Jow • ler ( joul-ler) n., 1. A still image of the face one makes while vigorously shaking one’s head. (http://jowlers.com/)

Every so often we get high school classes coming through for tours of the studio. They like to see what we do there, but they like it even more when they get to do something fun. Last group that came through got to see stroboscopic photography of people in rapid action and they all got to try it out from in front and behind the camera. Stroboscopic is cool stuff but it does take some time to set up, a lot of test shots, and a lot of adjustments to get it to look really good. This week’s student group, a herd of 35 teens, crammed into the studio about half an hour earlier than scheduled. I had to think quickly. What would a bunch of teenagers with short attentions spans be interested in that I could do quickly? Well, the exact same kind of things that easily entertain my immature little brain. In this case, shaking your face so violently that your lips flap in the wind.

Needless to say, the laughter as each photo loaded on the computer monitor for the group to see was enough to draw the attention of others in the building and soon we were shooting everybody that poked their head in the door.

The technique is relatively simple. Point the camera at someone and make them shake their head like a dog that is drying off. Just make sure your flash is turned on and is the main light source in the photo. I used three lights for these shots just to make it a little more interesting, but check the link up at the top to see how jowlers are usually done.

Now I’ll quit talking and just let you look at these pictures.

Last week at the Orpheum Theater in Phoenix (really cool venue), ASU held the first annual Pitchfork Awards. They even rolled out a red carpet, asked people to get dressed up and they hired a fancy-schmancy photographer to play the role of the paparazzi. Here’s just a few of the plethora of people I shot as they came in.  Check them out and leave me some love in the comments or over on Facebook.
 

I was in the studio a little while back and all the students had finished their work but they were still just standing around. I figured it was free labor so I put them to work setting up a shot that I had tried before but wanted to do again. Between the group we had about six or seven different video cameras, so we decided to use them too. As a result, you are lucky enough to have this rushed and poorly executed BTS video of how to make paint splash upwards from a speaker. Just what you were looking for, I know.

Anyway, we shot this really quickly without a lot of thought and I think it looks pretty amateur. Nevertheless, the subject matter is cool and that guy narrating has a mezmerizing voice so I decided to go ahead and post it. Soon enough, it got picked up by a few photo blogs (ISO1200.com and Petapixel.com) and the view count shot up pretty fast.

I’m just now getting around to blogging about it here. Anyway, cheers!

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.