Category — Photogallery

This  weekend is the annual Heavy Rebel Weekender here in Winston-Salem. While the main focus is showcasing the various bands that are on stage from Friday night to Sunday night, for me it is the cars that are as much of the event as anything else. Saturday from 9am-4pm, cars from custom jobs, classic vehicles, from all eras will be on hand.

Band Schedule:

Friday

4:45 p.m. SouthPaw
5 p.m. Atomic Drops
5:30 p.m. Wink Keziah & Deluxe Motel
5:45 p.m. Blue Diablo
6 p.m. The Keepers
6:30 p.m. Pete Yorko
7 p.m. Drop Tops
7:30 p.m. Dead City Dealers
7:45 p.m. Kings of Hell
8 p.m. Gojira-X
8:30 p.m. Hick’ry Hawkins
8:45 p.m. Motorpsychos
9 p.m. Reverend D-Ray and the Shockers
9:30 p.m. Los Rudos
9:45 p.m. Blacklists Royals
10 p.m. the bo-stevens
10:30 p.m. Jimmy and the Teasers
10:45 p.m. Guitar Bomb
11 p.m. Crank County Daredevils
11:30 p.m. Lords of the Highway
Midnight Dexter Romweber and The New Romans

Saturday

9 a.m. to 4 p.m.: HRW Car and Bike Show, Mud Wrestling
5 p.m. High Rollers
5:30 p.m. Bad Mothers
5:45 p.m. Mean Mean Man/Brass Knuckle Band
6 p.m. Filthy Rotten Sex Machine
6:30 p.m. Soul Reapin’ 3
6:45 p.m. American Speedway
7 p.m. Joecephus/George Jonestown Massacre
7:30 p.m. TBA
7:45 p.m. Luxury Pusher
8 p.m. Mad Tea Party
8:30 p.m. Big Spank
8:45 p.m. The Butchers
9 p.m. Wet Wifebeater Contest
9:30 p.m. Designer Drugs
9:45 p.m. The Cheats
10 p.m. Speed Crazy
10:30 p.m. Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival
10:45 p.m. Sasquatch and the Sickabillies
11 p.m. Red Hot Poker Dots
Midnight Rocket 88

Sunday

2 p.m. Nanner Puddin’ Eatin’ and Beer Drinkin’ Contest 2:30 p.m. The Black Knots
2:45 p.m. 220 Short
3 p.m. Adam the First Real Man
3:30 p.m. The Defilers
3:45 p.m. The Big Bad
4 p.m. Deadneks
4:30 p.m. The Flat Tires
4:45 p.m. TBA
5 p.m. Upright Bass Slapdown
5:30 p.m. Locke and Load
5:45 p.m. The Hottdamns
6 p.m. Crossroads Guitar Contest
6:30 p.m. Sandanistas
6:45 p.m. The Buzzards
7 p.m. Psycho Devilles
7:30 p.m. Matt Walsh
7:45 p.m. Lust
8 p.m. Killer Filler
8:30 p.m. The Straight 8’s
8:45 p.m. Pee Wee Moore
9 p.m. Truckstop Preachers
9:30 p.m. BuzzKills
9:45 p.m. Billy Joe Winghead
10 p.m. 7 Shot Screamers

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Had a chance to update the photo albums this weekend with the remainder of our Christmas in Jacksonville along with some flower photos which can be seen in the In the Garden photo album. I still have more autumn photos that need to be updated and that will be forthcoming soon.

Except for the most basic of models, mobile phones today come plenty of extra features and one of the most common is the camera attachment. Considering the advances that digital photography over the past five years, much of that technology is starting to percolate downward with cellphones on the receiving end.

For many people, the camera in their phone may be the only camera they may have. As the phone is usually within a hand’s reach, it makes taking impromptu candid shots possible. It also makes breaking news possible with on the spot coverage when events happen like the bombings in London a few years ago when cell phone pictures gave an indication of the chaos that was going just moments after the bombs exploded. The fact that the phones can readily transmit the photos to websites like Flickr quite quickly, these photos’ impact can spread quite quickly.

Some phone models have a resolution capability of 3MB which is on par with the little Kodak pocket camera I received three years ago. My LG phone’s camera has a 1MB resolution capability which is more than sufficient for my purposes which is taking advantage of a candid moment when I do not have my other cameras around. Moments like when Madeleine is goofing off in the backseat of the car. Of course, one can not expect the highest quality with these photos. Fixed aperture with a limited range of shutter speeds means that the subject has to be in decent light and relatively motionless in order to get a decent photo. Action photography is not something that these cameras do well at all.

I have uploaded a few of the photos I took with the phone camera to a Flickr photoset called Mobile phones. Nothing spectacular: just Madeleine at her most candid. I have made that photoset the default one for my mobile photo uploads which will happen on occasion. There may be other subjects but count on being most Madeleine shots.

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In a recent issue of National Geographic, there was a cover story about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans. What made the story stood out for me was the accompanying photographs by David Burnett. Using a large format SpeedGraphic camera set at a very shallow depth of field, he created pictures that took on a fantastic quality making ordinary scenes of devastation seem surreal like a dream or a nightmare depending on your perspective. Quite compelling. This technique though is not unusual and can be accomplish through a standard tilt-shift lens. You can also duplicate the effect through Photoshop as well.

After coming across another article about photography using shallow DOF, I decided to give it a try. Since I do not have the right sort of equipment in doing it in the field, I used a popular technique using Photoshop software to simulate the effect. You can see this handiwork on my Flickr site. It is just a few photos taken from a variety of photosets.

The one limitation I had was that my photos generally do not make great subjects for this sort of technique which works best if you are positioned above a landscape, preferably one without people and have a quality of light that is bright and casts long shadows.

This is something that I will not spend much time on doing but it is a good illustration on what you can with some basic techniques using the Quick Mask tool and gradients.

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I came across a reference to a new photo effect, the Orton Effect that has become popular among many photographers as an alternative method of processing photos. The Orton Effect is named after Michael Orton who first used the technique is a sandwich of two images, one in focus the other out of focus. The Orton image has traditionally been done using slide film with the first, sharp, image overexposed by two stops and the second, out of focus image, over exposed by one stop. This creates a dreamy sort of image where the image is sort of sharp but retains the glow like effect from the blurry aspect of the creation.

The effect can be accomplished in two ways. The first is as described above with two images taken of the same subject but at different camera settings. Needless to say, to make it work, you will need a steady tripod and a sure hand or preferably as little hand touching as possible to keep the image exactly straight.

The other and now more common way is to replicate the effect through photo-editing software like Photoshop where duplicate layers of a single image can be set with different settings to generate the Orton Effect. The explanation of how do replicate this effect can be found on PCIN.net.

It is not a complicated effect. The only real work is trying to determine the amount of blurring you need per photograph to get the effect right. So I did a few recent photos using this effect. I went for a variety of subjects to see how to respond to the effect. I posted the results in my Flickr gallery and in Snaps as well.

The results varied a bit. I did not try to overemphasise the effect but I did not go the other way and make it too subtle either.

In one of tests, I took the image “The Rocker Beauty’ and see if I could attain that dream-like quality. This is the original image, as posted to Flickr, with some post processing of the original image but essentially only to crop it and lighten some of the tonality. For a candid street shot, it is one of my favorites although comments on the photo are a bit more mixed.

Now here is the updated image with the Orton Effect applied. The first notable change is that the image is brightened overall due to the overexposure applied to the image. There is some detail lost which inevitable with this sort of processing but the way to avoid this is to be judicious in the level and tone adjustments of the image before applying the effect. But the image, while high keyed a bit more, has achieved a notable softening effect. You could say she positively glows now.

Not every photograph is a suitable candidate for this sort of effect. The subject of the photo matters greatly because part of the appeal of this effect is to attain that impressionistic quality and ordinary snaps of people and places just will not be dreamy no matter how hard you try to use this effect. It needs a good range of tonality that provides a good contrast between all parts of the photograph.

However, this effect, much like the Burnett effect I tried earlier, is something fun to do but not necessarily one that I may attempt again in the future but it does have its uses.

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I have finally managed to rework the photogallery that uses Flickr as its source. You can see the results on the Snaps gallery which is also found in the navigation sidebar area.

It functions a bit differently this time. Because of the caching issues I had before, not all of the galleries and images will load at the same time. Instead, the album list is paged at five at a time and the images are also paged so many at a time.

Another major difference is how the images are displayed. Each album will display a thumbnail representation of the image but clicking the thumbnail will display a popup window that showcases the image while dimming the background page. This popup is based on the popular Lightbox javascript technology. On each image clicking the image will advance the photo but moving the cursour to either side of the photo will display navigation arrows that will allow advancing or going back in the list of photos.

The photos themselves are of the medium size that is the standard size for all Flickr photos displayed on the site.

There will be a more formal gallery that will be available soon which will just highlight the more interesting of my photography in a better format for presentation. That site may be available sometime later this weekend.

One thing that fell off the map so to speak when I change my hosting plan last year was the galleries I maintained to showcase my top photos. Because of the setup, I found that I was unable to update the galleries. Thus they became somewhat stagnant. However, I did have my flickr account and a plugin to showcase the photos I posted onto Flickr. For quite a while, that worked out quite well until at some point the caching system went awry generating thousands of cache images, so many it forced my web hoster to shut me down.

I still do not know how to resolve the Flickr issue. There are only two plugins that handle the use of albums on Flickr and both of them have serious issues. There are other ways of displaying Flickr images but they tend to be far more limiting in what they can display. Flickr still can be the source for some of the content on the site like photo of the day but I may just have to leave a link to my Flickr account and just showcase certain photos.

Still, there is an ease in using Flickr as the image repository.I have already named the photos, gave it tags and organised in certain groups. Using my own photo management system does give me control but means duplication of work.

I will find a way though to make it work. For now, I will be building up the main gallery using my archived photos and release it soon.