Year: 2008

Photos from Erica and Chris’ Wedding Reception

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Kristin and Alison

My friends Erica and Chris got married near the end of May and I brought my camera along for their reception and took a few shots. I wasn’t the official photographer or anything — just some guy that brought his camera along to try his hand at a few shots.

Still, even though I’m pleased with how things turned out overall, I do regret that I wasn’t able to salvage any shots of Erica or Chris :(. As luck would have it, either the lighting was working against me during those shots, or other guests unknowingly ended up stepping into the frame at the time. D'oh!

As I did with my trip down to SXSW, I once again rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens. That lens hasn’t let me down yet and I probably ought to buy it outright rather than simply stuffing the pockets of the lens-rental companies ;). (All kidding aside, lensrentals.com came through for me yet again and their service has been great.)

Donovan Family Portraits

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Matt Blowing Bubbles for Gracie

My friend (and coworker) Matt recently adopted a baby daughter, Gracie, and asked Michelle and I if we would take a few family portraits at the Dallas Arboretum. This was right about the time of the yearly “Dallas Blooms” festival (where the Arboretum plants shedloads of flowers) and we just couldn’t pass that up. So, we headed down to the Arboretum one Saturday morning earlier this month and took a handful of posed and candid shots of Matt and his family.

As it turns out, I had just recently bought my Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens and this presented a great opportunity to put it to use. I stuck with the lens throughout the morning and I was really pleased with how things turned out. Admittedly, the focal length took a little getting used to — I had to remain about 20 ft away from the subjects even for sitting-in-the-grass types of shots. It wasn’t long, though, before it all became second nature.

Oh, one last thing — in the photo set on Flickr, you’ll see some shots from Michelle and some from me; as you might guess, the ones labeled “Photo by Alex” are the ones that I took.

Photos from the Dallas Arboretum

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Flowers Along an Arboretum Pathway

Michelle and I went down to the Dallas Arboretum over Chocolate Rabbit Day for their recent Dallas Blooms event. During the event (which runs March 8 – April 13 this year), the Arboretum plants a whole heapful of flowers:

Dallas Blooms will feature more than 400,000 spring-blooming bulbs, over 3,000 azaleas and thousands of another annuals and perennials spread throughout the 66-acre garden. The 2008 festival is a fun-filled five-week, six-weekend event and is the largest outdoor floral festival in the Southwest.

I had a hard time getting shots, in part because the only lens I had at the time was Canon’s 50mm f/1.4. (I now also have Canon’s 85mm f/1.8, but as it would happen, that isn’t exactly great for landscapes either.) It’s a great lens in general, don’t get me wrong, but with the 40D’s 1.6x crop factor, that 50mm lens had an equivalent focal length of an 80mm lens on a traditional full-frame SLR.

So, while it may have been a normal lens on a full-frame camera (that is, a lens with a magnification roughly equal to that of the human eye), I was dealing with a somewhat telephoto lens. And, for landscape photography (where wide-angle lenses are often the lens of choice), it felt a bit like trying to hit balls into the outfield with a Wiffle bat. All things considered, I’m pleased with how these shots came out.

Photos from SXSW 2008

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Alex Russell Enjoying a Beer

As I do every March, headed down to Austin earlier this month for SXSW. I also brought my new camera along, a Canon 40D which I’ve had since around February. To go along with that, I rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens from lensrentals.com (an awesome online lens rental shop, if you ever need that kind of thing).

I had always heard generally good things about image-stabilization including some reports of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/8 sec or even 1/4 sec. Given that I seem to encounter a fairly average amount of camera shake (as opposed to an extraordinarily low amount of it), I was cautiously optimistic about how much the image stabilization system might be able to help me.

In short, I couldn’t be more pleased. If the phrasing wasn’t so religiously-exclusive, I might even be tempted to call this the Jesuslens (see also: Jesusnoun.) Or, put another way, if this lens wasn’t around $1,000, I probably would have bought it by now. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I knew that I’d be hand-holding shots at SXSW and I was hoping that this lens would come through for me — it sure did. I managed several keepers at 1/8 sec. and even down to 1/6 sec.

With the aid of the back of a chair in my hotel room for additional sturdiness, I was also able to work through a set of four 1/2-second exposures of the Austin skyline which I then was able to stitch together to form a panoramic. (Incidentally, Photoshop CS3 is more intuitive than I thought it’d be for making panoramas. They’ve really improved that functionality over CS2.) I may have to try that panorama-thing more often — that was kinda fun.

Sched.org is a Pretty Nice SXSW Calendar

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

Sched.org — Pretty Nice SXSW Calendar

I’m going to SXSW this year (in fact, this weekend) and I was looking around for an online calendar that might help me plan which panels I was going to. (South by Southwest, in case you might not be familiar with it, is a music, film, and interactive festival/conference in Austin, Texas.) The sxsw.com website usually has a semi-usable calendar, but I just couldn’t get it to work this year.

Some friends of mine mentioned a third-party calendaring option, Sched.org, and I thought I’d give that a shot. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s great — it’s easy to use, intuitive, and uses just enough Ajax to be helpful without getting in the way. Anyhow, I’ve worked out my calendar and I think I’ve figured out most of the panels that I’d like to go to. As you might guess, if you see two panels listed for the same time slot, it means that I like both of them and just haven’t yet figured out which to go to. For instance, like these:

Of course, I’m open to ideas if you have any suggestions on resolving those stalemates. One way or another, I’ll figure things out :).