Fall 2007 Photography Portfolio - With Bonus

a_lepe07,
originally uploaded by SLepe.

Well, as the semester is coming to an end, I have finally turned in my final portfolio for my advanced photography class. I decided to go with a progression of my work through the semester as it went from straight documentation of action in low light situations to a study of form and prolonged exposures. I think it went over well in class, especially after getting a return on the last class critique we had that was a lot more positive than I had been expecting.

I think I'll be going back to photographing what I think is interesting, and if I can find the time, go into a study of portraiture because I really find faces interesting.

Tune in next week. Same Bat-blog, Same blog-time.

More Blurs at Practice

2007-11-14, Frisbee Blurs_0251,
originally uploaded by SLepe.

Last Tuesday as the numbers at practice dwindled the guys decided to play a box game which packs the action in a confined space due to a limited number of players. This was a good opportunity to get some nice blurred action shots and I think this one was my favorite of the night.

Be sure to check out the action page for galleries with more pictures in this, and the racquetball sets.

Blur Study - Racquetball

2007-11-13, Raquetball Blurs-34,
originally uploaded by SLepe.

I went to the activities center to see what I could come up with and did some prolonged exposures of a couple of guys playing racquetball. I found some of these to look interesting when I inverted their colors and think I may do this with some other blur images because it gives it the look of an x-ray when there's an area where the subject overlaps that is darker and it is surrounded by lighter areas where the subject passed through.

These exposures range from 1/2 a second to 1 and 1/2 seconds at varying f stops.

Blur Study

2007-11-07, Practice Blurs-11,
originally uploaded by SLepe.

I think I finally understand what my teacher has been talking about this whole time. She wants a style, not necessarily "good" pictures, just a theme that we can carry as "artists" and taking those pictures in that style and refining the style. This is the direction I'm going to be exploring. Taking pictures at night and embracing the blurs that occur instead of going for traditional sports photography at night. I'll start with tripod stuff tonight so that everything that's not moving is a lot sharper.

These first pictures were done hand-holding at about 1/10 of a second at F 2.8 at iso 400. Check out the gallery in the "action" section.

How To Get More Work In A Gallery

I've just quadrupled the number of photos I've to on display in the show for my portfolio class, and the pictures going up are more my style instead of the forced "identity" theme photo. How did I do it? The gallery wanted more pictures to go up in the show and I volunteered a handful, of which 3 were taken.

On display I now have the picture of the bottles of hot sauce from my first post, the picture of Jimmy schooling Kevin, the one of Dan at Splatterbeat, one from one of the practice galleries found here.

Tomorrow night is the reception at our show and a number of other shows in the area, so if you're into that whole "art" scene, I highly reccomend goign and checking it out. There will be punch & pie. Or at least some other forms of refreshments. Details below.

Fotophile: Where's Your ID? the UT Dallas photography student portfolio with work by Valerie Wong, Jeanie Vichayanonda, Justin Valle, Blake Tomlinson, Wendy Ray, Talia Luna, Alex Lepe, Sam Lang, Alvin Haynes, T.J. Griffin, Anne Friske, Hannah Frank, Irene Formillo, Scott Dougherty, Albert Almanza and Aekta Ahluwalia up now, reception 7-10 October 26, through November 18

The Courtyard Theatre is located at 1509 H Avenue in Plano just off 15th.

View Larger Map

New Format, New Pictures

I've split this up into three blogs so far, one for action shots, which will probably end up being split into two separate pages, one for ultimate and one for all other action, still life, in which I'm including landscapes and other pictures of stuff that isn't moving, and this will now be a sort of portal and updating page to keep everyone informed on what's going on with me, my photography, and my web pages.

This is a picture I took about five or six years ago with an old 1.3 megapixel camera one day while my Panasonic was in the shop on a day we got an unprecedented amount of snow. I went out at 7 in the morning and could have taken pictures forever it was so awesome.

Enjoy!

Ultimate 101 Tournament Photos

Well, the weekend has come and gone and I think I've definitely learned a thing or two about shooting action with digital during the daytime. I've been getting used to nothing but night pictures and shooting at 1/1000 - 1/4000 was a change that took some getting used to. I also need to work on my positioning relative to the action. That having been said, I got well over 1000 pictures and I whittled those down to about 100 to share.

A couple of my favorites are the one of Ike skying Phil from UTA and the picture of Steve flying to a D on Callahan, which he didn't make but looked cool nonetheless.

Slide show to come.

Ultimate 101018,
originally uploaded by SLepe.

Ultimate 101043,
originally uploaded by SLepe.

Splatterbeat - ISO 3200, F 2.8, 1/4

I've been known to complain about having to shoot action at practice because it's so dark, but that darkness is nothing compared to how dark it was at the Splatterbeat event put on by the PAs. My intention was to get some cool images of people with glowsticks moving around, but my cable release had not arrived on time so I ended up with very few pictures that I liked that didn't involve use of the flash. This one, however, I liked and did not use the flash. It was the first picture of the night and I think that may have set my expectations too high, but I'll just have to keep plugging away at it and it'll get better.

ISO 800, F 2.8, 1/200

This is one of my favorite pictures so far. The color is spot on, it's got all the action going on, the main subjects are quite sharp, and, best of all, you can see the precise moment when Jimmy's lower back slams into Kevin's face which resulted in Kevin being on the ground piecing together what just happened for the next thirty seconds.

Now For Something Completely Different

The Ultimate team here at UTD is hosting the annual Ultimate 101 tournament on October 13th and 14th. I estimate I'll take around 1000 pictures that weekend if not more. This weekend we got in a crunch to design something to put in the discs we will be selling and this is what I came up with and what the team determined will get printed on our discs. To order one contact me, the price is $10.

Yesterdays News

Two Tuesdays ago I turned in some prints for the class' identity themed show.

Love/Hate, but mostly Love

I've now had my camera for about two weeks and it certainly has brought a spark to my lulling relationship with photography. I may not be at the point where I was five years ago when I got my first digital camera, the Panasonic SV-AV10, one of those cool little convergence gadgets, where I am shooting at least 100 pictures daily, but I would say that with how much I have shot when I am shooting, the average per day is not too far off from those figures of yesteryear. Here are some of the things I love the most about my new camera, and a few that I wish would go away.

First, the things I love.

• The camera feels sturdy.
• I've picked up the Digital Rebel, which I ordered and canceled in favor of the Maxxum 7D, and it lacked the substance of the 7D. The 7D has some weight to it, but not enough to be a drag, and it fits my hand very well, whereas the Rebel feels sort of like a toy in comparison, heck, my Toshiba PDR-M700 might be at least as heavy as the Rebel and I certainly prefer the grip and girth.
• The knobs.
• The 7D has enough knobs to overwhelm even some of the most experienced users. All of the main controls have their own dials, knobs and buttons, with dials upon dials that help keep me from having to dig through menus to change my ISO, shooting mode, bracketing mode, even my focal areas and modes.

• Picture quality.
• Sure, I gave up two megapixels for a camera with more girth, options, and a rock bottom price, but I see no reason to double guess myself on this one. All of the prints I have gotten done so far, all 8 x 10, have come out looking great and the only ones that might have visual issues are the ones I have shot at ISO 3200, which is not due to the number of pixels, but to the ISO. The Rebel, I might add, has no means to push the camera to 3200. Count it.

• The price.
  
• Price was the biggest gripe all the reviews I could find online about the 7D had. Price is probably my favorite thing about this camera upon first getting it. I paid almost 1/10 of its initial MSRP of $1,500. The price I paid for the camera/lens kit was almost half of what I had paid for the Rebel body I ordered and canceled. This has allowed me a bit of free spending to invest in my camera and led me to a 75 - 300mm F4.5-5.6 lens which will be a huge plus when shooting all that hot ultimate action, a spare battery, lens filters for all of my lenses(this includes one long overdue filter for my 35mm Rebel), and two CF cards, the primary 4 gig 133x card and a 1 gig for any times I may fill up the 4 gig and want to keep shooting while I'm uploading to the computer. At this point, my spending has probably not reached the point it would have passed long ago had I bought the Rebel XT body, had to buy at least one lens, and still had to find a card and some filters. Oh, I also bought a fancy-schmancy camera bag for the body, lenses, and all the accessories.

That having been said, there are a few things I wish I could change, or I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.

• The exposure correction +/-.
• In full manual mode, I have less control over the amount of exposure compensation, even though there is a knob with fixed numbers on it. The camera just takes over and will only take a suggestion as to where I want to go with the correction and does the best it can with that. That having been said, the best it can involves switching to beyond -2 when I set the knob at +3. This is something I'll have to work on and I am sure will not be such an issue when I shoot action during the daytime, as opposed to all the night practices.

• Autofocus can go crazy sometimes.
• I've tried the manual setting of focus points, automatic, and everything in between, but sometimes the camera may be just slightly out of focus and the 300mm lens decides it wants to span it's entire focal range a couple of times before arriving at a good focal point right next to its starting point.

• Discontinued
• This is something I knew going into 7D ownership, but accessories, mostly the vertical battery grip that will only work with this camera is very hard to find and when found goes for at least $200...that's right, more than I paid for the camera itself!

I refuse to pretend I've got any major beef with this camera. I just love it and see myself using it for years and years and years.

Identity...I don't like this theme

The best thing I can come up with for the Identity theme is "you are what you eat" which involved me taking pictures of my food-less fridge. Hope it works.

Football - Farewell To Preseason

Ripped from my WordPress blog.

Last night the Cowboys survived a shootout with the Giants and that inspired me to go back through the pictures I took when my little brother and I went to the opening preseason game against the Colts. I remembered hearing something about a bug being thrown on Tony Romo while he was being interviewed and found Awful Announcing's take on Pam Oliver's handling of this situation:

I came to realize that in my picture-taking I snapped a shot of Pam Oliver interviewing Tony Romo just as Romo was trying to get the bug off his uniform. Talk about coincidence... I mean...I totally meant to do that.



The part of the pictures I like best here is Roy Williams and Terrance Newman turned around laughing at Romo and his bug problem at the top of the frame. Let me know what you think.

Addendum - check out Pam's facial reaction, it's great!

Scratch That; Replace Camera

I ordered my Rebel XT body for the unthinkable price of $320. You may Google the camera and get results showing some place selling it for $300, but after researching those "stores" it turns out that they're just scams run out of New Jersey. So I have this order in for one of the two Rebels they have in stock and today I go back on to see if they have any equally sweetly priced lenses, which they had a standard kit lens for about half the price of anywhere else, and found another camera, the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D for about half the price! I looked into it and it's due to the fact that Konica Minolta no longer exists as its own company since it was swallowed up by Sony. The camera comes with the same warranty as the Rebel I ordered and gives me money to buy that long lens now and already comes with a kit lens. The lens mount system is also supported by all the new Sony-released lenses, so this situations just seems win-win. As I said in my last entry, there seems to be no bad digital SLR that's been produced in the last two years. Digital Photography Review gave this camera "Highly Recommend" marks just like all the rest.

In addition to the price, there seem to be a couple of advantages to getting this camera over the Canon. First is the built in CCD stabilization system that gives you a maximum of 3 stops worth of compensation for a shaky camera hold. Second is the dominantly metal camera body that gives the 7D a clear edge over the XT's plastic body. The 7D also has dials and knobs all over the body for image customization that can be done without having to navigate through the camera's menu system.

There are a couple of drawbacks, though, most noticeably the 2 megapixel drop-off from the 8mp XT to the 6mp of the 7D. There's also a startup time in the neighborhood of 2.6 seconds from off to shot. On top of that, it's just hard to say goodbye to Canon as I move forward into digital. I'll be having one for my Canon Digital homies this weekend, but also one to my new 7D friends.

I've got good news and... well, more good news

I've been looking into buying a digital SLR for the last five or six years, but have never had the money or the real need for one until now. Since the semester started I decided that the time was finally right to scrounge up the dough for the next step from my old Toshiba PDR-M700 and my trusty 35mm Rebel. About a month ago a nice deal had popped up for the Digital Rebel XT, a steal at $400 for the body with a standard kit lens, but I had to buy those pesky textbooks and couldn't convince my parents that it was a viable "school supply."

Fast forward to this week where I've been reading up on all of the low level(low level meaning lower price points) digital SLR cameras and have been very pleased that it seems that no one is making a bad DSLR today. I read up on the Canon Rebels, dpreview.com said "Highly Recommend". I read up on the Nikon D40, same thing. The Pentax K100D? Of course! The Olympus EVOLT E-500? You bet. The Sony Alpha? Like you need to ask! It seems every camera in my price range is highly recommended. With this newfound knowledge, I decided to stick with the Canon system, since I've grown accustomed to it and already have a basic kit lens for it so I can save by buying just the body and put the extra money aside for a telephoto lens(I love the 10x Canon lens on my Toshiba and don't know how long I can go without EXTREME CLOSEUPS!!! Schwing!)

Today I wrapped up my two day clean out of my sister's garage-garage sale and finally ordered my Rebel XT! Now if it wasn't Labor Day weekend I'd probably have it by Thursday, but since everyone except for B&H is closed for the three day weekend, I'll have to wait for it to be shipped on Tuesday and may not get here until the week after that. Now I'm giddy with anticipation and need to prepare for the big arrival by spending more money on storage and maybe even that fancy lens I've been eyeballing...

Hooked on Weeds

I don't know that most people would feel good about their recently widowed mother becoming a weed-selling mogul in a big white-flight community, but the kids in Showtime's Weeds seem to handle the situation just fine. Too fine if you ask me.

The eldest son, Silus, is so cool with his unemployed mom selling drugs that he steals her supply in order to use it as leverage to get into "the business." This goes horribly wrong and lands his mom, the foxy Mary-Louise Parker, into a six figure hole of debt to a very vicious drug dealer. This seems like it's going to be the premise for most of season 3, and I think it's going to be a great one.

I used to think Showtime was all Queer as Folk and The L Word and had never watched a show from the network, not because I don't have fancy premium cable, but because none of their stuff ever interested me. Weeds is great and is on the complete other side of the spectrum from those shows and this leads me to going out of my way to find a way to watch every episode of the show. Now in it's third season, I'd say it's on par as far as consistent quality as my other current favorite tv show, Entourage.

So go out and don't call your cable or satellite provider and find a way to watch Weeds. You'll be glad you did.

It's the end of the blog as I know it...

I went to a high school where every student was issued a laptop at the beginning of the year. This led to everyone thinking that they were God's gift to the internet and a ton of poorly created, and some very well created personal websites. This was my introduction to blogging. I quickly lost all hope for the format.

I've got accounts in BlogSpot, WordPress, Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, so
on, and so forth, but I tend to not use them. Most of the people I knew that posted regularly to blogs did so through either Xanga or LiveJournal and their pages were either the standard fare of a cookie-cutter layout, or terribly pasted together pieces of CSS and html code from websites that would give even the cartoonist for Pokemon seizures.

Only recently have I started giving blogs a second look, and this is greatly due not to news sites accrediting the format by hiring dedicated bloggers or paying their regular journalistic staff more money for a blog, but due to the accreditation that ESPN and sports in general have given to blogs in my mind by incorporating them into their site.

I still think that someone would have to be damn near God's gift to the internet in order for me to read their personal dedicated blog, let alone regularly visit MySpace or the ever-cluttering Facebook, but I do give more of a thought to professional blogs dedicated to a single subject matter rather than what they ate for lunch or why they're quibbling with their boyfriends.