New Senior Templates Available at Stan Kozlowitz Photography!

New Senior Templates are available. Available in sizes 5 x 7, 8 x 10, 11 x 14, 16 x 8, 16 x 10, 16 x 20, 20 x 10, and 20 x 24 formats. Customize the templates with your choice of background, keyline and text colors, 16 different fonts and over 50 different vignettes and creative edge masks.


To see all the templates, go to http://Kozphotos.jalbum.net/Senior%20Templates

Please call Stan Kozlowitz at 304-742-5247 for prices and information on other services.


You can view all the Senior Portrait Templates at

http://KozPhotos.jalbum.net/

All senior portraits are from Brandon Michael Photography in Witchita Kansas.

New DIY Diffuser for Nikon SB-800 flash

I finally made the DIY diffuser and it works great. The idea came from a post by Chuck Gardner. Here is the link to that post : http://super.nova.org/DPR/DIY01/

Mine is a combination of two (or three) ideas that have surfaced on the internet. Here are some views of the finished diffuser.

The first view is a side view to show the curvature of the front. This forms somewhat of a parabola to get more light output. The only thing I would change is to curve the top in about two-three inches so more light goes outward instead of upward.

The second view shows the diffuser mounted on to the SB-800 flash. It is 12 " tall and 9 " at the widest part. I bought 2 pieces of "fun foam" from Wal-Mart, available in the crafts section, for $0.72 each, and something called Craft-It "clear plastic canvas". I cut out the foam, one white piece and one black. Then cut the plastic canvas about an inch shorter all the way around. I got a woman at Wal-Mart to sew the thing together and added the velcro stips.

If I make another one, I will use Duro spray adhesive. Will save the $3.00 I paid for getting it sewed. And the bond is permanent.

One of the pictures I took was of this woman, Lora Mullins, who was speaking at the Coal Miners Memorial Service in Craigsville on Saturday. She is the organizer of the memorial.

Another picture is of Connie Sue singing "Coal Miner's Daughter".

If you want to see more pictures using the diffuser, go

http://kozphotos.jalbum.net/. Click on Coal Miners Memorial.

The diffuser worked great and I'm really pleased with it. It even worked great on group shots. Take a look.

Third Week of football

Well, I have three weeks of Friday night football under my belt. Photos keep getting better, but it is. clear I need a faster lens. Something like a f/2.8 or even a 3.5 at 300mm would be great for night time football. My best pictures come from using flash, and that is ok except I can't click off more than one shot per play. If I had a faster lens where I didn't have to use flash, I could use the 8 frames per second feature of the camera and get some better pictures. But I may be through for this season, except for the play-offs. There is no doubt that Nicholas County will be in the AAA play-offs. They were # 10 in the state after last week. Here is the picture that was in the paper from last weeks game.

Two Weeks of Football

I have been to two games so far and have had two photos selected for the paper. The first one of Nicholas County High School shown to the right.

Nicholas County Grizzlies QB Pat O'Dell eludes two Braxton County Eagle defenders.

Richwood High School Lumberjack QB Sam Tindal runs for extra yardage in the 42-22 win over Tygarts Valley on 10-10-08. You can read all about it at http://www.nicholaschronicle.com/.

If you look closely at the two photos, you will see a distinct difference in the taking of the photos. One, the skin tones seem different, and without the flash, you get more of the background. But with flash, I see a better picture of the players. That is, it is shot at a faster shutter speed, so I get a better quality without blur. One thing is clear... I need a FASTER LENS.

In the Nicholas County game, I did not use flash. I had a shutter speed of 1/160s, usually. The white balance was on Auto-WB, and shutter priority. I also shot RAW and converted to high quality JPEG before sending to the paper. Some of my pictures turned out too dark. But I was shooting at ISO 3200 with NORM noise reduction turned on. I think they turned out pretty good. The Richwood pictures were done using the Nikon SB-800 flash, with a shutter speed of 1/250s, still at ISO 3200. I may try ISO 6400 this week and see how that turns out. The noise may be too much. Then again, it may be ok.

Here are some cheerleaders that wanted to pose for me. This actually is a Photoshoped photo where I took the head from one picture and pasted into this photo. See if you can guess which head came from another photo. I probably should have done this a little differently, but it was my first attempt. Taken with the pop-up flash, I believe.

I am adding a picture of the color guard. These are high school students enrolled in Jr.ROTC. Brings back memories when I was in "boot camp".

Next week I will talk about two projects I have going on. One is HDR photography. That's High Dynamic Range photography, which combines pictures of the same scene that have different exposures. I'll post a couple of HDR photos to show you what I'm talking about. Another project is a DIY flash diffuser for my Nikon SB-800 flash. This widens the light making it more diffuse and softens the shadows somewhat. More on that later.

Until next week, d'osvadania!

Final results of L-E-D experiment

My very short experiment with my little Garrity L-E-D flashlight from Wal-Mart was concluded a few minutes ago. The last photograph on the last installment of the blog showed a better photo than the first. The first one was too blue and I determined after reading the manual that it should be around 5000 degrees K. So, the second picture was taken at 5000 degrees K. Still a little too blue, but much better. So after posting the blog and reading some e-mail, I quickly made another test. I set the color temperature to 5880K. That did it. Walls are a neutral beige (correct color) and the carpet is exactly what it should be. So, I'm satisfied the color temp of the L-E-D flashlight is 5880K.

The reason I'm doing this is that I am intrigued with taking photos at night by painting with light. It makes for some very interesting photos.

Until next time...

Stan

Another experiment with Light Using L-E-Ds

Well it's another week and time to publish something new. A lot has been happening since last time. I reworked my Engagement, Portrait and Seniors Price List to just a Senior Portraits Price List. This was so I would have something to put out at the high schools in Nicholas County for the seniors to pick up. It has the prices on it. It's a single sheet with a picture of Brittney on it and the words "Senior Portraits" at about 20 picos, so it's catchy. I think the prices are a little low. The session fee (I call it a "professional" fee) needed to have different amounts depending on the package purchased. After all a 5-pose sitting, outdoors, with several changes of clothing, will be much more involved than 1-pose, no change of clothing inside. So after the first of the year, I will increase from $40 to $50, 60 and $70 for different packages. That's still cheaper than the competition.

I talked to the editor of the Nicholas Chronicle today about shooting sports and possibly other assignments. He said I should go out and shoot something and we would talk about payment later. Also, I'll get a credit line with the photographs. I'm really interested in doing a great job with the sports. Maybe that will lead to some individual assignments from parents, and maybe some T & I. That's Team and Individual, in case you don't know.

Gave Amy, who is a piano teacher, a price list for her piano recital. I hope that goes through. This would be treated more like T & I, but can't make any of the combined shots that sports kids are used to. Will just have to be individual pictures of each piano player, one with the teacher and the player, and one larger one of the group. Prices are pretty low for T & I, but a lot of good will can be generated with these pics.

Now on to today's experiment... Recently I saw a video on the internet. I think it was David Ziser. He used what he called a "Z-light". It was actually a bank of L-E-Ds that put out quite a bit of light. So much that he was able to get a decent picture at about 1/8 second or maybe 1/15 second. That's fast enough to handhold the camera in most cases. He actually had an assistant to hold the Z-light shining on his lovely model. I will get the web address later.

Anyway, I have a nice little L-E-D flashlight I bought from Wal-Mart that works very nicely. It has 9 L-E-Ds and puts out a lot of light. Hmmm... I thought to myself, "Self; that just might work as a light source for outdoor objects, such as trees, buildings, or even a bride outside. Well my little experiment involves staying in the house, and putting the camera on a time exposure. The camera will go up to 30 seconds timed. It also has bulb, which is a continuous opening of the shutter until you press the shutter release a second time. I set the camera on manual mode, timed it for 15s with an f-stop of 4.5.

Turn out the lights

Next, I set the camera on a tripod, turned out all the lights, tripped the shutter, turned on the flashlight and scanned the field of view. Here's what came out.:

Notice how blue the walls are. The reason is I left the white balance (WB) on AUTO. Ninty-nine per cent of the time the color temperature will be balanced, but this time it wasn't. So, what to do? I came back to the manual and found out how to change the white balance. David Ziser said the color temperature of his L-E-D flashlight was about 2800K. But I read in the manual that if the pictures come out with a blue tint the color temperature is in the area of 5000K, so I set the camera for a color temperature of 5000K. The next picture with a setting of 5000K is shown below:

The walls are still slightly bluish, but you can see the walls are warmer, so I think the color temperature was even higher. I may go make another test or two. It would be interesing to see what the actual color temperature is. The camera WB setting can go up to 10,000K. I just may want to use this technique to get some interesting shots. At least they would look a little different than the average photographer.

Well, that's all for this week. Next time, I may post some football shots. D'osvadania.

Experiment with Gary Fong Lightsphere

As some people know the Gary Fong light modifiers placed on a flash will modify the light output from the flash. Usually, photographers desire a softer light from what their flashes produce. It is flattering for women and especially for brides. Some type of modifier is used at most weddings , and in general, anytime portraits are taken.

I had the pleasure of being a judge at the Craigsville Fall Festival in Craigsville, WV last night. But after the judging, I talked with a fellow photography about cameras, and equipment. His name is Phil Berry, who operates Mountain Berry Photography. You can see some of his work at http://Mountainberryphoto.com/

Phil had a Gary Fong Lightsphere http://GaryFongInc.com/

The device sits up on your flash, which you point straight up in the air. Now we were outside, and I didn't think it would make much difference. But I stuck it on my Nikon SB-800 flash and pointed the flash straight up. The Lightsphere sits up over the camera about 6 inches above what the normal flash output would be. I took two pictures. One with the Lightsphere on, and one with the Lightsphere off. The Nikon flash did have the built-in light diffusion panel in place.

The first picture with the Lightsphere is shown above. Notice that there is some shadowing on his left cheek. The next picture below shows what the Nikon SB-800 can do.

The first one is definitely darker by about 1/2 stop I am guessing by the histogram of these two pictures. The camera shows the same exposure for the two pics, 1/60 s at f/7.1. But there is a difference in the two photos. I just don't know which one I like best. Any comments?

Well, until next time. D'osvadanya

Pictures of my new digital camera

As I promised, here are some shots of the Nikon D300 digital Single-lens reflex (dSLR) courtesy of NikonUSA.com. This is a great looking camera! And it takes awesome looking pictures, too. I have the 18 mm- 200 mm f/3.5-5.6 VR zoom lens. I want to make it clear that I don't think the camera is the cure-all for bad photographers. A professional photographer can make great pictures with a Holga or a Brownie Hawkeye. But it does have some neat features, which I won't go into detail about now. Maybe later.

I must say with this camera, and the other 35mm and the Mamiya RB-67 Pro-S, and the 6x6 cm twinlens reflex cameras, I don't think I will need to buy another one. Besides, I don't believe my wife would let me. HA.

Be sure to see my web site at http://www.StanKozlowitzPhotography.com/

Until next time d'osvadanya.

Stan

Aftter a day of working on Brittney's portraits...

Went through abought 120 of Brittney's Senior pictures. Most are excellent. Some are to throw away, and some need some type of Photoshop procedure. I must admit these are the first Senior pictures I have done after getting the new digital camera--a Nikon D300 with an 18-200 mm lens. I shot these pictures in LARGE JPEG mode (4288 x 2848 pixels). Thus, I can enlarge to about 20 x 24 without any pixellation. I doubt I will ever need to enlarge more than that.

I took far too many pictures of Brittney and her sister, Brianna. And way too much time involved. But this was my first time in almost 10 years since doing any senior portraits. So I was ok with it.

Next time I will slow down a little and shoot fewer pics.

Here's some of the pics I took. If anyone has any comments on them, please don't hesitate to comment.

As always, all pictures are copyrighted by Stan Kozlowitz. All rights reserved.

Welcome to the photography blog! My hope is that this blog will help a lot of people--first, those who may come here to see the latest photography from me, and me. In writing this, my aim is to showcase my photography and maybe in writing and photographing the people and things around me, I will "get in touch with my inner self". That is, I will be able to understand myself better. I promise to not get too personal. I don't want to embarrass myself or the reader.

All photographs, unless otherwise specified are copyrighted by Stan Kozlowitz. Photos of other individuals are used by permission unless, of course, they are editorial in nature. That is, news photographs, or photos of people in a public place, may not have their permission. It is not my desire to embarrass anyone, but to show you as the world is. Possible as I learn more Photoshop techniques, I will demonstrate some technique I have learned.

My camera of choice is the Nikon D300 digital SLR. It is a fabulous camera with a lot of great features. I am still learning the camera's capabilities. In a later post I will show a picture of the Nikon D300. It has 12.3 megapixels, and very low noise at high ISOs. It will go up to 6400 and down to 100 ISO. The ONLY drawback I have observed is the smaller eye viewer, but I think that is mainly because the image sensor is a smaller DX format. I understand the Nikon D700, which has the larger FX format, has a larger eyepiece for viewing.

Well, that's enough for now. Thanks for reading.