George Padilla Photography

Homeless Monopod

2009-04-10T17:34:00.011-07:00

Never underestimate a transient...

My friend Jeff was a big help at today's shoot. He helped mostly with lighting and posing. We shot at an empty building just off of I-10 here in El Paso. This place has been out of use for many years now, so it's no surprise when we saw a transient at the other end of building. Jeff and I have shot at other locations where transients are present, and we've been very lucky that they simply keep their distance, as do we. Today was no different. We did our shoot and the man at the other end didn't move from his declared place of rest. We finished up the shoot, packed up, and went to our next location.

When we began to set up at our new location Jeff said, with a lot more calm that I would have, that he forgot his monopod that we used to hold one of my strobes, as seen in this image above. Say what you want about Jeff, but he did not waver from the task at hand..."Let's just shoot, and I'll go back for it later", he said.

We finished shooting at the second location, which wasn't too far away from the first, and I was to meet Jeff where he left his monopod. When I drove up, Jeff was walking from the area where the transient was and toward his car. I instinctively joked about the transient having taking it...it turns out he did indeed have it!!! He told Jeff that he figured we would come back for it, so he held on to it. Jeff gave him a couple of bucks and said thanks.

I guess it could be taken either way; he could have been holding it for Jeff, or he was just hoping we forgot about it...I'd like to think that there still some good in this world, so I'm gonna go with the "good" assumption.

What's funny, is that we ended up by the mountains for our final shoot, and we had to hike up some rocks to get the shot we wanted. We were away from our vehicles and some equipment when Jeff says, "Better be careful, there are no bums around here to watch our stuff".

Nikon, Canon, and strangers all getting along.

2009-03-28T08:31:00.002-07:00

It's been a long running joke in the El Paso photography club "Megapixels", that one would get better results, look cool holding, and be the king of photography if one had a Nikon or Canon. Now I personally think it's the monkey behind the camera, not the camera...but I never back away from the chance at throwing in a jab or two at my fellow club members who are shooting Canons :) We even make fun of each other when one is using a tripod or not useing a tripod.

So, I found it interseting when I came across this video and story posted at Strobist.com. The photographer, Nick Turpin, did a shoot for Men's Health magazine using a Canon Camera and two snooted (looks like homemade snoots, which I got excited about) Nikon SB 800s. Nick and someone from the magazine, asked passing strangers, dressed approriatly for the magazine topic, if they would allow the crew to photograph them. What I love about this shoot is the very portable setup Nick was using, and I also like the snoots and the fact that he was using Canon and Nikon equipment together.

I'll let you see for yourself :

Nick Turpin street portraits for Menshealth from Nick Turpin on Vimeo.

2009-03-11T17:17:00.003-07:00

The Nikon D200 has a cool feature that lets you do time lapse.
I've been wanting to do some serious time lapse shooting, but have yet to get around to it....this whole work and provide for the family thing can take up time. So, on my home from work today I set up the interval shooting feature on the camera, sat the camera on top of my work bag and let it rip. The quality setting for the images was set at basic and small. If you go bigger than that get ready for some serious processing time. Believe it or not, I put this together on Window Movie Maker! Yup, with Adobe Premiere on my windows machine and three Macs around me, I found the Windows Movie Maker to work well for a quick, no extra effects, movie.
Gear: Nikon D200, Sigma 15-30 lens.
Interval Settings: About 900 shots, 1 sec intervals.
Image settings: Small basic, iso 200.

50mm 1.4

2009-03-10T12:34:00.007-07:00

I rarely use this lens...
One night just before bed, I decided to take it out of the bottom of my camera bag and give it a go.
Why I don't use this more often, I don't know.
All these shots were done with available light. I'm sure they can be sharper with a tad bit more light and faster shutter speeds. With that said, I
think they came out pretty descent.
The conversion factor for the Nikon D200 makes this lens about a 75 or 80mm. Nikon just came out
with a new 35mm 1.8 witch comes closer to the traditional 50mm lens. Having a lens close to a 50mm reminds me of shooting with my first camera, a Pentax k1000 with a 50mm 2.8 prime lens.