Dobson Central Photography

For those that are interested in Canons latest 1Ds Mark III camera, this is worth watching, even with the cheesy porno music.  I’m still drooling over the excellent features. 

Now here’s a cool new service.  Borrowlenses.com  You can rent all sorts of lenses by day, week or longer if you like.  They have all sorts of lenses for Nikon and Canon.  It doesn’t stop there though.  You can rent camera bodies, tripods, heads, teleconverters/extenders and flashes.

I can think of several reasons this could come in handy.  Want to test something out before buying?  Need an extra camera body for a photo shoot?  Your camera is in the shop?   Borrowlenses.com should be able to fill some of these voids.

Last Friday I went out to my sons tae kwon do dojang to take some night photography of them doing their nunchuck training camp. Every so often, they hold different camps and whenever they’ve done the nunchucks at night, I’ve wanted to get in there and take some photos. It wasn’t until this past Friday that I was able to schedule some time to go down there and do just that.

The first 10 minutes of shooting, I was getting what I had envisioned, yet the results weren’t satisfying to me. I had envisioned lots of different colored streaks throughout the photo, which was simple enough to do. It just wasn’t enough. So, I ended up using a strobe light to capture the students just prior to them starting their forms. The flash enabled me to freeze the students at the time I started the elapsed photo and then continue capturing the streaks for the remainder of the exposure. The end result is what is posted above (click on photos to see a larger version).

The setup:

1. Exposure: 30 seconds
2. Aperture: f/5.6
3. ISO: 100
4. Mirror Lockup on
5. Noise reduction on
6. Cable release
7. Tripod
8. Strobe: 580EX II at +0 with diffuser, bounced off of ceiling

I came across an interesting blog post today about where a photographer was harassed by a security officer for taking pictures of a building.  A few weeks ago I stumbled across another posting where a photographer was being harassed at a local soccer event for kids by some parents.  In both cases, the police can’t do anything about this, as long as they were not on private property or there was no reason or expectation of privacy (aka public place).

While I personally have never been harassed in a public place (in a government facility is another story), I have found some of these stories intriguing at what could happen.  In any case, while reading todays story, I came across a few interesting sites that had documentation from their research and state laws.  I thought a reprint of these here might benefit those that might be interested.   It might just come in handy to keep a copy of these with your gear, just in case you encounter some of these ignorant people saying it’s “illegal to photograph” (insert location here).

 Legal Rights of Photographers  The Photographers Right

The Legal Rights of Photographers was published by Andrew Kantor on his web site.  His posting on this, along with a LOT of interested comments, can be found at Andrew Kantor’s Place. The Photographers Rights was posted by Bert P. Krages. He has also written a couple of books pertaining to this subject.  You can find more info on Mr. Krages’ site.