Camera Phone Photograph of the day.

Sometimes you just have to use your phone because the moment is just too fleeting. My wife called me on her way to work while I was at home with the little ones and told me there was an amazing sunrise happening just outside. Unfortunately all my camera gear was at work with the exception of my phone, a little 5 mp LG. So I grabbed it, but it kept overexposing the background (limited controls) so I changed the setting to sports and it did the trick. I think for a little camera phone it worked out fine.

Daily Photo 3/10/15

Ok when I said "daily" I didn't realize that it would be every day. Just trying to keep up. This shot is from the photoshop class that I am teaching. We are focusing on compositing so as an exercise the students had to take several photos of themselves and composite them into the same image. This obviously is not the composite, but one of the more successful images.

Daily: Snow

Daily Photos, this one was just shot outside of my house. It had snowed last night and there was a fair covering on the ground, and also on the trees. Since whenever I need ice or snow I usually have to create it, this was pretty fun. This was hand held Macro (don't recommend it unless you don't have anything else) so I had to have my lens wide open in order to get a fast enough shutter speed. As you can see my DOF was reduced to about half a centimeter. For this shot I used my Nikon D7000, with a 24-120 lens, and a 36 mm Zeikos lens extender, F6.3, SS 1/250, ISO 800.

Daily: Macro 10,000 hours

We just recently had a great guest speaker at Stevens-Henager College from Disney Interactive. His name was Geoff Shupe and he is a Senior Concept Artist. His presentation was amazing and was very relevant across the board, but especially to my art students. There were quite a few great take aways, simply because it was just so great. My biggest take away was a number, 10,000 hours. That is the number of hours you need to perfect your craft, to get where you need to be to have "arrived" with the exception that when you actually have "arrived" then you're dead in the water. It got me thinking about how much I need to keep working on my photography, so here goes. I'm going to attempt to do a photo journal, where I take at least one interesting photo every day. Here is Day One.

Dance Photography

Here are some images from a photo shoot I did for The Edge dance company in Logan Utah. Most of these dancers are the instructors and it was a cool chance to do some promotional pictures for their web and printed materials.

Animation Class

Recently at Stevens-Henager College we started offering a bachelors degree in web design, which built off of all the classes that were taught in the Associates Graphic Arts program. The new bachelors included a lot of coding classes, and quite a few additional graphic arts classes. One of those classes was Flash Animation. What was really great about the way the syllabus was written (which I had a part in) is that it allowed us to really taylor the course to the strengths of the students and to the software that was in vogue at the time. Since I already knew quite a bit about flash (not everything) I decided to use flash to teach some animation. Now this wasn't just basic animation with tweens, this was embedding animations within animations, and all that fun stuff.

The projects they had to do was to shape tween an eye blink, a flag wave, and then animate a walking sequence. My only regret is that we didn't have enough time to rig and animate a face. Anyway, here are some examples of the students' work.

This one is supposed to be me. My student Gabby did a quick illustration of me and then animated my eyes blinking.

I'm really happy with how this one turned out. Ian (my student) worked so hard to get it right. 

Des Moines

For work I travel around the country managing the photography for the Color Me Rad 5k fun run. On these trips I like to run the course the day before, mainly for the exercise, but also because I get to see some really cool places, and you just don't get that same experience driving in a car. On this day in Des Moines I was almost done with the run (I did a variation on it to log more miles) and the sun was just setting at the right time and it was perfect. The only thing though, was that I was a mile from my camera, and the sun had about 15 minutes before it set. I clocked the best mile I have ever run. It's amazing what a little motivation can do for your run.