1. New pictures
2. New video
3. New, uh, “enhancements”

One caveat, though — the new pictures are in the new video. So you’ll have to watch it to see them. But don’t worry, real static versions are coming to the blog soon.

Without further ado, here’s a little video I put together of Sam, made from stills and video of our latest beach shoot, as she competes for Miss Hooters of Canada 2010:

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You might notice that Sammy looks a bit different since the last time you saw her… that’s what #3 above was referring to.

If you like what you see, do Sam a favour and vote for her from your mobile phone. Like the video says, text the name SAM to 747474 once per day, and you’ll be entered to win a trip to Hollywood, Florida for the Miss Hooters International Pageant.

She’s also on Twitter and has a Facebook Group too!

The DJ booth is a good place to stake out the joint and figure out where my best vantage points will be throughout the night. It also affords some cool photo ops:

Even though the disco ball, LEDs, and other lights provide for some nifty effects, their levels are all very low. The above picture was shot with the camera set to ISO 3200, an aperture of f/2.8 and a shutter speed that is barely hand-holdable at 1/25th. If you click through to view the image on Flickr, you can see the full EXIF header  by selecting “More properties” in the lower right.

The Nikon D300S that I shoot with is pretty effing good in low-light situations, giving very useable results even when it’s jacked up to ISO 3200.

The shot above adds some flash to light up the DJ booth in the form of a Nikon SB-800 with a LumiQuest Pocket Bouncer attached. I’ve slowed down the shutter speed even further, to 1/6th. This allows more of the ambient light into the photo, but the short duration of the flash still keeps the main subjects relatively sharp.

The two shots above are much the same as the DJ booth shot, with some added flash and slower shutter speeds of 1/8th and 1/10th, respectively.

The shot above is by far my favourite of the last few months, for a few reasons. One, the bearded dude looks angry and therefore funny. Two, he’s the most prominent thing in the photo, staring right at the camera, isolated from the sea of people around him. You’ll notice the orange glow this whole photo has, despite using flash. This was taken much closer to the disco ball than the previous photos were, meaning the light was more intense and the slow shutter (1/8th) picked it up a little more than before.

Dragging the shutter on the above photo helped to convey a sense of movement, but the flash still kept much of the important parts sharp. Looks like he’s in the middle of a pelvic thrust.

I love these last two for being totally impromptu club pictures. The first dude held the finger pose for only a split second as he danced around, but I snagged it. The group in the lower photo had no idea I was even there, as I just held my camera up high over my head to capture their ridiculous faces.

Turns out DJ Storm also needed some photos of himself for some promotional posters, so we went into the studio a few weeks ago and banged these out:

I used a High Pass filter technique in Photoshop to give them a slightly more dimensional look. You can read more about the technique on Dustin Snipes’ blog.

The studio is in Bowmanville, which is a long trek for me, but totally worth it. A couple weeks ago, I shot a familiar face for those of you who follow the blog — Samantha. I’ve only processed one shot from the shoot so far:

The pose and outfit was Sam’s idea. I lit her with an Alien Bees 1600 strobe in a Photoflex softbox, up high to camera right. The background is dark grey seamless paper, lit with a Nikon SB-800 on a tripod. The SB-800′s zoom head was set to about 135mm, for a narrow beam of light across the background, just enough to give Sam some separation.

But I also did another fun time-lapse video:

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The video is composed of 2,290 separate pictures, glued together using QuickTime Pro (version 7, as they’ve stripped this functionality out of the newer versions). I was using my ancient Nikon D70S tethered to a MacBook Pro running Sofortbild. Because the D70S doesn’t have an intervalometer built in, the Sofortbild software is necessary to accomplish pictures at set intervals. Despite setting the intervals to one second, I ended up with photos that were five seconds apart. I suspect this is due to the D70S’s slow buffering, processing, and/or transfer speeds, but I don’t know for sure as I have no real way to test it.

Music: Anger (Rare Force 2 Meg Mix) by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Heather is a friend of mine who takes pictures and today she opened her brand new studio space in Bowmanville, Ontario.

But before we talk about that, you need to know more about her!

Heather friended me on Facebook about a year ago, after realizing that we had each shot two of the same models. We hit it off right away, sharing our best photographic stories and insights. With Heather based a fair distance away from me in Oshawa, our first real-life meeting didn’t happen til many months later… at Hooters. Yes, Hooters. We had fried pickles and they were delicious. Hush.

She doesn’t like talking about herself on her website, but she’s a bit more chatty on her blog. And if you like what you see there, join the Facebook fan page.

Heather is a hardworking mom and fabulous photographer, so when she asked me to drive the 70km or so to Bowmanville and photograph her grand opening, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

There were tasty treats from Custom Cakeworks:

Check out this crazy nice wallpaper:

The size of these windows makes me very excited:

Mayor of the Municipality of Clarington, Jim Abernethy, even came out for the ribbon cutting:

I’ve been bugging Heather a lot about when I can start using the space to shoot in, and I’m glad the answer is… now! I hope to get in there before the end of February and have a whole bunch of brand new content for everyone to see.

On Tuesday night I photographed an Ed Hardy swimwear fashion show at Karma Lounge in Oshawa, Ontario. Using the Nikon D700, I shot almost everything at ISO 6400 and f/1.4 due to the very low lighting in the club.

I also experimented with the Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8 DX lens on the D700, which is a full-frame (FX) body:

There’s never a shortage of interesting people to shoot at a club:

And that brings us to the swimwear models. You might be wondering, “Ryan, why did you make all these photos blue?” Answer after these:

One major issue with club photography is the very, very strange patterns, colours, and colour temperatures of lights that are used. This is one of the major reasons I shoot raw-format photos (instead of JPEG) — so that I have full control over white balance after the photos are taken. White balancing via the auto function of the camera, or trying to do it manually at the club is an exercise in frustration. Check out the example below of Ashley.

The photo on the left is what the camera decided the correct white balance should be in automatic mode (4450 degrees kelvin). The photo on the right is after correcting the white balance in Lightroom to the maximum allowed setting of 50,000 degrees kelvin (and also setting the tint to negative 150 to combat some of the pink hue). So now instead of looking purple, Ashley looks closer to a regular human again. The problem, if there is one, is that both versions look kinda cool. So rather than trying to pick one, I compromised and just tossed out all the colour and made the selenium toned versions you see above.