On A Personal Note

The blogging has been a bit scarce lately. I’ve been traveling back and forth between San Francisco and my hometown Stockton. My mother was just recently diagnosed with lymphoma cancer. This week she started her chemo treatment. Her doctor has had her in the hospital since Monday for her first treatment to make sure there were no adverse reactions. She gets out of the hospital today. So far she is feeling fine so hopefully that will continue.

A friend of mine, Deirdre, is running for “Team In Training.” She will be running marathon and is looking for sponsors to donate money. All the money goes to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. If you would be interested in donating (as little as $25 is possible) you can do so on her link here:
http://www.active.com/donate/tntgsf/tntgsfDSabow

Her goal is $2800 and she’s 59% there as of now. Of course we could put her way past that if we tried.

If you know anyone else who may be interested in donating please forward her link on.

I’m sure I’ll get back to writing more completely useless blog posts soon.

Early Platon, Olan Millls and The Sweet Styles of the 70′s

Upon finding this funny link showing some classic Olan Mills photos I think I discovered an early Platon image. You can clearly see his style has developed over the years:

Now, the really funny thing about those Olan Mills photos is that I could have made the list. Here I am with my dog Fancy on the left (yes, I named her) and my mom and I on the right circa 1978. Sweet tank top and grey slacks combo:

Two Doors Down

This week I’m moving studios. It’s not that big of a move since its only two doors down from my current studio. The new studio is much larger than my current studio. And look, it even has its own website:http://www.studio308sf.com/The idea to move started a couple weeks ago when Caren Alpert asked me if my studio mate Natalie Bowen and I would be interested in moving into her studio. The timing was perfect since our lease was set to expire at the end of this month.If you’re a photographer in San Francisco looking for studio space you know it can be hard to come by. It won’t take them long to fill it, but if you’re interested my old studio #306 is now on the market. You can get contact information here:http://aicproperties.com/

I’d Like To Thank The Academy

The wonderful and brilliant “A Photo Editor” (you’ll see why I’m kissing up below) decided to team up with photo consultant Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua and do a “live” consultation with a photographer for purpose of posting the results on his blog. Much to my surprise, out of hundreds (thousands, millions maybe?) of photographers I was among the few he selected to get the consultation. However, there is one last step… the “winning” photographer is being selected by the public on his blog.Now, I’m not posting this to get you to go over there and vote for me. I just wanted to let people know that I was chosen to be considered for the consultation. Check out the other great photographers and vote for the one you like best. Of course, how many of them were in a life threatening car accident recently?Whether I win or not isn’t important, I am just happy to be nominated. Did that sound sincere?

Blinded By The Light

So far I haven’t made any posts about the technical side of photography, topics like equipment for example. This is actually quite amazing given that I am such a tech/equipment dork. It had to happen eventually so here I am with my first equipment post. And in true tech dork fashion, its a complaint.

I’ve been shooting with the Phase One P25/P25+ for about a year now. Before that I was shooting with a Canon 1DS MkII, which I still have and use for certain shoots. I’ve been mostly happy with the Phase One back, with one major exception: backlit scenes. When shooting into the sun or an artificial light, image detail is lost on a “strip” of the image near the light source. Here is an example:

Here is Phase’s response to the issue:

“the light is hitting the ccd at such a strength that is goes way above and beyond the dynamic range capabilities of the sensor. The anolog electrical signal produced in the pixel is more than it can handle and it gets passed to the next photosite in progression, hence the straight line. A similar thing happens in silver hallide crystals of film with the exception that they pass energy in all directions.”

Not very helpful to someone who likes to shoot with heavy backlight.

The problem I have with the response is, I never experienced this with my Canon 1DSmkII. So, I’ve sent off an email to Leaf to see if their digital backs would exhibit the same problem. I fully expect an email touting how great the Leaf back is and that it will not have the problem. If that is the case I’ll blindly buy the Leaf back and live happily ever after… yeah, right. In reality, if I do get a response saying the Leaf back won’t exhibit the problem I’ll have a Leaf tech come to my studio and prove it does in fact work well in backlit scenes. I’ll keep you posted on the results.

If anyone reading uses a Phase, Leaf, or another MFDB and sees or doesn’t see this problem, let me know.