Annual visit to the tulip gardens (Keukenhof 2013) report

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smallkhofcollageNSchober.

I have been so hungry for spring to get here. It’s been really, really late in coming. Thank goodness for the three inside pavilions with; orchids, roses and forced tulips. The park was full of adorable little crocuses. I read somewhere that they’d put out 10,000 forced tulips along the walkways. I don’t feel like the visit was a waste at all because the grounds are stunning on their own.

Last year.

This was a great chance to really try and get to know our new full-frame camera. There are so many buttons I did have some struggles with trying to get it to do exactly what I wanted.

three edits of the same stock photo

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filter painting

Created for Marcus Ranum Challenge #110

Model with thanks to Marcus Ranum

Messing around with PostWorkShop here. I’ve been playing with this particular pictures for a couple of days. The above version is the one I choose to enter into the contest.

Here are the two that didn’t make the cut:

twogirls

The contest is open until March 30, 2013 … if you have a Flickr account, and who doesn’t why don’t you give it a go?

Interesting links #5

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84kpracticingwithflash

I feel like my poor little blog has been neglected. I’ve been busy tho’ firstly creating a Facebook page for our photography business. And teaching DH WordPress so that he could make FIL’s war letters public.

This video (showing what’s inside Zach Arias’s head really ‘hit the spot’ for me;

I’ve also been glued to YouTube – specifically the B&H Photo channel…the toob keeps recommending these long videos that I find riviting…

This guys has some ‘McGyver’ type of creative lighting uses;

That made me want to put a speedlight on my GF2 and go play (you can see the results in the collage above)

And this video put it all together;

I get ‘it’ now! I can have window light any where I want.

Videos assembled with iMovie trailers

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Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve been working mostly on videos lately.

First we made a promotion one for DS’s guitar orchestra:

The beginning credits were made with Final Cut Pro X (now I”m Jonesing for Motion 5). I had to shrink the titles down to fit in the ‘safe’ area – I couldn’t find anywhere in iMovie to show this so I did a run through on our TV. I wish we had shot more ‘panning’ shots to use. I used a dedicated video camera for the super close-ups (60x zoom!) which allowed me to get those spontaneous expressions. This was shot during the rehearsal and we just captured audio during the actual concert immediately afterwards. My Mac had trouble reading the MTS/AVCHD files so I bought ClipWrap which is AWESOME!

and then I edited this one of our last skiing vacation;

I used what I learned in the last video (tagging! And using the clip trimmer to choose just the right frames). Someday I hope to figure out the precision trimmer. We shot this with Contours … I’m wondering if GoPros might give better quality. But since I’m a Panasonic shooter the HXA100 looks interesting too.

I’m still weighting whether to get Final Cut Pro X or not. My Mac isn’t that new and there isn’t much room on the hard drive — all those AVCHD videos keep filling it up. I did find Izzy videos a nice place for tutorials as well as Larry Jordan. I also bought this ‘Graphically Enhanced Manual‘ on iBooks it was pretty interesting but spent too much time (for me anyway) describing how X was different than FCP7.

Photographing the ineffable

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all rights reserved@

all rights reserved@

“There is no light without shadow”

Louis Aragon

There comes a time when you have to forget everything you’ve learned about f-stops and rules of thirds and just shoot. I had just such an opportunity when making the images for my esthetician’s website. Her salon is very tiny so I knew there wouldn’t really be room for huge flash umbrellas/soft boxes. But luckily I have had much practice in taking picture in the near dark. :-) I did run into a bit of a snag with DH – he was still in experimenting-hobbyist mode while I just wanted to get the work done. Luckily I was able to get into flow state and capture some of the wonderful objects she has accumulated from her travels in the far east.

If you need a photographer to capture some quirky/charming images like this for;

a website
brochure
promotion item

Drop me a line at: nlschober[at]ziggo.nl – I’d be more than happy to discuss creating some pictures for you that span that delicate balance between elegant and unpretentious.

Interesting links #4.

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the lady in blue
this is my latest ‘digital painting’ – I’m a little uncomfortable calling it that because it’s a photograph run though filters…so would ‘meta painting’? Or ‘filter-painting’ interpretation/thingy be a better name?

Since I was given a 3 month Flickr Pro account I can see the links to my pictures…. This one kinda made me laugh.

The Rijksmuseum has put 125,000 of its works of art on-line. And in the Rijksstudio you can order products using those works of art, cool – no?

I thought this was quite informative on how to edit video in Photoshop CS6:

This is very near and dear to my heart at the moment as I’m trying to decide if its worth upgrading to Final Cut Pro X — I will admit I’d love to have about 10 days to just play with Motion 5 and title animation…

Which brings me to these really cool rich media manuals for learning video. I love the idea of learning how something works as opposed to just which key to press.