Yesterday the IMC photo/video team got to go to a presentation by Guy Rhodes, an amazing photojournalist and videographer based in the Chicago area. He has a fairly inspiring story about how anything can lead to you being a photojournalist. He said that he started out by charging his middle school $20 per event to tape it on a little VHS tape camcorder. Pretty basic.
And from that humble start, he is now getting gigs in Florida, New York City, Las Vegas, etc. I find that very encouraging, and you should all check out his Blog sometime (guyrhodes.com/blog/).
I took a couple pictures, one of him, and one of his gear. A really nice guy with some really killer gear:
< This guy right here is Guy Rhodes
Shown here are his 2 Canon 1D Mark4s, one with a 17-40mm f/4, and one with his 400mm f/2.8 (wow). As well he uses a Panasonic Video camera for some of his videography work. That sort of tech makes me realize even more that I should really switch to Canon if I want to get into Video more.
Anyways, more on Photoblogging and such. As you may have read, there was a fairly substantial MLK day celebration here at Valpo, so I went to cover a couple events.
The first event, though there were very few people there out in the cold, was a simple Tree Blessing. Now the simple fact that there is a new tree on campus isn't really anything to get too excited about, but it is the meaning behind the tree that is significant.
Each year, a person or group of people are awarded the "MLK" award, and as a result the campus plants a new tree in their honor. This was the blessing of the tree for this years recipients.
The Pastor said a fairly poetic blessing, mostly taken from the Bible, pictured here. Then afterwards the award recipients posed for me for an IMC picture.
All in all, a fairly intimate event.
I also went to the Hip-Hop in Politics in Senegal presentation, and from a photojournalistic standpoint, it was ridiculously boring. Literally it was just a power-point presentation in a windowless square room in the student union. But the idea behind it was much more powerful than the simple space suggested.
The professor who was actually in Senegal while the events were taking place.
I might come back and edit this post, and go into more detail about the actual things that happened in Senegal, but the gist of it is that a group of Rappers radically altered the outcome of an election by protesting and writing songs about it.
So the rappers and hip-hop artists helped to basically out a corrupt leader in Senegal. Their "slogan" as it were, was "Yen a Marre" which is french for "We're Fed Up." Fed up with the established order and corruption. However, this "overthrow" was done mostly peacefully through demonstrations and music videos and such things, as opposed to violent opposition such as what happened in Libya and Egypt.
All in all, this was a fairly interesting assignment for my photo class, and one that I will probably use the knowledge gained in the future.
I found it really interesting that in one of their songs they made allusions to Hitler and De Gaulle. These are figures from quite a ways back in history, so it was strange to me that they would use these people to try to further their cause against a corrupt president who wasn't really killing anyone. I think it is sort of in "bad taste" to make this comparison.
on that note:
Preow
Kevin
TV: Top Gear
Movie: Kiki's Delivery Service
Game: Mirrors Edge (madness)
Music: Thirteen Senses
Food: Not enough
Wow, it has been SO long since I updated this blog. I don't even know where to start with updates. Lets see where my last post left off...
Ok, so after the Coldplay concert I finished up my last couple weeks or so of my internship and went back home for a week to get my drivers license renewed, and I brought my D7000 back with me with all of my lenses. I really do need to get back home to Colorado more often, I really do miss it quite a bit. The landscape if just stellar, so much more interesting than this flat stuff they call land here in Indiana. Even after 3 1/2 years here I still am slightly off-put by the lack of mountains.
Anyways, while I was back home in Fort Collins, the big city arts/music festival was going on, New West Fest, and there were numerous local bands playing at something like 8 different stages across the downtown area.
This band was quite good, and they had a good gimmick going on with the zombie makeup. Pretty good stuff.
The next day we went hiking up Horsetooth Rock. A few mile hike with a pretty nice view of Long Peak at the top.
Also Chipmunk.
A couple days later my brother, my friend, and I went backpacking up the Poudre Canyon. We hiked up about 2 miles with our packs and set up a nice little base camp from which to explore around from.
My brothers SOG tomahawk was getting a bit beat up after spending a couple hours throwing it into a very old very dead tree. Really fun, though, and I was able to nail down 2 and 3 rotations. It lent a nice sense of power sending this heavy piece of metal flying through the air and hearing the "thunk" as it embedded into the tree. Later we decided to go out on a hike, and literally less than 1/4 of a mile out from our camp we go around some trees and Bam! Moose! And not a little one, a very large Bull Moose. It is unfortunate that I only had my 50mm lens with me, or else I would have gotten some better shots of this majestic beauty.
Later that night we discovered a really awesome effect with an overpowered laser pointer and the fire.
Here are a couple nice result shots.
We tried some long exposure stuff later, but they didn't really turn out from me.
That was basically the end of the camping trip, and we didn't really do much more before heading back to Valparaiso for school.
Intermission:
Not chronological with the telling of this grand yarn, because GoPro just released this, but it is just awesome:
Be sure to watch it in 1080p if you can! Just stellar.
Anyways, School started and I got back into my Engineering classes. It is senior year, and it is a bit harder in ways, as the subject matter is a lot more confusing, but I have less homework.
I am taking:
Machine Design
AutomaticControls
Advanced Materials
And Senior Design.
Now, for senior Design I actually am in the greatest project group. We have to develop and build a remote controlled submarine for taking pictures underwater at a depth of up to 100 feet. I'll give more details in some future posts (hopefully).
Anyways, I got a job with my Universities marketing department as a photographer/ photo editor. It is basically one of my dream jobs! I get paid to go to all of the university sporting events and other happenings, as well as I get to use the large nice photo studio down in the basement. Yay 3 point studio lighting!
As "stellar" as our football team is, it is still really fun to go to their games and get nice shots like the two above. These were with my D7000 with my 80-200mm AF. I am getting so much better at timing and framing, and just photography in general. Yeah, I would go out and take some random pictures this summer, but that isn't the same as getting actual experience at an actual event. I'll probably post some more of my better pictures here, too, but I have to get them off the work computer still.
More event pics. I really should get those pictures off the work drive, as I have quite a few all right pictures that I really would like to have up here.
So as a result of all this, I bought my bosses D600. Full Frame beauty! I can definitely tell a huge difference in the Dynamic range and noise performance when compared to my Crop-Sensor APS-C D7000. I am So glad that I made the jump to Full Frame. The camera's performance in general, also, is also in general higher than the D7000.
Here are the specs on Amazon: Nikon D600
And compare them to the: Nikon D7000
The only thing that is slightly obnoxious about the D600 is that it seems to gather more dust on the sensor than my D7000, so I have to be more careful about changing lenses. There might be some issue with a slight gap in the shutter, it is something that has been seen in some models, and it might affect mine too. I'm not sure what to do about it, but I can deal with it in the mean time. The image quality is just so stellar that it makes up for it.
This is the only picture that I currently have on my home desktop that I took with my D600, so it;ll have to do for now. I spent a couple hours messing with this on Lightroom 4.2 and Photoshop. Also, it is fortunate that lightroom 4.2 supports the D600, even though Photoshop currently doesn't support the .NEF files out of it.
Anyways, Picture.
Well, a new semester has started, and that means getting used to all the new classrooms that I have to go to, and remembering all of the stuff that I have learned in the bast 2 1/2 years that all applies to the classes that I am taking now. Engineering is like that.
That, though, is one of the things that I love about it. It has a real sense of coherency throughout the field, because everything is interconnected. Mechanisms builds on Mechanics, which builds on Dynamics, which builds on Statics, which builds off of Physics, which builds off of Calculus, which builds off of Algebra, which builds off of Mathematics. Its like I'm climbing a mountain of knowledge, and I'm actually getting pretty close to the top now.
All of my classes this semester seem pretty interesting. Heat Transfer, which I'm sure will be the hardest, is necessary for basically anything in Mechanical Engineering, from engines to power generation. Everything is basically the movement of heat and energy.
I have an assignment for my Mechanisms class to go out somewhere on campus and to find an example of a mechanism. Looking around has really opened my eyes to how much engineering there is around me. I was aware of it, of course, but it made me look even more into the little things. Someone designed the little pneumatic door stop thing on all doors, they probably put many many hours into its design and development and testing and finally production, and now we all never think about it at all. Its just a given on many doors. And I think that's something that Engineers want. For their products to improve peoples lives. I will never meet the person who designed almost all of the things that I use every day, but I owe so much to these people.
That's why I want to be an Engineer. I want to create things that I might not be thanked for, but that I know will help people.
Kevin
TV: Family Guy
Movie: Beauty and the Beast
Music: Thirteen Senses
Game: Skyrim
Food: Cereal
The Pastor said a fairly poetic blessing, mostly taken from the Bible, pictured here. Then afterwards the award recipients posed for me for an IMC picture.
I found it really interesting that in one of their songs they made allusions to Hitler and De Gaulle. These are figures from quite a ways back in history, so it was strange to me that they would use these people to try to further their cause against a corrupt president who wasn't really killing anyone. I think it is sort of in "bad taste" to make this comparison.
