This past Saturday I participated in the 3rd Annual World Wide Photowalk. This event takes place simultaneously across the globe and involves all levels of photographers. For me, it is a fun social event where I get to meet and greet with socially-minded photographers. These are my people.

I should also note that I make poor decisions before I have eaten or had my caffeine in the morning. In this case both. So for a 1.5 mile, 2 hour walk, I thought it would be fun to lug around the 300mm f2.8 IS lens with 1.4 teleconverter on my 50d and giottos monopod. What could go wrong besides an aching back? Well, nothing went wrong, except for an aching back for the next few days!

Less talking, more pictures

The group heads out down 8th street.

The Sun backlighting a sprinkler

Pretty sure everyone took a picture of this hound dog on the porch, luckily I had the reach to get in close

The favorite stop along the way – an old mechanic garage that has collected some interesting pieces over the years.

Welding on a Saturday morning. This is from my favorite part, the unexpected welder. Again, the reach of the 420mm really helped get in and tight, without putting myself in too much danger.

Thanks to the Lone Star Model A Club for bringing your lovely Cars out to show off. We appreciate it!

Big thanks to Geoff Hammond of Hammondovi Photography for leading this walk for the second year. Great job, and great to keep it interesting.
Next year I invite you to come out and play with your camera. Come be a part of something bigger than yourself. It’s always fun.

The full gallery is here

–JB

The first monthly Flower Power Happy Hour is going to be held at Flower Child Design in Pflugerville, Texas on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Flower Child is located on FM 1825 near Railroad Avenue.

Local Plfugervillian Wedding Vendors will be on hand to provide expertise in Photography, Flowers, Wedding Planning, Catering, Hair and Makeup, and Cakes. We are also going to be providing excellent group discounts where the more vendors you book, the bigger the discount you receive. How is that for one stop shopping!

If you know any brides-to-be, please pass this information along because they will be receiving a great value with local vendors

–JB

A reminder to remember to check out the podcast that I am part of at www.oxandham.com.

The last episode has us talking about Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk that Geoff is leading in Georgetown, and we talk through the process of post-production in answer to one of our listeners questions.

Feel free to drop us a line about any topic related to photography, we will do our best to answer your questions.

–JB

Had wordpress fired up to write a post about the ongoing struggle in my stock photography career. Namely that I don’t have a stock career. That is so five minutes ago.
First sale was the first one that I had a laptop in, go figure. Thanks Steve for that tip

Here is the image

A big thanks to Tavia Williams for her awesome makeup, Andi for being my super yoga model, and for Geoff and Martina for helping me in the ins and outs of istockphoto.com

Now, let go get number two!
– JB

This past Saturday I got a chance to second shoot a wedding with the awesome Dave McLaughlin of DCM Photography at the Umlauf Sculpture Gardens in South Austin.

My role was to swing for the fences and get the homerun shots. I had a Canon 10-22 attached to my Xti on a tripod for some nice wide angle shots that I knew I wanted to blend into HDR’s. I shot -2,0,+2 exposure brackets of each scene. Blended in Photomatix, and Color Adjusted, Noise reduction in Photoshop.

I had fun creating these, hope that you enjoyed

–JB
More information about our Wedding Packages

One of my goals to increase referral business has been to visit local vendors in Pflugerville. I have driven past a place called Flower Child many, many times, but could never tell when they were open or not. I had seen the website, and I liked that they were more of a custom shop than a tele-florist. Finally in the last couple of weeks I noticed signs of life emanating from Flower Child. Cars in the parking, an Open Sign, lights on. Cool.

Went in early last week to check out the place, and Lewis was there to give me a tour and build me a bouquet for wife. Awesome job. Great little shop. Found out that Lewis and Bo had just purchased the place a few weeks back. Ah, makes sense now. Got to talking with the guys, and found out they needed some image work done and hey-could-you-come-by-saturday-for-prom-flower-pictures. Yes, yes I can.

The Flower Child Design team was in full production mode, making over a 100 orders on Saturday for Pflugerville’s Prom. I saw Boutonnieres, Corsages, Arrangements, Fresh Cut flowers and homemade pottery flying out the door. It was all I could do to get pictures of the finished products before they were gone to another happy customer.

I am looking forward to working more with this great team. If you are in Pflugerville and need Flowers, go see them at Flower Child Design

While you are waiting, here is my addition to the Texas Wildflower pictures this spring.

* (Lighting Information for those who care. Two snooted backlights serving as rim light/edge light for the flowers on 1/4 to 1/8 power zoomed to 105mm. A Lastolite Ezybox 24×24 directly over the top of the flower pointed down at 1/2 to 1/4 power. Shot at f10 to f13 and 1/250th. I wanted the background dark as could go. Message me if you have more lighting questions)

–JB

Long, fun filled weekend to be around the horses and players at the SCA’s spring event, Lysts at Castleton.

We started Thursday evening with Becca getting certified to be part of the ground crew for the Joust portion of the event. I was there of course with camera in hand, and sometimes on a tripod. I had been testing out a Canon 1dIV this week, and working on my HD DSLR video skills. I can say that manually following focus at 420mm and f4 is difficult. I understand why follow focus is an important position now. But I digress.

Here is a fun video I made tongue fully planted in cheek. This is my wife, the crucial member of Team AzulOx, riding a beautiful horse named Saga.

Video will be here once Vimeo can figure out my clip

For the participants Thursday capped off a Jousting Clinic held by Jeffrey Hedgecock in Leander. I was able to catch the tail end of their practice in pictures.

Friday, we headed down to the event site on Lake Austin to catch the mounted combat and Cut and Thrust. By we, my crew for the weekend, Geoffrey, Martina, Becca and Myself. Geoffrey debuted this awesome faux-fur covered camera backpack…

The Mounted Combat action was fast and furious, and for a brief few minutes the combat coincided with some beautiful afternoon light.

The highlight of the evening was the debut of the Cut and Thrust event. Sword and Shield in full armor with more slashing and cutting than the point contact of fencing. This was held at night, lit only by torches (5 of them). For the photographers out there I was shooting at approximately iso 3200, f1.8, and 1/80ths. Dark. especially needing a high shutter speed to capture the thrusts and parries.

My favorite shot had a bit of old world and new world

A car with their headlights on was coming right at me, so I maneuvered where one of the spectators blocked the source and I just got the glow. I wish my lightstands were considered period specific because then I could have some real fun with these fighters of course I might have blinded them too, but hey the images would be awesome.

We might have ended up at the pub Friday night, but strangely the camera doesn’t have any incriminating images from that time period.

Saturday morning, and ugh, hard to get up after getting home past midnight on Friday. Hit up the HEB for snacks and libations, packed neatly into our wicker picnic basket, and headed back out to site.

Saturday featured some good events, ground combat early and jousting later on. Becca would be helping the jousters, but also in attendance was a video crew shooting on a RED One, google it, it’s awesome. Since I have attended several of these jousts, I helped them setup and plan some shots. Suzette, the producer, was great to hang and talk with. Looking forward to seeing what they put together.

And then finally the joust. Horses were a tad wound up and spirited, and the horse and rider deck had to be shuffled a little, but all in all a good show.

Following the joust, I really wanted to use my strobes to get some better lit portraits of the riders and their steeds. Headed over to an area down by the water away from the crowds on the other side of cars so that I didn’t have to be period specific (outside of the RED camera of course). We had Eule, Alexis, Ryan, Britta, and Tarafon in full armor.

This is my favorite of this part.

After all of this action, time to head over to the Feast where we loaded up on cheese goo, drank some wine, some scotch, and caught up with the combatants so that we could hear their tales.

Enjoy!
–JB

First up let me say that I have not been able to edit any images yet to accentuate this post. We took some great ones, and we took some bad ones, but I haven’t had a chance to get them up online just yet. Expect a fuller post by the end of the week.

Second, Let me tip my hat to my often partner in crime, Geoff Hammond for putting on a great day of models, music and mayhem. His blog is in the links to the right.

Third, here are some things I have learned to today
- Everyone loves a ringflash some of the time.
- 14 minutes goes by quicker than you think when you know what you want.
- 13 minutes seems like a eternity, when you are out of ideas.
- Mark, you can never have enough sync cords between flashes and wireless triggers.

Lastly,
Here are some links to the software and products that I discussed today.

Orbis Ring Flash
Lastolite Ezybox
Imagenomic Portraiture and Noiseware
Alien Bee CyberSyncs
Photomatix (for HDR’s)

See all of my crazy new istockphoto.com friends bright and early tomorrow morning!

– JB

Been a crazy couple of photography days, mixed in with days of marketing myself. Learning to balance them to get AzulOx Photography where I want it to go. I am feeling more comfortable with my approach to image making, but still learning the ropes of marketing to new clients. At any rate, here is a recap of the past week, and a look forward to next week.

Last weekend saw me in Houston for the third straight week. The 71 to I10 to 610 South drive. We kicked off Saturday with trying to find the Houston Marathon Expo, I had registered to run this race, but an onset of Racing/Training Fatigue in November prevented me from training. . I wanted to still get the shirt though. We parked on the curb in front of the convention center, but I was 10 minutes late. Good thing I wasn’t racing on Sunday, I would have been a nervous wreck trying to get my bib number.

After the Expo try, we set off to meet up with Mark and Debbie Davis. The three of us have done many, many long runs together. We met up at Mia Bella’s downtown. Good Italian food, Strangest Mural painting on the wall. I know, this thread is useless without pictures, but the mural had a strange pastiche of Italian Renaissance-esque figures in gold on a blue sky. Even the waiter agreed that it was out of place.

After a good meal, Becca and I roamed over to the team brightroom photographers hotel, Aloft. I had to grab my media credentials and compact flash cards. Ran into Larry Castillo in the funky lounge at this W hotel. Went upstairs to check out the room I wasn’t staying in and met Andy Heatwole. Houston is his first marathon to attend, and first big race to cover. We bored Becca out of her mind by talking race photography and logistics. Turned out we would be shooting side by side for 7 hours on Sunday morning. Good thing he was a cool guy.

On to Casa de Fishel for the night, I quickly headed to bed for a fitful night of sleep and a 5am wakeup call.

Race Morning, cruised to downtown Houston in the Jetta, found an awesome driveway to a field that served as the parking lot and headquarters of our group of 4 photographers. Stayed in the car for the first hour, eating a honey bun. Headed to the first position around 7am, began the machine gun barrage at 7:30. From 7:30 to 1pm I average 2000 shutter clicks an hour. The Houston Marathon had roughly 30,000 participants, and I took 12,000-ish frames. When you wake up sore from photography, you have done something right.

After the throng passed through at mile 7, we walked a few hundred yards down to mile 24 on the course. Had a sweet spot with good cheering and good music being played across the street. I cheered through the lens at all my Rogue buddies coming down the line. Gave them high fives and support where I could. I wished I could run the last miles for them, but a marathon is a lonely journey even in a sea of people.

Finished up with brightroom, and headed back to the Fishel’s after a Whataburger stop. David had made some game chili, and that put me on my back for a while.

Woke up from the chili nap to drive back downtown for the Fishel’s maternity shoot. We had tried to get together earlier, but things happen and time runs short. She is due any minute. Really cool park – Discovery Green Park – artwork, water features, ice skating rink, hot air balloon rides. All in about 2 city blocks. If I was a houston based photographer, I would be there often to take advantage of the various vignettes in close proximity.

That finished up the weekend.

Looking forward, We have a bridal shoot on Saturday, and the second edition of the Ox and Ham Podcast on Tuesday. If you have questions for the podcast, leave them in the comments either here or there.

After the Capoiera Dancers in front of the graffiti on Thursday, I headed over to Rogue Equipment to cover the Zooma Run 2010 kickoff party. The weather turned away the weak, but the strong women that showed up had a great time and enjoyed increased odds in winning the door prizes.

Some really great organizations there including Advanced Rehab and LifeWorks Counseling, but I am pretty sure everyone’s favorite was the food from SimplyFit Meals. Chris, the GM, brought over some power pancakes and buffalo meatballs with a agave sauce. Mmmmmm. Luckily I stayed around til the end to gobble up some leftovers. Thanks Chris!

This weekend, I am headed off to Houston again to cover the Chevron Houston Marathon.