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Heading to Gila Bend, Arizona for two weeks!

Gila Bend Gate

I will be going back to Gila Bend, Arizona for two weeks at the beginning of December to do some filming and photography. I will also be building full size remote control Jeep Cherokee target vehicles for the F-16’s to perform practice targeting on. (see my earlier Tumblr post for some photo’s of my trip earlier this year)

I will be building out the electronics, radio control and setting up cameras in the vehicles. In addition, I will be setting up cameras on the desert dirt airfield where we will be driving the vehicles to capture all the action. These cameras will be feeding live video, via a two kilometer WiFi hop back to the hill where our base of operations will be located. The feeds will be recording to a DVR.

I will be posting photo’s and video to my Tumblr blog, Twitter and Facebook pages as much as possible, so stay tuned!

In the mean time, check out this short film that I edited for a trip I did back in January in Utah. This is what the cars will be doing in Arizona, except there will not be ground forces shooting at them! Only F-16’s targeting them with lasers and GBU-12’s.

November 21st, 2009 | Category: Military | Leave a comment

Photo Shoot at the Dojo

This week I was on location at The Dojo American Karate Centers for a two day photo shoot. A couple of times a year, I setup this shoot for the students (and of course the parents).

I utilized my 9 foot wide green screen for the background and three Norman LH2400 strobes for lighting. Two in PhotoFlex LiteDome Softboxes, and one in the back, bouncing off a silver umbrella. I shot with my Nikon D80, USB tethered to my MacBook Pro using Apple’s Aperture application. This workflow not only gives me a great place to organize and edit the photos, but also allows the parents to see the shots live on a second Cinema Display as I shoot.

Here are some behind the scenes photo’s…

I shoot everything in RAW so that I have full control of the images. From within Aperture, I export the images out to Photoshop CS4. I then use the Plug-in Vertis Fluid Mask 3 to cut out the green screen from behind the student. From there I composite two or three images of that same student on my own backgrounds and create the final composite images. I send the finals out to a local lab to print the orders that the parents selected. Everything from wallets to bag tags and prints up to 11×17. I also offer posters framed or un-framed that I print on my Epson Stylus Pro 9800 42″ wide ink jet printer.

Check out some of the finals from my last shoot:

September 26th, 2009 | Category: Martial Arts, Photography | 5 comments

Welcome to my website!

I have finally found some free time to get my website launched!

For a full bio, please see my About Page. In addition however, I wanted to provide a glimpse of my typical day filming and photographing fire & arson scenes, and filming for the military.

For fire scenes, I am usually out of the house at 4:30AM! If I am fortunate, I only have a short local drive, but usually it is a 1-2 hour trip to many of the fire scenes. Here are some photo’s…

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Large fire investigations, like the ones in the photo’s above, can go on for a couple of days. For scenes that large I will shoot 800 plus photo’s, and over 4 hours of video footage.

I use a Nikon D80 with a couple of SB800 Speedlights for all my stills, and a Sony PMW-EX1 with the Sony wide angle lens for all my video. For lighting up the pitch black rooms, I use an LED daylight balanced LitePanels MiniPlus Kit from Litepanels.com.

My military shoots are usually out in Arizona or Utah, out in the middle of nowhere.

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The military will setup these mockups of villages made out of steel shipping containers, like in this photo.

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Here I am doing some close up shots…

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Then the 3-4 days of fun begins. We will be stationed on a hill top like this one…

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and I get to film stuff like this…

This exercise was a four day event, and I focused on showing off the capabilities of full size radio controlled Jeep Cherokee’s and how well the aircraft could hit them with A-10 30mm rounds, and F-16 bomb drops.

So, there is my typical film and photo life. A lot of fun, and challenging. Please check out my other film work here on the site, as I will be adding more in the coming weeks.

May 31st, 2009 | Category: Announcements, Fire Scene, Military | Leave a comment