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!