Ever wonder how a planetarium show is built? Well, from the ground up of course. Yes, each star on the dome is made in house, by me, and placed strategically on the dome in its correct place. It’s daunting, folks.
This week’s Creative52 challenge is called “Use a Location to Wow” and after considering many Louisiana locations to wow the viewer, I ultimately chose to use one of the biggest and most technologically advanced planetariums in the southern U.S. region. This image shows a segment of the Irene W. Pennington Planetarium’s 60-foot dome, prominently displaying a real Hubble Telescope image of M95. This beautiful, barred spiral galaxy will be featured in the upcoming Summer Sky Tonight show as it can be seen next to Mars and Venus a little after sunset over on the western horizon amidst the constellation Leo the Lion.
Of course, planetarium shows aren’t built this way—placed on screen, star by star—but I wanted to illustrate how fun it can be to create planetarium shows and how rewarding it can be to control the very sky itself during live Sky Show presentations.
This final image is the result of 7 images being stitched together. The starball was created out of a Styrofoam craft ball with pixie lights wrapped around it. I used the remaining pixie lights to create this strand of stars issuing out of my tool belt as if they are waiting to be assembled into a star cluster.
Visit my Creative52 project inspired by Lindsay Adler’s book “Creative 52”
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Let's take a little look at how some of the Wizards in the Harry Potter universe are absolute jerks. Of course, this is all in good fun, but I want to take a look at the behavior and piggishness that Wizards have in this Potterverse. I mean, if they existed along with us here, they'd have a lot of explaining to do.
Creative 52, Week 29: Shoot a Very High-Key Image
High-key photography, damn near blowing out your image with copious amounts of light. Make your subject look like a pretty angel coming through heaven’s gate or something.
For this image I wanted to do a slight combination of high-key with low-key elements. By that, I mean, I wanted to put some form of viking face paint on the upper part of my face so I could later overlay an image of stars, the galaxy, or something of that nature. I wasn’t quite sure what yet. My girlfriend helped me with the makeup and even did an initial splatter spray of white on my forehead for texture and added pizzazz.
I wanted to wear a suit for this because you usually don’t see vikings in suits and I wanted to be a Work Viking…Assistant to the Regional Viking.
To make the blown out effect I hung up a white sheet in a doorway. Behind that sheet I put two softboxes with two 100 watt bulbs each to the side. I put two large LED worklights down a bit lower. ...
Creative 52, Week 28: Shoot a Very Low-Key Image
10/14/2021
Low-key in photography doesn’t mean relaxed, chilled out, and soft spoken. Low-key simply means that the emphasis is on the shadows, on the darks. Whereas high-key is all bright and damn near blown out, low-key has crushed blacks and is all mysterious. Perfect for getting close to Halloween, right?
Well, Gina was shooting a video for an upcoming belly dance gathering and was dressed like a witchy crone named Cailleach, a divine hag and Queen of Winter. She had a cool twiggy head band and some matching make-up; plus, we just finished watching this movie, Censor, which had this cool lighting theme all throughout. So, we decided to shoot this low-key image and video using only colored video lights…no strobes. The lighting was inspired by Censor and another movie called Mandy. Both movies are worth checking out.
This whole thing was a challenge because I really wanted to utilize the sharpness and look that I get with my ...
Collective Isolation
I have a strip of 75mm film I use for a bookmark and recently I was admiring just how damn cool it was. And then I was walking past these windows that look out upon the Mississippi River levee. In a way, this section of windows, framed by the support poles, reminded me of that 75mm film strip.
People, for the most part, tend to mind their own business. It's why we can go out to a restaurant with a loved one and pretend that we're not in a big room with dozens of other couples also pretending that no one else is around. When I set up my camera to take these pictures I decided to capture little frames of people minding their own business. So, no, I didn't want to "Shoot a Frame Within a Frame" using shadows or doorways; I wanted to use the entire wall of windows as a frame to separate interactions, use the lower section of windows to frame individuals going about their business while ignoring others, the upper part of the windows to frame birds flying together in ...
