A Jolly Good Time!

This is a picture of two guards changing shifts on duty outside one
of the many buildings at Windsor Castle. You can see from the
proportions in this picture that these buildings are massive. And this
is just one of about half a dozen that make up the entire compound.

I spent the last five days in London. It was my first time to visit England and my second time to Europe. I loved every minute of it. I stayed in the country, in a town called Egham at the Runnymede Hotel. It was a wonderful little place and the town was just as lovely. I didn't realize this until I got there, but Runnymede is where the Magna Carta was signed. They have a monument a mile or so from the hotel and I took a walk down the Thames one morning to go check it out. If you ever in this part of the world, you should definitely stop by. It's pretty amazing to be standing in the same place where civil law was born.

Here you can see the Magna Carta Memorial located in a small wooded area
just west of the Thames. This is the spot where the original document
was signed which influenced common law as we know it today.

I didn't spend all my time in the country though (Windsor and Egham are both well outside of London proper). I also spent two tourist-intensive days in downtown London trying to hit all the major "must see" sites in the city. I went to Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Harrods, Hamley's, Parliment, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Tube, Tower Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, three pubs to have a pint of bitter, and several other random places along the way.

This is a picture of one of the famous double-decker red buses that are
all over London. I caught this one speeding by while crossing a bridge over the
Thames near Big Ben. The one thing I regret from my trip is not riding on one.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?

This is one of the images from the Gold's Gym photo shoot I did yesterday
for Sustainable Flooring, the provider of the wood flooring for the gym.

Yesterday I spent an hour photographing three interior rooms of the Gold's Gym in Cedar Park, Texas. Sustainable Flooring, the company that had installed the wood flooring in those rooms, needed some photographs showing off their work. The photograph above is of the basketball court, but they also installed the wood flooring in the step class room (Group X) and the yoga room (Mind and Body Studio).


There are several things to consider when doing interior photography. First, you must use a good sturdy tripod. Typically, interior shots are low-light situations and using a tripod with a slow shutter speed will give you proper exposure. You could use strobes or other artificial light, but that may cause your image to look unnatural and most of the time using available light makes for a better picture anyway. Of course, if you have a highly light sensitive camera like the Nikon D3, then you may not need to worry about this at all. But for most of the rest of us, this is the key factor in getting good interior shots. Second, use an aperture that will allow you to get a decent depth of field. For marketing photos like this, it is important to show off the product and having the image turn blurry quickly is not optimal. I actually shot a series of apertures and picked the best one of the bunch. I started at f8 and went to f22, taking a photograph at each aperture in between. Finally, think of an angle that gives the viewer the best view of what you are trying to show off while still showing enough of the rest of the image to show context. In this case, I wanted to feature the flooring, but also keep enough of the rest of the room in the image so the viewer could still make out what kind of room it was. Overall, the client was happy with the 15 images I delivered and they are currently using them in marketing materials.

Working Like a Dog

This was my favorite image from the Cute Pooch Calendar contest.

The chair in this picture is about 2 feet tall mind you. You can gauge

the size of dog and the chair based on the real apple in the image.

Yesterday was a whirlwind of a day. I had a booth at an outdoor dog fair in Cedar Park near Austin. The event was called Paws in the Park and it was organized by the Austin Dog Alliance. What is a photographer doing at an outdoor dog fair you ask. What do you think? I was taking pictures of course. I mentioned this in my August 17th blog post (you should read it if you haven't already).

The reason I was taking pictures was for content for a 2009 calendar that I was asked to help design and print for the Austin Dog Alliance. After setting up the booth, I started taking pictures of any dog that would sit still for a second or two. Each entrant's owner into the Cute Pooch Calendar contest contributed $10, $5 of which went to the Austin Dog Alliance and the other $5 covered the cost of a 4 x 6 inch print each owner received at the event before they went home.

I used my Nikon 50mm f/1.4 for the entire shoot which allowed me to keep the aperture wide open and the depth of field really shallow. I passed off my 2GB Lexar and SanDisk Compact Flash cards to an assistant who threw them into my portable Epson PictureMate printer and selected the best image from each series and printed it. We kept switching out cards when I got about 100 images on them or about 5 dogs since I was taking about 20 frames per dog. We were moving fast and furious so the 3 hours went by quickly.

One of my favorite dogs and pictures from the event was a little chihuahua (pictured above). He seemed so scared that he just sat on the little chair I brought as a prop and shook nervously. He was selected as Mr. September because of the "Back to School" theme. There were a bunch of other great shots and all the dogs were wonderful, but this little guy was probably my favorite.

If you are wondering how I diffused the sunlight, you will have to check back in future blog posts. I designed and built a giant photo booth and diffuser that I will blog about in more detail in upcoming weeks. I also plan on posting the plans for the photo booth and maybe even doing a video on how to set it up and use it, which I will post on YouTube.