Hail to the Chief

This past Tuesday I was there. Yes, I was in the the most crowded place in the world that day, Washington, DC. It was the 56th Presidential Inauguration Ceremony and I was asked to be the person to document an event sponsored by Best Buy at Constitution Hall. This event was offered as a free service to the community: seating for 3700 people to stay out of the cold as they watched the very memorable day on a 60 foot screen (and two smaller side displays). Geek Squad had a booth to burn people's photos onto DVD so they could free up their memory cards and make room for all the photos they wanted to take. Also Best Buy Mobile, Best Buy for Business, HP, Slingbox, Jawbone and Verizon had booths to do everything from hands-on demos of their products, to give away free souvineers to taking photos of guests with a cardboard cutout of Obama and printing it out on a HP printer. Best Buy also set up a charging station so people could charge their phones and cameras if they were running low on juice. All this completely gratis, with no sales pitch... pretty cool!

I was amazed by the huge crowds, you hear a number like 1.4 million and it doesn't mean much to you until you see it and are a part of it. Constitution Hall was packed wall to wall with people trying to get out of the 18 degree weather and avoid standing on their feet without access to restrooms for hours on end. It was simply non-stop all day. It would have been nice to be one of the official photogs for the inauguration itself, but there's always 2013! The full gallery is on noahhayes.net, but here's a little slice of history for you:

This girl was waiting for us to open up the doors at 8AM...

I dare you to count them...there's 3700, def..def...definitely 3700 (a little Rainmain impression if you didn't get that one...)

Mark "Voice of the Washington Redskins" Kessler was the MC for the event...

Slingbox and Jawbone representatives demoing their products (cool stuff too!)

I let Jon hold my D3 for this one...scary thought...LOL

Starbucks' new "grime the planet" campaign...seriously, can't DC keep it's streets clean?

New view on the World (Wide Web)

Just got finished setting up my new 24" LCD. I REALLY wanted to get an S-IPS panel, but I really didn't want to pay 300% more for one. I calibrate all my monitors to prints that I've made on my Epson R1800 and prints I've received from the labs I order from, so if there's a little bit of visual color shift from different angles it doesn't matter to me. I just need it to be accurate from where I'm sitting, so I settled for a mid-range display. This replaces a 4 year old LG L1720P (TN type panel) that I had purchased two of when they first came out for $480 each...it's ridiculous to me how cheap good electronic gear is now.



Here's what my "office" looks like now...a bit like the matrix. (from left to right, 24" Samsung LCD,15.4" Macbook Pro, 17" LG LCD, 40" Samsung LCD) I'm so addicted...I'm even considering picking up a Mac Pro sometime next year after the Nehalm processor refresh and picking uo another 40" LCD to use as my primary system...I need to go to counseling or something!

The Sun is no match for the Nikon 14-24 f/2.8!

This past week I was up in Minnesota for a business trip, and I took my D3 and some glass (why wouldn't I?) and we took a cruise on the beautiful Lake Minnetonka which left right around golden hour, and before we left the dock I decided to test out the flare control of my newest addition to my lens collection, the amazing Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 Ultra-wide Angle lens. It has a nanocrystal coat and a bunch of ED (enhanced dispersion) glass in it to reduce flare and ghosting, and let me tell you...it works like a dream. The picture below is a picture of a ship next to the one we one SHOOTING STRAIGHT INTO THE SUN! The incredible part is there is only a VERY slim strip of flaring at the bottom left of the image!

Click this link to view a larger version

Incredible control of flare for shooting directly into the sun at Lake Minnetonka, MN!

Another test using the same lens with absolutely no flare (also no water to reflect the sun from a different angle...) from rural western VA

Video Project in 3 days = No sleep

James and I on our first day of shooting...prior to sleep deprivation...

So those of you who don't know...I have had all of 8 hours of sleep over the past week. I got approached by a GM in my district about creating a video project around customer acquisition and innovation in our local stores last week. I agreed to work on it without knowing when he needed it by (he made it sound like their was plenty of time). The next day he calls to tell me a little more about the project. This is a video which is to be made to show to our Executive Vice President of Retail and our CFO who would be coming to our territory office on the 27th. I said "The 27th of July? Okay." No...it was the 27th of June. This conversation was last Friday the 20th.

I freak out as I had to work all weekend and was scheduled to work all this week. I managed to get my employees to work a bunch of extra shifts to cover me, and grabbed James ( a friend at the company who I've done several video projects before...also a fellow contributer to Tech Tuesdays at Sillyman.org) and filled him in on the details. We began shooting Monday morning and found out Tuesday afternoon after shooting the last bit that this video needed to have a rough draft (90% complete) by 3PM Wednesday...

To make a long story short, this project took about 50 hours of actual work and James and I were sitting in front of a camera or a computer for close to 65 hours (waiting for things to render, import, ect) over the course of 3.5 days. We found out Thursday EVENING that the time for the presentation has been cut back, and due to time constraints they won't have time to show the video (it's only 7.5 minutes long!)

I wasn't going to blog this, but I emailed the video to a couple friends in the industry and they wanted me to post this up just to show everyone exactly how (to put in Armin's words) "...this really shows how much TIME and EFFORT goes into a freakin’ 7 minute video!"

Sorry I am not willing to link or post this video as it is does contain proprietary company information, but just rest assured that it came out great.

At least I got out of a blue shirt for a few days...

Softball 08

Today I was shooting a softball game for Best Buy's D91 annual tournament. They usually don't take it seriously as to go out and make uniforms specifically for the event, but this year the Gainesville store went all out and got jerseys made. Sterling VA completely dominated every round they played, with the first game being the biggest landslide with Sterling aat 28 runs OVER what Gainesville had. I took about 1700 shots and boiled it down to the top 250ish and uploaded the lot onto noahhayes.net under events if you'd like to view the events from the whole day, but I decided to post a couple of my personal favorites here for you. 

You usually don't see baseball/softball games from the angle of the field in photos, but here's one...

Stu = failure   Kyle = hero

Kyle's pretty fast too

Stu warming up

Zach's would-be hilarious shirt if 1022 (Leesburg VA) had more than three people show up to play...those three got stuck on Rick's team

George sporting his Julbo shades...

These were some pro-quality burgers and dogs, many thanks to Helen for feeding everyone...

Jermaine decided to play a little basketball while on a break between going up to bat...

Leanna and Kat(below) both decided to slide head first into the muddy expanse between 2nd and 3rd base...

Hope you enjoyed these, I've got some new photo toys I'll be testing out this week and putting a full review (or at least some sample photos) later this week when I get some more time. (BTW I usually don't shoot JPEG, but I did today expecting to take more photos than normal...I used up nearly 11 GB of cards using JPEG alone, which was mind boggling to me. Fortunately nearly all the shots were great straight out of the camera and the only post-processing I had to do was a little cropping here and there)