Check out the Daily Cal Photo Staff’s blog! It features pictures from all of our photographers, as well as links to their personal websites and portfolio work. Follow us to keep up with our work as we cover concerts, local events, and more.

http://takingshotsdc.tumblr.com/

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Rashad Sisemore / Staff Photographer

Kashmir, 2010. While walking along a food market in a town nearby Srinagar, I stumbled across this man and asked him if I could take his photograph. I got closer to him and his cart and kept my lens wide to try and have him fill the frame. I then dropped my aperture to f/3.5 to keep him and the foreground sharp, while blurring out the background just enough to put the man really in focus.

Rashad Sisemore / Staff Photographer

Srinagar, Kashmir, 2010. I was standing on a house boat in the middle of the lake in the city of Srinagar when I saw this boatman crossing the lake. I was a good distance away so I zoomed my lens all the way to get this shot. If I had a nice 70-200mm I may have been able to get in closer or a more crisp shot, but I used my 16-85mm at 85mm and I think the image turned out nicely. This is a good example of using what resources you have available, if I wanted use a telephoto I would have had to change my lens and possibly missing the shot.

Rashad Sisemore / Staff Photographer

Thailand, 2010. On a trip I made to Thailand with my family, we stopped at an umbrella making factory in a city outside of Chang Mai in northern Thailand. Within the factory I noticed that there were several stages in production, similar to an assembly line, in which people were responsible for making or painting certain parts of the umbrellas. I noticed in one section a man who would paint some flowers on the umbrella before moving them to another painter who would add more details until they were finished. So I got low to the ground and opened my lens up wide to capture this shot of umbrellas that had just been painted right before they were to be drawn in with more details from another painter down the line.

Rashad Sisemore / Staff Photographer

Thailand, 2010. Next to the umbrella factory was of course a gift shop for visitors to buy some of these umbrellas that were being made. There were row-after-row of different colors, shapes, and sizes of umbrellas that visitors could look at and buy. I decided to try and capture the dense amount of umbrellas there were by taking this shot. I set my aperture as low at it would go (f/ 3.5) for a nice depth of field look and adjusted my shutter manually. The lighting in the room was okay so I didn’t have to bump up my ISO really high and instead kept it at about ISO 400. I then zoomed in a little and manually set my focus to be on the tops of the umbrellas. I really enjoyed taking this shot and playing around with the focus manually. I find that sometimes its best to take off the auto focus and play around with it manually to get the shot your looking for.

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Granted there are definitely a lot of advantages to using a DSLR – such as speed in taking pictures of moving subjects, most people don’t really need much more than a good ‘ol point and shoot.

The following images were shot with a Canon PowerShot S410. This bad boy packed a whopping 4 megapixels back in the day, and usable ISO before anything got too grainy was around 100-200. By ISO 400, noise was already very apparent. Nonetheless, when I take a look at some of the images taken by this camera, they seem a lot better than the 10/12 megapixel cameras that are mass produced nowadays for compact digital cameras.

Andrew Kuo/Staff

Grand Teton National Park, 2007.  f/7.1, ISO 50, 1/400 sec

This was taken aboard a ferry going from one part of the lake to another on one of my family’s epic long road trip vacations. To be honest, its so long ago, I can hardly remember where I was going and or even for what purpose, but when I look back at this photograph I’m just stunned at the grandeur that lay before me – this world is crazy beautiful – it’s hard to imagine that it could have been an accident.

Andrew Kuo/Staff

Yellowstone National Park, 2007. f/7.1, ISO 50, 1/800 sec

This one is also taken on the same road trip, and I’m especially proud of this photograph. A technique I really love using with point and shoots is to hold them very close relative to the ground to get a really low perspective of the world. This is something you can’t really do easily with a DSLR, nor would you often want to risk it either. In this case, I was dangling my point and shoot camera just under the railing and inches above the hot geyser to take this picture. Incidentally, the light reflected off the surface to give the algae bloom a great orange-yellowish color that wouldn’t have been noticeable if you looked at the geyser from above.

Andrew Kuo/Staff

Banff National Park, Glacier, 2007. f/7.1, ISO 50, 1/800 sec

This one’s another from the same trip, but now we’re in Canada. After a relatively short two hour hike, my father, brother, and I arrived at the very base of this glacier. If global warming has accelerated since then, this glacier is probably a lot smaller or maybe even nonexistent nowadays. Just thinking back to this hike, the glacier is huge. It’s intensely awe inspiring and humbling at the same time… Anyways nowadays, I always carry a DSLR with me on my hikes, but having a point and shoot back then was truly a blessing – and the pictures come out great just as well!

Andrew Kuo/Staff

San Francisco, 2007.  f/4.9, ISO 50, 15 sec

This last image is a bit of a freak accident, and I don’t even really remember the circumstances in how I took this. If I remember correctly, it was on the other side of the bridge in the parking lot facing the Golden Gate and The City. I must have placed my PowerShot on the railing and let it auto-expose, possibly accidentally shifting the camera halfway in between the exposure. Whatever happened, this is one of my favorite images of The City that I have taken in my years as a photographer.

Hopefully by now, you’ve seen what a little point and shoot can do – and if you are an aspiring photographer, don’t be let down by your equipment. The most important thing, is to simply go out there and shoot – experiment – fail – try again – and sometimes end up with a keeper that you didn’t even expect ~

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My interest in photography was sparked when I was eleven years old after receiving a Point and shoot Nikon film camera for my sixth grade graduation. I soon fell in love with photography, and when I was fourteen I gathered enough of my savings to buy a DSLR of my own—a Nikon D70. When I started shooting I shot a lot of high school sports, my friends skateboarding, and began taking portraits of friends and family.

Over the years, however, I have developed a passion for shooting travel photography. This began after I took a trip with my family to Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank when I was fifteen, and became fascinated with the people and cultures I encountered on my trips. Since then I always have a camera on me while traveling and try to soak up as much of the life and culture surrounding me behind the lens. For this week I will display some of the photographs I took while traveling abroad in Northern India during the winter of 2010. I hope you enjoy these photographs and i’ll be posting more soon in the coming days.

Rashad Sisemore/Staff

New Dehli, India, 2010. I was in a textile bazaar in New Dehli when I saw this women sitting patiently for a customer. I didn’t want to raise her awareness by pointing my camera directly at her to frame the shot, so I did what is known as “shooting from the hip.” I increased my aperture to 3.5 and then manually set my camera’s auto-focus to be weighted on the left side of my viewfinder. I held the camera at my hip and took a few shots, never causing the women to notice me and to break from her pose. I think the shot turned out great, but I must say that “shooting from the hip” is a very risky way to take photographs and you may end up with nothing but blurry, out of focus pictures that are terrible shots. But sometimes you get a good one, and continuous use and practice of the technique will allow you to compensate better for the shot. Try it out, you may be surprised by what you capture.

Rashad Sisemore/Staff

Jaipur, India, 2010. This shot was taken in a street market in the city of Jaipur. I was walking along the market when I noticed this man working on sewing a garment for the women in the colorful shawl to his left. I was rather close to them when I took this photo so I opened up the lens wide (16mm) and waited until they both were preoccupied with the garment being sewed. For this photo I wanted to capture a real moment where both of my subjects were unfazed and unaffected by my presence. The only negative take-away I have from this photo is the distortion caused by the wide-angle. If you look at the women wearing the white shawl you will notice that her head is a little distorted. As a tip, it is always important to notice everything in your frame aside from your subject(s), especially for things like distortion.

Rashad Sisemore/Staff

Jaipur, India, 2010. While in Jaipur I visited a fruit market and ran into this fruit vendor. I decided to buy some bananas from him and asked if I could take his photo. He said yes but was quick to get business done, so I snapped this shot of him working, trying again to capture a very real scene that you may find yourself in if you are shopping for fruit in Jaipur.

Rashad Sisemore/Staff

Jaipur, India, 2010. Next to the fruit market in Jaipur, through a maze of narrow streets, I stumbled across a flower market. All throughout the market there were burlap sacks filled to the top with flowers (like the ones shown in this photo) being prepared for whole sale buyers. Inside the market I noticed a tiny storage shed used to hold these flowers and I asked the man working in the storage if he would mind if I took a photo of him. He motioned to me that it was fine and I snapped a couple photos of him, as he briefly rested against the wall, taking a break from shoveling flowers in a basket (seen in the background) and moving them to other workers outside. I choose to take this photo because #1 the contrasting colors were incredible and #2 because I felt that it was a good environmental portrait of the man. I shot this without the use of flash because I felt there was already enough natural light.

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Hello. My name is Andrew Kuo, I’m a third year mechanical engineering major, and this week I have the honor of writing for this photo blog. I hope you find my posts interesting and insightful.

I started shooting pictures when I was in elementary school through an old Kodak 2 MP digital camera with a 32 MB compact flash card, moving onto a 4 MP Canon Powershot S410. From then, I’ve used a Nikon D40, a Canon T1i, Olympus E-P1, an currently a Canon 5D Mark 1. I also currently shoot with my father’s Nikon FE2 and an Olympus XA2 and Olympus Stylus Epic occasionally as well.

Also, I’m from the East Bay, specifically the projects – P-town – Pleasanton, CA. As one of the most bougie cities in the 925, most of my pictures are from my travels because there isn’t much to look at back home. My love for photography has always had an intimate connection with the places I’ve gone to and the things I’ve had the great opportunity to see – this amazing planet – with all of its colors, shapes, and vistas. However, recently my passion has been shifted towards capturing and redefining true beauty. As I go forth into the future – I strive to discover and photography beauty that is against the grain. Tired of seeing pictures of women on flickr getting the most views (what’s up with that?), I aim to photograph beauty that goes beyond skin-deep. I feel like that’s too easy, and there’s got to be more.

As this week unfolds, I’m not sure if my portfolio can match up to that high ideal just yet, but what I will be aiming to do is to show you some of my work throughout my years with different cameras – just to give you a sense that you don’t need a fancy DSLR to take good pictures. Good photographers take good pictures, not good cameras. If you’re curious, here’s my flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/21146171@N04. Enjoy!

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Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

This first shot may not be too interesting, but it’s a good example of using strobes to balance out ambient light. The sun was setting and I was shooting into it. I would have gotten underexposed shadows on the shoes, but because I had a strobe lighting the shoes, we have even light across the frame. For this particular shot, I had a LumoPro LP120 strobe with a CTO gel to warm it up and match the sun light, shot into a reflective umbrella pointed down toward the shoes. The shot was taken with a Nikon D40 and a 35mm f/1.8.

Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

Here’s a goofy shot I took of some friends. They wanted the photo to look like a slumber party, so I had to be creative with the light. If I just used ambient light, the room would have been bright (this was shot during the day), and not very slumber party-like. So, I killed as much ambient light as possible by turning off lights and closing curtains, as well as shooting at my camera’s fastest sync speed, which is 1/250 of a second. A quick strobist lesson here – shutter speed controls ambient exposure and aperture controls flash exposure. To light them, I had to use some external light source, hence the strobe. I placed a bare LumoPro LP160 on legs of the second guy from the left and hid it behind the (upside down) book. The flash was pointed at the book so it would reflect back and illuminate everyone. I took a shot, and it worked beautifully! The flashlight is not doing anything as far as illuminating them, it’s just a nice prop that adds to the overall look and feel of the photo. Many times, you’ll have to play around with the position of your lights, modifying light, changing the output power of your strobes, and whatnot to get the shot you want. This photo was taken with a Nikon D7000 and a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8.

There you have it, I hope you enjoyed it! Once again, thank you very much! If you want to see more of my work, please feel free to check out my blog at www.edwincho.com!

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Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

This first shot is of Kevin Kim, the lead guitarist from The Nehemiah Band. They’re a smaller band from the Los Angeles area and they have a very unique sound. They blend elements from all kinds of music including soul, R&B, hip-hop, and rock…and they’re all Korean. Not that it matters at all. It’s just rare to see a (good) Asian-American band. They always put on an awesome live show and are always fun to shoot. I’ve taken photos at three of their shows and the energy they put off always results in great photos. This photo was taken with a Nikon D7000 and a 35mm f/1.8.

Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

Here is Bay Area rapper, Mickey Cho (no relation to me). Although I haven’t shot too many hip-hop artists, I love doing it because of their body language and movement. As seen in both of these photos so far, concert photography is a lot more exciting when you capture the artist(s) doing something visually interesting. You have to convey the energy and emotion the artist had without the music. Body language, facial expressions, and other visual aspects are what separate good concert photos from great ones. In short, concert photography is all about capturing “that moment.” This shot was taken with a Nikon D7000 and a 35mm f/1.8.

Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

Finally, this image is a detail shot of DJ Harper, guitarist for The Wiguna Project. They are a band from my home town, made up of three brothers and DJ. Getting detail shots like this one definitely add interest to photo sets of wide full band shots and other “typical” concert photos. I wish I had waited ’til he started playing in the upper register of the guitar to get this shot, but I think the photo still works as it is. This final shot was also taken with a Nikon D7000 and a 35mm f/1.8.

Tomorrow is my last day, and I will be sharing some more of my stobist shots!

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Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

Here is a diptych showcasing a G Burger and Tropical Fries from G-Burger in La Habra, California. Their burgers are so ridiculous that not only do they have two skewers to hold them together, but a whole steak knife jammed into the burger. You can read more about the food on my blog (link at the end of this post), but as far as the photos go, the lighting conditions were terrible. These were taken with almost no available light in the restaurant. I had to shoot these photos at f/2.5, 1/80, and ISO 3200. I am lucky that my camera performs so well in low light conditions like this. These photos were taken with a Nikon D7000 and a 35mm f/1.8.

Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

This is a photo of Crispy Rice with Spicy Tuna from the hip Hollywood ramen house, Robata Jinya. I loved the look of all the photos I took here thanks to the nice light outside and the simple white plates the food was served on. For my food photography, I really appreciate it when restaurants present their food in a nice, clean way…and I love the look of (most) food on plain white plates like in this photo. This photo was taken with a Canon 7D and a 28mm f/1.8.

Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

The final image is a photo of some home made Candied Bacon Ice Cream. It may sound bizarre to some of you, but it is a perfect mix of sweet, salty, creamy, and crunchy. The flavor and textural contrasts are truly amazing. Anyway, enough about the food. This is one of those rare occasions where I set up lights to get the shot. I had a single LumoPro LP160 in a softbox camera left angled down toward the ice cream and a white reflector camera right acting as a fill. It’s nice to use strobes as opposed to hot constant lights because strobes do not produce heat that would melt the ice cream. This was taken with a Canon 7D and a 100mm f/2.8 macro lens.

You can read a lot more about the food I eat and see much more of my food photography at my personal blog, www.edwincho.com. Check back again tomorrow for a post on some of my music photography.

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Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

This first image is of my friend’s tricked out BMW E46 3-series. It was a ton of fun taking this image. I was shooting out the window of a second chase vehicle with with a slow shutter speed to get the motion blur in the background. To keep the car from blurring out, both vehicles had to be moving at the same speed. This way, you get to see the motion, which you normally would never be able to capture in a photograph. This shot was taken with a Nikon D40 with a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens with a shutter speed of about 1/15. I also used a flash on camera to help freeze the car.

Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

This second image is of another friend’s Infiniti G37s. Compared to the first image, this one definitely required less set up, but it was equally fun to shoot. I shot this image right by the beach just as the sun was starting to fall, again with a Nikon D40 and a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8. The Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 is famous (or infamous) for being extremely prone to lens flaring. I though the lens flare was nice in this particular image, but I don’t care for it in every image.

Next time, I plan on showcasing some of my food photography next time, so don’t miss out on that! Again, feel free to check out some of my other work at my personal blog, www.edwincho.com.

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Edwin Cho / Staff Photographer

Hello, my name is Edwin and I’ll (hopefully) entertain you all with some of my work. I’m a second year student from a peaceful little suburb of Los Angeles. Besides photography, my hobbies include cooking, eating, playing music, and attempting to record music. That’s a self portrait of myself up there (when I had longer hair) made with the help of my sister, who is also a photographer. I guess you can say that creativity runs in my family. Most of us are graphic designers, musicians, photographers, or some strange mix of those (among other art forms). I also have a bad habit of using tons of parentheses, so forgive me for that (please).

I got my first DSLR, a trusty Nikon D40, when I was a junior in high school. I made the jump from a point and shoot after playing with other peoples’ SLRs. I naturally gravitated toward shooting other things I have interest in, most notably music, food and cars (though I’m not too crazy about the latter, they make for great photos).

Like my other hobbies, I am self-taught. My endless hours searching the internet led me to fall in love with strobism (using small flashes to create effective, versatile lighting) and long exposure photography. My self-portrait is an example of strobism. For all you technical photographers out there, it was shot with a Canon 7D (my sister’s, I still shoot Nikon) and a 50mm f/1.4. As far as lighting, it was lit with a LumoPro LP160 in a homemade beauty dish camera left and a LumoPro LP120 with a red gel lighting the background. I had other shots with a reflector camera right filling in the shadows on my face, but I liked the look of this shot better. If you want to read more on strobism, check out David Hobby’s blog, Strobist.

Throughout the rest of this week, I plan on sharing some of my photos of music, food, cars, and some more strobist shots.

Feel free to check out my personal blog at www.edwincho.com which covers food, music, and photography.

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