The exceptionally rare Bonneville Salt Flower.   Needed yesterday’s skies and didn’t get anything close.  The much more muted pastels tonight were pretty but not what I was looking for.  That massive cloud rolled in right as I arrived and pretty much killed all direct sun for the evening.  The silence out there is absolutely epic when you’re the only person for miles on the salt.  Being able to hear a fly approach from 200 feet away and then hearing it’s buzz trail off as it leaves is just silly.  Like a cartoon.  Next time…

]]> http://chadspector.com/blog/2010/08/10/bonneville-salt-flower/feed/ 0 http://chadspector.com/blog/2010/08/01/sunset-hangin/?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://chadspector.com/blog/2010/08/01/sunset-hangin/#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:36:21 +0000 admin http://chadspector.com/blog/?p=1144

Went out to the Flight Park in Draper, UT on Sunday with Alisa to shoot her first tandem flight.  The wind didn’t really play nice and she ended up getting two shorter flights vs. the one 40 minute soar we’d hoped for.  The upside was that the extra time spent with the re-launch lucked us right into an EPIC sunset with some of the most bizarre clouds I’ve ever seen.

Mammatus Clouds

Another image from the archives, this time inspired by a Facebook post from a friend living in the old hood in Chicago.  She snapped a sunset image tonight and as soon as I saw it I knew the exact water towers she had shot as they were a dominant feature on my skyline for a decade.  The sunsets over the West Loop had magic potential as the air pollution finally revealed it’s one and only gift in refracting and reflecting the low angle  sun light.  I miss the true urban jungle and it’s chaos.  It’s not always beautiful, but when everything falls into place it is truly sublime. This image was shot 6/27/06, only a few weeks after I had bought my first dSLR, a Canon 30d.  Kinda fun to dig for this one as I found a few other “lost children” in the process, so thanks Rebecca!

Another sunset over the Great Salt Lake shot from just above Weber State’s campus.  I was stuck inside all day waiting for this and dealing with that so I busted a quick move to grab a few frames.  Used a 3 stop Singh Ray reverse nuetral density filter to keep the horizon and sky in check.

Scouting the light and location of an upcoming shoot meant firing off some self portraits. Took a while to get the focus nailed down because of the very thin depth of field I was shooting (85mm @ f/1.6) and trying to stand in the spot you saw through the viewfinder is easier said than done.  All in all I’m liking what I found as it was pretty much what I though it would be.

Pocket Wizard product placement…

Hope we get another CA fire enhanced sunset for the shoot…

Maybe next time I’ll even smile

Of note, to shoot these self portraits I’m using 2 or 3 Pocket Wizard radio remote triggers.  One Plus II mounted to the cameras hot shoe, one Plus II connected to my flash unit (when I’m using one) and one Multi Max in my hand which I’m using to trigger everything else.   When adding the flash be sure to run the unit that controls the flash one channel up from the camera.  For me this meant channel 2 as the camera was channel 1.  This sets the flash to trigger in relay mode which accounts for the delay between me pressing the trigger and the camera actually tripping the shutter.  If you ran everything on channel 1 the flash would fire and be gone before the shutter opened.  With the Pocket Wizards achieving a perfect relay is as simple as selecting channel 2.