How to make your own portable gaffer’s tape roll

March 17th, 2010

Your regular role of gaffers tape is sometimes to big to fit into your camera bag, so what do you do when you still need it with you but you can’t carry it. You make a portable version.

Supplies
One roll of gaffer’s  tape
A knife or pair of scissors
A piece of cardboard

First step

Cut out a piece of cardboard in the width of the roll of gaffer tape. The width you make your piece of cardboard will determine the size of your role.

Second step

Simply cover one side of your piece of cardboard with gaffer’s tape and roll it over itself until you have reached your desired size.
Congratulations!

Other places to store gaffer’s tape:

Around the leg of a tripod, monopod, and/or light stand
Your lens hood
Pens

High Speed Beer Pour

February 25th, 2010

This past weekend I decided to try out some high speed photography. To make this shot I used my SB’s 800 and 900 as my two light sources since they have a very short flash duration at low power. I had a hard plastic tray as the base so that I could fire the sb-800 from under the glass and to contain the light I used some cine-foil to make a snoot. To hold the tray up I used a set of saw horses and used a magic arm and super clamp to place the flash in the right place. For the key light I used the sb-900 with  a LumiQuest Mini Softbox attached to the D300 via a Nikon SC-29 sync cord. I used the cord so that I set the shutter speed as high as I need to because there was a lot of ambient light in the room. To fire the D300 I used pocket wizards to shoot remotely. I had the 70-200mm on the camera as well.

To get the effect of the beer shooting out I used a air compressor while firing at 8 fps to get a wide range of options.

Here I have a screen shot of the layers for the Photoshop file.

Here are the three images that I used to put the final image together.

My friend Brian von Glahn came with me and shot this time lapse of the shoot.

SLU vs Clarkson Mens Hockey Game Timelapse

February 16th, 2010

A time-lapse of the SLU vs Clarkson Mens Hockey Game. This was my first time trying this, I took over 6000 still images ranging from 8 frames per second to 1 frame per 2 seconds.

Store Setup

May 7th, 2009
Bob Carroll, owner of John Hyatt

Bob Carroll, owner of John Hyatt

iPhone pic - About 2 feet to left of where I wound up standing to take the final image

Set up from a photo shoot last week.

Not enough room for the big guns since we kept the store open durning the shoot.

*Photo info* 1 SB-800 on the left and a SB-900 on the right with small soft boxes for key and fill and a SB-600 in the back left as a background and hair light and it has a gobo to stop flair from going into the camera and against the back of the subject

New Purchase, Multi-Cart R-6

February 25th, 2009

Multi-Cart R-6

iPhone pic – All loaded up and ready to head out of the hotel

I was in NYC for the B&H event by Photoshelter’s Grover Sanschagrin on Tuesday.

So since I was at B&H I wound up buying something from the used section, that doesn’t happen a lot…, anyways I picked up a Multi-Cart R-6. My bags were getting to heavy to carry and I work by myself a lot so I needed a way to move my Lowepro Pro Roller 3 filled with all of the camera and light gear, my Tenba CCT46 TriPak with all the light stands and odd grip equipment along with the background paper.

The cart holds the roller on its side with the light stand bag in the other corner resting on top of the roller and the background goes on the top of the bag. I am still trying to decide if I should use bungee cords or straps to hold it all in place.

I chose this cart because it was small enough to fit in my car and not take up to much space while being able to handle my gear. I will be using it this weekend when I go down to Washington D.C. and Philly to shoot some more headshots. I will post a full review after I put it though its paces.

High ISO and Twitter

January 28th, 2009

I was on twitter this morning and I caught a tweet that was asking about what your thoughts were on your camera’s high ISO performance http://twitter.com/adoramalearn/status/1155312549 . So I responded and as I am standing in line to buy some books I see that I got quoted in a story on Adorama’s blog!

My quote is in the 3rd paragraph at the bottom as my twitter user name ckegelman

The photo’s that we publish in the newspaper that are at high ISO’s, like 6400 on my D300 show up “great.” I think that they show up better when they are converted to B&W, but sometimes it has to go on the front page. When you have to cover something and its held in the darkest place on campus there are only so many tricks in your bag you can pull to get a good photo.