CalevPhoto

My father will be on the Discovery Channel today!

Tonight (Tuesday the 24th) at 10 PM on the Discovery Channel, there is a show called “Wreckreation Nation with Dave Mordall”. The show features two parts. First is a segment on swamp buggies and after that Dave attends the Pyrotechnics Guild International convention in Gillette Wyoming.

In this segment my father will be prominently featured as he attempts to break the world record for number of breaks in a shell. I’m not sure how long he will be on, but I think it should be around ten minutes.

My first wedding shoot

As many of you know, I am not into taking pictures of people other than my kids.  I have never taken a fashion shot and likely never will.  A lot of it is that I find these pictures very fake.  I am just not a “look at me” kind of person and do not like others who are.

Still, events I find quite different.  The pictures serve a higher purpose than just “look at me” and are a way for those in the picture to remember events for years later.  Therefore, when asked I often bring my camera to these events.  Still, I had never been asked to bring my camera to a wedding.

Recently, some friends of ours who were not able to hire a professional wedding photographer asked if I could take pictures.  I obliged and tried to do the best job possible.  In the process, I think some things worked well and some things not so well.  Here are several of the shots (note: I did not do any post processing).

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Coming soon… Doing my part to make this a better world.

Very soon I will be opening a new site whose goal is to sell prints.  I will be going through Smugmug, except the site will only display my top pictures that I suspect someone may want a print of.

I honestly am not sure what sales will be like on this site, but my suspicions are that print sales will be slow, if there are any at all.

However, if there are any sales the majority of the profits will be donated to several different charities.  I have decided to split the income up as follows.

World Wildlife Fund (20%) – I have a sore spot for wildlife as I think it gets the short end of the stick in most parts of the world today.  With the rapid state of species extinction and deforestation today, we need to do as much as possible to slow, if not stop it.

Doctors Without Borders (20%) – This is one of my favorite charities and in recent years has received the largest amount of my donations.  It is also one of the charities with the lowest expenditure ratios.

Sherwood Forest Elementary PTA (20%) – OK, not the most famous of all charities, but this is where my kids go to school and I would like to do the most possible to make it a better place for them.  Obviously I already donate additional money above twenty percent of nothing.

Myself (40%) – I love helping others, but some new lenses would be nice too…

I plan to start this site extremely soon, and in fact the main reason for publishing this is to push me over the edge.  Now that I have told the whole world I plan to do it, I’d better get cracking…

5D Mark II and Video

While I’m without camera and waiting for my 5D Mark II to arrive, I thought I would share some of my ideas on how to take advantage of the video feature in it.

First of all, I have never really bothered with video that much.  I tend to not enjoy watching videos of weddings, events, and vacations that others greatly enjoy.  I do enjoy videos of my kids, so we purchased a Canon HF10 some time ago.  This is a very nice video camera, though we still do not have a good decoder for the AVCHD format.

However, the Mark II offers some new perspectives on video previously unavailable to me.  For one, the quality is considerably better than the HF10.  While it is certainly missing features present in top video cameras, the raw quality of the video is on par with the best video cameras.  Therefore, I plan to use it for the following purposes.

1. Video of kids.  I’m not sure how much we’ll take with the HF10 and how much we’ll take with the Mark II.  My guess is the HF10 will still take the lion’s share of the video.  However, when I feel that the video is very important, I will likely use the Mark II.
2. Macro video.  In particular I hope to take macro stock video.  I am still working out a number of the details on how I plan to go about this, as lighting and stability are significant issues that I have not yet fully addressed.  Once I do start creating these videos, I will obviously post them here along with my technique.
3. Real estate videos.  I have gone back and forth about the need and use of video in real estate.  The truth is I have yet to see a real estate video that does a good job.  However, I have some ideas on how this may work and I plan to do use an upcoming listing of Nelya’s to test my theory out.

So, yes, the HD video feature of the Mark II is useful in my opinion.  It is not a replacement for a full video camera, but I suspect if you understand it’s limitations it makes a great tool for those of us unable or unwilling to spend tens of thousands on a professional video camera.

Congratulations Jason Turner!

A lot of attention has been paid both to the amazing accomplishments of Michael Phelps and to the wins by the USA basketball team, but there has been a lot of hard work that has gone unnoticed.  A prime example of this is one of my best friends from childhood – Jason Turner.

Ironically I believe we both started shooting around the same age – somewhere around 11 or 12 years old.  While I only shot for a few weeks each summer, reached a few rungs on the NRA Sharpshooter classification, then gave up, Jason took it far more seriously.  He would shoot during the evening multiple times each week and later on moved to Colorado so he can practice all of the time with some of the top trainers in the world.  Sadly, we did not maintain contact after high school but I still did keep track of his accomplishments – from the Pan American games to the Olympics.

This year all of the effort finally paid off with a bronze medal in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.  At first I was sad for him because he came in 4th place by only a single point.  However, the North Korean shooter ahead of him was stripped of his medal due to doping and the medal was then given to Jason.

Of course, I’m sure very few Americans have heard of him, but he has put the same amount of effort into his sport as the other more well known names there.  Here’s a list of some of his other accomplishments.  So again, congratulations that all of that hard work finally paid off with an accomplishment you will be proud of for the rest of your life.