Portrait Perfection

In good tradition, this post is a bit of a read (although not as bad as some), so get yourself a cup of coffee and prepare to read every mundane detail of my weekend.

Update! I’ve uploaded all the pictures for your viewing pleasure. Check them out here.

I’ve known Cody and Becca since January 2006 (wow, has it really been more than three years!?). They were our Neighbors when I lived in Elk Grove and came over to see what was going on the night we got a little crazy with some rum. From that night began the summer of nightly BBQ, wonderful weekends and perpetual tom-foolery (see examples here and here).

Since then they have been able to buy a home in Elk Grove, and start their family and while I was over for Dinner about a month ago they asked me if I would take some portraits. I was flattered and shortly we made plans to go up to the Hoffman cabin at Donner Lake for a weekend to have some fun and take the pictures.

I took all of Friday off so I would have time to get all my stuff together and take care of a few other nagging things around the house. I ended up  on the phone, going through emails and taking care of some paperwork though so I still worked part of the day. I made a trip up to my parents house as well to pickup my Camera (which Chadd had borrowed) and to show my Mom the Blog I setup for her (http://tracysnotes.com, more to come on that later though). and left from there straight to Cody and Becca’s house.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t what we hoped for when we planned the trip a month ago and it rained the entire drive up, we even had a few miles of light snow as we crested Donner Summit (~7,200 ft). Once we got to the cabin, and were settled, Cody and I passed time playing some board games and I did some reading before we turned in for the night.

We woke up fairly early Saturday to cloudy skies without rain and made a point to get out and start taking some pictures. We did have some very light rain (almost a mist) to deal with, and snow on the ground but I think overall we were able to get a lot of great shots in. I did a preliminary processing job on the photos so far, but they aren’t ready for prime-time yet, so I’ll save all that for a later post.

After we wrapped up our multi-location photo shoot we headed into Truckee to get groceries for the rest of the weekend. Cody and I stopped in the local bookstore and did some quick perusing, but didn’t end up finding anything interesting. We all headed back to the cabin for one last set of pictures (indoors) and lunch. Becca made fabulous sandwiches while Cody and I played a game of Arkham Horror. I did some more reading, and played more games. Cody and I even managed to play one round of Axis and Allies before dinner. Again, Becca made a delicious Pesto Ravioli meal while Cody and I played (noticing a trend here?). We all played Coloretto, Yahtzee and watched SNL before going back to bed with the rain pouring outside.

I got up Sunday morning around 8am and intended to make a pot of coffee, but all I could find was decaf and a bag of Peet’s coffee dated Aug 2007 so I gave up, and decided to read some more of my book. When Becca got up a little later she ended up making some of the Decaf (turned out to be all there was) and scrambled eggs with toast for breakfast (by the end of the trip Cody and I were feeling pretty guilty that she kept doing all the work while we played). Cody and I played a few more games and after lunch we packed everything up to head home.

All-in-all it was a great trip in spite of the rain. We were able to get the portraits done that we wanted to do and I read a few chapters in my book but mostly I had a great time relaxing with friends.

This Makes me want a D90 … Bad

The new Nikon D90 has the ability to do 720p, cinematic 24 fps video captures. Combine that with somebody who know what they are doing behind the lens and in front of a video editor and this is what you get.

Digital Pictures meet Old Fashioned Printing

I’ve expanded my gallery features! I know that A LOT of people enjoy looking at the pictures here, and I appreciate the enthusiasm. A few weeks ago, I added a “cart” to the gallery, and the ability to download a zip file of everything in your cart. This is really handy if you want to get a copy of a whole album’s worth of pictures.

How does it work? Just jump over to either an individual picture, or an entire gallery. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, in the green box you’ll see the option to “Add Photo to Cart” or “Add Album to Cart” depending on which you are looking at. Once you do that, you’ll be taken to the cart, where you can select from the pull down box in the upper right corner to “Download Cart as Zip”.

But now it’s even better. What if you just want regular old fashioned photos that you can put in a photo album? If you want just a single image printed and mailed to you, look in that green box again while viewing the photo, you’ll see there are two “Print on …” links as well. Fotokasten.de is for our friends across the pond, Shutterfly is what you should use if you live in the US.

If you want an entire album of pictures, go to the album, scroll to the bottom and “Add Album to Cart”. Once you are taken to the cart, select “Print with …” from the pull down box.

The prices are quite reasonable too, for example to have an entire set of 4×3 prints made from my most recent gallery (Company Trip 2006 – Tahoe; which I have yet to write about) which contains 43 photos is only $11.16 (€11.00 on Fotokasten).

I don’t make any money off these prints, so I can’t make you any kind of deals. The prices are set by the respective printers and not by me.

Hope you enjoy the new feature

More Sunsets

[fa:p:a=landscapes,id=465613273,j=l,s=t,l=p][fa:p:a=landscapes,id=465608152,j=l,s=t,l=p]I guess its jut the right time of year! We had another beautiful sunset here, this time I slung my camera bag on my back and made the mile or so walk out to the park there is near my house. I was a little dissatisfied with the pictures, I should have grabbed the tripod, but what can I say, live and learn. Also, next time I should put on some better shoes. Enjoy, please comment! I created a gallery of sunsets, to see the larger versions of these pictures, and one other I took a few days ago check here.

[fa:p:a=landscapes,id=465608138,j=l,s=t,l=p]This last one was taken with my new lens and 270mm + low light – tripod = blury. It could be worse, and at lower resolutions isn’t bad, but it was defanitly the best of the whole set.