The Aforementioned

How’d I Light That: The Droid X a Year Later

Matt — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:13:31 +0000

: One year later

A year ago this week I told my former boss I was going to be late to work one day that week. As it turns out it was a Thursday that I packed up my Motorola droid (still in grace -return period for Verizon) and exchanged it for the Droid X. Not to long after that I wrote a blog post with a photograph very similar to this one. The main difference is, in today’s photo there is no iOS device. Since that time, I’ve been able to distance myself entirely from the Apple ethos and ecosystem.

This phone stand before you one year old and still outperforms 65% of the smartphones on the market today. I don’t know if my next Android smart phone will be Motorola or not but I must say this phone has and will continue to be a workhorse.

Now on to the lighting:

I really wanted to model the photo after the Verizon adds depicting the Droid X enveloped in red:

As you can see from the setup shot, I had the main light gelled with 2 red gels and it was gridded. The key light, coming from camera right, was set at the lowest power setting (1/64th) and it was gobo’ed with two honl gobo’s and a piece of my camera bag. Even at 1/64th power the flash output was too great so I had to cover half the speedlight effectively taking it down to 1/128th power. You may ask, why even bother with this key light but, you’ll notice that the hard key light really pulls the right and left edge of the phone out from the darkness of the background. That, in turn, made the phone pop out from the background.

-Matt

Tagged: D300, Flash, How'd I Light That!!?

Deutschland Part II: The Autobahn

Matt — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 06:56:34 +0000

The view from the hotel where I stayed (and street racers came buzzing by at 3AM….every night!)

Completely separate from the beautiful scenic landscape and bier, is the Autobahn. The roadbed itself is more than twice as thick as the best road in America. consequently, the ride is uber-smooth. It would need to be if speeds commonly average over 200km/h (125mph).

BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, and Volks Wagon all have facilities/headquarters within 200km of where I was!

I can gladly say that our Ford Kuga maxed out around 210km/h (~130mph).

A Lotus whizzin' by

This Ferrari had no problem doing well over the "average speed." It blew by us as we were going 160km/h (100mph)

This concludes the posts from my trip to Germany. I hope you've enjoyed looking at these pictures as much as I've enjoyed taking them

-Matt

France Part I

Matt — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:50:00 +0000

I’ve failed to be consistent in posting these since returning but here are some of the lovely sights that France (the northern part) has to offer:

This is one of a few of the breathtaking country-side. I love the fact there are so many shades of green.

The yellow in the field really makes this shot!

and the last of the bunch…

On our travels in France we stopped in Reims which is in the Champagne Region. So, naturally we stopped to take a tour of a large Champagne company Tattinger (as opposed to the small mom and pop Champagne makers):

The caves had terrible lighting (to keep the champagne in the dark) but this was a label on the ridiculous stack of bottles (99,710 to be exact!)

A closed section of the caves.

Yet, another label.

Look for a conclusion to the Deutschland Series soon!

-Matt

Tagged: Rural Light

Deutschland Part I

Matt — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:05:00 +0000

German Countryside Between Pforzheim and Ulm

A month has passed and no updates have hit the blog. Well, A barrage of posts are about to hit. The next post will be based on the day trip I made to France. But the purpose of this post is show off some of the absolutely gorgeous sights in Germany.

We set off for Ulm cathedral (3 hour drive) early one Saturday morning and it was visible from 40/50km away. For those of you who don’t know why Ulm cathedral is worthy of mentioning, it’s only home to the tallest steeple of any church in the world.

And we climbed to the top!

The final ascent (after 550 steps in the sky) was inside a spiral staircase that measured no wider than 1 meter. Just as a side note this photograph was probably my favorite shot I took the whole trip. I love how the staircase leads your eye into the photo.

With no obstructions, the view from the top made the entire city of Ulm look like a city of ants.

The view from the inside of the church was also not disappointing. In fact, this panoramic is one of two that I shot on this trip.

After we spent the morning in Ulm we got back on the AutoBahn (there’s a post solely devoted to this, stay tuned) and headed into Munich and then south to go and visit Garmisch-Partenkirchen which is a mountain resort town in Bavaria, southern Germany and Home to the Zugspitze.

This is the tallest Alp in Germany and also played host to the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Stay Tuned for more updates soon!

-Matt

Tagged: Rural Light

Rural Light: Calgary In the Spring

Matt — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:45:00 +0000

While up in Calgary on business I was treated to a trip north of the city by one of the guys who had been driving me around all week.

You’ll notice that the weather is not exactly what we in the south call spring weather the night before we went exploring they got around 8 inches of snow with snow drifts as deep as 3 feet in some places. Luckily, in Asheville, we see all four distinct seasons.

Another interesting fact is that things in this part of the world are relatively young. I was told that if anything (structure-wise) that was older than 80 years was most likely built by Native Americans. And also that as few as 3 generations into the past would be Native American.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll not be updating the blog as frequently due to a two week business trip to Germany. Please stay tuned for another international update!

Until next time…

-Matt

Tagged: Rural Light