my own – manhattan, ks child photographer
It’s not very often that I go to a wedding as a guest. Being in this business, the odds are just against me. So this past weekend, I found myself in a rather rare position: I was at a wedding, I didn’t have to work it, I had my camera, and my oldest daughter was the flower girl. That last one meant that she was all dressed up and at the wedding venue (the Holiday Inn in Manhattan, KS) early.
While we were waiting for the wedding photographer to finish doing the bride and groom portraits, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind me making a few portraits of her. Amazingly, she agreed! I was so happy that she was willing, because the Holiday Inn has some amazing light and great locations. I’ve shot some wedding receptions there before and have never been disappointed.
We spent all of 13 minutes, and I made less than 70 frames, but am so happy with the results. I don’t normally share personal images on here, but since these were not your run-of-the-mill family snapshots, I figured it was okay. So, if you’ll indulge me, my daughter:
My very favorite ones of her from this mini-session (plus my other two kiddos), after the break.
fireworks, the follow up
So, I really thought I wouldn’t get to see fireworks this past July 4th. I was traveling and it just seemed like I would be in exactly the wrong places at the wrong times. As it turns out, I had the dates for the fireworks shows in Utah wrong, so I was there and we went! My family and I went to Thanksgiving Point to watch their show and got up about as close as they would let us get. Then we backed up just a little until we were sheltered from the wind, which was really moving up there–I was surprised how cold it can get up in the mountains in July. I actually had to put on a sweater! Weird.
Anyways, I was able to borrow a tripod from my aunt and uncle and set up shop right next to where we put out our chairs. We wandered the gardens for a few minutes until it got dark, waiting for the show to start.
When it started, I started shooting, using the focus-shifting technique I described here. A very short 10 minutes later, and they were done. Finished. My wife and I were so disappointed after having been to Wamego’s fireworks shows for the last 3 years. We assumed that if our tiny town of 4200 people can consistently put on a rockin’ 30 minutes of fireworks every year, so can anyone.
We were mistaken.
Anyways, I bet you didn’t come here to listen to me ramble–you came for pictures. Here they are: despite the very short show, I still came away with some images I’m very happy with. Enjoy, and let me know what you think below. Did you shoot any of your own fireworks? Leave a comment with a link below–I’d love to see them!
This next one really reminds me of a sunflower. The kind with neon sparkly seeds in the center.
Does anyone else think this next one looks like an alien abduction, or is it just me?
There you go. Ten minutes of fireworks, six shots to show–not a bad deal. =]
fireworks like you’ve never seen them before
With the 4th of July right around the corner, fireworks are on a lot of people’s minds. If you live in a state that allows you to shoot off your own fireworks, like Kansas, then chances are you’ve already heard some going off around your neighborhoods at night. You may have even been the one lighting them.
Those little fireworks are great, but the real fun comes from the massive pyrotechnic displays that are put on all around the country on the 4th. The show that my town puts on is really a marvel, especially considering that Wamego’s population is only around 4200 or so. It is entirely hand fired, typically lasts about 30 minutes, and the seating is wonderfully close (about a baseball field’s length away). You really get to experience the fireworks, not just watch them. And this show is as intense, if not more so, than other popular shows I’ve seen in much larger communities. Every year, people from surrounding cities make the trek out to Wamego because the show is just that cool.
But this is not a post plugging Wamego’s fireworks show.
Ok, it’s not just plugging Wamego’s fireworks show.
As a photographer, I’ve always enjoyed trying to capture the kind of fireworks images I’ve seen in magazines and online and have always struggled to get anything close. So I gave up.
Then, last year, not too long before the 4th, I read an article from a JPG magazine user about a different technique she had discovered that makes amazing images of fireworks not only much easier to produce but also much more enjoyable to create. I remember trying it out last year and just giggling like a giddy school girl as a watched the images pop up on my LCD. It’s easy and fun and the results are unexpectedly delightful and full of mystery.
She called the technique focus shift. All you need is a solid tripod, an SLR camera, and a long lens. She used a Canon 5D with a 180mm lens; I used a Canon 40D with a 75mm lens (equivalent to 120 mm). Here’s how the technique works, along with some images I shot last year:
- Try to set up as close to the fireworks as you can. One “mistake” I made in the past was trying to get the whole sky in the shot. Forget that for this–you want to fill your frame with the fireworks, so get close, and use a long lens. Wamego’s show is great for this since every seat is virtually as close to the fireworks as safety would allow.
- Shoot in manual. You can’t let your camera try to meter for these constantly changing bursts of light–either it won’t be able to keep up, or it will try to properly expose the pitch black night sky, completely blowing out the bright light from the fireworks.
- Use your lowest ISO. For me, that was ISO 100. We’ll be doing longer exposures, so we want the least amount of digital noise possible in the final image. You might even consider turning on your camera’s own long exposure noise reduction option for this.
- Start with a shutter speed around 1 second. In the article, she said that her shutter speeds ranged from 1 to 6 seconds. I used 1 second for all of the images I shot last year. At that shutter speed, I found that an aperture of f11 or f14 worked well to produce well exposed images. You’ll have to experiment a bit with this.
- Use manual focus. Make sure you flip that little switch on your lens from AF to MF. This is where the magic happens. After you press the shutter button, you’ve got about a second to change the focus during the exposure. Large changes in focus work best. You can start with the focus set up close and shift it towards infinity during the exposure, or you can start at infinity and move it back up close. Try both. Try going from one end of the focus range to the other and back during the same exposure. With focus at infinity, the light from the fireworks will produce sharp lines on your image. With the focus up close, the light creates soft, colored balls or stripes of light. As you shift from one end of the focus range to the other, you produce incredible, abstract images of color and shape.
- The last step is something to keep in mind the whole time you’re exposing and shifting focus: don’t rock the tripod.
Here are a few of my favorite shots from last year’s fireworks show. This was my first attempt at focus shifting, and I’m really happy with what I came home with.
For this first one, I shifted from a close focus towards infinity, which is why the green lights start big and get sharper as they move away from the center. The green heptagons came from a particular kind of firework that twinkled instead of burning consistently. ISO 100, f11, 1s, 75mm (120 mm equivalent), shifting from close to infinity.
In this one, I also shifted from close to infinity and just loved how it produced such organic, almost flower-like shapes. ISO 100, f14, 1s, 75 mm (120 equivalent), shifting from close to infinity.
I love that this one exploded out of my field of view, so I only really got the twinkling trails as they fell. ISO 100, f11, 4s, 75 mm (120 mm equivalent), shifting from close to infinity.
This last one is my favorite from the night. I was amazed not just by the fierce red color, but by the asymmetrical chaos of the main bloom. All the other smoke and stray light really added to the image. ISO 100, f14, 1s, 75mm (120mm equivalent), shifting from close towards infinity.
As you play with this, try shifting focus at different speeds: shifting slowly produces a smooth transition from large, out of focus light to sharp trails, or vice-versa. Shifting quickly produces sudden differences.
If you’d like to see more examples of what this technique can do, definitely check out the first article minka did, as well as the follow up story that she posted after the 4th of July last year.
Will you try out focus shifting this year? If you do, definitely leave a comment below with a link to your images. Or, head on over to the rik andes photography page on facebook and just post the images there! I can’t wait to see what you create, especially because I’m facing the distinct likelihood that, because of my travels this weekend, I won’t be able to capture any fireworks images at all, let alone see a big show. I’ll enjoy the fireworks vicariously through you this year.
Did you enjoy this little how-to? Feel free to pass a link around and tell your friends!
one month later
If I’ve been a little absent around here, there’s a good reason. It’s a cute little reason with incredibly pinchable cheeks, but this reason still loves to wake up at night and scream/growl/grunt at me.
This past Sunday afternoon, just before the light died away completely, Michelle and I were staring at our little girl in her adorable pink dress when we realized that she had turned one-month old without us doing a little photo session for her. She was already in an adorable dress, so we got right to the session. Michelle even prettied herself up a little (afternoon naps tend to mess up one’s hair, after all) and jumped in the shot.
Here’s a couple early favorites.
Yes, I am a very, very lucky man.
collaboration
When I went to install my show at the local gallery (which I mentioned before and will give more details about soon), I took a moment to check out the other artists’ work. One particular photographer, Ali Mocabee, caught my eye, so I went to her website and browsed around for a bit. I saw a link on her blog that said to add her in facebook, so I did.
A few days later, after we had had the baby, I got an email from her asking if she could come play with our baby. She was wanting to try out some natural lighting techniques she had learned but that couldn’t really be practiced without a model (i.e., a fresh, sleepy baby). We had the baby and love pictures, so we said yes!
She came over yesterday and brought a really fun bag of toys that we got to break out and play with for a couple of hours. Cate was a great model and slept almost the whole time. Except for when she pooped in my hand (don’t worry…I caught it all. Nothing got on the floor). Ali and I both shot a ton and I’m really happy with both what I got in the camera and with the whole experience and practice.
Michelle wouldn’t let me go to sleep tonight until I edited at least a couple of her favorites, so here you go!
Ali brought this AWESOME pink petticoat that we bunched up and used as a cushion for Cate. I love this series.
This last one was so yummy, I had to serve it up in two flavors!
If this just whets your appetite, don’t worry! There are plenty more to come!
an announcement and a contest!
So I’m going to be doing a show in a local gallery, and the gallery owner said I could display 15 images. Since I’m relatively unknown here in the area, it’s a great opportunity to showcase some of my personal work, but also to display the work I’ve done for some of my clients. I’ve tried and tried to select those 15 perfect images, and I’m just not getting there all by myself. I posted the images to my facebook page and petitioned help there and on twitter, and I’ve loved the response! So, I decided to open this up and make it even more fun.
I’m holding a contest! ***UPDATE*** the contest voting is closed!
I’m going to leave the voting open until Wednesday evening, March 4th, at 5 pm (Central time). At that time, I’ll count up the votes and choose my 15 images. The client whose gallery image receives the most votes will get to keep the gallery print when the display comes down! That’s right, baby: a free print! Depending on how big I print them, that could be worth something!
So, what can you do? Drum up the votes! Tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell your family! Send them a link to the blog post and tell them to come vote! They can vote on up to 15 images to help me whittle them down.
Voting is easy: you can
- leave a comment on facebook on the pictures you want to vote for (if you’re my facebook friend),
- send me a facebook message (even those who aren’t my friend can do that, as long as you have an account) with the image numbers you’re voting for,
- send me an email (rikandesphoto at gmail dot com) with the image numbers you’re voting for,
- dm or @reply me on twitter (twitter.com/rikandes) with the image numbers you’re voting for,
- leave a comment on this post right here with the image numbers you’re voting for,
- click on the images below you want to vote for and leave a comment there,
- find me and tell me the numbers in person–just make sure I write them down!
Here’s the link to my facebook album: http://bit.ly/k9QEd
Or the link to this post: http://bit.ly/9ZWnD
Good luck, and stay tuned for a separate announcement regarding the show dates and location of the gallery!
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The fine print: I withhold the right to make the final judgment over which images get into the gallery showing. The client image *in the gallery* with the most votes will get the print.
testing…testing
I got a new umbrella last month. Of course, when you get new toys, you have to play with them. And who loves to play with toys more than kids, right?
I tried it out a couple of times on myself, but I just can’t get the camera that far away, even with my freakishly long arms, at least not without a decent wide-angle lens.
One of the (many) things my wife and I love about our son and frequently laugh about (between ourselves, of course) is how expressive his face is. He’s seriously the Boy of a Thousand Faces. He brought a few of them to the party that night.
Grandpa called as we were shooting. Did that stop us? Nope. (You can also see Mysterious Eye Injury #1 fairly well in this next one. It just appeared at some point. Neither kid would tell us a straight story about what happened. Very Mysterious, indeed)
And my favorite of his faces. I know; it shouldn’t be, but it is!
union station | kansas city
I am guilty of bribery.
That’s right, folks. You heard it first here! I, Rik Andes, bribed my daughter in an effort to convince her not to do an optional science fair project for her school. She was quite reluctant, even though we pointed out that we only had two more days to do it in and very little time to enjoy it in. Eventually, we had to promise to take her to see the science fair at her school and then take her to the science discovery center at Union Station in Kansas City. When I said that, even her little brother was pushing her to cave.
We went out there at the end of last month and had a great time seeing all the exhibits and trying everything out. That’s really the best part of the center–you can play with everything. And it’s not just for kids, either. I was frequently the last one trying out the different stations when my family wanted to move on, and I saw several couples there on dates, too.
Of course, I brought my camera along and had some fun while we were having some fun.
Where it all began.
The price of admission also gets you a show at the planetarium. We saw a laser show of Peter and the Wolf.
One of the exhibits
Digging for dinosaur bones. With protective gear, of course. (Click for slightly bigger enjoyment)
After doing the rounds at the science center, we started the trek over to the Crown Center for dinner, which took us straight through Union Station.
I have only two words and one picture: Gor. Geous.
We ate at Fritz’s, one of our favorite stops in Kansas City. The food is greasy and bad, but it’s delivered via an automated train system that runs on tracks up near the ceiling. When your food is ready, the train brings it and it’s l0wered by an elevator to your table. Kids, as you can imagine, love this place.
On our way back to our car at the Union Station garage.
Definitely a fun little day trip.
pleasing the natives
We recently were given a portable dishwasher as a baby shower present for my wife (thanks, Leon!). Dishwashers, because of their size, come in rather large boxes. If you’ve ever been a kid, you will probably remember the joy that comes from having a rather large box at your disposal.
Keeping that joy in mind, just think how you would feel if your mom then broke out all her paints and helped you cut it up and paint it like a house.
And, as if that couldn’t get any better, imagine how you would then feel when the box ripped open at one end so you could lay it down and pretend it was a space shuttle with a perfectly placed front window.
Yeah…that’s how my kids have been feeling for the last couple of days.
This last one I spent a bit of time on in Photoshop. If you click it, you can see it a bit bigger on my photoblog.
Here’s the Space Commander, at the helm:
The top image was shot with a new umbrella I just bought: shoot-through 45″ white satin. I’ve been having lots of fun with that. The last two were shot with the same flash as the top (Vivitar 285HV), except that I shot it through my reflector frame, which has a translucent white material through the middle.
christmas portraits
My family are not usually the greatest models. My kids love to make silly faces or run away whenever they see the camera come out. They have very little patience for any direction, and lose interest in about 3.7 seconds. My wife usually flashes me a smile that lovingly indicates that she will tolerate my antics for just a very little while longer.
In short, my pictures of my family rarely turn out great. I think other photographers know what I mean.
All of that, however, changes when I get them into the studio.
Alan Honey, a wedding photographer in Manhattan that I second shoot for, recently let me use his studio to shoot some Christmas portraits of my family. Amazingly, the kids loved it. My wife, 6 months pregnant as she was, even enjoyed it.
I couldn’t share these until now because we gave a bunch of the prints as presents to grandma’s and grandpa’s this year, and we just didn’t want to spoil the surprise. But now, here they are.
We started with the kids in their Christmas outfits that Grandma sent.
Then we had a quick wardrobe and set change.
This is the one we used for our Christmas cards this year:
One more outfit swap and we even threw Mom into the mix as well, mostly because my mother-in-law threatened bodily harm if I didn’t I love my mother-in-law and think she should have lovely portraits of her daughter.
All told, we were in the studio for about an hour and a half without a single complaint from anyone! I’m super happy with these, too; they’ll be treasured images for me and our family for a long time.
near tragedy
I just accidentally deleted four months of personal and family pictures.
I was trying to clean up our poor, almost full hard drive (we’re running at 91% capacity these days, mostly full of pictures) after finishing the processing of Nichole’s session. I backed up all the files twice (one for storage here, one for storage off-site), like I do with all my sessions, and then started deleting the files I no longer needed to keep on the computer: the RAW, digital negatives and massive Photoshop documents.
I right-clicked on the folder of the RAW files and selected “Delete.” The computer thought for a second, told me the folder was too big to put in the recycle bin, so did I want to delete it permanently. This didn’t strike me as that odd–RAW files are, after all, quite large. I really didn’t see any need for them in the future, so I said yes, go ahead and delete them.
I watched as another window come up and start listing the files as they were being permanently deleted, bypassing the Recycle Bin on their way out of my life. I noticed something odd in the hundreds of files that were flashing by: none of them should be there. These were the names of folders containing personal and family pictures, not Nichole’s session!
I hit cancel about as fast as I could, but it was too late: I had already lost about 10 GB of family pictures, equating to the last four months’ worth of photography. As a habit, I back up my photo sessions as soon as I get home and don’t delete the originals off the card until they are safely backed up in a number of locations, just in case. Not so with the family stuff, however. I checked the Recycle Bin, but there was nothing there.
Fortunately, from reading past forums and discussion board postings from other photographers, I know this is not the first time that someone has accidentally wiped valuable photos from their computer, so I started searching the internet for help. I knew that the files I had deleted were still on the hard drive, and that they would be until something else was written over the same physical spot on the disk. All I needed was a tool that would look past all of the signals that said the files weren’t there, and there they would be.
A very short time later, I was downloading Pandora Recovery, a free personal file recovery tool. I installed it to my external hard drive (so I wouldn’t be writing over any of the deleted pictures with the new software) and started it up. It immediately showed me where on my computer I could find deleted files, and there they were. This lovely, easy-to-use program very quickly recovered about 95% of my pictures. Some of them couldn’t be recovered because they had already been partially written on, but most of them are back, safe and sound.
Well, at least, they will be safe…once I get around to actually backing them up.
I keep thinking there’s a lesson to be learned in all of this…
nichole and the girls
In between the summer session and the fall semester on campus, my family and I went to southern California to visit family and friends. While there, we went down with my wife’s family to spend a couple of days in San Diego right on the beach.
Frankly, I’m surprised I made it back.
But, while we were there, I had a fun little mini session with my sister-in-law and her two beautiful girls out on the beach. My mother-in-law was my trusty reflector-wielding assistant, which was fun because it was probably the only time I’ve ever been able to tell my mother-in-law what to do.
Ha ha! Just kidding! (Hi Kathy!)
On with the show!
Oh, and if you’re confused at this point because she looks a lot like my wife, it might help if I explained that they are identical twins.
Sorry to make you wait for these, Nichole–I hope they were worth the wait! Shoot me an email (or just call your sister) if you have any questions.
8 years later
It’s nice to have professional photographers for friends. When they need help, sometimes they repay in pictures. Alan Honey‘s son left on a mission recently, so he wanted to get his family’s portrait made before he left and asked me to pull the trigger since he couldn’t do that himself and actually appear in the portrait. As a thank you, he said he’d shoot my family and give me the images to play with however I wanted. We were really excited by the offer. You see, I think the last time we had a family portrait done, both of the kids were still in diapers. Seriously.
And, yesterday was our 8th anniversary, so it was about time to get proof that we could still stand each other. =]
Here’s last year’s anniversary image.
exciting news
Can you see that little photo credit there? Yeah, that’s my name. I was so excited this week to receive a copy of The Sailor’s Book of the Weather, by Simon Keeling, and finally see one of my pictures in something that I didn’t pay to print.
It’s a fun feeling.
The publisher was searching flickr for a picture illustrating centrifugal force when she found mine and liked it enough to ask if she could use it. A pleasant side effect of having my pictures online.
In case you can’t see it, here’s the original picture they used in the publication:
I shot this in November, 2006 with our old 3.1 MP point-and-shoot digital camera, so I’m not too sure about the settings, but here’s what the camera recorded on the picture:
ISO 100, 1/14s, f3.7, 10.9mm
The slow shutter speed (1/14s) is what’s producing the motion blur over most of the picture. The reason that the hand and bar are in (reasonable) focus is because I was panning, moving my camera from side to side, as I took the picture. It’s a really fun technique that you can use with any moving object with sometimes very surprising results.
error 99
This weekend, at my son’s birthday party, I discovered that this is not a good thing for your camera to display. At first, I wasn’t really sure what that particular error code meant, so I looked it up.
Apparently, error 99 means “You idiot. You left your camera, complete with it’s massive flash unit that, of course, makes the thing quite a bit top heavy, on top of your already unstable refrigerator right when your wife was trying to get all the food for your kid’s birthday party out of the aforementioned refrigerator such that, of course, when she shut it, the big, expensive, top-heavy thing took a tumble and your cheaply built 50 mm f/1.8 lens took it right on the nose and shattered into pieces. What did you expect?”
Anyone know of anyone wanting to give away their nifty fifty? I miss mine.
“7 years later” is semi-featured in jpg magazine!
If you’re not familiar with JPG Magazine, it’s a photography magazine by the masses. Anyone can sign up on the website, upload pictures, and submit them for consideration in various themes that might appear in future issues of the magazine. Website viewers can vote on whether they think a particular image is good for the theme in question, but the ultimate decision rests in the hands of the magazine editors. You can subscribe to the magazine and get it in your mailbox or buy them in most bookstores. You can also download every issue from their website in pdf format. It’s very cool.
One of the themes of the most recent issue was Family. Since I’m a family guy, I submitted a picture I took of us on our 7th wedding anniversary this past summer, appropriately titled 7 years later:
This image did not get selected for publication.
However, JPG Magazine just started producing outtakes: images that were cool enough to catch the editors’ attention but that, perhaps, didn’t quite fit the issue well enough. Or maybe they ran out of room for that theme. Or whatever.
The important point that I’m trying to make here, besides the fact that JPG Magazine is cool, is that my image above was included in the outtakes for the Family theme. You can get your own copy of the outtakes (I’m on p. 15 of the pdf) from JPG’s downloads page, along with pdf versions of whatever issues you’d like.
