I’d like to preface this post by stating that Facebook contests are pretty much amazing. A couple weeks back, I Shoot Reno ran a Facebook contest where the 100th person to ‘like’ our page would win a fun-filled photo shoot at the venue of their choice in Reno. When the winning ‘like’ (Matt Tress) came in, it was anybody’s guess as to where Mr. Tress would select to have his photo taken … and when, seeing as how he lives in Humboldt County in Northern California; but the long and short of it is that Matt chose ‘atop the tallest building in Reno’ as his photo shoot destination. While visiting recently for Thanksgiving, he and I found the opportunity to get in touch with the Silver Legacy and impart his winning selection of the 42nd story balcony of their establishment as the grounds for said photo shoot … and we’re sure glad that they obliged!
The shoot took place at approx. 1:30PM on Friday, Nov. 25th 2011, under direct sunlight at above 5,500 ft. in elevation. Any photographer (our mountain dweller) can tell you that the lighting at this time of day and elevation is not prime for portrait shooting, but truthfully I’m more than content with knowing that our small group that day included several of the very few persons to ever grace the ‘personnel only’ portion of the 38th story for a 30 ft. climb to the top of the world’s biggest little city aka Reno, NV.
As expected, I experienced several photographic ‘firsts’ during and after this shoot. The first came about in knowing that not only would this a portrait shoot, but there would also be ample photographic eye-candy to be shot in 360 degree panoramic proportions. For this I broke down and actually brought along (2) lenses for my Nikon D7000, and performed a manual lens change during the shoot (as I type this I await the arrival of an additional camera body which will ensure no less than two lenses mounted at all times, and an almost 100% guarantee of not having to perform manual lens changes during a shoot). I started with the AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR (kit) lens and finished with my trusty Nikon 50mm f/1.8D with some close-ups and for the group shot (Can you see the cross-hair ‘sparkle’ filter in the group shot? That’s a D7000 on-board effect. Do you like it? Think it’s ‘over the top’? Please let me know in the comments section below.).
The second ‘first’ of this shoot happened after bringing the JPEG’s (last shoot in JPEG; everything going forward will be in RAW) into Lightroom 3 (my first import to this software and initial testing / educational run). The shots all loaded perfectly and I could begin flagging for removal and selecting keepers to be further developed … that wasn’t the problem. The problem was a noticeable amount of dark spots appearing in the same spot on nearly every picture which contained sky at the top. After some poking around online, I discovered that the spots were either one of two things: a) sensor dust or b) oil spots splattered by the motor onto the camera’s sensor. Truthfully, I’m hoping for the earlier and will be performing my first sensor cleaning using Peter Gregg’s SensorSweep product in the next several days … I’ll let you know how that works out. To remedy the sensor dust / spots and save the shoot, I took advantage of the Spot Removal tool in Lightroom 3 and cleaned up nearly 30 spots in nearly every photo to much satisfaction.
The third ‘first’ came just after putting the Spot Removal tool to work. The photo above was technically ‘Photoshopped’, in the very literate sense of the term. Believe it or not, there was originally a satellite dish and shadow to the (our) left of Matt. I used CS5’s new ‘Content Aware’ Fill tool and HOLY COW is it amazing! If you look very closely, you might be able to see a slight disturbance in reality, but for the shot — it works.
There’s still more! The fourth ‘first’ of this shoot is … you guessed it, a brand-new (official) I Shoot Reno watermark! See the copyright information in the bottom-right of each photo? Another slick feature found in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3! I created the .png (to preserve transparency) in Photoshop CS5 and applied it when exporting from Lightroom 3 and it was beyond easy. If you’re looking to do this for your photos I couldn’t recommend a better method. Anyway, I could blab on about how cool the folks over at Silver Legacy are or how geeky us photo-nerds like to get with our gear, but instead I will kindly urge you to keep scrolling and click through to view the full gallery of photos from this Black Friday shoot. If any of them speak to you in any way, shape or form, please share their impact on your life below, and until next time … keep shootin’ Reno!
Camera(s) Used:
Nikon D7000
Lens(es) Used:
AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR; Nikon 50mm f/1.8D
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