new website, blog, etc, etc

I'm changing the company over to a new life. kengillstudios.com and new blog at kengillstudios.blogspot.com come over and check it out. I wanted to make the work a little more personal with my name.

Clean up, clean up, everybody cleanup

I have been staring at monitors for about 5 hours now, and decided to take a break from it for a few minutes - by typing a blog on my monitor. Silly Ken. I have been organizing and editing images in Lightroom. I finally decided that just knowing where the files are isn't good enough any more. Here is a little photo I took while on holiday in 2007 on Kauai. I just like the simplicity of it. I'm really not a flower photography type, but I like to keep my options open.

Lighting tests

I use studio strobes for rim lighting when I'm at my studio, but had never really tried it with my speedlights. I do a lot of different styles of lighting with the speedlights, but wanted to experiment. I didn't get exactly what I wanted, but was happy with a few of the shots we did.
This is Dylan, my willing victim of photo geeking. I think I got about a dozen shots before he started goofing, flexing and yelling "gadoosh!" That was when I knew we were done.

Walking around photos

Back to Vegas. One of the nights in Vegas, we walked from Mandalay Bay to the north. We saw an "in and out burger" that we were really hungry for. I haven't had one of their burgers for 4 or 5 years - the last time I went to SoCal.
Anyway, we were stopped by a freeway which had no access to the other side. We walked a few blocks east, trying to find a bridge, but to no avail. To make a long story short- 14 hours of exploring, way too much walking, blisters, tired, sore, neck was even chaffed from my "sling bag" - I had to carry my camera for 2 days by hand because I couldn't war my bag any more for the pain.
This photo is of one of the parking lots being built for a new casino being built. It was about 12:30 and I liked the lines of the structure in the dark. I never really thought about how many people work in one of those monstrosities. I was told that 6-7,000 people work in a couple of the larger casinos. To put this into perspective, Nintendo of America only has about 1,000 employees across the country. Wow.

Ah, cooking. One of my favorite things. I love vegies and fish - oh, and PASTA!!!! This was an exercise in evening (Guinness induced) photography at the end of a very long day. I like the motion of the noodles and the steam. I am taking some media classes at the local community college to get my web chops up, and had to do an assignment in color balance. In case you are wondering, this photo was only sharpened a bit, and a bit of a vignette added to knock the corners off. The rest is all done in the camera. I love post-processing images, but like to keep things simple when I am just doing things for experiments. The funny thing is that the original concept for the photo was to just shoot the knobs of the stove, with only one knob in focus. I didn't even shoot that idea, I thought of putting the pot on the stove, just for a different angle on the stove, plus having a little more visual interest. Next, I thought, "boiling water in the pot would be nice". Next, I decided that there should be a little motion in the image, since it is one of my favorite overall things to shoot.
For you photo geeks who may be curious, this was lit almost completely by the hoodlight over the stove and the regular kitchen lights. There was a bit of fill from a silver disk to the camera left, but that was it. This was a 2 second exposure at f8.

Another Cascade Corporation photo

Here is a before and after image of worm gears that are manufactured by Cascade Corporation. I never really thought about how worm gears and sprockets were made.
I don't just geek out about camera equipment. I love metal work and I felt like making Tim Taylor grunts the whole time I was in the warehouse. All of the cutting, welding, and grinding going on was pretty cool to see.

Portland Lift Truck Parts Manufacturer Picture

Cascade Corporation, a worldwide lift truck part manufacturer, whose headquarters are located in Wood Village, Oregon let me come to their warehouse to shoot some images for a school project. I hadn’t done industrial shots of that nature before, and they were very open to letting me walk around and take shots. I used mostly ambient light, with small splashes of strobe here and there to either fill in shadows or to bring a little more interest to the subject. The building was well lit, but for production, that means that the work areas are evenly lit, so the workers don’t have to strain to see because of shadows on what they are working. I had a blast, and the people in the different work areas were very helpful, either acting normal, or telling me when they were going to do something visually interesting.

Photo for the day - Vegas flashback

I love living in the Northwest. I drove from Portland to Seattle yesterday, and in the 3 hours that it took to get here, I saw every weather pattern the Northwest gets. We started in Sandy, Oregon (my stomping grounds), where we had about 4 inches of snow. That was a great surprise, because it's been raining nonstop since we got back from Vegas. We drove our dog to the Kennel in Boring, Oregon, where we drove through about 16 inches of water that was crossing the highway. The rest of the way, we got hail, freezing rain, rain, snow -little wet flakes AND the huge flakes that make driving difficult- overcast, and completely sunny.
I woke up waaaaayyyy too early this morning in my Seattle hotel room and wanted something to do. I realized that I didn't really do any processing on the images from my Las Vegas holiday. I edited them down to my favorites and ran them through Lightroom and posted them to my Flickr account right here
I carried my Lensbaby 3 with me on all the trips, but was too lazy to put it on the camera. One night, as we were wandering around, I was inspired by all the christmas lights to put the Lensbaby on and do some shooting with it. I love that lens - I need to get the Composer version one of these days.
....Anyway, as we wandered through every casino on the strip, I took some time to smell the flowers with my camera. Here's one of the results
Enjoy.

Happy New Year!!!

I hope that everyone enjoyed Christmas and is looking forward to the new year. I spent Christmas week in Vegas and had a blast! I was glad to get home after that week. I missed the huge snowstorm that buried the Portland area and am okay with it. We stayed at the Stratosphere, which is at the far north end of the strip - about 4 miles away from the other end of the strip. We had a few down days, but we had 12 and 14 hour days walking around. I shot about 600 photos - hey, I was on holiday.Here's a photo for today. It is a wide angle view of Kim - my accountant, wife, babysitter, base of the pyramid...... She was sitting on the edge of the dolphin pool at the Sigfried and Roy park at the Mirage. The dolphins were done playing and the other tourists were being annoying, so we took a little breather and enjoyed the sun.

Strobists meet at the Ballyhoo studio in Portland

The PDX Strobist group in Portland, Oregon had their meetup at my Portland Studio for November. What was intended to be a small and intimate meetup became a crowded and overflowing studio packed with photo geeks and models. The chaos was awesome. My studio is just under 800 square feet, with two main shooting areas. Add food, cameras, bags, makeup, props, lightstands, and a dozen models and I think we ended up with about 15 photographers. It was intimate, but not quite what I had in mind. It was more like shoulder to shoulder shooting with people spilling into the halls for setting up lights and models.

One of the photographers, Scooter, is a student, aspiring photographer, and quite a sport. Another photographer and I dragged Scooter and two of the models into the non-functioning elevator in my building for a shoot. It was a struggle to get started, as the space was so tight and the widest lens I had was my 24-70 canon lens. Nice and wide, huh? Well, I shoot a 40D, so you can multiply that lens size by 1.6, making the widest setting a relative 39mm lens. Not that wide. I had about 5 feet to move in front of the elevator shaft, so that was about 15 feet deep. My three victims, er models were good sports and put up with me. These images are from the series. This one is my favorite from the day

Colors in portraits

kim stress
Originally uploaded by ballyhoo photography

The impact of color in a portrait. I needed a few more pictures for a school assignment. Kim had a full day of work, then taught an evening class in Tigard. She got home about 10 to have a camera shoved in her face and a fill card pushed into her lap and was told to act "natural". I love when people put a camera in my face and tell me to act natural.
Fortunately, over the years, Kim has become tolerant of my obsession and has been my willing test subject.
I wanted to illustrate her stress, without adding to it by making her act stressed. I could see that she was already stressed enough. She ran her hands through her hair as she decompressed and I caught this shot on one of the sweeps and loved the angles of it. I cross processed the image in Photoshop to add the contrast and add the color dynamic to the image and am happy with the outcome.
The blue image was the same night. I wanted a different emotion out of the same light. She leaned back, I changed the fill card a bit and shot this. I think it shows quite a different person. What do you think?

Scream at the Beach

Scream at the Beach
Originally uploaded by ballyhoo photography

I belong to a strobist group here in Portland, and we were allowed access (during the day) to all the haunts.
For you non PDX types, the Scream at the beach is a huge haunted house set that takes up 5 retail locations in a mall in North Portland. Some examples are a mansion, complete with crypt, a mine, an urban zombie-scape, and others. This shot was made in the funhouse (from hell) and this attraction was right after you walk through a 24 foot "squeeze wall" and is in a black room. Nice, huh?
It was so dark in many of the areas, that some of us used flashlights to help our auto focus assist. It was too dark to manually focus. You'd think that cameras were made for use in the light or something.
So, we spent about 6 hours in the haunts, checking out the different scenes and figuring out how to make pretty girls with horrifying makeup look like they fit into the place. Can you say head lamp for finding gear? the best part was - what color is most photo equipment? - finding all of our equipment as we moved from one location to the next. A good number of people were at the mall as we went from haunt to haunt. Girls in make up, guys with bags and stands and cameras. Makeup was done by Matt Huntley.

So, this is what happens when you retire

My parents retired a few years ago, had a house sale -opened the doors and put a price tag on everything in the house, including the house, bought a big truck and a fifth wheel trailer. They have been criss-crossing the country ever since with their 6 cats. I call them the crazy cat people, but that's beside the point.
They stopped by the Portland area to visit, so I took some time off to hang out with them. Here they are in their full glory as we sat on their "patio" and had some apple-tinis. During their cruise around the country, they have taken a truck load of pictures - friends, wildlife, road hazards, sites, etc. etc.

Now, my dad has picked up a Nikon D80 and shoots like there is no tomorrow. I think my explanation of apertures and shutter speeds deepened the fog of confusion as he is trying to learn to actually USE his camera and have some control of the quality of his photos.
Guess what we did for the couple of days they were here. That's right, drink beer and discuss how an aperture and shutter speed combination can be made to control the artistic side of photos, like depth of field and motion blur.
Some people say that parents are like tornados, the come around for a short time, mess things up, and leave after all the pieces have been scattered. Mine come around, we have some good food, good drink, good conversations and then they run off to continue their trip. This time, it's from Denali National Park, Alaska to somewhere in the deserts of Nevada. They were going to Texas, but decided that it wasn't such a good idea. Here's a couple of shots from while we were out on their first night at the Wall Street Pizza in Gresham, OR.

Welcome to the Fall

Autumn used to be my favorite part of the year: colors of leaves, warm days with cool evenings, soup. MMMMMmmm, soup. Although it's not number one in my book of favorite seasons, it is in the top four - "participant" prize goes to Fall. Thanks for coming. Actually, it's not a bad season, but it means that the daylight hours get shorter and all that.


These are pictures from this week about the Fall evenings and the wonderful (relative term) things they bring. Notice that I put the rain first, then the clouds?

Both shots were done during the same night, actually within about 10 minutes of each other. Full Sail Pale Ale was the inspiration for both of these shots. mmmmm beer. Actually, my creative juices have been flowing again for personal projects and I am trying to expand my range and shoot with different styles.

Events in Stumptown

I have only been in downtown Portland after dark a few times, so had to squeeze this photo of the SAM station at the Pioneer Courthouse Square.
I had the opportunity to shoot some events for the Pioneer Courthouse Square. I shot the Italian Festival, Root Beer Floats, the Senior Prom, Flicks on Bricks, and a few other jobs for the group that runs the park.
Each job presented its own challenges, which was one of the reasons that I took these jobs on. Between the white umbrellas in the sun, uncooperative weather, large crowds of people, and the night shots, the events were a blast. Not just standard "walk around and shoot" type of work.

Here is one of the shots from the Ghostbusters night of Flicks on the Bricks. That job was awesome because I was able to watch a great movie while I did some of the work. I realized that seeing the movie in this venue was kind of like a hotdog at a Mariners game. The movie is great on its own, but it was that much better when watching it in downtown Portland with hundreds and hundreds of people. The party environment really made it a great experience. The park was packed with people by the time the movie started at dusk. It makes me wonder where all of these people parked.

Busy Times....

I have an appointment set in my calendar every Thursday for updating my blog, and you can only hit the snooze in Outlook so many times.
I have been a little busy lately, so I'm not beating myself up over not posting for almost a month....again. I haven't had a day off in a couple of weeks now, except for the night that my wife decided that we should go camping in our Element. It would have been fine, if it weren't for the dog and over 100 degrees temperature. I ended up sleeping (yeah, right) on the ground outside so Neo could hang with me. Between sleeping limbs (forgot my pillow and slept on my arm), rain, and falling supplies (see note about rain), I didn't sleep more than about 2-3 hours that night and had a job in town on Sunday afternoon. I'm almost done whining.... I was SO glad to be home the next night. No sleep, pack up, go home, unpack, shower, shoot a job. Okay, I'm done.
I had the opportunity to shoot the India Festival in the Pioneer Courthouse Square, and it was WAY more popular than I expected. I didn't know there was that much Indian culture in the area. The park was overflowing with people for a while. I love events there. Seems like every time I work in the square, the day is overcast, which is great for photos. The bright colors and beautiful outfits made for some easy great photos. The spirit and energy of the event was great, and it was easy to wander around and take pictures of people. What a great park. The bricks are close to a middle grey, and good for metering off of when the events have bright white tents. For the schedule of remaining events at the square, you can check out http://PCSPDX.ORG

I am not posting any pictures tonight, as Yellow Tail and the Olympics are calling. I am not usually into sports, but I do love watching the olympics. I was up really late last night, and got to catch one of my favorites in the olympics - Bicycle Supercross. Those riders just amaze me.

New Website Started

Hooray! I worked out some issues I was having with my DreamWeaver, and finally got most of my website updated. I am never happy with the site, so it's never finished. I like the new look and hope you will too. Here's a screenshot of the new home page. In case you haven't checked it out, it's at http://ballyhoophotography.com and you should go there. Drop me a line if you have any thoughts on the new look. I want a clean, simple, yet elegant look to the site. I don't like when people have music start automatically, so don't expect that.

Finally, pictures posted

Okay, so about 3 weeks ago, I mentioned the shoot downtown. I had the opportunity to shoot the Pioneer Courthouse Square Festival of Flowers and had a blast despite the overcast day.

I did take advantage of the dry day, and rode my motorcycle into town. I found parking on the street on the second block on which I looked, which was sweet! This was during June, which is one of the more unpredictable weather months here in the great Northwest. If you are going to be outside for a spell in June, bring your umbrella, and sunglasses. I didn't take photos of the tomatoes that were on sale that day, as the plants themselves aren't that pretty until they start producing fruit. I'm not a hater, but when a tomato plant is surrounded by sunflowers and wildflowers, they just don't grab me by the lens.

So, on to the pictures. Enjoy.

Holy Smoke!

I was flipping through my calendar today and realized that I haven't posted to this blog in over a month. It's been a good month - very busy - so I'm not that sad that I've been slow to post. I am trying to get better about doing a weekly blog with some interesting topics.
Last week, there were some events downtown that I was able to take some publicity shots for. I put all of them on my external drive, so I will have to get them and will post a couple of images... The Pioneer Courthouse Square had their "Urban Meadow" themed display in the park, which was what I photographed. It was a lovely layout of wildflowers and other plants (including tomatoes YUM!). The whole thing was laid out in paths and rows with a tunnel of sticks down the middle. I busted out my lensbaby 3g for some shots from the 11th floor of one of the close-by buildings. I've never used the Lensbaby for distant shots. I was thrilled by the results.

Coming soon - Pictures from the Pioneer Courthouse Square Urban Meadow.

Back to Work

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

No, I didn't turn into Jack Nicholson channeling Stephen King in The Shining. Just whining a little.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to take some portraits for a law firm downtown. What a great bunch of people! I'm not just saying that to suck up or to pad my chances of going back if one of them happens to read it. They were just a great group. From the time I said hi to the office manager, to the time that I packed up and got out of their hair I was treated very kindly. Here is one of my favorite shots from the day.

It won't make it to their website, but I love the shot. This is just one of those shots that I got for me on the day. Most of the other shots are pretty standard with a bit of personality.

Funny, I haven't posted to my blog in about 3 weeks, then I post twice today. My website has been updated a bit, and I finished doing most of the research that I needed to do. Only a 15 hour day today, but I got tons done, new business card, updated site, two blogs, plans and purchases for tomorrow's shoot, picked up some bike parts for my mountain bike. I think I have earned a nice long sleep tonight.