Upgrade to Studio Flooring

In this post I describe what was done to upgrade Jinsook’s studio from carpet/linoleum to laminate flooring.

Well after a year of using the old flooring with carpet, we’ve finally had a chance to replace it with wood flooring. It looks so much better and feel higher end studio. It took about a week to get this done. The first four days was just removing the carpet and linoleum. The removal of the carpet and tact board took half a day, and the linoleum about a day. Then there the problem of removing the base board and the staples for the linoleum. There were so much staples it took two days to individually remove about a thousand bits of staples. No kidding, we collected about a pound of metal bits.

The studio space is roughly shaped like rectangle at about 200 square feet, with a little extra square feet of space for the fridge, stove, and closet. After laying down the water barrier, we proceeded to cut and lay down the first row of lock type laminate flooring. With some help from Jinsook, it took us about a day to lay down all the flooring. The sixth day, I had the base boards added to the wall and caulked it. On the seventh day, I had Jinsook paint it.

It was well worth the effort to upgrade the studio flooring. It just looked beautiful.

The studio was a trial to see how much effort it would take to upgrade the carpet to hard wood flooring for the main house. From this experience, I think we’ll hire contractors to do it for us.

[IMAGE OF BEFORE UPGRADE]

[IMAGE OF CARPET REMOVED]

[IMAGE OF LINOLEUM REMOVED]

[IMAGE OF FLOORING HALF DONE]

[IMAGE OF COMPLETED FLOOR]

Wall Mounted Boom Arm for Studio Lighting

Recently I posted a review on Amazon.com of a pair of DMKFoto Studio Wall Mount Boom Arm that I bought and installed in the photo studio. Here’s copy of it.

“This was purchased for my small home photography studio measuring 12 ft by 15 ft. Because of the small space I really needed to get all the lighting equipment off the floor. The tripods were a real tripping hazard when I have little kids in the studio running about. With the tripods removed, the room looked so much nicer and safer. Giving it a more professional look.

PROS:
I bought two of these wall mount boom arms, one for each side of the wall between the rear backdrop wall. The long reach, 80 inch max length, makes it possible to cover most of the volume in the studio. By this I mean 180 degrees pivot from the wall horizontally and 160 degree vertically from floor to ceiling. My soft boxes can be positioned anywhere in the studio. I love it.

Virtually everything is made out of metal, except the knobs and wire clips. Very sturdy and smooth operation. The three sliding plastic wire clips keeps the cord to the strobe, nice and tidy.

Customer service was very responsive and helpful. Thanks to Alex at DMKFoto.

CONS:
Attaching this to wall was a bit of a trick because the studs in the wall were not wide enough for the supplied bolts to mount to the wall. So, I had to get some wood to span the 16 inchs between the studs in the wall. Then attached the boom arm to the wood. Afterwards, I just needed to paint the wood to blend in with the wall.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who needs to get the tripod off the floor to gain additional floor space, and provide a flexible platform for holding your lighting equipment.”

Here’s a few images of the installation process:

[BEFORE IMAGE WITH SOFT BOX ON LIGHT STANDS]

[INSTALL ON WALL WITHOUT SOFTBOX CAMERA LEFT]

[INSTALL ON WALL WITH SOFTBOX CAMERA LEFT]

[INSTALL ON WALL WITHOUT SOFTBOX CAMERA RIGHT]

[INSTALL ON WALL WITH SOFTBOX CAMERA RIGHT]

[FINAL IMAGE WITH SUPPORT WOOD PAINTED]

 

Green Screen and the Force

We had a Star Wars theme birthday party for my son. On my blog, a description of the steps for preparing for it is described in detail. Here, I describe how Jinsook helped me create a green screen composite of my son over a background for his invitation card.

Jinsook created a few images of my son an daughter posing with an imposing expression holding a toy light saber. Edited an image for the background with a text saying “Jedi Academy” on it.

 

GREEN SCREENED IMAGE OF KID

GREEN SCREENED REMOVED, GRADIENT FILL ADDED

BACKGROUND IMAGE

 

TEXT CHANGED TO JEDI ACADEMY

FINAL COMPOSITE IMAGE

Ghost Writer (or Guest Blogger)

Wow, this space seems unused for some time. I’ve been bugging Jinsook to update this blog site but she prefers the Facebook. So if you want to follow her go to her FB page. In the mean time I’ll be keeping up this place as a guest blogger (or is it ghost writer) to add some new contents as they become available.

There is short list of things Jinsook’s been working on this year and it would be nice to mention them here.

– Green screen

– Wall mounted light boom

– Upgrade to her studio

– OnOne Suite software

– New camera body

– New lens

– Photo shoots (lots of them)

JT

Zoom Lens Compression

One of the really fun side by side comparison of two photos to show to people is that of zoom lens compression. Zoom lens compression is a technique where two photo are taken of the same subject at different focal lengths. The greater the difference in focal length, the greater the effect. Here is an example of two that was taken this past week. The first one is at high zoom and the second one on the right is at a lower zoom. In the high zoom the background looks so much closer. The surprising thing is that the only thing that moved was the camera.

Music in the Park

This weekend, my family and friends had a chance to relax a little and just enjoy the nice weather while listening to a free concert in Central Park in Mountain House. I’m always bringing a camera to events just in case there are some nice shots to take. Here’s a few shots using the neutral density filter and the circular polarizer received last week.

Neutral density filter (ND4)

This filter stops down the aperture by four exposures. So when I want to open up the aperture in bright sunny days and still be able to have a relatively shallow depth of field, this filter is used. After reviewing the photos, I realized that the ND filter introduces a lot of noise into the images.

Aperture 3

The Aperture 3 software is really great at showing the metadata, such as the shutter speed, lens zoom number, f-stop, ISO, and two dozen other metadata that is available on the EXIF metadata. The specific data that you see can be customized to your needs. Learning to zoom in and out using the the apple command and minus (-) to zoom out and command an equal (=) to zoom in shortcut keys.

It was a wonderful day. The kids had a great fun playing in the grass. The adults sat back and listened to the band Sun King.

New PC and Photo Software

The background story

Earlier this year, my four year old Windows based Dell PC started to act up. The dreaded blue screen started appearing. All my photos had been backed up, and the PC hard drive was reformatted then a fresh copy of the OS was installed on it. It worked for a few more weeks, then the blue screen started to reappear when shutting down. It was time to upgrade to a new computer. My husband was tired of being the tech support for this dying PC. He suggested we take a few field trip to look for a replacement. After a week of looking at desktops and even laptops that were Windows based, we went to the Apple Store in the Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton California. After about an hour talking with the “blue shirts” at the store. The seed was planted in my mind. The 27 inch iMac looked gorgeous. The bootcamp was a key selling point for me. What bootcamp allowed me to do is to use my Windows version of Photoshop on the iMac OS. A few days later, I ordered it. Then a few more weeks later, by shiny new iMac arrived. It was love at second sight.

New 27 inch iMac

Now, I’ve been using the 27 inch iMac for about four months and everyday I just have more enjoyment using it. The screen displays my photos beautifully. Learning how to use iLife suite of applications like the iPhoto and the iMovie was really quick and fun. Since I already knew how to use Vegas Movie Studio, it was easy to move over to iMovie and iDVD to make videos and burn it to DVD. The face recognition in iPhoto is really a cool way to group the pictures and be able to organize images.

Fusion versus Parallel

I’ve been testing both VMWare Fusion and Parallels for desktop to be able to use my Photoshop in Windows and while keeping the Mac OS running. Even though Parallels is a little more technical, it is more seemless when switching between the two operating systems and transferring photos back and forth.

Apple Aperture 3

A 30-day trial version of Apples Aperture 3 was downloaded last night to try out. Even though it has some simple photo touch up tools on it, I still like Photoshop because it can do everything I need. I’ll probably use it more for the photo management and integration with Apple products. I’ll blog more on this after using it for some extended time.

Filters, polarizers, oh my!

Today, a replacement UV filter arrived in the mail for my telephoto lens. It was without a UV filter for about two months, so each time I used it, I became conscious of it and was more careful of the lens than trying to take the photo which may have put the lens at risk like at the swim meet early this month. Now with the filter, I feel like I can take more risk to shot that important shot.

A second filter received is a neutral density 4 filter. Looking forward to using it in the daylight to stop down the exposure to bring down the depth of field.

Also received a set of circular polarizers for doing some contrast shots of the sky and the subjects. Removing reflections from the water is so cool.

Lighting Accessory: Reflector

Just received a new lighting accessory in the mail, a 40″ Westcott 5-in-1 reflector. This will help me apply a nice secondary light to my subjects. This has gold, silver, white translucent, and black color to bounce, spread light, or act as a gobo to block light.

New backdrops for photo studio

We received two new backdrops for the photo studio came in this past week. The first one was a 10 by 15 feet backdrop. It is a beautiful hand painted portrait backdrop with white and black colors and nice random gray patterns. I’m really looking forward to using it.

The second one is a 9 by 13 feet green screen. This will give me some nice options when clients want to substitute the green screen with a background that they want.

JT installed them over the weekend. It was really hot that day, about 100 degrees F.