Welcome! This blog is mostly about images - both still and moving, plus observations surrounding my photographic and multimedia projects... and every once in a while the occasional standing on a soapbox in case anyone might be listening.
You can find me on the Twitter (@davegriffin) and Facebook. My videos will occasionally end up on Vimeo and YouTube.
More information and photographs can be found at dmg-photography.com, or you can check out some of my ongoing projects:
Only a little longer till these guys start to get dull — and the leaves start changing color as well.
If you like this image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:
Download the 1024×768 version here.
Where does the time go?
Photographs taken at the Assabet Reservoir in Westborough, Massachusetts.
Canon 7D, 500mm f/4, 24-70mm f/2.8, handheld in kayak (calm water).
Minimal Lightroom processing. The tricky part is picking the white balance… A topic for another day I guess.
Betsy and I snuck out of town for a few days to catch our breath and meet up with some friends at Umbagog Lake in New Hampshire.
We had camped on the lake a last year and this time we decided we would try camping at one of the remote sites, in our case site 1 on the “Big Island” located about 2 miles from the main grounds. Our son Jay joined us and he had arrived there a few hours beforehand. Our friends were to arrive the next day and set up at site 7, which was about a half-mile around the island.
We arrived with good weather but do to timing and weight limits of our kayaks my camera equipment stayed in the car until I could retrieve it the next day – by which time the weather was beginning to play some games. I’ve included a bit about the tradeoffs made for this trip in the technical section at the end of the article.
The island was nice — kind of a northern rainforest feel to it…
On Saturday our little flotilla paddled around the island with the goal of getting to the Androscoggin River inlet. After a few hours paddling we stopped for lunch and, by then, I had decided to turn back as my tendonitis was sending some warning signs. Because we were camping I was piloting our 16-foot tandem kayak which weighs quite a bit more than my normal boat. Coupled with very little paddling this year, the miles were beginning to take a toll on the arms. Sigh!
Shortly after we turned back it started to rain (lightly), so perhaps it all worked out well anyways. The nice thing is that the light turned soft and we were getting a bit of saturation in the vegetation. Forests always seem so peaceful, but I’m reminded that they are really battlegrounds for plants. Conifers versus deciduous, leaf vs needle vs moss…
Umbagog is also home to a number of Loon families and at least one of them dwells near the island. The calls at night are simply delightful. We paddled fairly close to this mother/youngster pair. It was this moment that I felt REALLY annoyed about leaving the 500mm f/4 in the car (logistics, once again, rearing its ugly head).
The fast-changing weather may have destroyed the opportunity for glorious sunrises and sunsets, but it did provide an opportunity for some soft light within the woods and the opportunity to record some time-lapse sequences. I had one and a half tripods with me. The Gitzo was set up to record the time-lapse movies while I padded around the woods with the Gorillapod. Here’s the 40D rigged for the inevitable inclement weather.
Doing macro photography with a Gorillapod turned out to be somewhere between surprisingly good and quite challenging, but the wind was the real spoiler for getting good macro shots. Faced with incessant winds I decided to make lemonade. If I couldn’t get things to sit still then I’d take advantage of the movement. I switched the 5D to video.
Here’s a little short that incorporates video captured with the 5D/Gorillapod (mostly) along with the time-lapse sequences.
The rain was getting a bit more persistent and this 30-second exposure turned out the be the last image for the trip.
Technical background:
First a bit about equipment choice. We were camping on an island that was a 40 minute paddle from power and something solid over your head. Whenever I travel into the unknown my camera bag of choice is the Lowepro DryZone. I’ve had this bag for probably 9 years now and it only comes out when things might get hairy. The DryZone bag is a regular camera bag that is surrounded with a reasonably watertight shell. (And no, I haven’t tested it recently.) If the kayak is swamped or our tent site is inundated by a thunderstorm (which, by the way, happened) I like to keep the sensitive electronic gizmos reasonably dry. Much less stress when you don’t have to worry about that.
I packed the Canon 40D and the 5D Mark II cameras. You might ask why I didn’t bring the 7D as it would be better than the 40D – and you would be correct. The 7D stayed home nice and dry because I had a business filming assignment the day after I returned and, although I don’t use the 7D for video shoots it is my backup camera. In heading out for a vacation I decided to only risk half of my revenue-generating equipment. If the worst happened I had everything I needed to meet my obligations to my client when I returned.
The trusty 70-200mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8, 16-35mm f/2.8, and the 100mm f/2.8 macro rounded out the lens choices. The 1.4x teleconverter came along for the ride along with a wide set of filters, Zacuto Z-Finder, spare batteries, plastic bags, clips, rubber bands, and CF cards. A separate utility bag, which remained in the car, held the chargers and other non-critical items. I also brought along the 500mm f/4 – but that doesn’t fit in the DryZone bag. Sadly, considering the less than ideal weather along with the amount of cargo we had to ferry out to the site, I decided to not bring the 500mm to the island. For the most part this was a good decision. For stabilization I brought along the Gitzo tripod with the H38 video head and a Jobi Gorillapod. I didn’t end up doing much in the way of tilt/pans with the video so the H38 head turned out to be a lot of weight and bulk I could have done without — but frankly that had more to do with the weather.
I’m beginning to wish I had purchased a Vari-ND filter. My 5-stop setup just isn’t up to the task for really long exposures when light levels are even moderate. This turned out to be a limiter on some creative ideas I wanted to explore (e.g., blurring the clouds). The other reason for wanting more stops is that I was forced to use apertures like f/16 and higher for some of the images and the dust spots just come out of woodwork when you do that. You can probably see a more than a few in the time-lapse sequences.
While the 40D was cranking out time-lapse sequences I screwed the Gorillapod to the base of the 5D and it did a pretty decent job. I used a cable release to keep the vibration to a minimum — although as I noted the wind eventually got the best of the situation. I will definitely try that again under different conditions — the Gorillapod works naturally near the ground — unlike my tripod.
The first two timelapse sequences were captured using S-Raw files, then processed by Lightroom for exposure/contrast/cropping. I really like using S-RAW for time-lapses — the file format provides decent storage utilization while preserving the ability to fully tune the images in Lightroom prior to rendering it as a video file. Due to card constraints the 3rd timelapse in the video was captured via JPEG. This turned out to especially annoying because the sky lightened more than my 1-stop safety and blew out badly for the first 200 frames (of nearly 1000). Rats. If it had been S-RAW I might have been able to recover the sky a bit and extend the sequence a bit more.
All images (including time-lapse sequences) processed by Lightroom 3. Techniques varied widely for the images so I won’t bother trying to spout off settings.
The 5D clips were converted to ProRes LT by MPEG Streamclip and the video was edited and graded with Final Cut Pro. A shout out to my friend Duke Levine for granting me permission to use his great music on these personal video projects. I thought the tone of the song matched the dreary weather just great. But, as we all know, bad weather makes for great photographs — so I’m not complaining in the slightest!
My “Places In Between” exhibit at Nashoba Brook Bakery ends at the end of August and as a way of thanking the bakery for hosting my photographs for the past few months I offered to give one of the prints away.
The bakery is running a contest/raffle and the winner gets to choose any of the framed prints*. There are 3 ways you can enter to win:
The bakery will choose the winner at the end of the month, so don’t delay — September will be here before you know it!
My thanks to Jess and John at Nashoba Brook Bakery for putting this promotion together and I hope everyone will support their fine establishment while getting a chance to win a print.
All of the photographs are archival, fine-art prints, matted, framed, and ready for hanging.
* The large canvas print is not part of the contest. Sorry, it’s spoken for.
A couple of months ago my friend and guitarist Ricky Berger introduced me to a band that rehearses here in town, The Museum Direktors. TMD was a pretty big Boston band back in the 80′s until, well, it gets complicated. It was a combination of that story plus their great musicianship led us to start a little documentary project on the band. Progress is a bit slow right now, mostly due to the rehearsal loft hitting 100+ degrees and consequently not being terribly conducive to sitting down and having an interview where everyone isn’t dripping wet. But they are in my sights…
We’re currently experimenting with shooting video in the rehearsal space. I’m working through the dubious mechanics of doing a single-operator multi-camera shoot, but mostly I’m learning the music so I can anticipate shots (and yes, I may even script it a bit). Despite shooting in a really dark room the real challenge is getting decent audio (as you’ll no doubt notice if you play the videos, there is plenty of room for improvement).
Here are a couple of videos we shot a few weeks ago that I finally got around to putting some title slates on and posting to the YouTubes. They are definitely rough but I kinda like the edginess of them in contrast to where the music is — which is also “under construction”. We’re hoping that Museum Direktor fans will enjoy this sneak peek into the creative process and we promise a lot more in the coming months.
My thanks to Paul, John, and Chris for inviting me into their working space and letting me document some great musicians at work.
Fans can check in on the group via the Museum Direktors Facebook page
Technical stuff:
The rehearsal room is dimly lit — a few bare bulbs around the perimeter plus maybe 1 or 2 100W floodlights illuminating the rehearsal space. Audio is, well, besides being really loud, is just whatever they have for personal monitors plus a vocal feed. It’s not rigged for performances. I’m still hunting for a spot to set up a mike that isn’t dominated by one of the trio’s monitor vs. the other sound in the room. It’s a bit of a battle right now because I really want to get better audio.
This is all experimental stuff so nothing is set in concrete:
Canon 7D with a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens either on a tripod or sitting on a chair. You can see segments where I move this camera with one hand while holding the 5D with the other. Not the quickest way to a quality end product.
Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L lens handheld or on a monopod.
Both are set wide open, ISO 3200 I believe.
I’ve done in-camera audio and via an Edirol R-09. I was using a wireless mic, but that is too easily overloaded by the dynamics so I switched to a wired mic (AT825 stereo field mic). I was so depressed with the audio track for “Unromantic” that I sent it through Soundtrack Pro just to toss a bit of compression and reverb in a vain attempt to give it some life (so yes, the original is even flatter…)
The stills on this page were taken on one of those “it’s gotta be f-ing 110 degrees in here” nights. Canon 40D, 50mm f/1.4, manual focus. Various exposures.
More proof that sometimes the nicest photographs are waiting to be discovered in your own backyard…
If you like this image you can download it to your computer and use it as your desktop wallpaper. A few of the common screen sizes are available:
Download the 1024×768 version here.
For the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to teach several nature photography workshops to young photographers (age 8-13 or so). I work with the Water Wise Workshops, created by the Organization for the Assabet River – which teaches youngsters about the water cycle, plants and animals, and other topics related to living in a watershed such as ours — and I’ve been working with the local National Wildlife Refuges (Great Meadows NWR and Assabet River NWR) as part of their summer camp programs.
The workshops aren’t very technical in nature — my two main objectives are to instill a sense of respect for the environment that they are photographing (learn about your subjects, don’t stress animals, leave no trace) along with the basics of composition and stabilization. In my experience the two biggest disappointments people have with using small cameras are blurry photos and boring results.
Most of the participants have a genuine interest in exploring their environment and using the camera and it is rewarding to me, as a photographer, to help them a bit in coming back from wherever they go with, I hope, better photographs. The other main lesson I try to teach is that the best camera is the one you have with you (credit to Chase Jarvis for coining the perfect mantra on that topic) — and how, with a few things they probably have lying around the house, they can make their cameras even better (e.g., using a hacky-sack as a camera stabilizer for low-angle shots).
Here are a few more scenes from my 2010 workshops along with some portraits of a few of the participants. Normally I’d have more pictures, but most of my time was spent answering questions and creating challenges for them as we walked down the trails.
Thanks to the OAR and Eastern Mass. NWR Refuge Complex staff for making the workshop sessions a great experience for both me and the next Art Wolfe’s of the world.
Life has a way of throwing curve balls at you and last week our family was pitched hard and fast. If you’ve been wondering if I’ve been on vacation the past week, the answer is “anything but” — and compared to others I’ve had it easy.
Last Saturday we headed up to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, NH to photograph some friends who race there in the LRRS series. We spent several weekends up there last year and had a great time learning how to photograph high-speed bikes winding their way through the course while becoming good friends with a number of the riders there – particularly Larry and Chris, the core of “Slowpoke Racing” – LRRS #387 and #446.
Chris and my sister Kate are a bit of a item (not sure how else to say this) and our families share holidays together, etc. Larry is a great guy and they are both considered to be some of the nicest guys racing at Loudon.
This year my schedule on the weekends has been pretty full and there was only one opening to head up to get some images. Larry had changed the paint scheme on the bikes and wanted some new photographs. They are kind enough to pick up the cost of the infield pass and feed us well, so this works out well for both of us. My son Jay often tags along and has been doing some excellent shooting – which gives me more coverage on the track (and significantly more images to process afterwards).
So we headed up to the NHMS and found “Slowpoke City” – Larry had upgraded from a trailer and a tent to about 5 tents, an air-conditioned RV trailer, and the bike trailers. The Slowpoke team included a few other members, Justin, Shaul, and Wes and everybody was enjoying a day of racing in the 95+ degree heat. It was a very long day — there were numerous accidents and incidents on the track that affected a number of races.
I still haven’t scored an “on-track pass”, but we were able to get access to some pretty decent locations for doing photography and came away with almost 1800 images for the day of the team racing along with various shots of other riders. I even tried shooting some video with the 5D Mark II through the 500mm f/4 lens. This was an experiment that didn’t go very well, but it was fun to try anyways. I’m always looking to push into new territory.
Normally we’d go up for both days but I had a DSLR workshop in Boston with Philip Bloom (sponsored by BOSFCPUG) on Sunday, but we had a good set of photographs from Saturday’s races that I’m sure would keep everybody happy.
On Sunday, near the end of the workshop, I receive a text from Betsy informing me that Chris had a serious accident on the track and was being airlifted to the hospital. Details are sketchy but the news was not good: many broken bones, severely damaged shoulder, many broken ribs, at least one lung collapsed, and he’s unconscious.
And so begins a week of trying to meet all of the various commitments one has that keep the lights on while trying to be a resource for my sister and Chris’ family. We quickly become as well-versed as we can in trauma care, traumatic brain injury assessment, insurance, and a dozen other things. Meanwhile I’m giving lectures on Social Media, teaching kids about nature photography, photographing musicians, all the time wondering if there’s something more I could or should be doing to help. I know that compared to Haiti or Afghanistan we’ve got it easy — but that doesn’t really seem to matter much when it’s your family that’s suffering.
Chris had a number of things going for him. He’s built like a bulldog and healthy as a horse. The NHMS racing officials are very serious about their job and safety on the track. On Saturday I spent most of my day 20 feet from one of the ambulance crews and saw first hand how they dealt with various accidents on the track. I’m sure someone was there within seconds of the incident and an EMT crew was probably 90 seconds away. He was airlifted to Darmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, which has a Level 1 Trauma Center. No better place to bring someone with those types of injuries.
This was a week of excruciatingly slow progress as Chris fought to stay alive and we, friends and family, doing what we can to cope and understand the situation and give comfort and support to those closest to him. It really was touch and go there for a few days. He was alive almost entirely due to his excellent physical condition, and initially we were all focused on his breathing and physical injuries. The best you could say was that they had not gone in to perform surgery on anything.
As the days crawled by it became apparent that he was likely to survive the trauma to his lungs and arms, but then the attention turned to his brain — which had sustained some “shearing” type of injuries. When someone is on a ventilator they sedate them pretty heavily, but he would be brought out of sedation occasionally for neurological assessments. Only minor improvements were seen. All the while his body continued to heal with his lung capacity increasing, swelling dropping, and no hard signs of infection.
Last night, 1 week after almost leaving us, Chris began to give positive cognitive signs to his medical team and family. We don’t know the details of his condition and they aren’t really of concern to anyone beyond his immediate family right now anyways — but for the first time in a week Chris is breathing on his own and responding to questions, and those of us around him are starting to breathe a bit ourselves.
There will be a long road to recovery for Chris, but knowing and seeing the support he has received from his family, Kate, our family, his medical team, and the unbelievable caring racing community that he is a part of – we’re very optimistic. Every once in a while the universe decides to teach us a lesson. For a few of us, this week, it has been one word: hope.
===== Postscript: July 29, 2010 ====
Thanks for all the comments in Facebook and elsewhere regarding this article. It really helps to hear from folks. Yesterday Chris had surgery on his shoulder and arm and is scheduled to leave the hospital as early as tomorrow (30th) for a rehab facility. His progress continues to be steady and inspiring — and I hope to have more to say on his progress in the coming weeks.
As I alluded to in the article above, the racing community’s support of Chris has been astounding. Racers and crew who have never met Chris have been sending money, donating stuff for auctions, organizing fundraisers, and the list goes on and on. Christopher Ormonde (LRRS #617) kindly sent me a set of links to threads in the New England Street Riders forum that may be of interest — particularly if you want to become involved in any way.
Many of us who photograph nature do so in the hope that it inspires our viewers to take a deeper look into the world around us. Of course there’s no exclusive hold on that desire to just photography – writers and artists around the world have similar aspirations. And so I was thrilled to be a contributing photographer to a project inspired by local artist and teacher, Cecilia Sharma, who gave our photographs to 18 local artists for their upcoming exhibition entitled “Season of Wonder and Renewal: Celebrating Spring through Nature Inspired Watercolors”.
The project was co-sponsored by the Sudbury Valley Trustees and the Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge and the exhibit was displayed at SVT from June 26-30 attracting over 100 artists and guests on the opening evening.
It was really fascinating to see how the individual artists interpreted the photographs. Here are a few of the photographs I provided along with the watercolor interpretations:
I’m not a studio photographer. I prefer to get out into the field (or crawl around a stage) and find great photographs. Studio photography is about having the control of lighting and the subjects to create compelling images. I’m envious of those with that talent and I consider myself a dabbler at best.
That said, if someone asks I tell them the truth and we get on with business. Ricky Berger asked me to take some photographs of him and his long-time musical partner, Mick Fridley, for some promotional materials they are putting together. I converted our living room into a studio (which is utterly not up to the job), added some lights, and the guys came over and we had a blast for a couple of hours.
What follows are a few selects from the evening with what I would consider to be “lite” post-processing. Just some minor exposure tweaks for the most part. The final images will clean up the clutter in and tone of the backgrounds and there will be all of the usual final tweaking that portraiture tends to require.
They brought a bunch of great guitars and we tried to include them in a few of the setups. Here I took the photo at 24mm and then used Lightroom 3′s new lens correction capabilities to clean up the perspective and vignetting. Way cool.
After the posed shots were out of the way I just had them play and I began to search for more images. Like I said, I’m envious of those talented photographers that can direct a person into creating a feeling of energy or emotion — for me, I prefer to have the person do what they do and then get myself into a position to capture the moment.
From a customer perspective capturing both is important to me. The posed pictures will end up as the features at the top of a web site or on a poster. But the candids can be sprinkled liberally in copy, articles, and just decorations on web pages and other promotional material, and lend their power in subtle ways.
I had the camera connected to my MacBook Pro running Lightroom 3 and enabled tethered shooting. What this did was provide a running preview of the shots for both myself and Ricky and Mick. They could see if they liked the pose and think about other variations. Giving your subjects that kind of instant feedback, and control, can cut both ways. In this case, with these great guys, it worked very well.
When Ricky and Mick make their final selections and I finish the processing of them, I’ll be sure to post that here as well — but I thought it might be fun to document the beginning of the process as well.
I had a great time and while I’m certainly no Zack Arias, the results were pretty satisfying for an ad hoc “studio” setup.
Technical details:
All photographs taken with a Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70mm f/2.8L and 70-200mm f/2.8L lenses. ISO 400, 1/125 second, f/stop varies between 2.8 and 5.6.
Lighting/Strobist: 550EX strobe into a 40 inch umbrella set at just above eye level to image right. 1/8 to 1/16 power most of the time. Wireless trigger (Cactus PovertyWizard) – which worked most of the time. DIY Spiderlight (18×18) set at just above eye level on image right, feathered. This was there mostly for fill of the duo shots — I turned it off for the single person portraits. Two CFL lights in cans on floor illuminating the lower backdrop. I also used a LitePanels Micro for a fill light (but only for a set of shots not shown here).
Lightroom: exposure tweaks, white balance set to 5300K, bit of clarity and vibrance. Some B&W conversion (tinkering). More to come. Client review is via web (TTG Highslide Gallery Pro 2.0).