Lincoln Woods engagement and family portrait session

Lincoln Woods engagement and family portrait session.

Weekend rock climbing trip to the Blue Mountains in Australia

           Before heading off to Australia I did a good amount of reach search about rock climbing in the Blue Mountains; I knew there was no way I would miss the opportunity of climbing in such a beautiful landscape.  In the reach search I did I found and joined a Blue Mountains Rock Climbing Facebook group.  There I posted the dates I wanted to climb and if there was any one that would be interested in getting together.  I got lucky and Damien replied to my post letting me know that his buddy Nick was visiting for those same dates on a weekend climbing trip and I could tag along with them.  So knowing I had some climbing partners I booked a hostel in Katoomba and headed off to meet up with them.
         

         After a two hour train ride from Sydney to Katoomba I went straight to my hostel where after I checked in and dropped off my bags headed out because I was to met with Damien and Nick at restaurant to get to know each others and have an idea what were the plans for the weekend.  We had a good meal and I headed back to my hostel to get some rest for the next day.
          While in the lobby of the hostel I noticed a girl was on her Mac using Lightroom.  Her images were really nice and the more I payed attention I could tell she knew what she was doing, so I decided to talk to her.  I found out her name was Melissandre, she was from France, worked as a graphic designer, was taking some time off to backpack around Australia, and her photography was beautiful (check out her work here: CelestialK).  I mentioned to Melissandre that earlier while checking in I saw a poster advertising a night time photo tour around The Three Sisters; one of the main attraction in the Blue Mountains.  The only thing the tour was the night before but we that was fine because we both had tripods and knew how to shoot at night, so we head off to The Three Sisters to play around with some night photography.

 

       At first we wanted to capture the Milk Way like the images on the poster I had seen, but it was too cloudy, so then we just started photographer anything.  Being a portrait guy I crated one of Melissandre using both our iPhones on the brightest setting as a key light to light her face.  

Wide lens VS long lens

    In both thies images images I shot of Christian Herrera, a friend that's a singer, were shot one right after the other, with the same light, same camera, same ISO, same f-stop, and same shutter speed.  The only thing I did different was on the top one I had my 24-105mm lens zoomed in all the way to 105mm and on the bottom image I had it zoomed out at 24mm as well as I got in closer to make his head the same size in the frame. As you can see the top image is more of a straight up portrait; he stands out, the background is nice and soft like a painting.  In the bottom image its more of a charter study or environmental portrait;  the distortion of the wide angle lens makes him look like his coming at you, even tough he's only in a small area of the frame he has a feeling of owning the frame, the background has a feeling of been up in your face and it has some sharpness but that it doesn't distract from him, the main subject.  Another thing that you notice is on the bottem image you see the V shape tree by his right earn, our left, it's reall small but then when you look at the top image that same tree is hug, it's larger then his head.  So there's no right or wrong way to make a portrait you just have to have in mind what it is that you want at the end, and know what are your tools to get that done.

Extra:

The video below is a scene from Good Fellas where the used the zooming in on the lens and moving the camera back to keep the subjects the same size as an effect.  Here you can clearly see what effect a lens has on the background, not just the subject.  

(Starts at 0:26 mark and ends at 0:54mark)

The art of extracting balsamo

                   While I was in El Salvador with La Ruta Inka the department of tourisum took us to a town that is one of the major exporterters of balsamo in the world.  Balsamo is the sap/oil that comes form a tree, that is used for medicine, chap stick, hair products, and has many other functions.
                  The balsamo farm that we were tooken to was a farm that used very old tecenics to extra the sap and keeps the tree heathy for futrure use.  The way they collect the sap is by climbing up the tree, by wrapping a rope around their hands and the tree to pulling them selfs up it.  When they are up in the tree they burn the top layer of the bark to make the tree extract a sap that it uses to heal its self.  By waving their hat they control what parts of the tree the fire burns.  After they have the area brunt and it's extracting the sap the place rags in that area.  After a few days of the rags soking in the sap they collect them all up and take them to the next process.

                   The reason they use this process is because by burning the bark they are able to let the tree heel its self up and then after a year or so they can do the process again unlike the other way of just cutting the trees down for the sap.

           The next step is to collect all the rags with the sap and place them into a cloth bag that they put into a pulley/lever system.  They pour boiling hot water over the bag and use the pulley/lever system to drain all the water and oil out of the rags.  Once it is all collected the separate the balsamo oil from the water and bottle it up for sale.