Anti-Inflammatories and Rock Climbing

As a person who has had a few injuries

involving my spine, nerves and muscles I am 

curious what happens to climbers / athletes in the 

long run when their bodies tell them to rest but instead

they take 800mg or more of anti-inflammatories and push on.  

One thing I've learned as an aging climber is when 

to listen to my body and take those much needed rest days.

To reference: One Move Too Many...

"You don't get stronger on your training days. You get 

stronger on your rest days."

"Rest: Pain is an alarm. It is a warning that something

 in the body has been damaged, and you should not 

ignore it. After any injury you should listen to the pain 

and immediately rest."

I shot this on a climbing / bouldering trip of 

a climber who is pushing through 

with the use of anti-inflammatories.

I would like to know other peoples thoughts...

DANLUBBERS.COM has been redesigned and is now LIVE

Thanks to my good friend Jeff Louden,

danlubbers.com has been completely redesigned.

This design is optimized for extremely fast loading

content and easy user interface and 

showcases the images in a beautiful layout. 

(If you like my work, please share 

with your friends and get the word out)

A little about Louden:

For the past year he has been working tirelessly

as Lead Developer of BarackObama.com

He spent his days and nights buried in politics and 

staring at screens full of HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Check out his website here: JEFFLOUDEN.com

Examples on Interior Architecture

Test:

Shoot an interior shot to show the different 

variations in styles of shooting. 

Canon 5D | 16-35mm 2.8 | 580EX II's | Pocketwizards II's

Manfrotto Tripod & Light-stands | Canon TC-80N3 Trigger

As shot, no lights or perspective control.

HDR blended with 5 exposures and no lights.

Exposure Fusion with 5 exposures and no lights

 Final Image: One exposure with 2 light setup.

By far this is the best technique!

Portrait shoot of Artist/Oil Painter Sunny Ra w/diagram

Finally got to shoot a few beautiful portraits of Sunny.

It's been awhile since I've listed the BTS's diagram of 

a setup on how I get a shot.

We were shooting in a living room of a house 

and even though the wallpaper color was nice, 

I did not want the pattern at all as the background. 

I used a diffuser to only get the color that I wanted 

to achieve without the pattern. A Canon 580 EX II 

Speedlite was between the diffuser and the wall 

to control the intensity of the background.

My main light source was a White Lightning X1600 

gelled with a CTO shooting through an umbrella. 

Due to height issues I wasn't actually able to 

get the light source as high or infront of the model 

as I would have liked, so I had to add another Canon 

580 EX II for fill. The fill light was also gelled 

with a CTO and softened with a Lumiquest 

softbox III. 

Imported into Adobe Lightroom 4 where a few adjustments 

were made then exported to CS6 for a few touch ups

to get the final image you see above. 

Diagram of setup:

Sunny Ra is an exceptional oil painter. 

Most of her paintings are big, 

like in the 4ft x 8ft range.

Click to to go to her website!

iPhoneography

"The best camera is the one that's with you..." ~ Chase Jarvis

That being said, sometimes it's not your DSLR, sometimes it's a P&S or a camera phone. 
With the quality of camera phones being so damn near exceptional these days for most
casual applications and the one that's always in a persons pocket or purse, I've added 
a new gallery to my website titled , "iPhoneography." It's not always about the best gear, but how you convey a message with what you have...

From Camera to Post-Processing the Final Image

There is quite a bit that may or may not go into a photo 

once it's been uploaded to a computer. 

I have often heard gawkers looking at images saying 

the phrase, "Oh, that's Photoshopped!" 

Usually in a negative connotation. 

There is a big difference between Photoshopped and over-processed!

News Flash: Every photo that is digitally taken these 

days is "photoshopped" regardless of what software 

one may use. Ex. Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto, etc...

This is no different from the days I was shooting 

film in high school/college and processed the film canisters 

of chemicals, took it into the "dark room" to an enlarger, 

where I "dodged and burned." Layered negatives for a composite 

and then dropped the paper in more chemicals to get my result. 

Granted we have much more flexibility with 

what we can manipulate through the means of 

computers than we had through a dark room, 

but that shouldn't necessarily mean that 

everything is over-processed to the point of 

where it doesn't look natural with the human eye. 

The first image is straight from the camera.

I've laid out the actions I took to take this from what 

I would call a "Point and Shoot" image to the final 

image below it that makes it really pop and look the way 

it did our natural human eye would see the scene.

Final Image

A little Post-Processing goes a long way...

The skies have been amazing in Kentucky lately. 

They could go one of two ways: 

A beautiful gradient with little to no clouds 

or a fierce contrasty sky full of clouds. 

I decided to head down to the Louisville Extreme Skatepark 

& Waterfront Park one evening and

see how the sky was going to perform during sunset.

I started out shooting the Louisville Extreme Skatepark 

and once I was satisfied with the light decided to head over 

towards the old train bridge which is suppose to be converted to 

a walk/bike path between Kentucky and Indiana over the Ohio River.

The Train bridge image will you show how much difference 

a little post-processing can do to the overall quality of an image.

The top left version is a bit washed out.
Only some slight adjustments were made to boost up the tone,
clarity and contrast to make this image really pop.

(Final image in lower right of screen shot)