Gear notes: Vagabond

That's Kamarose - her set's just about done, I'll get it finished within a week barring accident.

So my last little purchase of my 2007 gear binge was a Vagabond II unit. It's basically just a battery and an inverter in a nice case. The inverter puts out a very clean AC power that you can plug strobe lights into. Strobes are kind of picky about power - if you don't have the right kind of inverter you can damage them, especially over the long haul.

It's smaller than I was expecting - I didn't pay that much attention to the specs, but it's only about 10 inches tall and 6 inches deep. You can run quite a few lights off of them but I plan to use it mostly in scenarios where I'm doing something simple - a single light to illuminate a fire spinner, or it will make on-location portrait shoots much easier (maybe they don't have space for a full studio, but they have a lovely staircase to pose on) or if there's a power outage at home I can get through a full shoot with my normal lights as long as I'm not too wasteful with the power.

I plugged a light into it and it seems to work OK - with a single light it powers up pretty much the same speed as if it were plugged into the wall. You can strap the unit to your light stand to keep everything stable outside if there's a bit of wind. Just an all-around nicely thought out piece of gear.

Now, the one thing it won't be used for is a normal outdoor nude shoot. You really don't want to be staying in one place a long time or carrying tons of stuff around. Low profile's the key. Or when that isn't possible, go for speed. But with any luck it will give me more flexibility, and that's always nice.

Speaking of outdoor shoots, probably I'll be sticking to that until as late as Feb 1st unless there's some portrait work I can't reschedule - sometimes with maternity clients I have to be the flexible one! (You're due in how many days?). I have some nice shoots tentatively lined up already and I'm going to start looking a bit more seriously in a couple of days. I'll basically do as many shoots as I can find suitable models for - there's less setup and the editing usually goes fast. The hard part's finding models who are tough and beautiful enough to make the cut.

New model: Meg

Here's Meg. I actually left her test chart shot in the set, it was so cute. Somebody make my day and buy a copy. ;-)

The plan is still to have Kamarose's set up in about a week. I'm going to start looking around for models for outdoors shoots in the first three weeks of the new year so if the timing works out I may be able to keep up weekly updates for a while but no promises.

Merry Christmas II

You'll shoot your eye out!


That's Fierce.

Merry Christmas!

I'm rather early for California but I'm not sure if I'll be online tomorrow.

That's Lily, by the way. I have the film developed and scanned for the Meg and Kamarose shoots but I haven't really looked at the digital shots yet. Most of the work in editing a set is choosing the keepers out of the ones that are OK. But it's nice to have the film out of the way - whenever I have undeveloped film laying around I'm sure something bad is going to happen to it.

Things are underwhelming on eBay this year - for everybody, not just me. Most of my "Christmas Rush" last year was actually after Christmas though, so I'm still hoping. Anyway, it's a good time to check it out.

Also, you can give the gift of beautiful naked women, it's legal and it's instant too...

(just scroll down, I have no idea why blogger thinks I need a big gap here)

New Model: Lily

Whew, finally uploaded the shots of Lily. Now I'm just two sets behind. Hopefully I'll have them done by the next two Fridays.

This is one of the film shots. I have some nearly identical film/digital shots I left in the set if anybody wants to compare. If you can't figure out which are which, the URLs all end with IMG_XXXX for digital and lilyXX for film. The film source file is of course much higher resolution - I pulled something like a 25 megapixel file for all of these.

I tried this Arista.EDU film for this set. It's very cheap, made in the Czech Republic. It's imported by Freestyle and I have a friend who swears by it developed in Rodinal. This was developed in a conventional developer to get a kind of baseline - I'll use it outdoors the next time I get a chance and develop in Rodinal and see what I think. But so far it's a plausibly good film, and at $2/roll it's hard to complain. The other films I use are typically more like $3.50ish. They market it as basically a cheap/decent film for use in schools - likewise I'll probably use it for more experiemental stuff where I'm not that confident. But who knows, maybe I'll fall in love with it developed in Rodinal like others have.

Feeling Old

That's Lily again, who has nothing to do with this set except that I'm scanning the film from our shoot and it was handy.

I was talking to a friend about the whole "legal age" issue - what you can and can't shoot if they're below 18 and I was talking about taking a picture of the model's ID and that it's nice with California licenses because they say "Under 18 until year XXXX" and "Under 21 until year XXXX" on them. But in my case basically I just like to double check the birthday and it had better be more than this date in 1989.

And then I realized... Jan 1st it's going to be 1990. That's right, some kids born in the 90s are going to be legal in a couple of weeks. And they're going to have the same relationship with the 80s as I had with the 60s (I was born Feb 7, 1970).

Feeling old...

Post Shoot Notes: Kamarose

Yes, I'm still enjoying the gels way too much.


So that's the last studio shoot of the year - I'm going to pack it all away this evening. I'm hoping to fit in an outdoor shoot or two before the end of the year, but if not 31 model shoots is a decent count for 2007 and I'm already three shoots behind in editing so obviously that will be my focus for a bit.

42nd Street Moon

I never know how much local stuff to include, but SF is such a major tourist town, who knows, maybe somebody will find this interesting.

If you're here, or will be here, and want to see a play you might want to check out 42nd Street Moon. These guys resurrect old musicals - something that might have been a big hit in its time but somehow got lost in the shuffle. It's not the kind of thing where you think "This became obscure for a reason" - they're always really amazing. They do a semi-staged deal to keep costs down - so minimal costumes, minimal set, the "orchestra" is a piano, but the actors are always reliable. Just as an example I recently saw "Oh, Lady! Lady!" which I'd never heard of. But it's a Jerome Kern / P. G. Wodehouse (yes, the Jeeves guy) play and was a big hit. The songs are so good that one song that got cut, "Bill", got saved and used in Showboat and was a big hit in of itself. Laughed the whole time. (Meghann May, if you're Googling yourself and find this - you were wonderful).

And as I said, it's cheap. $38 each and they have cheaper preview days and such. Check out what's coming up - next play's not until Spring, unfortunately, and don't expect to recognize the names - that's the point, you won't recognize them. Just pick something that looks good and it probably will be.

Post Shoot Notes: Meg

Meg. Really, you can never have enough pictures of models holding test charts.

This means I'm two model shoots behind in editing, including film for each one, but I'm still hoping basically to have an edited shoot up every Friday for the next 2-3 weeks at least.

Testing... one two three...

Oh, man, you still haven't finished shopping? Want to give a print and don't want to guess (or know!) which they'd like best. Oh, if only there were a way to buy a...

Post Shoot Notes: Lily

This may end up as black and white or something, but you get the idea.

Shoots scheduled Sat (portrait) - Sun, Tues (model) so I won't really get a chance to look at these shots until mid-week. I'll shoot for having them edited and online by the 21st.

Update: What the heck, added a test chart shot of Lily too. Let's make it a tradition.

You're not helping!

You know, when some loser kills a bunch of people because he wants to be famous, running his picture at the top of every news website really doesn't help. It especially doesn't help the next guy who is inspired by this.

PS CNN seems to think the guy used a wildly different gun than every other news agency. Very odd. You would think they'd try to get this kind of basic factual stuff right if we're supposed to believe the trickier bits.

New Model: Azana

Well, that was a pretty straightforward set to go through - not a whole lot of shots, and some of them of course didn't really look like anything. I think there's some nice stuff in there, but I'd love to do it again with a real strobe instead of an on camera flash - lots of power and I could have set it off to one side to do angled light, and could also have just done some regular modeling shots while we were there. I'll have to think very seriously about getting a battery/inverter unit. The pictured shot is just with the light from the flames - sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. One of the difficulties is that the flames start out really big and then get smaller. Changing light sources are just so much fun for a photographer.

Azana was very brave to swing a staff with flaming ends around her, in public, next to the bay wind, on a day when it was raining on and off, where we had raccoons run by several times (really!). It's not everybody who will risk frostbite, burns and rabies all at the same time!

Post Shoot Notes: Azana

I've been meaning to do this for a while. The technical issues of a shot like this are a bit nightmarish - you have the lights from the bridge, the fire, and a flash all in different competition among other things.

We went out tonight and did a relatively short test shoot - got some technical data, some shots to look at. Most of the nudes are zoomed way out since she could get the fire way up there and I wasn't sure how far, but I probably overdid it a bit (these are both somewhat cropped). I should also have switched lenses or gotten closer for one set to do some more closeup type shots to get some variety in there. But that was kind of the point - instead of doing some big elaborate thing or every possible shot, just get out there, see what works, and now I'm in a position to go back with a bit more experience.

Since it's a short shoot I'll hopefully have the full set up relatively soon, but I really don't know how many keepers are in there. As usual I haven't actually looked at all of them yet - I just grabbed two that looked nice from the thumbnails.