I recently had a near death experience. Yes, that’s right DEATH …or at least pretty near to it.

Hold off on the concerned phone calls, panicked emails and frantic tweets. It wasn’t me that nearly died, it was one of my hard drives. Computer hard drive failure is more common than you might think. Luckily my files and I made it through okay, although at first I wasn’t sure I would pull through.

Moral of the story: back up your junk.

So, now that I am backing up my junk I have found myself looking through a bunch of photos that I haven’t looked through in a long time. It is kinda fun to go back and see the crappy, crappy photos that I used to take and think were amazing. Not saying my photos have gotten less crappy, just that I spot the real turds right away and try to flush them down into the recycle bin. Nevertheless, here are a few old photos that I took a second look at and didn’t have to plug my nose. Also, I love the word ‘nevertheless’, it rocks.

I shared a video of this guy here on this blog a long time ago. It still doesn’t have much to do with photography, other than the imagery in the videos is superb, but it does still inspire me. I mean, seriously, if a person can get this insanely good at something through determination, hard work and tons of practice then the rest of us have a chance of being at least a little good at the things we work on too, right?

I don’t know if that makes sense, but either way, click this right here for full-screen glory or the link below to watch on YouTube.

I’m really slipping up on my post titles. I mean, come on, Group Portrait Timelapse? How boring is that?
Oh well. The semester is almost over and then I might regain a small portion of the meager brainpower that I possess and dedicate it toward more clever and engaging blog post titles.

Check out a few of the pictures below to see the results of the photoshoot in greater detail than they appear in the video.

See what I did there?

The only difference between the picture below and the picture above is the vantage point from which they were shot.

“If you do not raise your eyes you will think that you are the highest point.”

I’ve recently been spending gobs of time in the newly dubbed “Technical Imaging Lab” at Arizona State University where I attend grad school, work in the photo studio, and work for the university under two separate grant projects. I really can’t complain about being there too much, I get to do things like what you see in the video above and call it work/school. In the fall a new class will be available at ASU called Technical Imaging. It will give students a chance to get their grubby little hands on some fairly awesome equipment and learn how to make sweet videos of themselves getting slapped in the face or hit with water balloons, fruit, dodgeballs, etc. They can also learn how to take still pictures of high speed events like liquids dripping and splashing, stuff getting chopped up in a blender or exploding.

Actually, I don’t know what kinds of things they’ll taking pictures and videos of, those things are just what I do with the gear while I’m in the lab learning how to use it myself. hee hee

A little background on this video…

The first two clips, wherein the illustrious Chris Paxman shoots himself in the face, were shot at 1245 frames per second. The latter clip of the soft (and very tender, ouch) tissue of my arm getting pelted with a pellet was shot at about 5700 frames per second.
The camera used to shoot such high framerates in this instance was a Phantom Miro eX2.

Oh, one more thing… While it may look cool to shoot projectiles at one’s face, this is not recommended.

Everyone has New Year’s resolutions. Updating my blog more often is one of my resolutions. So today I am updating my blog with a few photos that I came across as I was backing up the last years worth of pictures on my multiple hard drives. This isn’t really intended to be a “best of 2010″ collection of photos or anything close to it. Just a random smattering of some of the good stuff I’ve come across so far.
Hopefully this will be a resolution that I stick to beyond next week and if so, I will get a lot more pictures up and posted.

“How can I help”, you ask? Well, if you see something on the blog you like, don’t like, agree with, hate, etc. then be sure to leave a comment. I know people click on and visit the blog, my site statistics tell me that much. But if I see that people are engaged at all then I will be more motivated to keep it up.

Enjoy the pics, I sure enjoy making them!

A few months ago I posted a cool little video that showed some really cool timelapse photography by a really cool guy named Dan Eckert. I thought maybe people would thing I was really cool too if I could make a really cool video like Dan Eckert. It would make me even cooler if I talked a little bit about how I made this video rather that just show it. This way if anyone else wants to be cool like I have officially just become, feel free to shamelessly mimic me shamelessly mimicking someone else. Here is the video, be sure to make it full-screen.



You like that stuff right there? I hope so. Leave a comment if you did. If you didn’t like it, uhh, just quietly grumble and move along, thank you.

If you’d like to find out exactly how to make this kind of video there is a great tutorial over on AdoramaTV by my buddy Mark Wallace . If you are only mildly curious how this was made, it is pretty simple. You take a bunch of photos of the same thing over a long period of time, then you play them all back really fast.

I get to spend my time doing all sorts of cool things. One of those cool things is helping to set up a high speed imaging lab at ASU Polytechnic. We have all sorts of brand new, really cool gear that I am learning from scratch. Things like laser and sound triggers, extremely powerful and short duration strobes, thermal cameras, high speed video cameras, and so on. Needless to say, I don’t know where to start. So I thought I would try my hand at some of the things I’ve seen done by others and compare the results then once I have a clue what everything does I can get a little more creative.

The photo above was made using a flash duration of 1/7500th of a second. The video below, while not the highest quality in the world, shows the same setup in action at 1000 frames per second. Playback of the video is set at 30 frames per second so even though it takes 30 seconds to watch what happens it went down much faster in real life.

Next item on my agenda, exploding fruit. Stay tuned.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a parent of twins. Double the diapers, double the feeding, crying, sleep deprivation, and did I mention double the diapers? I have three wonderful, amazing kids of my own and readily admit that after the first month having each I have decided not to have any more. Obviously that hasn’t worked for us so far.

After hanging out with these two little dudes I have decided that if you are going to raise twins, you had better hope they are as awesome as these little guys. Seriously, I have never seen babies that fuss so little. It made photographing them really easy too, all I had to do was look at them and they would smile at me. Like this one below, my lovely assistant and wife, took the picture because when my face popped out from behind the camera he would grin like he was looking at a clown, okay maybe something less scary than a clown. We’ll just say that my goofy face was working better than anyone else’s so you get to look at the back of my head a bit now.

Sometimes I just have to post something completely unrelated but because it is so full of awesomeness it simply has to be shared. I envy the patience and effort that this chap puts into not only shooting thousands of gorgeously delicious still images but editing and composing all that into these videos. Wow, just wow.

You’re gonna want to hit the little fullscreen button for this one.

Oh yeah, and let it buffer first if you are on a slow connection for best results. Enjoy!

The photographer is Dan Eckert and I think he’s cool. You can check out more of his videos over on Vimeo. I recommend it.