Gear

VScameras More specifically, what makes a DSLR superior to a point and shoot? That's a loaded question, but lets look at the major factors to consider buying a DSLR if you are serious about photography. A DSLR camera is requirement if you are looking at attending a Matty Photography workshop, and you'll see why next. Control, Quality, and Performance are the three of the many factors we are going to look at today. There are ALL KINDS of bells and whistles on today's cameras, but we are going to specifically concern ourselves with the ones that really truly matter when it comes to making a photograph. Control is pretty basic really, but hard to appreciate/understand if you do not know how cameras capture light in order to make a photograph. In short, the camera has a couple parts that vary their size and speed in order to capture the proper amount of light. Most of your point and shoot cameras to not allow you to control this. In turn, you lose control of your image taking. I mean... how can you control your camera and take the photo you want if you can't control your camera's functions in which determine all this? These mysterious functions that I speak of are aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, all which contribute to making the image. If you do not fully know what these are or how to control them, you are not taking the photograph, your camera is, you are just clicking the button. Now don't you feel special? ;) Learning these functions and how to control them are covered in-depth and practiced in the beginners workshop, so don't sweat not knowing this information, just know that it's important stuff. A lot of students will walk into the beginners class with a camera that they do not know how to use, but by the end of the class, they are all well-skilled in how to take the photos they want with a DSLR and do it great!

IMG_0578 Life is all about time, or rather the lack of, right? Time is always the most scarce resource, even if you have all the time in the world, others around you, or even mother nature does not. As a photographer, "good light" naturally only happens in small fragments of time, and we counter this by using off-camera light, even when we don't need to in order to get even "better" light. I think we need to put all our cancer curing resources and task them into figuring out how to extend really nice sunsets to say... twice as long (I kid.... but seriously). Here is a behind the scenes video I cut together today, it showcases a little bit of the stuff we did while we were running around the island.

6-canonMerlin Been integrating more video work in with my clients. I'm experiencing that once business clients know that I can shoot/cut video along side the photos, they ask for it. And why not? At a flip of a switch, I can go from photos to video, both top quality products out of the same device, pretty neat. I say that loosely, although you can make the transition to capturing photos or video with a flip of a switch, there is a bit more to it than that. Obviously photos and video capturing have a lot in common, but as much as they have in common they also have just as much that separates the two arts. First, you have a completely different selection process for what to capture in each medium. Some things are best captured with photos, some with video. Understanding and getting a feel for working to each medium's strengths will greatly improve efficiency and the overall product given to the client. With photos, you have the luxury and power of flash/strobes to blast light, greater controlling your environment. With video, you are stuck with continuous light, which also has it's strengths as well.

matty_8.21.10_ 004 Very, very rarely do I come across a location shoot where the ever adaptable light stand just can't cut the mustard when I need to hang a light. The only time I find myself unable to use a light stand is when I simply don't have enough room to squeeze a light stand into a composition due to various constraints. It can be tricky, and at times, you end up having to change up your shot to a less ideal composition to acoomodate light stands where you need them. Last weekend, I didn't have that option, I couldn't change up my shot even if I wanted to. You've heard me say it many times... I love location photography. It's always something new, fresh, and pushes your photographic work to a dynamic range whether you like it or not. To be able to walk on to a location, one that you've never seen before, and it's your job to tell a story with a photograph. To create and control light and execute proper exposure for an inspiring photograph within just a couple minutes after arriving is challenging and something I love doing. It starts with seeing what you have to work with, asking yourself a bunch of questions, and visualizing the desired end product.

IMG_7850 So throughout my life, I've occasionally owned venus flytraps. I'm not what you'd call a "plant guy" by any means, in fact, the only plants I've ever purchased for myself are flytraps. I'm sure most of you all know that these are not your normal, give water, give sunlight kinda plant. Of course the flytrap requires both water and light, but these things eat bugs! Come on, that's just cool. Ok... maybe I'm just too much of a boy still, but it's fun as heck to watch. These things use the traps to catch bugs, seal up, and literally liquify said bug for food. Evolution... you are scary scary thing. Oh, and if you are reading this and going "why did this Matt guy tag this post as a gear post," just wait for it.

matty_7.1.10_ 165 So, what do you need to use when you are looking for softbox-like light quality without having light spill all over the place? The answer is simple, the gridded softbox. It gives you the same control over light as normal grid spots that you'd throw in front of a normal barebulb light, but now with soft, beautiful light. I've always loved using grid spots on my barebulbs, but the light can just be so harsh on a subject's face, especially when it is one of the key lights. The gridded softbox works on that same principle, controlling the light and only letting it hit a small portion of a subject, but now you can get those pleasing contrasts and skin tones you can't get very well with barebulb lighting. That's typically my problem too, wanting that gorgeous, soft light on my subjects (usually female), but having trouble trying to keep the light off of other elements of the photo. It's not an easy task, that is, until now. Notice the photo below, my subject is literally 2-3 feet away from a black sheet used for a background, yet no light is spilling onto it. Even though it is a black sheet, if you were using a normal softbox for a light modifier, you'd have light spill onto the sheet and you'd get a little grey tint to the background. The grid added to the softbox directs the light on just my subject... a very good thing in this case.

matty_3.4.10_ 373 Ok... so we are shooting on-location. Woah, hold on. What does "on-location" even mean?! That all depends on you, the photographer, or you, the client who has hired a photographer. A lot of new photogs out there will toss around words like "on-location" to describe in a round-about way of saying they don't use lighting. Which translates to they haven't invested in either the knowledge, the equipment, or both in order to utilize lighting for on-location shoots. Photographers who spin their own reality using catchy words in an attempt to sound marketable, allthe while misinforming the public can drive me crazy at times. On-location does not mean you are having to settle for anything less than amazing. I bring up this odd tangent at the very beginning of my post to make a key point. That point is that on-location does not mean I can't bring the power and control of my lights with me where ever I go, in fact, it's the exact opposite. I repeat, I'm bringing more than just my camera to the party. I use every single piece of lighting equipment that I use in the studio in that big, wild, endless possibilities of an environment we call "on-location." It's the world around us, every part of it. And I'm here to tell you that every single part of it can be lit with off-camera lighting to create your own vision. A vision that couldn't happen without bringing your own lights along for the ride.

matty_5.17.10_ 108 Yep, that's my super intelligent title for this post. Sorry, I'm kinda at a loss for this one. The resulting pictures from this shoot are actually for the Emergency Food Network. They have a harvest every year where they grow their own food for the food donation cause. The EFN team want me to capture the harvest at different points of the plant growth, then use the resulting photos for large prints around the office and such. So I'll be heading out to the harvest a handful of times from now to September. Pretty cool idea, something a little different for me, and a reason to try out the most recent addition to my lens collection, the new Canon macro lens. Yes, I market myself as a portrait photographer, however, I do a lot of other kinds of photo work besides just capturing people. So much so that I invested in a top shelf macro lens. Enter the Canon 100mm F2.8 L USM Macro. I'm using this bad boy for all of my small product photography as well as... well really small plants and anything else I need really great close-up detail on. So this post is kinda of a shoot/gear post, as I'll talk about the shoot itself and the macro lens too. I'm not great at all about doing the whole review thing on my gear. I just kinda like telling you what gear I have, how I use it, why I like/dislike it, and show you some work made by the gear. I'm a practical guy. I like practical explanations and real examples. So that's what you're getting. :)

drobo 25 MBs a pop, yes, that's right... every time I click the shutter on my 5D mkII, the 21.1 megapixel DSLR consumes 25 megs on the memory card. The real concern is not how fast today's cameras fill up 8 or even 16 GB memory cards, it's at the end of the day when I have a total of 10-20 gigs of file data to upload, edit, and store. Shoot 3, 5, however many sessions a week... you start eating up disc space like crazy. I store and backup every picture I've ever shot in the last 5 years. I used to store all of my data on a 1 TB drive, then have another 1TB drive to backup the first drive in case of a drive failure. It was annoying, cumbersome and I got real tired of all the manual backups. Enter the drobo unit. The drobo is the best thing to happen to anyone who needs a simple, no thinking required, redundant storage solution. It's a RAID'd external hard drive setup (RAID is a fancy acronym meaning if you lose one or two drives, you still retain all of your data). I won't go into the details, you can surf the drobo site for that. The drobo unit can hold up to 4 hard drives of any size, you can even vary the size and make of the drives. The drobo unit then takes all of the drives and combines them into one large virtual drive. For example, my drobo has four 1.5 TB drives, and all RAID'd together as one drive, providing space for redundancy across all drives, I get a little over 4 TB of storage. Like I said before, I can have up to 2 drives fail at one time, and all of my data is still secure. This all provides me with a massive storage device with the peace of mind that all my data is safe. It can connect up to your PC or Mac, with high-speed USB and firewire interfaces (it also can be configured and hooked directly into your network and accessed from any machine on that network).

Canon-EF-24-70mm-f-2.8-L-USM-Lens-2 I'm trying to make an effort to write more posts about some of my equipment, 'cause I know that other photographers out there in the market for new stuff would like to hear feedback about this stuff from real people they know, and not some crummy product review on adorama.com. I'm also going to try and make a spot on the site that details the current equipment I use in the field. Before I go off about how much I like this piece of glass... it's important to note that for all of you photographers in the beginning or even middle stages of your learning don't get too consumed with buying super expensive gear and thinking it'll make your photos magically turn to gold. A sharp lens and a poorly executed photo composition is still a poor photo, no matter how heavy and expensive your setup may be. Invest in some knowledge and gain solid skills in the field before you blow your savings on equipment that won't help your game too drastically in the beginning. I've taken many awesome photos in my years, and some of my top favorites of all time were taken with a $900 body/lens Canon Rebel setup.

TT5-CA_lbox A wireless flash trigger system, ya gotta have it. A must have with on-location lighting photography, but I'd argue almost a must have in the studio as well. No one needs to be tripping over those old dinosaur sync cables now-a-days. Of course we all want them, it's just a matter of if you can pony up the dough for a couple. Pocket Wizards, if you know anything about flash photography and the technologies used to talk to your lights, I'm sure you've heard that name. It's the Cadillac of wireless flash, an industry standard in pro photo, and they are not cheap. They fire from a 1000 feet away (don't ask me when you'd ever need such range), you can fine tune them using your computer for super specific needs, and they can carry your camera's flash settings wirelessly to hot shoe flash units from across the room. There are a ton of photog geeks out there writing post after post about these little gadgets, not to mention the manufacturer's site where you can read up on the fine details, so I'm just gotta give you the easy-peasy, simple, practical use for these things, while trying to leave out as much geek speak as I can.

IMG_2913 So I ponied up some dough and bought the AlienBee RingFlash system a couple weeks ago. Just got out in the studio to finally play around with if for the first time. Lisa, the brave soul for most of my lighting testing, stepped in to let me blind her at point-blank range for an hour or so. I will feel fully responsible if this poor girl looses her sight by the ripe old age of 30, cause at the current rate, it's totally a possibility.

The blog has been quiet for a week or so, and for good reason. I'm currently conceptualizing a large-scale photography project. It will involve the community, creating inspiring pictures, and best of all, it'll cost you, the ones getting your photo taken, absolutely nothing. More...

Every time I hear the words "weapon of choice," I think of Christopher Walken dancing around like a fool in Fatboy Slim's music video. And to be honest, the first time I slapped the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens on my camera body, I...