More!

Below you'll see a picture of my good friend Lucas. I was stationed with him in Las Vegas and ended up rooming with him and another friend Lloyd for a majority of my time there. I had the good fortune of being sent to the East Coast for DINFOS and Lucas just so happens to goto Virginia Tech now days. Well I had an assignment that consisted of portraits and expressions. I hung up a blanket, set up a couple of SB-800s and had him pop a squat in front of the camera. I've got probably 30 photos of him acting completely goofy. Which is great for memories sake, but I won't post them up here just for his sanity. :)

After returning from DINFOS I found our headquarters building being torn apart for construction purposes. Apparently they're remodeling the first floor. I was over there knocking out some paperwork and thought I'd grab the camera to shoot some of the construction. Unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot going on. None of the shots were really newsworthy or important. But I really liked the one below, could be better, could be worse, but cool nonetheless.

If you're following me on twitter you probably heard me talking about getting a Justin Clamp from Manfrotto, unfortunately I need it this week, and wound up running to the local camera store and making my own. In the end it cost more than the Justin Clamp itself, but I get a few more pieces that I can use later on for other projects out of it. But below you can see it, and as you can probably tell, its incredibly useful for any kind of lighting you might want. Instead of relying on having someone hold the flash, or sitting the flash on a surface that could possible get into the photo, now i can hang it from the ceiling, mount it to a chair, or whatever else I feel like mounting it to! :)

More to come!

As promised!

Part of our training that we took part in while at the Defense Information School, there was a block (section of training) that focused on Combat Photography. This is the one thing that I actual crave, and want to do. My name will always be in the hat to goto a "hot" zone to take photos. I know my mother would probably cringe to read that, but it's definitely what I've always wanted to do.

Below are some of the photos I took during one of our exercises. Obviously we used paintball guns, instead of the real thing. But it made it quite a bit of fun. It was probably a good 20 degrees outside, it had just snowed the night before and we were going on approximately 4 hours of sleep. Wish I could do this all the time! :)

^ Lindsay High - she just has some killer eyes... can't help but shoot 'em!

^ one group stacking to breach a building. Low light inside and no use of flash for obvious reasons, and we don't have high quality low light cameras (**cough** D3's - Are you reading this NGB?) :P

More to come!

Back from Maryland

Well, I'm back from Maryland, and I was unable to keep posts going on the blog, mainly due to being busy and lazy during what free time I had. Through the next couple of days I'll be postings updates with pictures from my time at the Defense Information School.

Overall it was a good experience, and I feel I walked away learning some things. The first couple weeks were a wash (stuff I learned in college) but understandable, you have to start with the basics so that everyone is on the same playing field. Thankfully, the instructors kind of let me break free of the mold they were keeping everyone in and allowed me to experiment using a ridiculous amount of equipment. :) I checked out 3 flashes, stands, umbrellas, a nice wide-angle lens, and a few other miscellaneous items.

So here are a few photos from the course!

All 3 of the above images are recreations of works done by Joe McNally. One of our assignments was to create a reproduction, and since I admire his work so much and aspire to be like him, naturally, I wanted to create a challenge. Now, they're no where up to par with his, but for the most part, I'm happy with how they turned out.

More later :)