And the Rest: The Vinyl Brunch at Chimera

Starting July 28th, every Sunday at Chimera in Tulsa, OK there will be a 4-hour long live show hosted by Dillon Hargrave.  Each week he will have a guest come on to bring in their vinyl collection to mix for the patrons and the show will be recorded for a podcast.  My friend Beau Blackstock from SpyFm's 'You're Welcome' will be the special guest for the inaugural show and I'll be on the following week spinning the cream of the crop! I've been amassing rare and hard to find vinyl's for 5 years now and I am very excited to be able to share and discuss music.  Be sure to come by and check it out on August 4th!

Gear Talk: Saying Goodbye to my old Ballhead

It's time to say goodbye to a piece of my tripod hardware that I've been using for nearly a year.  When I first ordered it, the Manfrotto 498RC2 seemed to be exactly what I was looking for: a reasonably priced ball head with quick release plates and a fairly decent build quality.  But that is great on paper, not always so great in practice.  

The Manfrotto quick release plates tend to have a little bit of give in them and don't have a lock tight grip, so when shooting vertical shots they tend to droop every so slightly.  This is not always noticeable at first but when shooting architecture with a lot of leading lines, that slight droop causes major headaches in post work. The camera plate is also somewhat small and doesn't grip all that well, so unless you screw it in unreasonably tight, it will have some movement in the base, a very big negative.  Also, when stacking several shots together, there tends to be a very slight amount of movement which leads to less than tack sharp images.  So after doing the typical run through of entry level tripod gear, to the prosumer Manfrotto gear,  I've decided to retire this piece and upgrade to the Really Right Stuff BH-55 LR Ballhead.  

I spent several days researching everything on the market.  The Arca-Swiss heads looked pretty nice and have been around for quite some time, but the Really Right Stuff won me over.  Everywhere I looked for reviews the one head that kept coming up was the BH-55.  It has garnered a great deal of positive feedback from professional photographers for it's build quality and reliability.  One problem ball heads can incur is locking up in different climate situations.  I've seen a photographer use this in -45c without it locking up, that's more than enough to ease my concerns.  This head is also manufactured in the US and although the price is a little steep (see: very steep), I think this will last me for several years. I also ordered the BD-800L plate for the D800 so I can do vertical shots with more stability

Once I get this in I will do a full write-up and review or possibly a video review.  The next upgrade in sight is going from my aluminum Manfrotto tripod to a carbon fiber tripod by Really Right Stuff.  Gitzo tripods are considered by many to be the best out there, but after reading several horror stories about legs breaking and cameras falling off of the base, and seeing the amazing build quality of RRS, I've decided to go with them.   

From the Kitchen: Lemon-Poppy Ebelskivers

I haven't been cooking too much the last couple weeks since I've been mostly on the road, but on the way back from Colorado we stopped at a small Swedish community in Kansas and picked up a book on making Ebelskivers.  They are like a mixture of pancake and muffin in a bite sized form.  We made lemon-poppy with a lemon glaze and a parmesan crusted fresh basil with stuffed mozzarella ebelskiver and a marinara dipping sauce.  For being gluten free they were surprisingly good and had a really nice texture

Back from Estes

We're back from our trip to Colorado, got lot's of good shots.  I have about 1,300 images to go through so there should be a steady flow of new content for the next few weeks.  Went downtown Tulsa this evening to take some pictures and still have tons of July 4th images to go through so stay tuned.  I've also changed the appearance of the photo gallery so each full image thumbnail can be easily seen. 

Estes Park: What's in the Bag

Well I'm glad I've been excercising for a couple months now! This camera bag is not very light with all this equipment.  Here is what's in the bag

Nikon D800

Nikon 14-24mm f2.8

Nikon 50mm f1.8

Nikon 24-70mm f2.8

Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VR II

Nikon 200-400mm f4

Nikon 60mm Macro

Nikon 2x teleconverter

Not Pictured: Lots of filters! Cokin 1,2 and 3 stop graduated neutral density filters, Hoya HD circular polarizer, Tiffen ND filter set, and various color grads.  My friend Jenn is accompying me for this trip and will be shooting with my D7000 + 35mm, 55-300mm, and 11-16mm lenses.  Lots of updates coming soon!

Traffic Update: #1 on Google Images!

Well I finally figured out where all the traffic has been coming from.  If you search on Google for the Heaven's Trail image that is all over the internet, under the wallpaper size images, a picture I took in Estes Park, CO last year is the #1 hit!  So far that image alone has recieved over 22,000 hits in the last 5 months.  Pretty incredible! And the traffic seems to only be picking up. Needless to say the site redesign is on hiatus.  I'll be staying on this site for awhile, at least until I finish the storefront for purchasing limited edition/signed prints.  

The First Timelapse!

Well better late than never!  Before heading out on vacation I decided to do a last minute timelapse of my post-processing work on the Sunset image taken 6-22-2013.  This will look slightly different from the final image I've posted on my site as I did this video after already finishing that image; this was done mostly from memory.  More of these will be on the way including music written and recording by myself

Yellowstone: Update

I will be taking a photography trip to Yellowstone within the next month.  There will be several new details coming soon. 

UPDATE: It turns out there is a norovirus outbreak at Yellowstone and the trip has been cancelled.  I'll instead be taking another trip to Estes Park and postponing Yellowstone til the fall.  Many new photos will be up soon after I return

Site Redesign Update

The new site is finally finished and ready to deploy, however I have been getting significant traffic to a few specific images right now for some reason and switching to the new site might break these links.  So until traffic dies down a little, a preview of the site can be seen at paul-agee.sqsp.com 

Site redesign coming soon

I am currently in the process of completely redoing this site.  The new layout will allow for higher resolution photos to be displayed in a larger area and will also have everything divided in to categories.  With the new redesign will come several photos I have never published and also the first timelapse tutorial entry.  If all goes as planned the new site should go live within the next couple weeks.  The new design will also feature a storefront where you can buy signed limited edition prints directly from my site.  Stay tuned.

Paul

Introducing Timelapse

Welcome to Timelapse! This will be my central hub for posting on all things photography.  Its main purpose will be to offer tutorials, instructional videos, timelapse video of my post-processsing, and discussion of future projects.  I will also be reviewing and discussing photography hardware and software.  Over the past year I have learned and discovered a wealth of information and wish to share as much as I can.  I will also in the future be posting my timelapse photography videos that I am currently developing.  The timelapse videos will all be posted in full HD and include music that I will be writing specifically for the videos. I will also respond to any questions regarding exactly how I captured and processed my images.  Stay tuned for some great things to come!

Paul

Coming soon

This is currently in development.  Some really cool things coming soon