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Atlanta based photographer Zack Arias 6 degrees of separation experiment

On a random note, I was reading Zack Arias’s blog today and thought I’d throw this out there for him.  He’s doing a little social networking experiment playing with the 6 degrees of separation theory.

He’s got two goals that he’s working on:

1 - He wants to shoot a portrait of Coldplay.

2 - He wants to hang out for a day and shoot Diddy.

I doubt that anyone that stumbles across this blog will be of any help, but Zack’s teaching on off-camera lighting for photography have helped me enough that he’s worth the shout out.

Check out his post.

Boss RC2 Looper

Earlier this month, I decided to get a new pedal, the Boss RC2 Loop Station.  This is a fun little pedal.  It can be used for live performance, however, practice is the main reason that I decided to get it (so far, it’s been a great way to make practice fun.)

For those of you who don’t know what a looper is, the concept is fairly simple (and the name should give you a pretty good idea.) A looper allows you to record a portion of sound, and play over and over again, creating a loop.

There are many different loopers out there. When I was looking at which one was right for me, I had to stop and ask myself what my needs were.

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Is my practice getting too routine?

I need some motivation.  I’ve been trying to practice my guitar every day, but it’s really easy for me do the same things over and over, not challenging myself to try and learn new things.

The last week or so, for my practice time, I’ve been grabbing my guitar, turning on a television show and working on the same picking techniques, hammer-ons and fret board positions over and over again.

In some ways this can be a good thing to do, I want to get a good grasp on the concepts and fret board positions that I have learned before trying to cram more concepts into my mind.  Besides, building muscle memory is one of the biggest things that helps learning to play the guitar…

Normally, I may let these excuses be justification to keep doing what I’m doing. However, the purpose of focusing on guitar this month is to stretch myself.  I say no more!   ;)

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DigiTech RP500

If I were to have chosen my effects, I probably would have gotten individual pedals and built the effects that I wanted, however, I signed up for Musician’s Friend’s Weekly Gear Giveaway and won the DigiTech RP500. (Unfortunately, Musician’s Friend no longer does the Weekly Gear Giveaway, which is sad, because it’s always fun to get an email saying “You won!” no matter what the prize is.)

I am very impressed with this pedal.  It is made out of a cast metal chassis and has very sturdy “vacuum-style switches.”

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My electric guitar.

Welcome to the month of June!  I couldn’t wait for this month to get here…  As you may know, every month I pick a topic to focus on.  Meaning I spend my free time and money trying to learn or improve myself in one specific thing.  This past Sunday night, May 31, I was so excited to move on to this month’s topic that I jumped onto the computer and started ordering things to help me out in June.  After all, the money wouldn’t come out of my checking account until this month.

So, what am I focusing on for the month of June?

If the photo here hasn’t given it away, for June I am working on electric guitar.

I’ll be doing individual posts going into more detail of my gear soon, but for now I’ll just say that I like my set-up but need to learn how to use it much better.  I’ve taken the money to invest in the equipment, now I need to take the time to invest in learning to play it well.

The things that I plan on focusing on this month are fret positions, triads, power chords, scales, arpeggios, and picking techniques… I know it’s a lot, but I don’t want to cheat myself.

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I had been doing really well, riding my bicycle to work every day this month… at least until the weather started getting cold, rainy and windy… then I was out of town for a week doing video production work at Pursuit ‘09 for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Granted, I did bring my bicycle along to Pursuit, however there were only two out of the five days that I was there that I took the time to go for rides.

I where I have been doing well is keeping a record of my calorie intake each day… I have a goal and try to stick to the calorie count that I set… but again, I’m realizing that I’m coming to the end of another month and haven’t gotten as much done as I would have liked to, part of me feels like I need to spend more than a month focusing on each topic, but at the same time, I feel totally ready to move on to something else but at the same time continue to ride my bicycle to work whenever possible… so maybe moving on is the best thing.

I am excited for next month becasue I will be working on improving a skill again.  I think that that was one of the things that I missed this month… I was bettering myself, but I wasn’t excited about it as I should have been.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for now, but, I thought I’d throw it out there.

It's begining to feel like summer... I've been riding my bicycle quite a bit lately.

As you may have noticed on the right hand side of the blog, I have added the “Recent Activities” list, that shows some of the things that I have been doing to work on being more physically healthy.

I have found my iPhone to be a huge help in keeping track of my activities.  I am using an application called iMapMyFitness which allows me to track my bike rides, walks, runs and other physical activities.

For example, I just open the application and hit record at the beginning of a bike ride and it will automatically record my route, time, speed, and calories burned.

I can then log into their website, Map My Fitness to name the workout, and add extra details such as the weather, my weight, heart rate, etc.

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It’s the beginning of a new month… which means that it’s time to move on to a new focus for what I’m doing in my free time.

There are so many things to learn in this world and so many skills that can be developed that if you try and conquer learning about all of your interests at once, you will end up so spread out that it’s hard to do anything well.

To make my life skills a little more focused, I’ve decided that every month I’m going to try and learn more about one specific skill, or interest, as well as putting into practice whatever is associated with that skill set.

Since today is the first day of May, that means that yesterday was the last day of April. April’s topic for me was off-camera lighting for photography. and I had a lot of lighting assignments to get caught up on from the Strobist: Lighting 102 course that I had been working my way though.

Wednesday night I finished watching the Strobist Lighting Seminar DVD set that I had started a couple of weeks ago which goes through most of the same material as the online Strobist: Lighting 102 “course” does (which is a series of blog entries that David Hobby put together to help teach lighting.)

I didn’t quite do all of the assignments from the course in order, but I worked on what I could, and here is what I ended up with.

Lighting 102 - 3.1 Balancing Light: Twilight

Balancing Light: Twilight - Mr. Matt was a great model while standing waiting for someone to toss him the Frisbee.

For the photo of Matt here, I lit him from the front right with a Nikon SB-80 Speedlight. With the Speedlight, Matt’s exposure in relation to the sky was easy to control.  The flash that was lighting him was seemingly instant, which allowed me to get proper exposure on him right away, and the sky was then able to burn into the image while the shutter was still open with a longer shutter speed.  Matt didn’t get over exposed because while the sky was burning in, there was no light on him… once the flash had fired, he went dark for the rest of the exposure, but the initial image of him at the proper exposure was captured in that brief instant. Continue Reading »

We are nearing the end of another month.  I’m sitting here asking myself “What happened to the month of April?”

This month has flown by. This is the view from the airplane that I took to Las Vegas.

It seems like I just got started on this month’s topic of lighting, and it’s almost time to wrap it up.  Sorry I didn’t post more about my experience.  It was one of those things where either I take my time to learn about lighting or I spend my time writing about it… which is hard to do if I haven’t learned what I was going to write about.

I was also planning on working my way completely through the Lighting 102 course… but due to traveling and loosing some of my lighting equipment, I haven’t had the chance to finish that yet.

I do plan on spending my time between now and then to finish the 8 DVD set that David Hobby of Strobist.com put together. Continue Reading »

So, you have a digital SLR but don’t find yourself using it as much as your point-and-shoot because it is just too big to be carrying with you all of the time… or, you don’t have a digital SLR and can’t justify spending the money on one, or you just don’t want a big camera.

Don’t worry, there are other options for getting the flash off your camera besides using big digital SLRs.

I recently had a friend ask me about the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3.  I did a little reading on it along with a good competitor that looks just a bit cheaper… the Canon G10.

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