overseas flights. I’m flying to Tanzania in a couple of weeks, right through Amsterdam, and I’m currently figuring out how to jam two carryons worth of stuff into one bag.

It’s a safari and I thought my only concern was the 33 lb. limit on my checked bag for the regional charter in country. Now I have to get the long lens gear, audio stuff, and the backup stuff in one bag that will pass muster in Schipol Airport (and weigh less than 13 lbs). Remember the Minox?  I might be the first guy to shoot a safari on a cellphone. What the hell, it worked for Chase Jarvis!

Hit the jump for a couple of strategies to consider: Read more…

The Sins of the McNally Shall be Visited Upon the Father…

Career issues, Ironies, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology — January 4, 2010

I don’t know why I let McNally talk me into these things. What can I say? He’s irresistable!

So now I know for sure I’ve got a ringside seat reserved in hell; but at least it’ll be warm….

Tailor-made Multimedia

Audio, Career issues, Technology, Workshops & Seminars, multimedia — December 29, 2009

While the tips for the camera bag contest keep pouring in, and the judges continue with their evalutions, I wanted to point you to a cool little multimedia  project about George de Paris, tailor to the last six or seven American presidents. This site not only gives you the behind the scenes stuff, but also has some clever interactive flash games where you can “dress the president” with different suits, etc.

This multimedia package is a  project from a bunch of students in the American University masters program in Interactive Journalism, my middle boy Brian, who works as an online editor for documentaries, being one of them. He sure is having fun, and in his spare time, he’s trying to teach an old dog (me), new tricks (Final Cut!).

We’ll be announcing the bag winner on New Year’s Day, but not too early, so party hearty and have a good and safe one!

Ken Rockwell shut me down…

Ironies, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology — December 10, 2009

WTD500SUN

courtesy www.whattheduck.net

Wow, I had no idea what it was like to be one of the popular kids….until Ken Rockwell put a link to one of my posts on his blog. I’m a fan of Ken’s analyses and advice, and apparently, so are thousands of other folks!

Because once that link appeared, this little blog was immediately swamped with a 400% increase in traffic, which caused my hosting company to shut down my site. I had a little shared server which was plenty to handle my normal traffic, but it just melted down at the onslaught of Rockwellian readership.

And all it took was the immediate payment of triple my normal yearly fee to get the bandwidth I needed to stay up. Oh fifteen minutes of fame…. nobody told me you’d be so costly!

All of this because I admitted to shooting (and occasionally even using) JPEGs along with my NEFs. It’s clear to me that file format and raw processor choice is only a slightly less controversial topic than global warming, health care, or Apple vs. PC (wait, wait, is there still even a question about that last one:-)

It’s clear that you guys love techie posts, like Don’t Ask, I’ll Tell and What’s in The Bag, and are not so much on “state of the biz” or “what I’ve been doing lately” posts. That’s cool.

In an effort to keep some of you coming back to visit now that I’ve actually got room at the inn, I’d like to point you to a couple of older techie posts that answer a lot of questions raised in the comments and emails generated by those other two posts.

First, the question of what else I pack and take besides the camera bag: check out this post and this one too. If you’re interested in audio gear for multimedia, take a look here.

I’ll have more tech posts coming up but I wanted to try to keep some of you guys here by pointing you backwards a month or so. Because, truthfully, most of what I’ve got coming for the next couple of weeks are witty think pieces (he says modestly!)….oh, and an audio slideshow featuring beautiful ballerinas…shot in NEF (but not in the raw)!

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