Alex the Photo Blog

Two weekends ago, Keri and I drove to Brevard, NC to visit my grandmother.   Brevard has recently become a vacation destination for “leaf lookers” in the fall as it is nestled in a valley in the Appalachian mountains.  In addition to getting to see Brevard and Mimi, Keri and I also had just enough time on the way home to go on a 2 hour hike in the DuPont national forest.  It’s pretty amazing to be able to see 3 very impressive waterfalls in a just a couple of hours.

I brought my new (used) camera along with a  plan to test it out along with my new (new) 50mm f/1.4.  Overall, very happy with the performance of the camera and lens, but still wishing I had a better eye for landascape and night photography.   I’ll let you judge for yourself (all 4 readers).  I think the waterfall pix would have looked better at sunrise, but I’m too in love with sleeping to go see something at the crack of dawn that I can see at the crack of 2pm…

Also found that my fisheye lens is a real fisheye on the full frame 5d.   Here’s Looking Glass falls in Brevard:

Don’t know why, but I found this random streetlight and snowpile to be interesting…

One of the life-sized toy soldiers through the window at O.P. Taylor’s Toystore in downtown.

Photos of Rocky’s soda shop after hours.  This is one of the places Mimi would hang out after school.

The stars above Mimi’s house (click on photo for larger view):

Triple Falls in the DuPont National Forest:

And of course, yet another “please don’t take a photo of me” photo of Keri.  She loves these:

Two weekends ago I had the pleasure of shooting a good friend in a makeshift studio in his living room.  Though Lou and I work together at Wells Real Estate Funds, we both have outside endeavors and passions that just happen to involve blogs.  My blog of course is all about photography and his is an inspirational site based on self betterment.  As he puts it, the Lou Davis blog is about “becoming the best version of himself” through various life challenges and goals.

Lou was looking for some new photos for his blog and I was recently inspired by Zack Arais’ blog about white seamless backgrounds, so I figured I should give it a try to push myself beyod my usual “available light” photography bounds.   Lou and I met for brunch at Ria’s Bluebird Cafe and from there went to PPR to pick up the background.  I usually do my local Atlanta shopping at Showcase, but for some reason PPR was $25 cheaper for the exact same background.  From there we went to Lowe’s to pick up a sheet of tileboard and (very poorly) secured it to the roof of my car.  Luckily we were only headed half a mile.

Lou was a good sport as I spent so much time screwing around with settings that I neglected to give him good direction.  Luckily he was a natural model, even if he needed a little direction from the peanut gallery (a few friends drinking and playing poker in the kitchen).

Here’s a shot of the setup in Lou’s living room.  White seamless on my background stand with one softbox on the right loaded with my Canon 580EX.  Also had a Vivitar 285 flash on a chair aimed at the background (though it’s hidden by blue cardboard as to not spill light onto Lou).  Ideally I would have had 2 flashes aimed at the background, but the Canon 420 EX I borrowed from a friend unfortunately didn’t have any manual settings, so it was of no use firing only at full power.

Here are some of the final photos, starting with my favorite:

Hi- I’m a Mac:

…And I’m a PC: