Although it has been nearly a YEAR since my posting with images from a day hike at Cougar Mountain, the video below was “shot” the very same trip (on my mkII).  The reason I have been procrastinating is that I have not had any video editing software until yesterday.  Although I own the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Suite, there are no apps for editing video with is in the package.  So currently I am running a thirty day trail of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.  Yes, the music is cheesy.  Yes, the shots are shaky.  Yes, the transitions are lacking.  Yes, this is my first video edit.  But who cares!  You have to start someplace, and it seems that this is my starting line.

As part of our two year running tradition (with many years to come), Asha and I took the time to have some fun taking photos for our holiday card.  Thanks to my trusty tripod and MkII, we were able to capture a few fun and partially random moments (the cones on our heads was totally Asha’s idea!).  Our location was in Bothell, down by the amphitheater back in mid October.  Also, take a peek at the whit and wisdom of my good friend Horace Glump at his website, featuring photos from yours truly at the Glumpabilia Store which can also be found in the right sidebar.

If you were to check out the metadata imbeded in these images, you would see that they are in fact not very old.  Nonetheless, I shot these and didn’t touch them for a while.  Today I was bitten by the creativity bug, so I sat down and poked and prodded these images until the itch stopped.  Here’s a little info about each image, with a before and after.

The first is of my sister(She is starting grad school this fall!  They grow up so fast *tear*.) on the University of Idaho campus after her graduation ceremony.  She insisted on having a picture shot in front of this building, so I complied.  Although cute, I wanted to jazz it up a bit.  Yes, yes, yes I can hear you moaning “HDR imaging is so last year!”.  That’s ok, because this image isn’t meant for you!  Technically this is a fake HDR as I am only using one shot, not multiple image.  The method I chose can be found on Deke McClelland’s podcast, dekePod.  I had forgotten how much fun it is to work in the LAB color space instead of RGB.  Makes me want to go back and dust off my channel mixing skills!

This second image is a portrait I did of my friend Tracey.  For reasons that I will not go into for my own personal safety and that of my family, Tracey has recently “exited” the country.  Tracey (and my sisters legs sticking out of the trunk of his car) actually made the cut for my final portfolio when I graduated from AIS.  That was quite a while ago, so we both thought it was time for a new unsettling image.  This image was originally one of three in a series, but without the binary code running across it.  I liked it, but it needed something more.  While I was working in the yard it suddenly occurred to me what the image needed to complete it.  Below is the final product.

Last year I stumbled upon the work of Tokihiro Sato in a little coffee table book called Photo Respiration.  If you have never seen any of Sato’s work, take the time and punch his name into Google.  His super long exposures combined with the sun reflected off of a mirror or the trails of a flashlight are very ethereal.  One of my favorite images of his is actually the very first image in the book, #22 from 1988 (Seen below,  image found at this site).  This image makes the light feel so dimensional and tactile, it looks like you would have to push it aside like long stalks of grain to make your way up or down the stairs.  

I decided to experiment with Sato’s technique.  My clumsy attempts were far from graceful and nowhere as elegant as Sato’s work, but I am starting to get a feel for it.  The first experaments were with my 5D mkII.  For whatever unknown reason, the bulb mode on the mk II requires you to hold the shutter down for the duration of the exsposure, that is unless you have a cable release.  I did not have a cable release, so my esposures were limited to 30 seconds.  Not nearly the 1 hr. + exposures that Sato did unfortunately.  Below was as much as I could accomplish in 30 seconds, manually popping a 580EX II on both sides of the tree, and running across the frame with my small LED flashlight.    Obviously this is pretty elementry, bit I feel like I can take it much further.  None of Sato’s work that I have seen features any human subjects.  It might be interesting to create scenes where there is human interaction with the light.  I shot a few longer exposures containing more “light” with my Mamiya 645, but I have not processed the film yet.  I’ll do another post with images once I get a hold of a cable realease and or process the film.