Kettlebell still-life

 
From portraits to still-life....... I didn't have much time for photo-exploration today since I had to leave shortly after my WOD (so Brown gets credit for most of the shots from today's WOD; see link below) But I did find time for a quick still-life of some kettlebells that were lined up and waiting for the next heat to begin.

My preference would have been to use my 50mm lens to capture more light (and minimize the depth of field) but I didn't have time so I used the kit lens which was already on. I didn't want to use the flash so had to use a slightly longer exposure (1/30 sec) and a high ISO (1600). I set the camera on the mats and then selected the 2-sec time-delay exposure. This is a neat feature that waits 2 seconds after you've pressed the button before opening the shutter, minimizing vibrations from the button-press. It's not just for use when the camera is on a base; you can use it while hand-holding the camera, too. (I used this technique to take a night shot from the apartment in New York last week. Since I knew it was going to be a super-long exposure, I braced my arm against the window ledge, exhaled, and then used the 2-sec delay to minimize the resulting vibrations from my button-press.)

When I got home I darkened the kettlebell pic a bit using Picasa's Shadow feature but I still wasn't happy with it. I tried a few more effects before deciding on the Glow feature to give it a slightly softer look. I'm still not happy with the end result because of the noise (it's really pronounced in the full size image). But when I tried the de-speckle filter in GIMP, I just didn't like the final version.

So here is the semi-final version for now until my GIMP techniques become more sophisticated and I can clean up the noise to my liking. You can see the original uncropped shot for comparison as well as Brown's pics from the actual workout at Smoke Out.

My very first gym portrait

 
Have you ever watched The Ultimate Fighter? If you have, then you've seen all the portraits of the big name UFC fighters adorning the walls of their training facility. I love those portraits, but I almost never shoot portraits myself.

Maybe it's because I'm uncomfortable making that connection with the subject through the camera lens. I don't like staring at people and I like being stared at even less. Shooting portraits pushes me outside of my comfort zone. I much prefer to snap a picture when the person is in their own little bubble, completely unaware of me.

But today I got a little wild and crazy. Maybe it was a leftover adrenaline rush from just finishing Fight Gone Bad. Or maybe it was a subconscious nod to the out-frickin'-standing building-sized promo portrait of Michael Bisping that I passed in Times Square every day last week. Who knows? But after the Fight Gone Bad workout, I saw Dan C. reclining against the wall drinking water from a gallon milk jug. He had just finished the WOD and was a little disappointed with his score (although, between you and me, it was a very very good score. I would kill to get that score, but I digress...) He was sitting on the blue mats leaning against the red ones looking pretty dejected and -best of all- there was no clutter around him. I couldn't resist. I asked him if I could take his picture and he said yes so I snapped a couple of shots while he sat there guzzling water.

My favorite one is the one above. It's the most natural and relaxed shot of them all. My one complaint is that I didn't center the picture very well. I made the mistake of using the lens to get up-close and personal when I should have pulled back a little bit and left room for cropping. With so many pixels, I could have taken the shot much farther back and then cropped in tight without losing too much resolution. Since I started in too close, I had no room to maneuver and, unfortunately, just buzzed the top of his head.

Ah, well..... Live and learn! Next time I won't come in so tight.

For more shots from our Fight Gone Bad fundraiser, check out FGBIII.

A day in NYC

 
I'd like to give a special shout out to the fine people of CrossFit New York who opened their Black Box to me today, and especially to Allison, Keith, and Chad for their hospitality. Allison, it was great getting to know you and talk blog-shop; hopefully I can squeeze one more WOD in before I return home on Friday. You've got a great gym there. Chad, the pig roast was superb; I'm so glad you told us about it! Keith, it was very nice putting a face to the name; I'm so glad we could meet. Good luck with your endeavors, and be sure to look me up on your way to Swoope!

A few more pics from my day with CrossFit New York here.

A little bit of history....

 
Apologies to my readers. I've been on a business trip for the past week and haven't had a chance to get into a gym which means I don't have any gym pics to post here. But I did get to wear an EOD bomb suit the other day which reminded me of how I got hooked on CrossFit. Join me for a stroll down memory lane while I explain:

I'd been doing CrossFit off and on for about 5 years out of my house but never really committed myself to it. One day, I had the good fortune to meet two studs from Navy EOD while in Florida. I overheard these guys talking about CrossFit and I, thrilled to find some workout partners, mentioned I did it too. They invited me to join them the next morning for a PT session and I eagerly accepted, completely unprepared for what would follow.

The next morning I boarded the Jon & Ace Pain Train. We met at a gym on post and Jon, a Level I certified CrossFitter, started us out doing some basic Olympic lifts. I was a little nervous, but not nearly as nervous as I should have been: I failed utterly and completely. Never having touched an Olympic bar before, I had no idea what I was doing. Every time I tried to lift the 45 lb bar, I would lose my balance, the bar would go clattering to the floor, and every guy in the gym would turn to glare at me. It was humiliating.

They could have rolled their eyes at each other. They could have cut the WOD short and sent me home so that I didn't waste any more of their time. I mean, they were looking for a serious workout and I was a female civilian who grossly over-estimated her abilities. But instead of blowing me off, they helped me through it, patiently showing me what to do, and deftly catching the bar when the inevitable would happen and I would fall over backwards like a turtle. They didn't give up on me and so neither did I, even though my ego was crushed.

Every morning I met them at 0-dark-thirty to join in their WODs, and every morning they smoked my ass..... and never made me feel bad about it. They cheered me on, encouraged me when I faltered, and gave me high-fives when I finished. Thank God I was too naive to be intimidated by them when we first met; if I had known better, I wouldn't have even tried to keep up with them, and I would never have gotten hooked on CrossFit. After spending a week with those guys, I went home a changed athlete. My body was sore beyond belief- I couldn't sit, I couldn't walk, and I couldn't straighten my arms all the way. But I now knew how CrossFit was meant to be done, and I've been hooked ever since.

This past week, I got to try on an EOD suit for the first time (ok, it was an Army EOD suit, but it's not like I could tell the difference.) All told, it weighed about 110 lbs, almost as much as me. It was hot, heavy, stiff, and uncomfortable. And I was reminded that it's the business suit of choice that my two friends willingly don for their country all the time. I thought they were great guys when I met them, and now that I've had a chance to see the world from inside that suit, I have even greater respect for them.

Guys... wherever you are, know that the Pain Train continues. Wish you could see me now- that 45 lb bar is nothing! Keep fighting the good fight and I'll keep you both in my thoughts.

"EOD. It's a blast."

Atlas

 

Today was a day of exploration. I followed our athletes around taking a ton of shots from all different angles, looking down on them, looking up at them, running alongside them, etc. I had no clear image in my head of what I wanted so I just took the same shot from three or four different vantage points just to see what would develop.

I thought this one of Mark was nice because it was simple, clean, and fairly symmetrical. It reminded me of Atlas. Since my vantage point was down low, much of Mark's upper body was silhouetted against the sky, making for a nice clean background. I decided to crop out the parking lot and use the filtered black & white but I might have left it in color also... I guess it was just a matter of personal preference. Here's the original for comparison:
 

There were a few other shots that were interesting as well. You can see the rest at Playing with our balls!

Back to basics

 
Our workout today was called "Back to basics" which was appropriate since the shots I took today followed a similar theme, that is, getting back to a basic technique- focus.

A while back I got a suggestion from a reader, bentzurm. He pointed out that many of my photographs were soft and that I might try using a higher ISO if it allowed me to take sharper pictures. Well, today was the first chance I got to give it a shot (no pun intended). I'll admit, I didn't follow bentzurm's suggestions exactly: I was in a rush because I knew Browns' workout wouldn't last long (less than 3 minutes!) and I didn't want to miss any opportunities. So I used the sensitivity mode on my Pentax K10D and set it to 1600 ISO- basically, the highest sensitivity setting for my camera. Unfortunately, I was in such a rush I didn't realize some of the settings were still in place from an earlier shoot I had done over the weekend around a late-night bonfire so many of the shots had very weird exposures to say the least! I was forced to use the flash a few times against my will before I realized what the heck was going on..... Nevertheless, I think the focus was better overall today than in previous WODs, so I'm encouraged.

Like I said, I didn't have much time to set up these shots at all, so the background is cluttered and many of the pictures are spur of the moment snapshots. In an attempt to crop out the most distracting stuff, I cropped it wide and thin, almost like a widescreen perspective. I used the filtered black & white tool (red) to emphasize his tattoos and then brought up the contrast just a tad. Love the facial expression in this one. There's another one with an even better grimace, but the exposure is too dark to make much out of it, I'm afraid. You be the judge- see the rest at Back to Basics.

In memory of 9.11.01

 

The view from my office building today, Sept 11, 2008. Normally it's of the Washington skyline. Today it was of the American flag.

Many of the buildings in and around Rosslyn, VA had draped flags from their structures in memory of 9/11. I worked in my office today thinking about all those people who lost their lives so many years ago, while working in their offices.

We will never forget.

Tinting as an alternative to black & white

 
Ok, everybody familiar with this blog knows my favorite Picasa tool is the Filtered B&W. I don't use a lot of color in my photographs by choice. First, the gym is not a particularly colorful place. Second, the things that ARE colorful (mats, flags, and medicine balls) have already been featured in my blog. Time for something new. Enter Picasa's Tint feature.

I've used the tint feature before, but never with the Color Preservation slider. In the case of the picture above, I wanted to go for a different effect from the other pics I recently posted. I had already posted a black & white shot of Treefrog doing the Warriors Never Die workout. And the other day I posted a full color shot of her. Today, I'm going middle of the road. I decided to keep a little color, but only just enough to add a few accent notes to the photograph. So I slid the color preservation slider about halfway from the starting point until just her athletic top, mats, and dynamax ball had some tint to them, but everything else was bland. Then I selected the white filter to give it a black and white feel.

This effect is often used to give pictures an "old photograph" look, but I thought I'd try to use it to underscore the feeling of old-fashioned sweat and toil. Treefrog is exhausted. She's half-way through a beast of a workout and, if I recall my own experience doing this WOD, this is where the world starts to shrink and lose all detail in your mind. So I thought I'd try to mimic that with the coloring. Not sure I achieved it, but it's a different look than I usually produce, so it's kinda neat.

Here's the original for comparison:
 

Red!

 
This is the second photograph in a set of 3 that I'm featuring from the Warriors Never Die workout. Treefrog was doing knees-to-elbows on the rings and she happened to be wearing a red athletic top which perfectly matched the bright red mats along the wall. The fact that she is in a near fetal position suspended in the air against a red backdrop almost reminds me of a baby in the womb.

Normally I don't like to leave my photographs in color, but in this case, the vivid color IS the photograph. I removed some distracting white PVC pipes using GIMP's clone tool, and tweaked the levels just a tad to give her skin some more color. I have heard that some cameras do not photograph well when the picture is predominantly one color, but in this case, it didn't seem to be a problem.

For more pics from this workout, visit Warriors Never Die

The meaning behind the whiteboard

 
Everybody in the CrossFit community knows about the whiteboard. Once you start your workout, the whiteboard contains your sole purpose for being alive. It dictates your every action. You are a voluntary slave to it, and it is an unforgiving task master.

So a CrossFitter can generally appreciate a picture like this one because we all know what it's like to crank out those reps in the shadow of the whiteboard. But this picture is slightly different: Treefrog knew the warrior this workout was named for. He was a friend of Brown's and he gave his life for his country.

So even though "Warriors Never Die" was one of the hardest workouts I've ever done, and it took the better part of an hour, and I barely had enough strength to lift my camera to take this picture, I'm so glad I did. Because it wasn't until after I snapped the shot and viewed it in the LCD that I realized how much more there was to this photograph than is apparent to the casual observer. This isn't just a picture of an athlete doing a workout in honor of a Hero; this is a picture of an athlete doing a workout in honor a friend.