Author Archive: ken

Today I shot some photos of a new American built Supercar. It is the GTM-R built by Revenge Designs based in Decatur, Indiana. (Yep, in Decatur, Indiana). It is a custom built ride with 505 horsepower, a top speed of 180 mpg, 0-60 at 3 sec., and 28 mpg. The car is absolutely beautiful and the fit and finish are unbelievable. The dash is all LCD with all the stats you could imagine. There’s on-board GPS, DVD, and premium sound (also backup camera). You name it, this car has it.

This car is amazing and made quite a stir at the Detroit Auto show. These photos are straight out of the camera. I will post some retouched/edited photos later.

I finally got the new website up and running. It not only looks different, but works differently under the hood. I expect it to be much easier to maintain and update. I broke each page into header, footer, and content. I should have built it this way to begin with, but I was in a hurry to get the site up and running when I opened the studio.

Did you know that April 1 is my 3 year anniversary of going into business? Man, time flies. It just doesn’t seem that long ago. Isn’t it ironic that my first day was April Fools day? 🙂

Also, last week I posted some photos of flowers I shot for my wife’s office. She hung them over the weekend. Here’s a crappy camera phone shot of how she arranged them. They look much nicer in person.

Oh, and on the kitchen saga, last week they put in baseboards. I should say most of the baseboards. One 8 foot section is about 1/4 inch smaller in heigth so it doesn’t line up with others. I need to call them and let them I can’t find baseboards at Lowes that match the ones they have already installed. I have no clue as to where they found the baseboards. This will never end.

OK, my wife was wanting some new pictures for her office. The prints she had were OK, but she was bored with them as she’d had them a long time. She asked me to shoot 3 photos as replacements. My concept is use black museum style frames with white double mattes. The flowers were to be white flowers of some sort shot against a black back ground. The photos were to converted to B&W with the intent of retaining the textures of the blooms.

After checking with the top florist in Pasadena I found a Calla Lilly and a White Rose at Cantebury Flowers. I also found a plain White Lilly at Krogers. The difference is shapes make the 3 flowers look quite unusual. 

All three where shot at my studio against a Thunder Gray Savage paper background. The flowers were lit by a single grided (eggcrate) strip box.

I ordered prints from my lab today and expect them before the end of the week.

I am continuing my weekly shoots at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. The museum is going thru a major addition as well as the interior will also be remodeled. Documenting the changes has been a lot of fun, even thought the shooting over the last 2 months has kinda uncomfortable due to the cold temps. Brrrr.

It’ll be interesting to put the photos into a timeline where you can really see the progress. I’m tempted to do it, but want to hold off until it’s complete. Here are few random photos from the last couple of weeks.

I’ve been working on more marketing materials, which may include a DVD (still prototyping the format) as well as possibly a hard back portfolio. Just so much to do and never enough time. I’ve also been Twittering a lot lately and can be found on several of the social network sites:

http://www.twitter.com/krieves
http://www.myspace.com/kenrieves
http://www.facebook.com/ (you have search for me)

Check them out when you get a chance and say hello. 🙂

OK, my lovely wife got me a Starbucks gift card for Valentines day. She knows I like a good cup of coffee in the afternoon. It just helps when I sitting in the studio editing photos to have a little caffine boost. So this afternoon I go to the Starbucks on Coliseum to get a cup of java. When I pulled in I noticed the Circuit City was still in business so I thought I’d check it out and see if they had any good deals left. Really the store looks like it was looted. Most everything was picked over except the TVs. They still had a bunch of those. I did notice that, on the bottom shelf of locked case, they had a few of the Flip video cameras.

If you haven’t heard of the Flip, they are a bare bones digital video camera. They have a USB plug built in that flips out of the side (hence the name). I’ve been hearing about these for the past several months, because they produce a pretty high quality image, record on flash memory (about an hour of record time), and are very small and easy to use. Circuit City had them marked down to $80 from $150. So I felt it would be fun to use and monkey with. I really haven’t had much time to mess with it, so here is a short video I threw together.

See the video.

The camera comes with editing software. This weekend I’ll play with that see what I can come up with.

First of all, due to some technical problems I was not able to update my blog. Now that I have that fixed I can post again. My kitchen is almost done. I have the floor in and all that’s left is for the contractor to come in and put in the new baseboards and trim. I forgot that installing tile is real pain in the butt. I used 18in porcelain tile. Porcelain is much harder than ceramic which makes it very durable, but is difficult to cut. Since the floor is pretty large it was also difficult to get grouted before the grout hardened in the bucket. But I got it done and it looks great.

Here’s a shot from last evening.

Once everything is complete I’ll shoot it from some different angles.

… of a photographer. On Friday, Feb 13th, I decided to shoot some photos throughout the day just for the heck of it.

Kate waking me up. If it isn’t Kate, it would be my other dog, Abby.

A peek out onto the upstairs deck to see what the weather is doing.

Coffee. Need I say more? It just happens that I used my Chamber cup.

On Hilligas Road on my way to work. Most of the time I take the interstate, but this morning I cut through town.

Pulling into the studio on Coliseum Blvd.

Turning on the lights, I discover how messy my studio is. I’ve been shooting of mix of studio and location work so gear is in a state of flux.

I have a location shoot in Audburn this afternoon so I need to pack up some gear. I’m going to be shooting in a small space so I’m only taking 4 lights (AB800s, the 1600s would be overkill), stands, grids, gels, and umbrellas.

On the road to Auburn for a product shoot.

After the shoot, I’m back at the studio and have to unload and unpack the gear.

And finally, one of the images of some machine parts from the product shoot.

Anyway, it was fun to document the day. I will do it again for an in-studio shoot in a few weeks. Maybe it’ll be a little more exciting. 🙂

Well, unlike last week, I’m not going to bore you with techno babble about the characteristics of light. I just thought I’d share a couple of photos from last week.

This first photo is of a couple from Warsaw. They have this wonderful custom Harley and wanted some photos. As an ex-rider (BMW) I can appreciate how people feel about their bikes and the pride that they instill.

This next photo was taken for the model’s application/audition for a popular swimsuit calendar. Keep an eye out for this girl, she is definately going places with her modeling career.

Well that’s it for this week. Next week I’ll try to post on Monday.

OK, today I am actually feeling better and came up with an idea for the blog. This may be information that a lot of budding new photographers have missed or have been taught in a formal setting without regard for its practical application. You may have heard of the Inverse Square Law of Light. There’s formula for it and everything. Just like any other law of physics. Which makes it pretty boring. 🙂

A summary of the law suggests that the energy (brightness) twice as far from the source (light bulb/flash tube) is spread over 4 times the area and is therefore 1/4 the intensity. This means that 3 times the distance means the light is 1/9th the intensity, and so forth. So, right now you are saying “so what?”, right? Well once we see this in practical terms, we can see how powerful this concept is.

OK, to put this in more practical terms I setup a down-to-earth experiment. I setup an Alien Bee 1600 with the standard 7in reflector on one side of the studio (if you’ve been to my studio, I set it up next to sofa in the sitting area). I turned it up to full power. I used a Sekonic meter set at ISO 800 to meter the light. I laid out a tape measure across the floor over towards the shooting area ( a total distance of 33 feet). I took a test exposure every 2 feet. 

I won’t bore you with all the details, but the results confirm how quickly light falls off as you move away from source, but as you continue to move further away, the amount of fall off slows. For instance,  from 3ft to 7 ft, the fall off changes more than a stop from f/90 to f/45. When we are 13 ft away and move to 17ft away, the light drops from f/22.7 to f22.0 (less than 1/2 a stop).

Ok, the lesson to be learned from this exercise? Light fall off fastest when you are closest to the source and falls off more gradually as you move further away from the source. This is a very powerful notion and can change the way you light individuals or groups. For instance, suppose you are shooting a person in room with a distracting background. You’ve tried moving the subject further away from the background, but is still a distraction. What you can do is move the light source closer to the subject, use a large modifier like a softbox or perhaps a large umbrella. The large light source will provide a softer look, and if the light is close enough, then let the light falloff and hide the distracting background.

I hope this helps you understand light fall off and how it can used to improve your photography.

Gosh I hate colds. Last week it started off innocent enough, just a running nose. Nothing more. It was a just a bother. I figured it would pass in a day or so. Now, it’s a week later, and I can’t sleep thru the night, have a raspy cough, and am popping antihistamines like M&Ms. What a pain in the butt. Will it ever end???!!!!

Another totally non-photography related thought, I really feel badly for all the folks around that country that are losing their jobs. Everytime I turn on the TV I hear of more layoffs and companies closing. A few years ago, when I worked in a corporate environment (rather than freelance), I found the company I was with was closing. Nearly 800 people lost their jobs. Most employees were trained in specific job rolls that were relatively unique to the company. This meant that there were several hundred people (with similar qualifications) in our community competing for the same jobs . What a brutal environment.

Today’s job environment is certainly worse. While I am optimist that things are going to improve, I am concerned about the timeline. I believe in the free market system. I don’t think government can do it better than private enterprise. Government’s role should be protecting the people. The recent problems in the free market system have been a lack of oversight by the government. I don’t want the government telling my bank how to operate, but I do want the government to make my banks investments more transparent. In other words, if my bank wants to invest in speculative mortgages and other securities, then that’s fine. I’ll likely get a higher rate of return on my deposits for taking the risk. However with greater transparency, I can make the decision whether the higher return is worth the risk. Let the customer make an informed decision.

One problem with the current mortgage/financial implosion was that there was no disclosure, no transparency, and no oversight. The financial industry was heading towards the precipice 4-5 years ago. People in the industry saw it and didn’t care. They were making too much money. It was gluttony on grand scale and few people were questioning whether the business was heading off a cliff. There should be a financial rating system assigned to banks and other financial institutions that is based on their propensity towards risk. For instance a bank that holds gold as the majority of assets would be considered a 1 (very low risk) or a financial institution that has most of assets as stocks in IPOs may be considered a 10 (very high risk).

Anyway, that’s my feverish rants for this week. Thanks for reading.