Avi Revivo

Archive for September, 2008

My brother’s band, which I wrote about in the previous post, needed some PR pictures for their upcoming shows and new album. They asked me to do the photo shoot and I gladly accepted. The location was an open parking lot in south of Tel-Aviv on a Friday noon, a time when it’s usually empty. The band brought a sofa, old speakers, a table and some other stuff to the parking lot, which all together created a great looking set. The credit for finding the location goes to Avner, the band’s keyboard player.

I took a large number of photos, which turned up quite good, but I want to talk about just a couple of them. I decided to get my first attempt at HDR during this session and the outcome was quite cool, I will definitely keep on shooting HDR image in the near future.

For those of you we are not familiar with the HDR Technique, it is quite simple. Basically, you shoot the same image a few times with different exposures. For example, one image is taken at correct exposure, one image underexposed and one overexposed. The purpose of the wrongly exposed images is to obtain details in the dark areas and in the bright areas which are lost when the image is exposed correctly. After the images are taken, they are combined to a single High Dynamic Range photo using Photoshop, Photomatix or some other tool with HDR generating capabilities. For more info, check out this excellent HDR tutorial.

This image was generated from just 2 pictures. A correctly exposed shot and a underexposed one by 2 stops. I used my D300 mounted on a tripod for this shot.

I was really surprised when I managed to get a good HDR image from 3 images shot at 78mm handheld with my 70-200mm VR lens!

I really love how this HDR turned out in terms of details and colors. I tried a few more HDR shots in this session, some more successful than others, but as I mentioned before – you can expect to see more HDR pictures in my blog in the near future. That’s it for now, have a great weekend!

BTW: I would like wish a big Mazal Tov to my dear and best friend Arnon and his lovely wife Neta for their newborn child – Noa! I wish you guys all the best in the world!

My brother has an excellent band named November, you can check their Hebrew site here. A week ago or so he had a small gig at a place called Levontin 7 in south of Tel-Aviv. The place has the basement style look without any seats and without any extremely elaborate set of lights for the stage, which is the most important element for good live show photos. I decided to check out the D300 capabilities at such a low-light condition. Before leaving for the show i grabbed the D300 coupled with the Nikkor 50mm F1.4 and the Nikkor 35mm F2.0, i left my SB-800 flash at home. All the shots were taken at ISO 3200 with in camera noise reduction set to Normal.

It was an excellent show with great vibes and I wish them great success with their upcoming album!

A few weeks ago I came up with an idea to setup a Photographers Club in my company. The basic idea is that everyone interested in photography can join up and participate in various activities related to photography like photography trips, lectures from professional photographers and photo competitions. I brought the idea to my company Human Resources department and it looks like that very soon my idea is going to be realized.

To kickoff the Photography Club, 3 more photographers from the company and me decided to create a small exhibition of 12 pictures, 3 pictures from each photographer. The exhibition will most likely be presented in the entrance to the building.

We decided to hold a meeting where each one presents around 15 pictures and of which we will select the pictures for the exhibition. I guess it sounds easy but it is definitely not! Selecting pictures for an exhibition is not an easy task, especially when you’re the photographer and each picture tells a different story for you. I decided to pick ones that are “less sophisticated”, in the hope to aim to the taste of most people.

What pictures did I choose and which of them we selected together for the exhibition you ask? Here is the full gallery:

From these we decided to go with 2nd picture, the one in the “desert”. One of the pictures with the kids from Thailand, still not sure which one and the picture of the sea lion trying to keep himself cool by throwing sand all over himself.

What’s your favorite three? I would love to hear! Thanks.