David Griffin Photography » Photography

September 2010 Wallpaper

Dave — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:51:12 +0000

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.

Download the 1280×1024 version here.

Download the 1680×1050 version here.

End of Summer

Dave — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:47:01 +0000

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.

A Short Vacation on Umbagog Lake

Dave — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:03:30 +0000

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.

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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!

Contest! Win one of my exhibit’s prints

Dave — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:21:16 +0000

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:

There is an email sign-up in the cafe
For Facebook folk you can “like” Nashoba Brook Bakery and then write a post on the “david griffin photography” discussion board topic.
Following @slowrise on twitter and re-tweeting “I want to win a David Griffin print from Nashoba Brook Bakery.”

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.

Video Projekt

Dave — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:18:07 +0000

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.

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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.

2010 Summer Workshops

Dave — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:42:51 +0000

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.

Photographs into Watercolors

Dave — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:00:27 +0000

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:

Two guys and a bunch of guitars

Dave — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:01:42 +0000

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).

Stone Mountain LIVE – July 2010

Dave — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:08:54 +0000

It is always a privilege to photograph the Stone Mountain LIVE shows. Over the years I’ve come to know many of the talented musicians and behind-the-scenes staff and see the dedication and passion they bring to each show. Within the confines of not getting in the way and being as invisible as possible to the audience, I try to capture that passion.

July’s show took place on a warm Saturday evening. Special guest performers Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas performed some vivacious Scottish tunes on the fiddle and cello. The regular Stone Mountain crew, along with guest pianist Consuelo Candelaria-Barry, provided a wide variety of folk, R&B, and roots music. The evening began with a short film I produced for the show. I produced a 3-minute “music video” of the barn raising that took place on Memorial Day. Sonny Barbato provided a live piano soundtrack for the film. The film closes with some lyrics of a Carol Noonan song about the barn, which was the first song of the evening. Pretty classy. I hope to have a slightly longer version of the film published soon — we’re kicking around ideas for the music.

A complete gallery of the evening’s photographs can be found at: http://smac.dmg-photography.com/SML-Jul-2010

Here are a few of my favorites from the evening along with a bit of “technical” commentary.

Summer shows at Stone Mountain start well before the sun goes down and so the floor to sky windows behind the performers create a very strong back/side light that competes with (and almost overwhelms) the stage lighting. So for the first hour there’s a lot of decisions to be made regarding exposure and composition. One of the more annoying aspects of this is that the color of the light coming from outside is very cool versus the very warm stage lighting. I decided to render the photograph above of Carol Noonan (which you can find in the gallery in color) in black&white and I think it is a stronger photograph because the contrasting colors are eliminated. That still leaves a lack of tonal balance, but I didn’t have any control over that.

It’s hard enough getting good photographs of individual performers when there is a strong backlight, but add in the complexity of two or more performers and there’s just not a lot of options left.

For the second set I changed location to backstage. While this location provides very few angles, I enjoy the vantage point it provides and affords me opportunities for images that are sometimes stronger than the normal front-stage view. When I get lucky, I get to photograph glances and postures of the performers that provides a more intimate view. It’s not quite the “musicians point of view”, but just shy of that.

Technical stuff:

All photographs were taken with a Canon 7D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens, handheld. ISO ranged from 1600 to 5000. Shutter speeds varied from 1/60 to 1/100 second depending on stage and background lighting, angle, etc. Aperture was typically wide-open (f/2.8).

Lightroom 3 was used to process the images. All of them had exposure tweaking as I typically underexpose the images slightly to gain a some shutter speed (the stage lighting is relatively dim and you lose another 2-3 stops when shooting from side-stage). I took advantage of the noise reduction in Lightroom 3, particularly for the ISO 5000 images. Very pleasing results.

For more information about Stone Mountain LIVE, visit the Stone Mountain Arts Center website or check out these videos I produced for the center:

Shooting in the Dark – River Solstice

Dave — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:13:13 +0000

For the past eight years or so we’ve had this fun little event on our local rivers, River Solstice, that celebrates the longest day of the year. We’ve had our share of washouts, but most of the time Mother Nature cooperates. The location and the nature of the event make this a definite challenge to capture photographically. After a nice picnic on the lawn of the Old Manse (where the music performers typically have the sun setting almost directly behind them) a large number of paddlers descend on the Concord River at sunset to begin a flotilla of boats, most with lanterns, up to the Old Calf Pasture where a bonfire and drumming occurs. My goal was to photograph the paddlers making their way up the river.

So let’s be clear about the challenge: 1) subjects are gliding by on the river, 2) I’m in a kayak on the same river, 3) the sun has set and it is rapidly getting quite dark. Perfect! Let’s make some portraits!

The full set of images is available on my community gallery. In there you will see the progression of the evening’s light disappearing and I was left to find whatever candle or other light was nearby. There was a near full moon rising, but it really didn’t have much of an impact when I was shooting.

Here’s the link to the evening’s pictures: http://community.dmg-photography.com/2010-river-solstice

What follows are a few highlights of the evening plus some technical details for those that are interested. I encourage you to look at the full gallery mostly because it clearly shows that the current generation of DSLR cameras are capable of some pretty amazing photographs in some relatively challenging conditions.

The evening starts with a picnic and music on the lawn of The Old Manse in Concord which overlooks the Old North Bridge. I tried to have some fun with the strong back and rim lighting the setting sun provided.

The kayak and canoe “parking lot” was pretty full…

Some folks were watching the moon rise in style…

The sun has set, the singers are making their way along the river to the Old Calf Pasture for some pagan fun, and the flotilla of boats begins working its way up the Concord River…

My friend Julia Blatt, who heads the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance, was paddling with her hubby…

Night quickly overtakes the river… I think a number of people were kind of shocked that I was taking photographs — and probably assumed that everything I was doing would be a blurry mess. (I knew otherwise…)

Here we are at the Old Calf Pasture where a bonfire is ringed with torches. The sound of ceremonial drums pierces the darkness. (And drowns out the sound of mosquitos, which are pummeling everyone — or at least me…) For reasons that I won’t go into here, I don’t hop on land and photograph the fire circle despite it being an obvious target of opportunity for great images…

Technical notes:

All photographs were shot with a Canon 7D. Nearly all were taken with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, although there are a handful (which I hope are obvious) that were taken with the 24-70mm f/2.8L. All shots are handheld, all but the picnic shots are from a kayak. Due to the rapidly changing light I opted for aperture priority exposure. (If you need me to tell you what aperture I was using most of the evening you probably shouldn’t bother reading the rest of this…)

As the sun sets the camera is set to ISO 1250, then 2500. If you aren’t familiar with shooting on a small New England river, you should be aware that it is similar to being in a hole. The shoreline is typically lined with trees and long before the sun sets you are in shadow. A few minutes after it sets, it just gets plain dark – especially if there are no clouds to reflect light straight down. So it was a matter of a minute or two before I cranked the camera to ISO 6400.

Exposures vary from 1/100 (if there’s a bright lantern) to 1/20th of a second. Image stabilization and years of practice shooting from a kayak kept my throw-aways amazingly low. And a quick shout out to the 7D’s autofocus! I used center-point focus because I know that is typically the most sensitive part of the AF array. Half the time I was hunting for a subject in the viewfinder. If the camera found anything at all, it did a great job of holding focus while I did the final composition and shooting. (This is the primary reason why I didn’t bring the 5DMk2 to this project — it’s low-light AF is, um, “sub par”…)

In the case of these photographs however, the camera only did half the work. A significant portion of the image quality comes from Lightroom 3′s new image processing and noise reduction capabilities. As I cranked up the ISO on the camera in the field, I had a commensurate increase in the luminance noise reduction in Lightroom. Quite frankly, tack sharp images were not my goal. Moving subjects in a dimly lit area don’t feel sharp to our eyes, so I didn’t feel any need to try to bring any particular sharpness out — the default sharpening of Lightroom fit the bill most of the time. Most of the night images had the Luminance noise set to 45. A few, including the young lady at the beginning of this article, were bumped to 64. I knew from reports and the beta testing that the noise reduction was going to be impressive, and it served me well for this assignment.

The processing of these images varies significantly depending on the lighting conditions. The look for the photographs taken after the sun set was achieved by adding fill light and then raising the black point to restore some contrast. I really didn’t want to raise the exposure of the whole image as the scene was, in reality, quite dark — but rather mimic what the human eye does by selectively increasing the luminance of the subjects. A bit of vibrance and a dash of clarity round out the Lightroom processing.

There you have it, a new branch of photography: action portraits in the dark.