Aquarium of the Pacific
July 13, 2008
How to shoot at an Aquarium
Step 1: Forget the Flash
When you go to an aquarium it is a courtesy to the sea life to not bombard them with fill flash. Besides the glass on the aquariums will bounce back the light and ruin your photograph. Yes you could shoot at an angle and reduce the bounce back but just be kind to the fishies and forget the flash.
Step 2: Use a fast lens
If you are using a point and shoot then you get to use the lens you have but if you have an SLR then use a fast lens. Another idea is to use a prime because usually these can be even faster then their zoom counterparts. Jamie used a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens on the photo above.
Step 3: Learn to set the ISO
The rule is to bump up the ISO last after everything else has been done to improve shutter speed. So if you are shooting at f/1.8 and you can’t turn on more light (which you can’t at the aquarium) and you can’t use a fill flash and you photos are still blurry then you might need to bump the ISO. The higher the ISO the more noise. With film this will translate to more noticeable grain. Either one is better than blur. Luckily reducing ISO noise is a top priority for the camera manufacturers so as time goes on this will improve.
Step 4: Be patient
Fish and Sea Mammals are not going to pose for the camera so sometimes you just have to be patient to get the shot. Next time you are at an aquarium put these four steps to practice and see what develops.
Be sure to check out our other shots in the gallery.
Fourth of July
July 5, 2008
We hope everyone had a fun and safe 4th of July. This year we decided to go to Huntington Beach to check out their fireworks show. We got down there around 6pm and we were suprised to see how many people were down there. We had to park on a residential street over a mile away from the beach. The majority of the crowd watched the fireworks show from the beach but we decided to pay $10 each to watch them from the pier. It was definitely worth the cost, they were shooting them off at the end of the pier so they were right over our heads. Bryan got some really great slow shutter speed shots. Check them out here.
Oh yeah, we also got some amazing sunset shots. Aww…the sun setting over the Southern California coast, is there anything more beautiful?
San Diego International Triathlon
July 1, 2008
This past weekend (June 29th) was the San Diego International Triathlon. We have posted pictures of the event in our gallery.
Early One Morning
Well the first thing you have to face when covering a triathlon is getting up way too early in the morning. It is well worth it but when that alarm goes off you ask yourself just for a moment “What was I thinking”. So Jamie and I piled into Jay’s vehicle and went off towards the starting line and transition area. Jay is our friend who participated in the event along with hundreds of other triathletes. We arrived and Jay went off to prepare and warm up while Jamie took a spot along the bike route and I took a spot on the run course.
It’s Dark Early in the Morning
So guess what? It’s dark early in the morning before the sun comes up. This made shooting the swim pretty futile. That and the fact that even a 200mm lens was not enough reach. I later noticed that the light meter gets easily confused by water too. Either it was that or all the bright orange kayaks and yellow swim caps. Either way my swim photos were useless. 
Jamie got a good shot at the turn around point for the swim though.
“I hit 47 mph on the downhill!”
Jay told us he hit 47 mph on the downhill section of the bike part of the race. In case you don’t know, anything over about 30mph feels really fast on a bicycle. This is especially true on road bike with brakes about as wide as my pinky finger. Jamie got some great shots of the bike riders including this great panning shot.
Time to hit the pavement
Once the athletes transitioned from the bike they got into their running shoes to finish out the triathlon. I positioned myself so I could take photos of the runners along two points in their run without moving from my location. This worked well and I was able to get some great shots. The funny thing is runners can look awkward depending on where they are in their stride when you take the photo. This one came out pretty well. 
Lessons learned
Jamie and I learned a couple of lessons at this event. First is always bring more memory then you think you will need. The second is that sometimes setting the autofocus to use only one point makes sense. I got a lot of shots where the AF focused on the cones in the road or a reflective road sign or the sign for a hotel instead of the runner. The third is to check the histogram to make sure the meter isn’t confused.
“I’d do it again”
In the end it was a blast. We even took a pic of Jay, drove his car to the finish line, and took a pic of him again. We learned a lot and we will definitely want to photograph this event again.
For race coverage check out www.amateurendurance.com
Red Bull Air Race 2008
May 5, 2008
US Navy and Coast Guard
The Red Bull Air Races were held May 3rd and 4th, 2008 in San Diego California. We were able to attend on the 4th and take many great pictures. Before the races themselves started there were many side acts and flybys. San Diego is home to many Naval Ships and has a huge military presence. I’ve been to air shows before but none of those compared to this in terms of how close we were to the action and how slow the flybys were. In this photo you can see the heritage
flight formation where older aircraft fly side by side with the current generation fighter jets. It’s funny to think that the F-18 will soon be one of the old aircraft too. The first thing you notice here is that the other two planes are propeller driven. The F-18 can fly really slow. How slow? Well so slow you think it’s hovering when you are looking at it from the ground up. The pilot does this by flying at a high angle of attack. The F-18 has the ability to fly at an almost unlimited angle of attack. That means that the wings are pointed up in relation to the air stream and the movement of the aircraft. So why am I telling you all of this? Well of course because the pilot did
such a low-speed, high angle of attack flyby. In this photo you can see the pilot tipping the wing right after powering up from the low-speed flyby.
The demonstrations were not limited to fighter jets though. The Coast Guard demonstrated a hoist rescue as you can
see in this photo. These helicopters are huge and being underneath one is like being in a small hurricane. I found this out first hand as one flew right by the shore and then leaned left. Jamie’s hat flew about 50 feet.
And last but not least is the crazy maneuver of the Navy divers who hook themselves
onto a tether and get pulled out of the water by a seahawk while using no hands. All I have to say is that these guys are nuts! I also wonder how they get down from there. I guess I will never know. Now to the racing itself.
Smoke On!
When the planes prepare to enter the course the air control tells the pilot “smoke on” which tells them to turn on the smoke so the officials can see the flight line and to enter the course. The course is just over 3.5 miles long but it is contained in an area of about 1 square mile. 
These highly advanced aerobatic prop planes fly at or sometimes over 300 mph. This makes for a very exciting race. The course is defined by a series of air gates. These are conical towers made of a very thin nylon and inflated with air. If a plane collides with a gate it just bursts apart leaving the plane undamaged.
Here you can see what they call the “Quadro” where four air gates are used. The pilots fly through this group of gates twice in two different directions. 
Since it was so bright outside, shooting these planes was easy… except tracking them was hard. These things moved really, really fast!
Here is a photo of the winner. His name is Paul Bonhomme 
from Britain and he beat American Mike Mangold in the final by just over a second. See more great shots in the Gallery.
Fiesta of the Spanish Horse 2008
May 5, 2008
A Noble Event
Every year one event brings together excitement and horses and fund raising for a good cause. All the proceeds from each years event goes to the American Cancer Society, the USC Norris Cancer Center, and the Roy and Patricia Disney Cancer Center. The Extravaganza is where the best acts and the most polished Spanish horse breeds are shown off. Photographing this event is challenging. This year we sat in the box seats to get a close look. The Equidome is lit inside but it isn’t bright enough for say ISO 100 film or that setting on a Digital camera. Jamie and I shot ISO 800 film and shot digitally in both 800 and 1600 modes. This was in an effort to keep the shutter speeds above 1/90th of a second.
All the Excitement
The event is very exciting all the way through. We saw trick riders who rode their horses while hanging off
the side of the saddle upside down or while standing on the saddle while using no hands. One of the two trick riders even swung in front of their horse to the other side and got back on. The crazy thing is the horses steer themselves when the riders are doing these tricks. So both horse and rider have to trust each other.
The other exciting thing to see is when the horses are taught to jump straight up in the air from a standstill. This is called a capriole. It’s not something you would see if you’ve been to a thousand horse shows but each year you can see it at the Fiesta. Shooting such an act is difficult as you can imagine. The photographer on the floor of the arena had a powerful strobe.
Being in the stands meant not being afforded that option. Therefore we had to rely on a high ISO and a quick response on the shutter. If our camera’s had any shutter lag once the shutter had been pressed we would miss the shot. That is the thing I love about our XT and the Canon A2E I was shooting film with. Both of these cameras have little to no shutter lag.
“Awww, how cute!”
Every year the Fiesta trots out the newborn foals with their mothers. This year one of them was only 5 days old! The reaction of course is unanimous. “Awww, how cute”, is what I hear from the whole audience. Taking this picture wasn’t hard at all. Any shot
would do but I think this shot on the right demonstrates the interaction between foal and mare especially well.
I could write on for days about all the wonderful acts you can see at this show. I can’t show them all here though so be sure to head over to the Gallery to check out all the photos. We put them under the Horses category.
Chino Hills State Park
April 8, 2008
This weekend Jamie and I had the opportunity to take some photographs. We decided to go all out here. We took three cameras and used all three of them. Jamie and I took our film cameras with b&w film loaded and we took our Canon Digital Rebel XT as well. In this post I’ll show you two of my favorite shots from the XT. I concentrated on landscapes of the beautiful hills and portraits of Jamie. We also got a few portraits of both of us using the remote.
The grass was really overgrown in the park. There were wildflowers everywhere. Some of the wildflowers were taller than Jamie. The only thing that went against us was the color of the sky which was somewhat overcast. The open shade makes for easy photography but it also doesn’t make for as dramatic landscapes.
Jamie, of course, being the model that she is gave me a lot of shots to work with. I like this one the most, it really pops out at me because of the contrast, the focus and the pattern of the flowers.