Nimes Coliseum Bullfighter
When I was in France two weeks ago, one of the places I visited was Nimes. In case you’re not familiar with where Nimes is located, it’s about 450 miles south of Paris. Our reasons for visiting Nimes was twofold. The main reason was so we could watch Sting perform inside of “The Coliseum”. The other reason was so that we could meet Fabien Barral, who is a very popular French designer. Fabien is the one who designed Trey Ratcliff’s blog at StuckInCustoms.com. I’ll have a future blog post all about the incredible afternoon we all spent with Fabien and his family at their home posted in the near future.
The night before Sting was to perform, we all ventured down towards the area where the Coliseum is located so that we could walk around the town and explore some. While there, Trey and I sent our wives off on their own so that we could take some photos. Since there was also a concertContinue Reading This Post —>
Trey Ratcliff shows off some "Really Big Lenses"
When I was first down in Cocoa Beach earlier this year for the launch of space shuttle Endeavour, my friend Trey and I had rented some really big lenses from BorrowLenses.com. Our intentions were to get some incredible close-up shots of Endeavour as it lifted off the launchpad.
Unfortunately, the launch was delayed for several weeks, which left Trey and I trying to figure out what we could instead get pictures of with these humongous lenses. Since we were staying within walking distance to the beach, we decided to get up before sunrise one morning to get some shots of the sun coming up.
We arrived on the beach about 20 minutes before sunrise, so Trey asked me to whip out my video recorder so he could share with you a little information about the lens he was using and also explain why it’s necessary to use a Gimbal tripod head when shooting pictures using very large lenses.
Final Launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis
I’ve just returned from an all-day event at Kennedy Space Center in which I got to witness the final launch of space shuttle Atlantis. What made today even more special was the fact that this launch was also the final launch of any type of space shuttle vehicle. I’m extremely exhausted, sweaty, and sunburned, so I plan to write a much more in-depth post about my launch experience in the near future. In the meantime, please enjoy viewing some of the photos I captured both yesterday and today.
Photo of the space shuttle on the evening prior to the final launch of Atlantis from NASA.
The NASA Astrovan rides by the crowd as it transports the astronauts to the launch pad.
Space Shuttle Atlantis just seconds after launching.
Space Shuttle Atlantis as it beams through a layer of low lying clouds.
Ferrari on the Savannah
On Saturday, I traveled into Savannah to check out the Ferrari Car Show that was taking place on Hutchinson Island. The event was put on by the “Ferrari Club of America“, which consists of over 5000 members. About 90% of the members own Ferrari’s, while the other 10% consist of Ferrari enthusiasts and/or soon-to-be Ferrari owners.
It was extremely hot while I was walking around. It felt like it was at least 120 degrees outside, but I managed to walk around for a couple of hours. There was well over 50 Ferraris spread around the grounds. I couldn’t help but think of how much money would be lost if an airplane were to crash in this field. (I know, sick thought… But you can’t help what you think.)
After losing 5 lbs through my sweat, I decided it was time to leave. I headed to a Starbucks on Broughton Street in downtown Savannah and spent 2 hours processing the photo you see in today’s post. Later that evening, I processed the photo you see below.
Fun in the Sun on Cocoa Beach
A couple of weeks ago I headed down to Cocoa Beach, Florida to snap some photos of space shuttle Endeavour blasting off. My friend and mentor, Trey Ratcliff, had been given special permission to take some close-up shots of the launch pad and called me 10 days prior to the launch and asked if I’d help him out by being his assistant. Trey had previously arranged to rent several gigantic lenses from BorrowLenses.com and was going to need someone to help carry them around for him. Trey owns 2 high-end Nikon DSLR’s and also needed someone to “work” his 2nd camera during the actual liftoff. Being the great friend that I am, I immediately agreed to help him. (Trey had already known how jealous I was about his upcoming shuttle launch adventure. I believe the actual amount of time that I had to think about helping him out was less than one second.)
Unfortunately, the shuttle launch was scrubbed 4 hours prior to the scheduled launch due to a malfunction in a heater assembly unit thingy. Since Trey and I had these incredibly awesome lenses at our disposal, we decided to make the most of them and headed to the beach to get some “action shots”.
Here's Trey and I showing off the lenses we rented, just before heading out to the beach to capture some beauty! I'm holding a 500mm F4 Nikon lens and Trey his holding a 600mm F4 Nikon Lens.
After attaching the “ridonkulously” huge lenses to our cameras, Trey and I left our hotel and began the fortunately short walk to the beach. (The made-up word “Ridonkulous” is the exact word that Trey used when describing these lenses in an upcoming video I’ll be publishing on this site.)
As we arrived on the beach, we began setting up our tripods and attaching our cameras. It was amazing how much attention we were getting. I imagine most people thought we were with the paparazzi because once they spotted us, they quickly began looking in the direction our camera’s were pointing to see what/who we were snapping photos of.
We had about 5-6 people come up to us during our photo shoot. Most were just curious what we were doing and were very friendly. One person came up who had recently started his photography hobby. He mostly just drooled over our gear and asked us a bunch of questions. I’m not even sure if the answers we provided were correct or not, but because we had these huge lenses, he probably just assumed we knew what we were talking about.
During our walk to the beach, we passed by the "Adult Emporium". Trey thought it would be funny to get a picture of him in front of their sign with him holding his camera/lens, so I snapped a quick photo with my iPhone's camera.
We ended up staying on the beach for about 1 1/2 hours. We snapped photos of kite surfers, volleyball players, kids building sand castles, distant cruise ships, and women in bikinis. (How could we not get pictures of women in bikinis with these lenses at our disposal?)
As we were getting ready to pack up our gear and return back to our hotel room, an incredibly beautiful woman crossed my line of sight. I pointed her out to Trey and we both just starred in her direction, hoping she’d soon be venturing into the water. As luck would have it, that’s exactly what she did. She was with two of her friends and they all darted down towards the water.
The lenses that Trey and I were using were really fast. They allowed us to take photos with very fast shutter speeds which would freeze the action. Because of this, we both had our cameras set to rapid-shot mode. What was so funny is that as soon as I would begin taking rapid-shots, Trey would also take rapid shots at the exact same time. It was as though each of our cameras were synced together. For the next 5 minutes, we continued taking shots of this woman and couldn’t help but laugh a couple of times as our shutters continued with their synchronous shutter demonstration.
We took a lot of pictures of this young woman. We couldn’t help it… She was very beautiful and almost all of the pictures we took of her made her appear as though she was at a swimsuit model photo shoot. What made these photos even that much better was the fact that she didn’t even know she was having her picture taken. Even though our lenses were huge, she never spotted us because we were so far away.
This is what the original version of this photo looked like prior to any post-processing. As you can see, there were actually 3 people within the shot. Unfortunately, 2 of them didn't make the cut.
Bummer… You’re either not currently a “VIP Member” of this site, or you’re not logged in. If you were, you’d be able to watch a 30 minute video tutorial I made which shows you how I post-processed this photo in order to remove the 2 additional people who were in the original image. You’d also be able to see some of the additional pictures I took at the beach during this photo venture at the beach. Worry-not, however, for becoming a VIP Member is FREE and just a click away. Click here to learn more and signup.
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