Chris Crumley Blog

If you were here day before yesterday, you know part of the story: late at night Chris made a picture for his spouse's oil painting project. Raise the curtain on a new day and find "fuzzy" (shallow depth of field) wasn't what she wanted.

So, being very appreciative of how good she is to him, he broke out the black velvet, moved to f16 and made the picture again guided by a concise description, "everything sharp on a black background."

This one was "perfect."

So, don't cast dispersions on someone because they don't "see" things the way you do; we all have our visions. That's a good thing.

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Photographers often move between taking and making pictures, depending on the project or job. In this case, I'm in the process of making a portfolio picture. I've composited a couple of exisiting photos, then sketched in a piece.

I'm not a sketch artist, but you can probably see where I'm going with this.

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The morning of September 11, 2001, I was in Virginia Beach, Virginia with underwater model Sherry Smith, who'd flown in from Illinois, and Brian Courtney, an editor at Sport Diver Magazine, who'd driven up from Winter Park, Florida.

We were reviewing the shot list for the day's photo shoot, a story on underwater communications, and had Good Morning America on a TV in the background when ABC began showing smoke coming from a gash one of the World Trade Center Towers.

We worked underwater most of that day but made countless trips to the TV as the black events unfolded.

Brian made his way back to Florida the way he came, but all commercial aviation ceased and we had to find a rental car for Sherry to get back to Illinois.

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My wife is taking oil painting lessons from Charles Kello, a talented artist in Norfolk, and she wanted a photo of some peaches to work from.

I'm going through the 40 video tutorials for Adobe Lightroom2 recorded by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe and needed a new RAW file to try some of the new features in the Develop Module.

So, I did a quick setup in the studio and shot this with the MkIII with just the modeling light in the Mola Beauty Dish and a couple of silver reflectors. The 85mm f1.2 lens was on the camera, so I used it and settled on f1.4 for the shallow depth of field.

Yeah, I know, I could've done it in half the time with a point & shoot, but this was more challenging and I got some quality time with Lightroom.

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