Results tagged “nikon” from Andrew Kornylak Photography Blog
Wedding season is full-on, and June kicked off with a fine mountaintop wedding in the North Georgia Mountains, near Helen, Georgia.
Helen is a quirky little Germanic alpine town about 1.5 hours north of Atlanta. Mountain bikers know it for awesome trails like the NORBA race courses at Unicoi, and climbers might pass through Helen en route to Yonah Mountain or Tallulah Gorge.
The more adventurous do what the locals do for fun: monster truck rides, a dip in the river, beer and putt-putt... A huge downpour signaled good luck and cleared the skies for the beautiful ceremony, which was held at Lucille's Mountaintop Inn
Congrats to Vanthan & Adrian, June 5, 2010:
Crew:
My indefatigable assistant Sharif Hassan and my intern Brett May. I try not to leave home without them.
Here's one reason why: shooting at the reception, my Nikon SB800 flash started doing unholy things to the exposure, so I grabbed Brett's brand new SB900 and shot away. It worked, the SB800 did not.
I'm pretty sure the critical difference here was that the SB800 shoots TTL at a maximum ISO of 1000, where the SB900 will work up to 6400. The controls on the 900 are way more intuitive. These together mean better performance in the trenches. I bought one immediately.
Your crew should all shoot the same gear and have it ready to go. It also helps if they can assemble a grease a new racing bike with a multi-tool and a can of mustache wax.
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North Georgia Mountain Wedding
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"I love these!!
...Is it normal to take so many shots?"
I had to think about how to answer that one. I delivered about 60 shots of 5 different locations with 3 different outfits for an engagement portrait session.
This happened last week with Aimee and Shu, two lovebirds whose Maui wedding I will have the pleasure of shooting this fall. Both are world travelers - Aimee just got back from New Zealand - and we wanted to shoot an engagement session loosely themed around travel.
When we started, we all had some ideas in our head, but by the end we followed some different threads. We hit a half dozen great spots in Atlanta, many of which were new to me.
I love it when a simple shoot turns into a little adventure for everyone, where things don't go exactly as planned. It's risky, but, as I answered Aimee, "I'm not a normal photographer."
Behind the Scenes:
I'm pretty sure that when they built the MARTA line, Atlanta gathered the best lighting engineers in the city, brought them down to the underground rail tunnels, and buried them alive. Only that can explain the hideous lighting in the stations. The extreme mix of color temperatures will drive you nuts, but the scale and spaceship-like architecture of Peachtree Station is too cool to pass up.
Below: Assistant Sharif Hassan (in red) and intern Brett May lighting it up.
I pack the Westcott Octabank on almost every location shoot but this time we used the Strip Banks a lot more, sometimes with egg crate grids, for even more control over light.
Recently I've been shooting the Zeiss T* manual focus primes a lot, for stills and video. The edge-to-edge sharpness and lack of vignetting is unmatched, and especially superior for use as a video lens, on a 35mm video adapter like the RedRock M2 for example - more on that later.
In the Lowepro Bags:
Westcott Strip banks and Octabank modifiers
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Where We Ended Up: Aimee and Shu Get Engaged
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Thanks to NikonRumors.com for featuring my motion work with the Nikon D3.
I thought it was fun to point out what could be done with existing caveman technology, coming on the heels of an announcement about the new Nikon D3s, which supposedly adds video capabilities...
Besides being an extremely popular site for - what else - obsessing over the latest rumors about new Nikon products (and Leica stuff), it's also a fun place to see what's going on in the photo world in general.
Speaking of which, I'll be giving a workshop about mixed media production for photographers at the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar in December. I'll be doing a walkthrough of the stillmotion workflow on the D3, and maybe the new D3s if I can get one in my hands by then.
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Rumored
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National Geographic Channels is currently airing a show called Hard Time, a look at Georgia's paramilitary correctional system. From NGC: "Hard Time takes viewers on a yearlong journey behind
bars, following the lives of those who work and serve time in two of
Georgia's toughest maximum-security prisons."
Before the first airing, I was hired to shoot a few 360-degree panoramic photographs of the interior of a prison: the cells, the yard, the common areas, etc. I spent the day with Executive Producer Greg Henry of Part2Pictures at Hays State Prison, near Rome, Georgia.
Click here to see the resulting virtual tour of a prison cell and the yard.
Technically, shooting a 360-degree panoramic for this type of virtual tour is straightforward. Almost any camera and lens combination will work, but the wider the field of view of each shot, the fewer shots you will need to cover the entire 360-degree field of view. The critical part, if you want to do it well, is using a tripod that will allow you to rotate your camera about the lens rather than the camera base. This eliminates parallax errors when you are stitching the images together (Tricky to do handheld - try it.) Ideally you will use a tripod that can do this rotation horizontally (hula hooping) as well as vertically (jumping rope). Then you can get the sky and the ground while the camera is still attached to the tripod. Crank those images through some special software and voila: QTVR, or in this case, a Flash VR.
I couldnt get my hands on a true 360 "spherical" pano head in time for this shoot, only one that gave me proper offset horizontal "cylindrical" swivel. No problem: With a full frame camera and 8mm fisheye lens, you can get nearly full 360-degree coverage in 3 shots. Yes, I know, for you pano experts out there, there were some nadir and zenith issues. Don't sweat me. We nailed it.
I took the photos on a Nikon D3 with a Sigma 8mm lens, and a Manfrotto 303PLUS tripod head. The folks at Channels did the stitching. Temporary accomodations provided by the State of Georgia.
Before the first airing, I was hired to shoot a few 360-degree panoramic photographs of the interior of a prison: the cells, the yard, the common areas, etc. I spent the day with Executive Producer Greg Henry of Part2Pictures at Hays State Prison, near Rome, Georgia.
Click here to see the resulting virtual tour of a prison cell and the yard.
Technically, shooting a 360-degree panoramic for this type of virtual tour is straightforward. Almost any camera and lens combination will work, but the wider the field of view of each shot, the fewer shots you will need to cover the entire 360-degree field of view. The critical part, if you want to do it well, is using a tripod that will allow you to rotate your camera about the lens rather than the camera base. This eliminates parallax errors when you are stitching the images together (Tricky to do handheld - try it.) Ideally you will use a tripod that can do this rotation horizontally (hula hooping) as well as vertically (jumping rope). Then you can get the sky and the ground while the camera is still attached to the tripod. Crank those images through some special software and voila: QTVR, or in this case, a Flash VR.
Ben? Nice to meet you. Victor Hugo.
I couldnt get my hands on a true 360 "spherical" pano head in time for this shoot, only one that gave me proper offset horizontal "cylindrical" swivel. No problem: With a full frame camera and 8mm fisheye lens, you can get nearly full 360-degree coverage in 3 shots. Yes, I know, for you pano experts out there, there were some nadir and zenith issues. Don't sweat me. We nailed it.
I took the photos on a Nikon D3 with a Sigma 8mm lens, and a Manfrotto 303PLUS tripod head. The folks at Channels did the stitching. Temporary accomodations provided by the State of Georgia.
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Prison Pano
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Check out the Winter 09 Nikon World Magazine which carries a feature on me, written by editor Barry Tanenbaum. Published quarterly, the magazine features articles by and about professionals using Nikon equipment.
Oh, and it has a monkey on the cover.
You'll have to go get the mag to read it and see the beautiful printing job they did. It is available by subscription here. You can also find it at your local camera shop.
The magazine will also be available online at nikonworld.com soon. It will have audio interviews from me about the images featured in the magazine. Hope I don't sound too rough!
Oh, and it has a monkey on the cover.
You'll have to go get the mag to read it and see the beautiful printing job they did. It is available by subscription here. You can also find it at your local camera shop.
The magazine will also be available online at nikonworld.com soon. It will have audio interviews from me about the images featured in the magazine. Hope I don't sound too rough!
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Nikon World
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Heart of Stone - HD from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.
This winter, Josh Fowler and
I produced a short documentary called Heart of Stone, about grassroots
activism to preserve and protect climbing areas in the Southeast US.
activism to preserve and protect climbing areas in the Southeast US.
We premiered the short film at the finals of the Triple Crown Bouldering Series, the world's largest outdoor climbing competition, to a standing-room-only crowd at Rock/Creek Outfitters in Chattanooga, TN. Great response. Since then, we have distributed HOS freely via the internet. In just a few weeks, it was rated one of the top 10 climbing videos of 2008. Not bad. Problem is, once it was distributed everywhere (Climbing, Marmot, TNF, UCTV, Rockclimbing.com, etc) some film tours decided it had already gotten too much play and decided to pull it from their lineup. Tell me if you want to put it in your tour, I'm all ears. Anyway, here's some buzz:
"...a masterpiece that will help climbers and access for years to come." - Dawson Wheeler, co-owner of Rock/Creek Outfitters
"The best climbing film I have seen yet!" - Kurt Smith
"...a great example of positive, constructive film-making and a clear indicator of where web-based climbing movies will be heading: high quality and large format." - Peter Beal, from Mountains and Water Blog
Our day with Brad McLeod of the Southeast Climbers Coalition was a great example of serendipity. Josh and I had hit the road with Brad one day to visit about a half-dozen closed crags around Alabama, just to get some far shots and chat with him about the project. While we set up a shot of the crags outside Steele, Alabama, Brad mentioned that a couple days ago he had chanced on a For Sale sign in a nearby yard. He had the realtor's number in his phone. I suggested we call her up, knowing full well that the landowners in these parts have been stonewalling against climbing here for years. Well, a miracle happened that day - the realtor came out with a friendly landowner who offered to show us some of the cliffs above his property. We rolled footage on the whole encounter - a classic look at how the Southern sausage is made. That is the scene that opens the film.
Heart of Stone also features some unusual techniques. Most of the footage came from a Sony XDCAM EX1 HS camera, with some b-roll with a Canon HV1. The film also contains stills and stillmotion clips, which are 4K "ultra-HD" moving pictures which I shot entirely on a Nikon D3 still camera. See more stillmotion examples at my Vimeo site. Suprisingly the stillmotion blended well with the HD video footage and stills. I edited everything using Final Cut Pro.
The film ends with a tantalizing look at a new climbing area being developed in Tennessee... Yet another jewel in the southern sandstone crown. Yeah!
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Inside the Heart of Stone
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Thanks for all the info Andrew! Absolutely love the concept and execution on this project. Amazing!
(07.26.10 @ 03:30 PM)pleased to see the photos...its wonderful
(08.02.10 @ 05:06 AM)Love the one with the bride in front of the car!! Great vibrant colors and overall nice composition! :)
(09.05.10 @ 11:30 AM)