Good Lord, am I still alive?

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.

Oh, I almost forgot that all of my pictures are somewhere else:
Basketball with the D600
Engineering Building with the D600
Volleyball with the D600
Men's Soccer with the D600
These are all my pictures, they are just on the University Flickr page.  


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.

24.3 Megapixel Full Frame Madness! 30 Megabyte files! Creamy Bokeh goodness! Beautiful.

And I'll leave it at that for today, I'm tired.

Thanks for reading,

Kevin

TV: Friends
Movie: Can't wait for Skyfall on next Friday!
Game: Skyrim, still...
Music: Mumford and Sons and The National
Food: Cheese Quesadilla

Coldplay Concert

As many of you may have read, my band that has been my favorite for a long time is Coldplay. However, I had not been to one of their concerts, due to them being prohibitively expensive or in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

BUT my girlfriend bought us tickets to a Coldplay concert for my 21st Birthday!

Pictures! All of these were taken with my little 6 yer old Fujifilm f100fd point and shoot, so they obviously aren't of the quality that my DSLR possesses. Anyways, onwards!

 We got there are almost exactly 7pm, which is when the tickets told us to get there, and this is what it looked like, so it obviously wasn't then.

 This was the second of the opening bands, the first one being mediocre so I don't remember their name, but this one was Marina and the Diamonds, and they were pretty good.

 But of course they were nothing compared to the main act. Coldplay! The whole show was absolutely mind-bogglingly amazing. I obviously know all of their songs by heart, so it was interesting to see what songs they chose to put into the concert. They didn't just do the Mylo Xyloto songs, they did all of their old good ones, plus some of their less-well known songs as well.

 As you went into the stadium each person was given a wrist band, and they all lit up at strategic times during the show, so the entire stadium was awash with lights and music.

 This was during one of the songs, I can't quite remember which one, though.

There is just something about their music that evokes an emotional response in me, and really relaxes me. I have a tendency to quell any emotions that try to come out from me, as a defense mechanism or some such nonsense.

Each song just sort of... works, if that makes sense. There is just something sublime about them that comes together into a masterpiece.

 This was taken by holding my camera way up and shooting down the row that I was sitting at.

And the final bow.

Whatever you may say about them, Coldplay knows how to put on one hell of a show, and I would gladly go to another concert.

That's all for now. School is coming back and I've got lots of engineering and swimming, and I've got a job as a photographer for the Torch (my universities newspaper).

So preow.

Kevin

The Wedding of the King and Queen of the World

So two of my very good friends got married last weekend.

They are basically the two coolest people in the world, and their wedding was pretty awesome. I think it was probably only my third wedding that I have ever been to.

Anyways, while they did have a professional photographer there, they asked everyone to take pictures with their personal cameras and email them to them afterwards, so it's fortunate that I brought my D7000 (plus my two prime lenses) with me to the reception. I unfortunately only brought my 35mm lens to the actual ceremony. Oh well, it's fine. I took way more pictures during the reception.

Here are a few pictures from the ceremony:

 Fun random collage of pictures, here.

 







I took quite a few more pictures at the reception, though. The Professional Photographer left about halfway through, but there were still some things that were fairly significant that they should have gotten.

Here's a few (or more than a few) shots from the reception:

 Cutting the Cake                                                       First Dance

 Father Daughter dance and Mother Son dance

Artsy shot

 I am very proud of these few shots, while they were dancing.

 The last picture before they headed out.

I had an awesome time, and I figured out a lot about my photography style, too.

Congratulation to Blake and Amy!

Kevin

Independence Day

Well it is that time of year again. The Time when Americans get all hot under the collar with patriotism and they have to cool themselves off by firing off inordinate amounts of highly combustible rockets into the night sky! Fireworks!

So yesterday I went up to St. Joe to chill with a friend and watch their fireworks show (since I'm sure it was more interesting than staying here in Valparaiso). It was my first real attempt at doing some serious shooting of fireworks (I had years and years ago with my little point and shoot at the time, but that doesn't count). There isn't really much to be said about the composition of each photo, and the Exif data is basically the same for theme all (I did switch from f/16 to f/18 about halfway through, though). 

It was a good exercise in really learning more about low-light photography (which I already talked about in my previous blog post about the moon), and how the aperture really does affect it. I was shooting on the Bulb setting on my D7000, as well, and I could also tell how long I left the shutter open really affected the shots. 

One thing that should be said is that there was a pretty good wind coming in from the Lake (Lake Michigan) so that affected it quite a bit.

I'll start with the pictures of single fireworks that I somehow managed to get:

   

For some reason the blog format won;t let me put small pictures in the middle here, too, even though there is obviously enough space for them. I even tried manipulating down in the html, but to no avail. Maybe I just need to make my template wider. Probably.

Anyways, it was a really nice night right by the lake. It was probably 103F or so at my house, so I decided that I had to get out of there, at least for a little while. So we drove up to Michigan and chilled with my friend Steve. Here is his personal website: http://stevekbooth.com/

He took some great photos too, with his Canon 1D Mark 4. You can see some of them under his "Blog" tab, then follow the link to his flickr account.

I really like this one on the Right ->

IT looks like some sort of fire palm tree

This one on the right, again, is two of those starbursts that I like. I think it might have been when I was stopped down to f/20 or so, as its a bit darker

And now for some Finale pictures:

The finale was a bit bright for the cameras, though, especially because of the massive amounts of smoke in front of the fireworks.

This one was the very last one that I took, right as the finale ended

->

These next few are my personal favorites of the ones that I took (therefore they shall be in larger format than the tiny pictures above)

 I really really like the blue explosion in there, it is almost perfect. When I saw this one on my camera I was like "Aww, I wish I could have gotten that all by itself, because that's awesome"

 I really like the big spark trails in this one coming out from the almost perfectly formed fireworks. Lovely.

 Oh! I spoke too soon! I did get a nearly perfect shot of a single firework!

And this one is just a good combination of everything.

I had a really enjoyable time yesterday taking pictures (even though I did get home at like midnight and didn't fall asleep until 2am and I had work at 7am this morning). I am pretty proud of the pictures that I got, too.

And that's all for now. I have a Manfrotto Tripod Coming tomorrow, so I'll let you all know how that works out for me (maybe include a quick thing about it in my Lowepro Flipside 400AW review that I plan to do this weekend).

Catch you on the Flipside,

Kevin

TV: Chopped

Movie: Ted

Game: Rayman Forever

Music: All.I.Can. Soundtrack

Food: um, I'll let you know once I make it.