Long Time No See

Hey world!

It's been a long time since I last posted, but in exchange I have some new work to post up! New pics coming up shortly!

FanimeCon 2010

Well, Fanime is now over, and it was a blast. Now I begin the arduous task of of processing all these pictures to be posted on the blog (I have over 500 to sort through, but not all are getting posted). I'd figure I would speed things up and just post them as fast as I can, just doing basic tweaks (such as White Balance correction and contrast adjustments) for those who just want the pictures now, and work on them in depth individually over the next few weeks.

More to come

Update 5/31/2010: Narrowed down the pictures from about 700 to 100. About 10% done doing the quick post processing in light room (it's great for getting things done quick!). A couple of the pictures are going to need some noise reduction (Lot's of Noise looks terrible on the D40's image sensor, in my opinion) which have to be done in photoshop.

Update 6/1/2010: First 8 pictures are up! More to come later tonight!

Update 6/2/2010: Almost 60 pictures are now up. I have about more to work on, but I got the boulder over the hill now.

Update 6/3/2010: The majority are now up! There are a few remaining ones I need to touch up, which require more precision tools to touch up on (such as removing obvious yet very fine strands of hair covering the face which can be distracting or removing massive amounts of noise).

Update 6/4/2010: All pictures are now up! Thank you for viewing!

For my first set of event photos, I'm posting the album from my first photo gig. I was given the task to take photos of the Educational Opportunity Program of San Jose State's Honors ceremony. The task included both candid shots and select photos of certain people. For my first gig I think I did pretty well, but there's room for improvement.

Cherished Possessions

Another Semester has came to a close. Here is my Final for Color Photography, a photo set I have called " Cherished Possessions." Simply, I took photos of people with their most cherished and beloved of possessions. The only requirement I asked was it had to be the most cherished, no matter how dirty, banged up, trashed, or dismembering the object was.

On a side note, I have more content that needs to be uploaded, which I now have the time for. Stay tuned.

Portraits of a small Business Owner

A while back I got an assignment to take portraits of people who are shared a similar uniformity. Some of my classmates went with smokers, some went with baseball players. I chose to go with the Local owners of small businesses. I chose this route because most people don't really think about the business owner as an individual. By taking these portraits, we get to look at each individual person for a longer amount of time, which makes these pictures that much more personal.

Color of Night

Here's a small set of pictures from my Color of Night Assignment. The goal here was night photography around my neighborhood. I had the camera set for the daylight setting, because it the many different light sources yield colors that our eyes automatically compensate for the correct color.

All of these pictures use time lapsed exposures, so you get to see that cool light trail from the cars passing by. The assignment was a challenge but in the end I had a lot of fun with it.

Saint Elmo's Fire

Last week the fog layered incredibly thick on my street. I walked outside after awaking from my slumber to the sight of a eerily and spooky environment caused by the diffusion of light by the fog.

I seized the opportunity and grabbed my camera. In my pajamas, I begin taking long exposures of about 20 seconds or more with a very aperture to create not only a long depth of field, but using the long exposure time to create vivid colors that are invisible to the naked eye.

With this photo, I had to take in account timing, because cars go up and down on my street. You can even see the headlights of an on coming car in this picture. Fortunately, the camera was done compiling the exposure just before the car was moments away.

Frost

I've been busy with school so I have not been able to update in a while. Anyways I took these back in December when we had that brief cold spell. All were shot in the morning. I particularly like the flowers. Enjoy.

A set of Panoramas

I started to experiment with Panoramic photography in the fall semester of 2009. I would periodically work in this style from time to time while working on other assignments. I was exploring how the stitching methods along with the orientation of the camera and movement of the camera on an axis can distort an image. I have prepared some samples on what I worked on the past few months.

Happy New Year!

It's that wonderfull time...

I was asked by the Pastor of a church to take a series of photos of the altar and the Christmas tree that is set up. Here are the results. In order to pull off the lighting, I had the camera stopped to f/28 and set the expose time to about 30 seconds. On the Bay Jesus I used a shutter release to get a long exposure (about 2-3 minutes).

Signs of Our Times

This post updates the Signs of Our Times Gallery with additional work. Hope you enjoy.

Street Grafitti

Hey Folks,

I've been busy with schoolwork, but now I have free time to update this page again. Beginning tonight I will be posting of series of photos that represents the signs of our time. I'll be doing separate posts for each section, I'll be opening the set with a series of street graffiti found around San Jose. I hope you enjoy.

Art Project

I got another reason to play around with my camera when I got assigned a rather unique assignment for an art history class about a couple of weeks ago. I used the assignment experiment with both photo cubism and synthetic cubism.

What I did was I took a glass bottle of Mexican coke, smashed the bottle with a hammer, and re assembled the key elements piece by piece by taking a photo of each one. I took the collected photos and re assembled the bottle on a two dimensional plane.

I dub it " Glass bottle of Mexican Coke"

The San Francisco Trip

I recently took my very first trip to San Francisco. Got there with friends at about 11am - 12pm and made our merry way throughout parts of the city. We started off at Fisherman's Wharf, amazed by all the camera stores so close to each other. We then grabbed some lunch, then made our march through Chinatown to the more Metropolitan area of the City.

The journey through the city was a new experience for, since I never seen so many people in such Small space, simply amazing. China town yield some great shots along what I believe was the downtown area (Post St. is downtown right?). The 20 block walk ended when we got to Rasputin Music. We went in and spent some time inside. After making my purchase, we left and walked back to the wharf, taking even more photos.

The lasts shots I took were of this very photogenic seagull. It didn't seem scared of me even though I was about a foot away from it. After those shots, we headed back to the car, and left San Francisco. I am hoping to return soon!

Enjoy the shots.

Trip to Alum Rock Park

I got hit with a last minute Biology assignment, so some very good friends and I took a trip to Alum Rock park on the east side of San Jose. The assignment was to measure the level of stress prior, during, and after a set amount of time being out in nature. I got some pretty good shots, and Ben was having fun with his Mylo. Also I took this as an opportunity to test out taking panoramic shots, which should be uploaded soon.

Update: My first two panoramic pictures are now online.

First set of photos now up

After a couple of days trying to get every thing synced and working, Picasa has now replaced Flickr as my photostream, and with that I show off the first of my photos that I took at Seacliff beach. It was a fun day, spent with friends goofing off while cleaning the beach. Got some great shots in too! Check my Photostream for more shots.

First post

Hey there,

This is my first post on this portfolio/blog of mine. I'll be using this as a place to post my latest shots, updates where I'm going, what I'm doing, what I plan to do, and list off contact info and a FAQ. Updates are planned for weekly after I get things in order. I am mananging and setting up a picasa and twitter account to go along with this blog.

Enjoy the updates.

UPDATE

Picasa was giving me issues, so I went with Flickr for the time being, so you can view most of my shots from my day at Seacliff beach (more on that to come)!