The Minifig Artist Guild
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Mountain biking the high desert of Round Valley, with Canyons ski resort in the background.
The sweet carbon fiber bikes made it a smooth ride, with only one endo for the posse.
We were told we could dress casually for an all day meeting, so, of course, I wear a short pleather skirt, high-heeled hiking boots, and fur-embellished sweater instead of the suggested jeans. My reasoning was this: I wanted to wear something that would have normally been inappropriate for work (the miniskirt) with something too fancy for a casual day off (the sweater). Because that’s not a combination I get to wear often.
Sweater, vintage. Shirt, INC (thrifted). Skirt, Mossimo. Tights, We Love Colors. Boots, Lauren Ralph Lauren. Sunglasses, Target. Cape, Mossimo (thrifted). Bag, Nicole Lee.
I get a couple of good photos of Tim Cook during these Apple Events. I like this one the most, despite all of the high-ISO noise. Here he is at the Apple Watch event, offstage, watching the video along with the rest of the audience.
At any live or even recorded presentation, my attention is always called away to stuff the audience isn't supposed to see. In movies, for instance, I often look at shoes, and the props that people in the background are carrying, and the stuff at the edges of the shot. You sometimes get a sharper view of the underlying reality that way.
It's easy to read too much into a photo. But I like the fact that when eyes were off of Tim -- I had to crank up the ISO and the exposure A LOT to record this image, and even so, I had to tweak it VERY MUCH in Aperture to get it working -- he was still completely present and interested in what Apple was presenting.
It reminds me of Steve Jobs during the last keynote he gave that I attended. I was paying attention to "backstage" stuff, then, too, but for sadder reasons. It seemed a miracle that Steve was even able to give this presentation. I was concerned and curious to see if the preso had been planned with invisible breaks which would let Steve go offstage and sit.
The curiosity and concern had little to do with my being a journalist covering the event, mind you. I have extensive first-hand experience with terminal cancer patients near end-of-life, I'm sorry to say. Having followed and admired Steve since I was a kid pulling blown ICs from Apple II disk drive controller boards, I hoped that this event wasn't costing him.
But no. I could see Steve just offstage through the side of the curtain, standing steady, watching the video with the rest of the audience and looking just as interested. Just like Tim Cook here.
Photo Note: Conditions like this lead to "hail mary" photography. I was sitting way back in the cheap seats and shooting with my consumer-grade Panasonic long zoom. It takes fine photos but it's quite a slow lens: f5.2 was probably as wide as it could go at that focal length.
I've learned through past mistakes not to fear super-crazy-high ISOs. The alternative is to mitigate the noise via a lower ISO an longer shutter speed. Getting a sharp image under those conditions is an utter crapshoot, though.
Hence the lesson. There are ways to make an image's ISO noise less noticeable. It's even possible that the noise will read as part of the charm of the image. If you're desperate? Apply a high quality filter that makes a photo look like a painting; the noise won't even matter.
But if the image is blurry due to movement of the camera or subject during a long exposure, the photo is garbage. Take a bravery pill and raise the ISO to where you need it to be.
Shots like this one tempted me to buy an APS-C or even full-frame digital camera instead of continuing with Micro Four Thirds. MFT starts to show signs of trouble at ISO 1600 and becomes sketchy at 6400 and above; cameras with larger image sensors have greater low-light agility. But a bigger camera would only have paid off for me with these oddball "no light at all" photos. Whereas MFT's huge savings in weight and size pay off every time I throw my Olympus E-M1 and a couple of lenses into the outer pouch of my laptop bag.
I usually take my "good" camera with me whenever I travel more than forty miles from my house and I think I'll have a couple of hours free, whether I plan to do any photography or not. I sure wouldn't make that choice if the "good" camera were a big Nikon or a Canon.
Launch Party celebrating fashion + art + style and featuring the New Minimalists show.
Toronto, Canada ~ September 23, 2016.
Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster hosted ARCIC's 2017 Offsite at the Jacobs Conference Center, February 15, 2017. ARCIC leadership and others comprising over one hundred participants heard outbriefs from 4 cross-cutting Working Groups that were formed to tackle streamlining the concepts-to-capabilities
process and to improve integration through more effective organizations, products, and procedures.