Harrisonburg Day One

Well it's 10:30AM and I've been up for 2 hours waiting for my sister and Jon to wake up so we can go do something, while I'm waiting I perused some shots I took yesterday. Jesi was suppossed to have call for her rehearsal yesterday at 1PM which got changed to 2PM, then when we arrive at her theater...it turns out they won't be starting until 6PM! So Jon and I went exploring Harrisonburg and found an old burned out building that looked like something out of a horror movie, I was just imagining some deranged lunatic jumping out of dark closets and climbing out through holes in the walls. Fortunately (as you can tell since I'm writing this the next day) that no such thing happened. What can I say we had 4 hours to kill and since it was spring break for the school a lot of places were closed!

Told you it was a fire!

Quite a skylight

I was telling Jon how sharp the 50mm f/1.8 is and I held up my finger a did a 100% crop...you could give that image to the police and get an arrest with that much detail...if I was guilty of anything that is.

When we got back to Jesi's place with about 1.5 hours left to kill we found a bottle of acai extract juice something or other. It had some sort of substance floating in it, probably acai seeds right?

I noticed a little warning sign on the bottle that said "WARNING: Shellfish" and decided to check the contents in total disbelief...sure enough, whichever of Jesi's roommates owns this bottle is DRINKING shrimp. I'm definitely a fan of shrimp, but I prefer mine separate from my beverage.
When we arrived back at the theater we found out they were not going to start until 7:30/8PM now(they finally started at 9PM and finished at 2AM). Later we went to Subway for dinner, which happened to be connected to a convenience store and saw some tubes of Pringles chips. (How convenient for me!) I remembered reading a post on strobist.blogspot.com about a snoot made out of a Pringles can. For those of you who have never been to Strobist, go now. David Hobby (owner of Strobist and a Speedlite Guru) is a genius when it comes to off camera lighting. 

For those of you who don't know what a 'snoot' is, a snoot is a tube designed to restrict the spread of light from a flash or continuous light source. The idea is to get a nice tight circle of light that you can either isolate a feature on a model or item you are shooting to create an interesting lighting effect for a background. Normally these are used on flashes that are on stands off camera, giving some truly stunning images, but I couldn't wait to snap a few pictures with my new Pringsnoot and threw it and my 17-55 on Jon's D40 and fired away at the actors and actresses and stagehands that were looking at me like I was crazy when I was wrapping an empty Pringles tube in gaffers tape.

This is the effect a snoot has on a blank wall as a background. Cool huh?

Jon is snapping off some serious snoot action. It may look ridiculous but the results make it worth the effort and possible embarrassment.

We're going back today to watch yet another rehearsal so I'll be taking quite a few more images today and will post them up tomorrow. Got some awesome shots of the cast in their creepy puppet like makeup. Enjoy!