Author Archive: ken

Saturday afternoon, I had a few minutes so I took a stroll by the lake in my backyard. I saw a ton of dragonflys so I decided to shoot some photos of them. I tried to catch some in flight, but they are really fast and my auto-focus couldn’t keep with them. So here’s a couple of shots of them just hanging out. When you see them close up, they do look kinda scary and monster like.

I also saw some Bluegills hanging out around to shore. They were eating bugs that fell into the water from the tall grass growing at the waterline.

Last Friday I drove to Warsaw to Bussard Perfomance Specialties to photograph three cars that they had restored/customized. Bussard Performance Specialties can restore a classic or antique car to showroom specs or in any way you can imagine. Pretty impressive. Brandon Bussard wanted some photos of these cars to submit to Popular Hot Rodding Magazine. Ideally these shots would have been done much later in the day to take advantage of softer light, but due to logistics of car availability we had to shoot between 1:00 and 5:00 pm.

I had the pleasure of shooting with a model, Amanda Hypes (http://www.amandahypes.com/), whom I’ve worked with before. She’s always a such a trooper, during this shoot in the mid day sun it probably around 90 and she never complained.

The first car is a 1964 GTO. It has been completely restored to brand new factory condition. It even has a dealer sticker in the window that looks vintage.

The next car is one that I featured in an earlier posting. It is a 2002 Ford focus that has a 400hp V-8, rear wheel drive, and 5 speed transmission. It also has a custom interior and paint.

Lastly this is old Dodge Cornet that has an altered wheel base. Basically the entire body of the car has been moved back around 18 inches. The point being to move more weight over the rear wheels for better traction.

Anyway, it was fun shoot and under the conditions we got some good photos.

Yesterday I stopped by the Michiana Mustang Car Club’s car show. It was held at Ivy Tech’s campus. The weather was a bit concerning, I kept waiting for the rain to come, but it held off and we only saw a few sprinkles. The show was pretty well attended and there was a good variety of cars.

This was pretty awesome. It was not a Mustang, but a customized Ford Focus. A 400 hp, rear wheel drive, 5 speed tranmission, Ford Focus!

This was a great looking 1954 Ford Fairlane.

And of course a classic Mustang.

It was an interesting and fun afternoon.

Oh, and one more thing. If you like checking out local blogs, take a look at A Beautiful City . It is a great blog and portal to other local blogs, check it out.

OK, I know I already posted a blog entry, but I thought I’d add another brief post. Last night was the TRF Bed Race, and man there was great turn out. Thousands of people showed up on main street to support their favorite team and to see a great competition.

After a lot of heated competition, the team from DeBrands Chocolates winning, for the second year in a row.

The team from St. Joseph Hospital made a blazing start against the Indianas News Center team.

However, problems with the front wheels caused them lose in the first round.

Overall, competitors and fans had a great time. It was another fantasitic Three Rivers Festival event!

I have been nominated by Fort Wayne Newspapers for the Readers Best Of… award for 2008 Best Photographer. You can vote for me by going to              http://fwnextweb1.fortwayne.com/adv/readerspicksvote/ then select “Show Media/Personalities”, then click on Photographers. The list that appears is alphabetical, so just scroll down and vote for me! You can vote only once per day and voting ends on July 27th.

If you live in, or around, Fort Wayne you know it’s Three Rivers Festival this week. Part of the festival was an activity known as Art in the Park that takes place at Freiman Square Park on Main Street. It’s basically a bunch of professional artists showing and selling their work. It’s pretty cool, there are jewelry makers, painters, photographers, wood workers, and much, much more. It’s a neat thing to visit. The exhibits have gotten where they over flow Freiman Square and have also taken over part of Main Street.

There is so much diversity in terms of the types of art, it can act as inspiration for any artist visiting the exhibitors. If you’ve never been, you should try to go next year. It’s worth your time.

Along with Art in the Park, another Three Rivers Festival event is the Chalkwalk. This is also very cool. A portion of Main Street as well as the Art Museum’s parking lot are used as canvases for artists that use chalk as their medium. Anyone who has an artistic eye can apply for a segment of asphalt on which to create a masterpiece. There was a ton of great work, below is just a sample.

There are some hughly talented people in Fort Wayne. Anyway, that’s all I have this week. I’ll try to have something more photography related next time. Thanks for reading!!!

Whew, the weekend is over and I’m back to work. I’m taking a break from editing some pictures from some recent shoots to post a blog entry. Over the long Fourth of July weekend, we had family in from out of town. It was a really nice visit and anyone who lives around Fort Wayne knows that the weather was just about perfect. We grilled out, lounged on the deck, and didn’t do much but hang out. It was great. Oh yeah, one more thing. We also played Bocce. I think this is the correct spelling. It’s a fun yard game that’s kinda a cross between Horseshoes and Croquet. If you get a chance to play, give it a try.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. Hope everyone else had a good Fourth. Well, back to work. 🙂

You know I try to add an entry to the blog about once a week. However, this week I don’t have much to say. I’ve been pretty busy with shooting and editing photos so I haven’t had a chance to come up with something to post. I was sorta thinking about adding a post about incident versus reflective metering, but haven’t had time to shoot some sample shots that illustrate the differences.

I also have seen a large egret stomping around the edge of the lake (I live on a small lake) eating fish. I would love to sit on the deck with my 300mm + 1.4 TC and get some action shots of him in action catching a fish. I just don’t have time right now. I also need to make some time to play my guitar more. I have pretty much finished learning “45 (Acoustic version)” by Shinedown and started working on “Are you gonna be my girl” by Jet.

There’s just so much to do and so little time. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Well, today’s post is gonna cover a few topics. I’ll try to keep things rolling along will attempt to keep things slightly interesting.  My first thought is about a concert I shot last night. I have previously shot publicity photos for the band Jacob’s Well. We shot in the studio a couple of weeks ago and got some really nice images. I shot the band individually, then composited the guys in so it looked like a group photo.

Last night I got to shoot Jacob’s Well in concert and they put on a really good show. If you get a chance to see them, make sure you do. They are not only good musicians, but also good song writers. Here is shot from last night.

Ok, here’s another topic. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spoken with several aspiring photographers as well as a professor of photography at a local college. In speaking with all of these people it occurs to me that sometimes people overlook learning the basics. They try skip over the fundaments of photography and then wonder why some of their work is lacking. It seems to me (IMHO) that one of the single best ways for a beginner to improve is to set the camera’s exposure setting to manual. This will force you to think about 3 things every time you take a photo, shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field. Since photography is the art of using light to create images, by shooting using manual exposure, you are forced to think about how your subject is lit. In doing so, you will start to look at lighting from a different point of view and you’ll see the overall quality improve.

Or, maybe not. 🙂

I had lunch the other day with a friend who is wanting to improve his photography. He asked me what he could do take better photos. This may sound obvious, but the best way to improve is to look at some else’s work, (someone whose work you respect and admire) and compare it to your own. Look at your work critically and see where you are lacking. Then, the next time you are shooting try to improve on those weaknesses. It also helps to deconstruct photos you like. Try to figure out how it was shot.

For instance, I don’t shoot a lot of sports. So, my ability to keep moving subject in focus isn’t as good as I would like. To improve on that skill, I periodically stop by a local park that has a lake that attracts a lot of waterfoul. I try to shoot the birds in flight, this forces me to concentrate on accurately panning with the moving birds and reacting quickly. It really seems to help.

So, that’s it for today.

This past weekend was really nice. In general, the weather was really pleasant. My wife and I just hung out and didn’t really do much. We sat out on the deck, read, grilled out, watched movies, walked the dogs, and generally had a quiet relaxing couple of days. While eating Brat-burgers on the deck, I saw a small spider hanging from the umbrella. He was working hard to build a web, not realizing that it would be destroyed when I cranked the umbrella closed.

I would say that this would lead me to some analogy about the spider wasting his efforts in web building and comparing that to the futile efforts that we all go through, but it didn’t. Instead of pursuing an meta-physical internal discussion on the spider’s efforts, I got my camera and took a couple of photos.