www.TomAHolic.com

I’m on vacation and trying to process all of my backlogged photo sets.  This is my set from Carnival in San Francisco back on 5/25/08.

Overall the event was great.  I loved the vibrant colors, but the sun wasn’t always with me.  I did learn one important lesson about photographing parades… always take them from the beginning of it.  I was past the half way mark, and a lot of the people looked wore out by the time they got to  me.  This was my first  time at Carnival, so I didn’t know what to  expect.

I’m having some problems exporting from Lightroom right now, but I don’t have the time to figure out what’s wrong.  My prints look  better than the web versions for some reason.  This set was with my D300 and my 18-200mm VR.

Well, here is the set.

http://tomaholic.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8066

I went to take pictures at the fashion show at Fluid on 7/3/08.  Unfortunately, I ended up getting a horrible spot during the show, so I didn’t get that many good shots.  I did get a decent amount from the club, though.  It took me a while to upload these because I’m starting a vacation right now and I had a lot of loose ends to take care of before I went out of town.  I’ll be off net until the end of July, but I should have some new sets of Hawaii when I get back.

So, here’s the set.

http://tomaholic.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=7883

I got a last minute call to hit up Heights on Friday (6/27/08).  Things got a little… um… interesting on the dance floor that night.  Let’s just say that I needed to remove quite a few pictures from the set due to nudity and/or panty shots.  If you were there, you probably know what I’m talking about.

I ended up with a ton of pictures of Jessica Colette.  I loved the way she flirted/played with the camera.  I’m hoping to design a shoot just for her in the near future.

The full set is under “Clubs”, and I posted some of the extra shots of Jessica under her own album (the first thumbnail in the set).  She was in plenty of shots with other people and she would have been in half of the set otherwise.

Full Set

http://www.tomaholic.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=7470

Jessica Colette Extras

http://www.tomaholic.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=7871

UPDATE:
I messed up the permissions so the sets weren’t available.  I fixed it and everything should work now.

I went to Taylor Lee’s CD Release Party hosted at Heights Ultra Lounge on Thursday 6/26/08. The music was great.  I love the sound of live performances.  There are some things CD’s can’t reproduce.

They setup the full band on the dance floor near the DJ booth. With the mirror on the wall and me having to use my flash, I was somewhat limited at the angles I could use.  I thought they were only going to play 2 songs, so I was a bit rushed in my shooting.  They ended up playing like 6 or so songs.

If you’re interested in hearing her music, she has a MySpace page with some of the tracks.

http://www.myspace.com/taylorlee

The full set is on my gallery under “Events and Performances” or you can follow the link below.

http://www.tomaholic.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=7631

I’m still lagging on processing my photo sets, but I finished one from last week.  This set was at Heights Ultra Lounge.  There are a lot of shots from a birthday party because I loved the 80’s theme.

 Heights Ultra Lounge - 2008.06.21

I have a full set of hi-res pictures for the birthday girl.  All she needs to do is contact me.  8-)

Okay, so it happened almost exactly a month ago on 5/18/2008. Post processing is definitely not my friend, but you can’t become good at it until you do it a lot. 8-)

For those who don’t know, Bay to Breakers is an annual marathon in San Francisco. It starts off at the Embarcadero and ends up at Ocean Beach. There are people who take the race seriously, but the vast majority of the people dress up, take their time and drink along the way.  Please click here for the Wikipedia article on it.

The event was awesome as usual. There were kegs and alcohol everywhere. The costumes were great and sometimes non-existent (I’ve decided to not have nudity on my site, so those were removed to the best of my knowledge). Most of the pictures were taken on Fell from Divisadero to Stanyan.

This was my first event with my new Nikon D300 and I used my new Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8 (aperture priority @ f/2.8). I was only about 25% through with the 400 page manual, so there was definitely a learning curve here. I also just learned that Lightroom zeros out a lot of camera settings when you import RAW files, so I spent a lot of time in the post trying to make the pictures look like they did on the camera. I now shoot in RAW + JPG so I can avoid this mess.

Side note: If you’re in one of the pictures and would like a non-watermarked, printable copy, please email me (see contact page). I will require either a social networking profile link (MySpace, FaceBook, etc) or a candid picture to prove who you are. Also, if you would like to picture taken down, I require the same plus the reason why.

The set is under “Events and Performances” on under my gallery, or you can click the link below.

2008 Bay To Breakers Photo Set

I reorganized my gallery to sort the sets easier.  I added main albums to sort photo types.

• Sunsets and Sunrises
• Urban, Architecture, Skylines
• Portraits
• Events and Performances
• Clubs

I also finally posted some photo sets.

Set 1  - Portraits - Veronica and Erlene

This was my first shoot I had complete control over.  I  took them to Golden Gate Park around Strawberry Hill and Stow Lake.  It was also my first real shoot using my Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe and my cheap remote flash triggers.  Unfortunately, the cheap remote flash triggers didn’t always work, but when they did the lighting was great.  All in all, it was a great learning experience and I like the set.

Set 2 - Clubs - Heights Grand Opening

I took pictures at the Heights grand opening on 5/31/08.  They’re located on the corner of Van Ness and Pacific.  The crowd was cool and the music was nice.  I love the lighting in the club.  One of the few places I know of with blue lights.  I loved the way the red light on the dance floor interacted with the fog, but it definitely made for difficult photos.  I’m going to have to use my tripod if I want to get more ambient light in.

I have a few more sets to go over.  I’m hoping to get them done over the weekend, but I also plan on being at the Haight Street Fair on Sunday (11-5:30).

I haven’t been posting many photo sets lately, mostly because I recently purchased the coveted Nikon D300.  I was debating on either investing in lenses or a new body, and the D300 narrowly won (mostly due to the awesome 3″ LCD).

The camera is amazing.  The manual is over twice as thick as the one that came with my D70S.  The on camera picture controls are fantastic.  The only bad thing about the LCD is that if you forget to adjust the brightness in low light, you’ll effectively blind yourself (I learned that the hard way this past Saturday).  The best review of the camera came from a guy I work with that bought one as soon as they came out.  When I asked how he liked it, he said “it’s like sex”.

I’ve been processing a lot of photo sets the last few days.  I should have a model shoot, Bay to Breakers, SF Carnival and a club shoot going up this week.  They will probably not be posted in chronological order, but hopefully I’ll be done before the Haight St. Fair this Sunday.

I took some pictures at the fund raiser for One Mama (www.OneMama.org) on Thursday 2008.05.08.  The performances were amazing.  The crowd was great.

I opted to use my 50mm f/1.4 for the depth of field, so I wasn’t really able to get crowd shots.  I just bought the Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8 (a recommendation from another photographer at the event as it’s only $179.99 @ Amazon right now), so hopefully the next event I do I can get more crowd shots.

I just created a slide show for now.  It took me awhile to get through all of the pictures I took.  I’ll get the individual images online (hopefully) within the next week or so.

One Mama Fund Raiser Slide Show

I was looking at this set with really bad light in Starbucks. I didn’t really get the colors I thought I did. I decided to make this a test set for Lightroom. I put an album with the originals for comparison. I also built a flash slide show with the originals, Lightroom modified and one with both for comparison. Each set is about 4MB, so the combined show is 8MB. I made it with my trusty ACDSee Pro. The best program ever to view pictures in. It also has a lot of batch processing. It’s what I used before Lightroom and some functionality is still better.

So first link below is to the main folder for the albums. The links below that are the direct links to the Flash slide show.

Photo Albums

Lightroom Adjusted Slide Show

As Shot in Camera Slide Show

Comparison Slide Show